 What was going on with the Pentagon and UFOs? This was a topic that was routinely treated very seriously by officials, by senior people in the military, by the mainstream public media, I mean this was routinely on the cover of Life Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, even the New York Times Magazine. And then around 1969, this all of a sudden became a, was relegated to the fringes. It was something that serious people no longer were expected to talk about. And for decades, it was the same. Any talk of UFOs was inevitably linked to questions of alien abductions or ancient aliens or who built the pyramids or who drew the Nazca lines. Until just a few years ago, when in December of 2017, the New York Times published a very long investigation into the question of a secret black money program that Harry Reid had begun funding in 2007, 2008 to look into the question of UFOs and their relationship to our ongoing military concerns. So I think the issue to think about it in a venue like the Future Security Forum, the way that I would frame this for this audience is to say, what are the things that we are encouraged to talk about and what are the things that we are discouraged to talk about as far as national, as far as fringe anomalous observations go. And in this case, fringe anomalous observations being sort of one vessel to talk about broader questions of things that we don't understand. So for a long time, the feeling of the military between 1947 and roughly 1953 was, look, this is a very tense post-war moment, the beginning of the Cold War. It seemed, obviously, in recent memory, the first use of the atomic bomb, it seemed very possible that foreign adversaries like the Soviets had developed craft that could easily outmaneuver us and travel several times faster than the speed of sound. And so it was a very real concern that there were things in our airspace that we couldn't account for. But the point was serious reports were coming in from credible people, people like military pilots, civilian pilots. There were hundreds of these coming into the Air Force every year. So the feeling was something had to be done about the fact that all of these strange sightings were happening. There was also the feeling that we could not show that we were ignorant of stuff going on in our airspace. We couldn't show that there were repeated incursions into our airspace, potentially by adversaries that we couldn't account for. And especially in the early moments of the Cold War, we never wanted to project that kind of weakness. So there were two countervailing tendencies among officials. There was the feeling of we should take weird things seriously because it's the only way we're going to learn if there's stuff going on that's beyond our ken. And on the other hand, we need to prevent people from taking weird things too seriously or it'll look like nobody's minding the store. So this was more or less the kind of epistemological conflict that went on in official circles through most of the 50s and the 60s. Of course, the public imagination was completely captured by these reports and people were fascinated by it. And one of the things that I found that I think has sort of been lost to history is that there was certainly an interesting kind of class to mention to this at the time that many of the people who were doing the reporting were people like policemen and firefighters and other first responders. And many of the people who were doing the sneering and the debunking were Hayden Planetarium astronomers or Harvard astronomers. And so there was some tension between scientists saying this couldn't possibly be true. And people like policemen and pilots saying these are things we saw with our own eyes. Don't tell us what we saw or what we didn't see. And don't tell us that something that looked like a flying disk was actually just Venus. I mean, we know what Venus looks like and this wasn't Venus and that's insulting. So all of this came to a head in the late 60s. Marty leader Gerald Ford called for a hearing. There were hearings about the Air Force Project that had looked into unidentified flying object sightings. These hearings eventually culminated in a scientific panel hosted by the University of Colorado, which was helmed by a nuclear physicist who was kind of a known debunker, known not to take this stuff seriously. And they came out with a report in 1969 or fall of 1968. That was a thousand pages long that basically said there's nothing to see here. There's no national security interest here. There's no reason for scientific concern or curiosity. Kids shouldn't be allowed to study this in school. We need to put this whole thing to bed and make people understand that this is really just a fringe topic. So to some extent, the history of this time shows that UFO conspiracy theories aren't totally wrong to believe that there was in fact a concerted effort to get people not to take this stuff seriously. And it worked. And after about 1970, that's when you start seeing the mainstream media making fun of these things. You see most official pronouncements making fun of these things. But at the same time, behind the scenes, you still have people taking it seriously because the concerns about potential national security implications never went away. So the decision was in public, we still need to project this strength. We need to show that we know what's going on and that we're never left puzzled by flying enigmas. But in private, the feeling was we still need to be aware that there might be stuff going on that we need to figure out a better way to account for. And there are lots of documents that have come out through various FOIA requests over the years that show that this stuff was taken seriously. There's an amazing memo written by a DIA official from 1976 after some Iranian pilots had an encounter with what they described as a massive UFO over Tehran. This was reported back to Washington as a serious subject for concern. So then the question is, what then happened in the last few years to bring this back to national attention? Now, the sort of cynical answer is, well, lots of people are interested in UFOs. There's no reason to believe that our high-ranking government officials, both elected officials and in the military, are prone to have more reasonable rational beliefs than the rest of us. And so this is just a matter of a few kind of UFO nuts who manage to end up in positions of power where they could fund UFO studies. So one version of this just says, well, people who are interested in UFOs finally had an opportunity to pursue official input. Probably, to some extent, part of that is true. But at the same time, it's no surprise that this coincided with the early years of widespread drone deployment. And increasingly, over the last couple of years, there's definitely some evidence that at least some of these mysterious UFO sightings over our carrier groups probably represented drone swarms, either from our nation-state adversaries or non-nation-state actors. And so the question then, the balance that had set the taboo in motion began to shift. But all of a sudden, it seemed somewhat less important for us to emphasize that we knew everything that was going on in the air and a little bit more important for us to say, look, if we're hearing weird things from our pilots, we might need to concede our puzzlement in public in order to make sure that we are getting good information from the people who are on the front lines to tell us what's going on. Because if there is wide-scale drone swarm deployment, that certainly is a national security issue. And we would never want to discourage people from reporting things like that just because they're afraid of being seen as UFO nuts. But the point that I would leave you with is that there's always this question of, to what extent do you want to leave yourself open and vulnerable by saying that you don't know what's going on versus making sure that you have an opportunity to update your priors about them. And I think the UFO story is a great case study in why exactly we would admit uncertain DNA ambivalence and why we would hide that uncertain DNA ambivalence. What is it? Kieran, what is that? What is that? Kieran, what is that? Don't move me.