 Welcome you to this Ollie program. Okay, you all have to be quiet now because I'm speaking. And I have no shame. I'm Grace Worcester. I used to be a member of this Ollie committee, but they kicked me off, but I've come back to introduce Garrett, who really needs no introduction. But before I do that, I have been reminded by two people that today at 2.20 is the national, whatever it is, test of something. And what you need to do is turn off your phones. Everybody needs to turn off their phones, or every one of them will ring at 2.20. Is that right, Ram? Yeah, I think so. Okay, I don't know if anybody has anything else to add about that. The first person that told us about it was from Minnesota, so I thought maybe it's just a mid-western thing. Apparently not. So turn off your phones. Yeah. Okay. Do you have any conspiracy theories about this, Garrett? I wrote a previous book about this. Okay. So today we have Garrett Graff, who is a former editor of Political Magazine, former editor and chief of Washingtonian Magazine in Washington, D.C., of all places, and instructor at Georgetown University. In 2005, Graff became the first blogger to receive credentials to cover the White House. I still think it's really cool. He has published eight books, including The Threat Matrix, about Robert Mueller, which we hadn't talked about before, about Robert Mueller and the FBI, Raven Rock about the government's plan to save itself, but not the rest of us, and most recently Watergate, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Now how cool is that? Today he will talk about his book on UFOs, which comes out next month. In addition to writing books, he writes articles for many prestigious journals such as Wired, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, and is often seen or heard on news outlets such as MPR, PBS, NewsHour, the History Channel, and CBS. He is also the host of Long Shadow, a podcast series whose multiple seasons have examined the lingering questions of 9-11 and the rise of the American far-right. He is also the founding director of the Aspen Institutes Cybersecurity and Technology Program. Of course, the really important things about Garrett are, one, that he grew up in Montpelier, two, that he had the sense to come back from D.C. to live in Vermont, and three, that he has two adorable children, Eliza and Christopher. Garrett. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be back here in Montpelier. This is the second time that I have trial-run a book talk at a grace-organized ollie talk prior to the book actually coming out. And actually, the last book that I was here speaking about was Raven Rock, which Grace mentioned was a book that I wrote in 2017 about the history of the U.S. government's doomsday plans and sort of all of the weird stuff that would happen during and after a nuclear attack. Two legacies of which we are still are sort of newsworthy and noteworthy today. One, the FEMA test alert that she said will be coming at 2.30 today. This is the second time they've done a nationwide test like this. And it is part of the government's sort of nuclear war doomsday scenario to do these nationwide text alerts. And FEMA, which of course has, is an agency that has had some relevance to Montpelier and much of Vermont this year, unfortunately, started off as the government's nuclear war planner. And then what it turned out was that we didn't have all that many nuclear wars. And so they turned the agency that was then the Office of Emergency Preparedness into an agency that was able to help with more sort of normal natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and that's the FEMA that we know today. And I'm also paying very close attention today to the Kevin McCarthy implosion as speaker, which has some super interesting implications for the presidential line of succession because absent a house speaker, it actually takes the speaker of the House out of the presidential line of succession, moves Patty Murray, the president, pro tem of the Senate up one slot in the presidential line of succession. But that Congressman McHenry, who's the acting speaker pro tem right now, does get a whole set of doomsday powers that we don't actually know about in a program called Enduring Constitutional Government, which is the government's secret system of how the three branches of government will work together after a nationwide apocalypse or catastrophe. So he's not in the presidential line of succession, but does have some secret set of powers that we won't know about until we're dead. So it probably won't be of interest to us then either. We'd much too late to worry about it. Yes. So I'm pleased to have the chance to sort of talk to you a little bit about UFO, which when I start talking with people about this book feels like a little bit of a departure from my previous works on the Cold War and Watergate and 9-11. But actually it turns out to be very similarly situated in American history, because our fascination with UFOs actually begins as part of the new anxieties of the country at the dawn of the Cold War at the end of World War II, which I'll come back and talk a little bit more about. And then sort of mostly ends up as the backdrop over the last 75 years of how our sort of concerns over both stolen Nazi rocket technology to secret Soviet technology to modern-day Chinese technology like the spy balloon that we saw in February this year and sort of kicked off the latest chapter of America's fascination with UFOs. This book began for me actually in December 2020. John Brennan, who was at the time the former CIA director and former White House Homeland Security Advisor, gave an interview to a writer named Tyler Cowan. And he said in the interview, I've seen some of those new videos from Navy pilots and I must tell you they are quite eyebrow-raising when you look at them. Some of the phenomenon we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something we don't yet understand and that that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life. And it was sort of just an interview that came and went but stuck out for me because this was a man who had spent basically the 20 years up until that moment in the upper ranks of the US intelligence system. You know, he'd been CIA director, he'd been White House Homeland Security Advisor and I was like, you know what, there aren't that many mysteries in John Brennan's life. Like if he has a question he can wake up in the morning, ask someone to get him the answer, there's a $60 billion a year intelligence apparatus that we have that can deliver him the answer to almost any question that he faces. And so if he's puzzled by the answer to a question, it's probably something actually worth looking into. And so that led me to start the sort of research and thinking for this book which really ends up being two different threads. The subtitle of the book is the inside story of the US government's search for alien life here and out there. And these end up being sort of two very separate but increasingly intertwined threads of the military's hunt and interest in understanding the UFO phenomenon here on Earth mixed with the astronomical and NASA search for extraterrestrial intelligence, sort of a program known as SETI, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, out there. And that the evolving science between these two ends up being obviously very closely related. So the question of whether UFOs are here has a big bearing on whether there's intelligent life out there. And the modern era of UFOs begins in the summer of 1947, which of course is an incredibly important year as the Cold War begins and we are beginning to race through our own space program with a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists that we hoovered up across Europe and deposited in places like Los Alamos to begin to harness their knowledge for the future of what would ultimately become the Apollo program and other space programs of the 50s and 60s. And in June of 1947, an Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold is up flying through the Pacific Northwest when he sees a series of bright lights that he tracks at what he estimates as possibly speeds up to 1,000 miles an hour. And he lands and starts talking to people about it and he describes them as sort of skipping like saucers through the air. And this gives us the imagery that we sort of now recognize of flying saucers. And that summer of 1947 in very quick succession, there are sightings of these flying saucers in almost every state in the country. And America, this is sort of end of June, 47, by the 4th of July there are sightings in something like 34 states across the country of sort of these bright lights, these flying saucer type objects up in the sky. It becomes this national fascination. And that's the backdrop on July 8th and 9th when a rancher named Mac Brazel comes into the city of Roswell, New Mexico and tells the local sheriff that he's found some interesting wreckage on his ranch. And the sheriff says, this is probably military, you should go talk to the military folks at the Roswell Air Force Base. Roswell Air Force Base in the summer of 47 is actually the most advanced military unit in the world. It is the home of what are known as the silver plate bombers, the one set of bombers armed with nuclear weapons in the entire world. And the commander of the Roswell Air Force Base is a very serious guy. He was actually the backup pilot on the Nagasaki bombing. And he assigns two military intelligence officers to go out to the Brazel ranch and retrieve the wreckage and bring it in. They lay it out on the floor in the commander's office and the commander calls in his public affairs officer and he says, effectively, good news, we found the first of these flying saucers. And they put out a press release that afternoon that the Roswell Air Force Base has found its first flying saucer. It has solved the mystery. Meanwhile, they put the wreckage on a plane to Dallas Fort Worth to the 8th Air Force headquarters where it lands about when this press release ends up going out. And the first people who look at it at the 8th Air Force Base headquarters quickly call back to Roswell and say, you idiots, this is a weather balloon. And there is one afternoon where America is quite convinced that it has found the first flying saucer. And then the commander of the 8th Air Force goes out and does a live radio interview that afternoon from Fort Worth and explains, sorry, this was all a misunderstanding. It was a weather balloon. And for 40 years, Roswell disappears into the ether. One of the most interesting aspects of tracing back this history is Roswell meant almost nothing to anyone at the time. This phenomenon of the summer of the saucer continues to unfold and unfurls across dozens of more states through the rest of the summer starts what is now known as the nation's first UFO flap. Waves of sightings are called flaps in UFOology. And that over the course of that fall, again, this is a really interesting moment for America and its military development. The summer and the fall of 1947, you see the passage of what is the National Security Act, what we now know is the National Security Act of 1947, which creates the Joint Chiefs of Staff, creates the National Security Council, creates the CIA, and breaks off the Air Force as an independent military branch for the first time. Up until then, of course, the Air Force had been part of the Army, been the Army Air Corps. And then in September of 47, the Air Force breaks off, and literally one of the first things that the Air Force ends up confronting is this question of what are these flying saucers? And they launch a series of programs. The first one is known as Project Sign, the second one is known as Project Grudge, the third one is known as Project Blue Book, that end up running basically for the next 20 to 25 years. And it's sort of this low-level effort by the U.S. government to try to figure out and solve the question of the flying saucer. And one of the first things that the Air Force does is they rebrand it to destigmatize the name from flying saucer to UFOs, unidentified flying objects. And so they sort of start off with this effort to destigmatize these sightings and bring people out to report on them. And there's a sort of deep irony to this fast-forwarding through the story that when this issue has sort of cropped back up in the last 10 years, the government has now rebranded it as UAPs, which initially stood for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, and then they changed that again to be Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon because not all of them are aerial, but that sort of they have now launched another rebranding effort to destigmatize UFO, which was the original way to destigmatize flying saucer. So we just sort of keep having to come up with new terms to make the old one seem less crazy. And one of the things where the sort of book spends a lot of time is this question of over the course of now 75 years of this phenomenon, and there's a much, much longer history once you sort of get into it of people spotting weird things in the sky. The vast majority of them are very easily explained. You know, the vast majority are secret military technology, it's estimated actually that more than half of the UFO sightings of the 1950s were in fact the U2 spy plane, which was truly a UFO. It was a plane flying at an altitude that planes did not fly at, that did not look like a plane that anyone knew and at speeds that no one knew. And sort of similarly in recent years you have confusion over the testing of the stealth bomber, the SR-71, the stealth fighter, these sort of secret government projects over the years. And then you have sort of a whole bunch of very innocent public confusion over a huge percentage of UFO sightings actually turn out to be the planet Venus. That sort of once people, you know, sort of trace back many sightings that ends up being that, you know, the bright light that they see in the sky, the unexpectedly bright light that they see in the sky is actually just the planet Venus. And that over 75, 80 years though, a very stubborn 20% of sightings have never been able to be explained with either the known data or by known science and astronomy. And so at this point, there is sort of no doubt that UFOs exist, but that's not actually the question that most people, that's not the question that most people mean when they ask, are UFOs real? Because the question that sort of most people actually mean is, are there aliens? And that's a very different question that I'm gonna spend some time talking about the science behind because I think you will find that the answer likely ends up being more surprising than you might think. So this hunt and identification of UFOs over the years has been confused in part because we use the term popularly mixing with, we use it as sort of popular shorthand for what scientists and ufologists call the interplanetary theory or the extraterrestrial hypothesis, ETH. UFO technically only means exactly what it is. It is something that we spot in the sky that is flying that we don't know what it is. But the fascination with UFOs and ETH and aliens and space travel has become one of the most popular threads of popular culture over the last 75 years. From Star Trek and Star Wars to ET to close encounters of the third kind that are an alien and even ALF and the X-Files. It is difficult to name another subject so quickly identifiable, so widely debated, so easily dismissed, and yet so little understood, wrote historian David Jacobs, who's sort of the one serious historian of UFOs. You know, one of the things that I think I have come to understand about our fascination with this is that UFOs fascinate us in part because of this fundamental question of are we alone, but also because it is one of the few areas at the extremes of human knowledge that all of us get to participate in. Like, sort of, any one of us on a given day is unlikely to stumble into solving string theory or discovering dark matter. You know, like, my math is pretty poor and, you know, I'm not going to probably invent nuclear fusion in my garage on the weekend, but, sort of, any one of us, anytime we look out a window, anytime we're driving along a road at night, like, we might have that sighting that sort of opens up this whole new realm of human understanding and comprehension. So, let me talk a little bit about our understanding of the math behind this question of are we alone. So, as we now recognize it and understand it, space and time began about 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang. In the first three minutes of the universe's life, temperatures cooled from 100,000 million degrees down to only 1,000 million degrees. And that stew for the next 700,000 years did almost nothing interesting. But over the next billion years, you began to see world form and stars form, and then over time the objects that we now recognize in our solar system and our universe sort of began to form and spread. Our own solar system is about 4.6 billion years old and consists of our own sun, which astronomically speaking is a relatively average G-type main sequence star informally known as a yellow dwarf, and eight major planets as well as what astronomers generally accept are nine dwarf planets including the once upon a time planet Pluto along with 650 natural satellites commonly referred to as moons. Our solar system exists in a tiny corner of the Milky Way. We're about 25,000 light years away from the center of our rotating galaxy which astronomers estimate contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars and at least that number of planets. The Milky Way stretches across something like 87,400 light years and what we see in our sky as the Milky Way was sort of us looking at the edge of the Milky Way along the edge of a Frisbee. Sort of looking down the edge of a Frisbee. It's a spiral shaped enormous spinning pinwheel which humans have been able to recognize in the sky since at least the first recorded record of astronomical observations of the Milky Way in 964 by a Persian astronomer. As we have come to understand it the Milky Way itself is about 2.5 million light years from the next closest galaxy, Andromeda and together our two galaxies and all of the stuff in between them and those 2.5 million light years including a number of dwarf galaxies and satellite galaxies and a third large galaxy known as Triangulum make up what astronomers refer to today as the local group which is one corner of a larger cosmic structure known as a supercluster. For most of the last 50 years our particular galactic neighborhood was believed to be part of the Virgo supercluster which was a gathering of about 100 galaxies but in 2014 a team of astronomers led by a Hawaiian astronomer named Brent Tully realized that we were actually more connected to our neighbors astronomically than we thought and they redrew the boundaries of the galactic map to dub a new supercluster known as Lanakia which is Hawaiian for immense heaven. We now believe that this galaxy that our supercluster contains 100,000 other galaxies that astronomers still define as nearby despite the fact that they stretch across 520 million light years of outer space. Lanakia in turn is now understood to be part of the Pisces-Settis supercluster complex which is an enormous structure of about 60 superclusters that together stretch across a billion light years. The Pisces-Settis supercluster complex is what's known as a galaxy filament which is actually the largest building block of outer space. Next door to us is the Perseus Pegasus filament which is itself another billion light years wide. Take this all together and NASA now estimates there are about 200 billion galaxies that stretch across 46 billion light years. Each galaxy, so each of those 200 billion galaxies is estimated to contain 100 million stars although the largest galaxies which are known as supergiants contain 100 trillion stars. So on the one hand, Earth may seem unique to us and yet when you set it against the scale of that universe even if the odds of intelligence life are incredibly slim recent estimates imagine that there are one sextillion which is a thousand trillion habitable planets in the universe across all of those billions of galaxies. So the sort of question that we are left with after a lot of this mind-bending math is the odds of intelligent life may be long but are you willing to gamble that there are only one in a sextillion? Which to me is actually a really interesting question which I'll come back to in a little bit about sort of how the building blocks of life actually turn out quite common across our universe. Now the spies and analysts who work in the intelligent community talk about the distinction of what they call secrets and mysteries that the capabilities of the newest Chinese hypersonic weapon is a secret. How the Egyptians built the pyramids is a mystery and that the story of UFOs, the story of the government's interest in UFOs to me boils down to a question of what percentage of this question is a secret and what percentage of it is a mystery. Now UFOs I believe sort of confound us today in part because we still know so little about the world around us. As much as we know about meteorology, astronomy, the heavens and physics it's worth remembering how new how much of this knowledge actually still truly is. Most of the core principles of physics, time, space and astronomy have only been discovered in the last hundred or so years. In fact, even before you get to the mysteries of outer space much of our understanding of our own planet is startlingly new. Western scientists have only known about the existence of gorillas, our closest living relative, for about 150 years. Before 1847 reports of the sightings of gorillas were dismissed as a largely mythical creature akin to a yeti or a unicorn. George Washington never knew that dinosaurs existed. The first dinosaur was only discovered and identified in 1824 and it's effectively only in my lifetime that we've come to recognize that they were wiped out by an asteroid collision and that many dinosaurs were actually feathered. When I was learning about dinosaurs, they were these scaly reptiles and now we understand that actually probably most of them had feathers like the birds that are the modern descendants of it. Giant squids existed only as a myth for thousands of years. Traceable actually back to Aristotle, but it was only first caught by a French ship in 1861 and it wasn't until 2004 that biologists actually ever saw a giant squid in its natural habitat. My high school teacher here in Montpelier, Mr. McGraw, would remind us that plate tectonics now widely understood as the entire way that the Earth moves wasn't proven when he was a geology student. We still know less about the bottoms of the ocean than we do the surface of the moon. Jay Allen Heineck, who is one of the premier UFOologists of modern history, says there is a tendency in 20th century science to forget that there will be a 21st century science of which we are living through right now and indeed a 30th century science from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different. So as you sort of think about these questions, I encourage you to keep in the back of your mind this sort of intellectual humbleness about how much more we are likely to learn about the world in the next 100 or next 1,000 years. So part of the challenge in putting all of this history together is of course that the government is absolutely covering up the truth of what it knows about UFOs. And I say that not because I stumbled upon any great secret in my own research, but because I've spent 20 years covering up knowledge, I've spent 20 years covering national security and the government sort of covers up much of what it knows on a routine matter about almost everything and that there are plenty of revelations and declassified documents and public reports that prove an active ongoing cover-up of UFO knowledge over the last 75 years. But what's fascinating to me is that so much of what we find the government is covering up is ignorance, not knowledge. It is sort of the government really not knowing what many of these UFO sightings actually are. And there are sort of some of these fascinating documents that I write about them and talk about them in the book where you will see sort of government officials talking between themselves in memos long before the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, sort of long before they had any imagination that any member of the public would ever get to see what they wrote being genuinely puzzled about what UFO sightings actually are. And that one of the things that I think also stands out to me is that as someone who has spent 20 years researching and reporting on US intelligence and national security, the conspiracy theories that the government is covering up some grand 75-year or 100-year conspiracy about the arrival of aliens or crashed flying saucers at Roswell presupposes a level of competence that is not on display in much of the rest of the work that the government does. And I sort of point people to the Discord leaks earlier this year where you had, you know, there's probably in our modern government today no more sensitive set of secrets than our knowledge of Ukraine's fighting ability against Russia in terms of things that the government is desperate to protect in terms of sources and methods and sort of our own penetration of Ukraine's military and visibility into its military and intelligence systems. And yet earlier this year, as you may remember, it turned out that a random Massachusetts Air National guardsman had been printing off these highly classified briefings being given to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, photographing them and posting them to a video game server for a year before anyone in the government actually managed to notice. So I sort of end up getting stuck a little bit with this question that the government is covering up meaningful knowledge of what UFOs and alien life may exist out there. How rare life, let alone intelligence life is across the universe remains a big mystery. But as the last two decades have unfolded, science has come closer to understanding how life began at least here on Earth. And they've come to better understand the timeline of how and when life evolved on Earth as well. Life, of course, got here long before intelligence life. And it's not clear that life evolving into intelligent life is actually preordained. Life emerged here as primitive microbes somewhere between 4 billion and 3.7 billion years ago. An astoundingly short half billion years after Earth existed at all, which is sort of in the grand scheme of the idea that life emerged on Earth within a half billion years of Earth existing becomes, you know, as you sort of weigh that against the possibility of the one insectilian chance of habitable planets elsewhere. That to me means that probably life is much more common across the universe than we may be used to thinking. It took about two billion additional years before those microbes evolved into multi-celled organisms. Along the way, cyanobacteria began to transform the planet, creating oxygen and collectively transforming the planet's atmosphere into the breathable, livable territory it now is. This transformation was not without its own cost, of course. It decimated the population of anaerobic species, those that do not breathe oxygen. But it worked out well for the first things that we would recognize as animals, which emerged about 600 million years ago. Megavolcanoes and meteors came close to extinguishing life altogether multiple times. Around 250 million years ago, during the transition from the Permian to the Triassic, something like 90% of all life on our planet went extinct. For several hundred thousand years, volcanoes of what paleontologist Steve Brousset calls preposterous size poisoned the planet, acidified the oceans, and cooked the forest, and the entire ecosystem on Earth collapsed. That extinction gave space, though, for the first Triassic mammals to evolve, giving them time to evolve and develop jaws that move in multiple directions and giving them the ability to chew, which, if you've never stopped to think about it, is actually sort of the defining biological strength of mammals. That ability to consume food efficiently and to begin digesting food even before it reaches the stomach gave mammals an important evolutionary advantage. Along the way, of course, dinosaurs thrived, but never appeared to evolve toward what we would call intelligent life. And this to me is sort of one of the great turning points in the world. It's sort of that had that asteroid missed Earth coming 20 minutes earlier or 20 minutes later and sailing right by Brontosaurus's never the wiser. It doesn't necessarily follow that modern-day dinosaurs would be gazing at the stars through telescopes or would have ever invented the Tesla. Dinosaurs had 150 million years of evolution to get smart and didn't. So what would another 65 million years have done with them? Fast forward instead through the entire history of dinosaurs and a few more mass extinctions including particularly that six-mile wide asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago and and mammals managed to survive. We are all their descendants today, a class of about 6,000 mammals whose DNA split off from reptiles about 325 million years ago. All modern-day mammals belong to just one of three groups, Steve Rousset points out. Egg-laying monotremes like the platypus, marsupials like kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us which give birth to well-developed young. That's the entirety of mammals. For most of our history, mammals were not the dominant species on the earth. For most of our existence as mammals they were about mouse-sized and while we have shaped the world in profound ways we remain a very tiny evolutionary corner on earth. There are twice as many bird species and nearly a million species of insects. Humans are an even tinier class of mammals closely related to monkeys and rabbits that whereas nearly one in five mammals, about 1,400 total species, are bats. And while mammals appear to be smart some like elephants even appearing to express feelings and complex social behaviors and whales can communicate across vast distances and some like primates can work with tools and do other human-like things, the gulf between us and the most and the next most intelligent life on earth is still vast. One of the things that I became sort of fascinated by in my research on this subject was the idea of marine planets existing elsewhere that you could sort of imagine these worlds that are heavily dominated by very advanced dolphins and whales and something that by sort of almost any measure we would consider intelligent life not just life but intelligent life but that on a marine planet it is possible that none of them have ever glimpsed the stars. That sort of part of this question of is life elsewhere and are we alone is you need to have the ability to recognize that there is more beyond your own planet to even begin to ask questions like that and so you're sort of left with these questions of imagining sort of these planets where you have these incredibly developed intelligent life forms of dolphins and whales and yet none of them have ever seen a star, have never seen a sun. The split between apes and homonyms happened only about five to seven million years ago and we co-mingled genes up until about four million years ago. Initially humans were an endemic group restricted to Africa where all of the great inventions of bipedalism braininess and tool use first took place, Brousset writes. Our single modern human species, Homo sapiens, is the lowest ebb of our genetic diversity in the history of our species as mammals. We are very much likely to be much more the exception than the historical norm. We survived and thrived because we learned to eat calorie rich meat gorging on protein that allowed our brains to grow and ensuring we have the time and energy for more advanced pursuits like socializing. Some of our closest cousins, a dwarf like vegetable chomping Homo Luzonius that thrived in the Philippine islands and Homo Florencius in Indonesia lived until as recently as 50,000 years ago. The ice ages delivered one final mass extinction of megafauna somewhere around that mark 50,000 years ago. We survived and about 20,000 years ago we began to domesticate animals for the first time. From there we'd something that we would recognize as modern life began to emerge families, settlements, agriculture but it's easy to imagine when you sort of look back across that history that a few minor evolutionary twists and turns and we would have never evolved at all. Life has existed on earth for 3.7 billion years and for only about one one millionth of that time have we been able to look at the stars and imagine this world, imagine worlds existing beyond. So as you sort of think about that underlying question are we one in sextillion? It's actually the math is incredibly strong in some ways and incredibly weak in others but part of the math is also this fascinating question of the possibility that we have missed intelligent life by billions of years that when you think back over a universe that is four points of a planet that is over 4.7 billion years old it's possible that it billion year civilizations elsewhere in the universe have come and gone before we ever even got here and in fact Carl Sagan the astronomer who many of you know who was in fact one of the most press most enthusiastic searchers for intelligent life elsewhere but most skeptical that they of UFOs and aliens visiting here has calculated that probably intelligent life passes by earth about every hundred thousand years on average that sort of statistically when you look at that universe when you look at the chances of habitable planets and intelligent life that probably there's some civilization that passes by about every hundred thousand years and that to him was the pessimists case for why the thing that you happen to see last Tuesday in the sky was probably not those aliens happening to swing by on their once every hundred thousand year visit but to me it's sort of fascinating to think of that possibility that like intelligent life has come and gone perhaps many many many times before we have actually ever gotten here this is your two minute or not even two minutes this is your warning of the FEMA text alert so I will use that as a moment to sort of switch and we can talk about I can open it up to questions and we can sort of talk about any of this that you want to yes it yes which you would appreciate if it was an actual emergency yeah so yes so one of the sort of biggest misconceptions when you talk to scientists about the idea of aliens visiting earth is that anyone knows we exist at all that when that we sort of have this idea that you know we're detectable and the answer is we're not that we are that the length of time that there has been any detectable sign of intelligent life on earth is incredibly minuscule across the vastness of light years and that even with the most advanced this was so the summer we have the sort of first congressional hearings on UFOs since the 1960s and at that point there was a congressional hearing in the 1960s pushed for by of all people Gerald Ford who was the congressional representative at the time for a district in Michigan that had had a wave of UFO sightings at a place called Hillsdale college and Carl Sagan came in and showed the most advanced satellite photos that were publicly available in the 1960s satellites you know pretty close to earth there's no sign of human life at all you know when you sort of look at something at the like one mile per pixel range you know there are like three places in the world where you see signs of human life at that scale and it's stuff like timber tracks and logging roads in Manitoba in Canada you know it's not things that you would sort of recognize as cities or you know signs of civilization and so if you sort of think about how long we have existed at that scale of engineering you know 50 years 75 years 100 years or just sort of big engineering even that you know there would have been no sign if you were looking if you were standing even 200 light years away from earth right now looking through the most powerful telescope that we on earth possess there would be no sign of intelligent life or life on earth that would sort of lead you to seek us out as anything more than a random planet that you might happen to be exploring as you go through you know your own celestial wanderings as a you know Star Trek Enterprise yeah just as we're searching exoplanes and other star systems for life possibilities of life we're not using we're not going to recognize it visually like you're imagining it would be through the composition of the atmosphere or electromagnetic signaling that has come off the planet it wouldn't be about visibility yes but so that then gets to sort of the second two questions one is you know even if you're doing electromagnetic searching you know our footprint is only you know 75 90 years wide there there's sort of some really weird science sort of wrapped up in that also there's some interesting science sort of wrapped up in that that actually the first thing that someone might probably detect is Hitler speaking at the 1936 Olympics which was sort of the first thing that we really blasted off into space but that actually the most likely thing that people would detect is the Super Bowl which is annually the most broadcast moment out into space across the airwaves so that the Super Bowl might be Earth's calling card to other civilizations but that to me there's sort of another interesting question wrapped up in that which is almost all of the exoplanets that we're studying right now for signs of life or what we're really sort of is the possibility of habitability are so vastly far away that it would be meaningless for us to discover life or have any meaningful interaction with them so to me sort of part of that question of like are we alone ends up being that the math to me is sort of overwhelmingly likely that there is life elsewhere highly likely that there's intelligent life elsewhere but that it is almost certainly too far away for us to ever notice or interact with in any meaningful way which is sort of gets to the Carl Sagan question of you know the once every hundred thousand years rolling by which you know if absent a craft coming here and again there's sort of lots of reasons to doubt that anyone would sort of happen by our yellow dwarf to swing by our particular planet that it's probably the distances involved are too huge for us to ever know quite there was a question back here yeah your book contained the background scope that you're telling us now yes and goes into a lot more detail of the sightings and the evolving science along the way great yeah I noticed in a number of the caveats that came out of the Pentagon that they chose to pretty much blow off the word extra terrestrial as a solution for what a US or UAP might be but that to me also signals the possibility that looking for an extra terrestrial explanation is a bit of a repairing in this much as say someone like John Valet or Heineck himself or John Mack is an example of that. Have looked at other phenomenon that could produce a visible artifact in a detectable way including a lot of stuff we don't know about which is this extra dimensional interaction between parts of the universe we don't understand where there may be breaks or openings through which something you could fall or peek or deliberately come through whether it involves sentience or not and all of the explanation I've seen rarely look at extra dimensional as opposed to extra terrestrial explanations that I'm wondering if that's a deliberate strategy. So I think deliberate strategy is probably an overstatement again of the level of strategic conspiracy that the US government is able to pull off but you have skipped all the way ahead to the second to last page of my book where I answer the question that people actually ask when they are saying you know so what are the UFOs and I think it is a pie chart with four pieces and I draw sort of one boundary around it which is what are the things that the US government thinks are UFOs or UAPs in their nomenclature now so immediately ruling out everything that is you know Venus or a meteor or you know confusion with a you know commercial aircraft or even you know our own government's secret projects because there are surely some secret planes that the US government is testing out their drones or otherwise that we don't know that we don't know about but the government does that we are reporting as UFOs right now. So what are the things that the government thinks are UFOs? To me it's four categories. The first is astronomical meteorological and atmospheric phenomenon that we don't yet understand and this is again a much larger category than people generally think. Ball lightning is something that we really don't understand sort of meteorologically sort of how it forms, what it is, how long it exists. Like there's a lot of you know meteorological science, atmospheric science, astronomical science that we need to solve to sort of get through you know one corner of this pie chart. The second category to me is adversarial technology that is being tested against us. So this is you know Russian drones, Chinese drones, Iranian drones, you know Tony Stark in his laboratory building something that we don't know about yet. And we know that it's some chunk of this category because one of the things that the Pentagon has actually said since they revived what is now the UAP program is that those UAP sightings have led them to identify a heretofore unknown Chinese trans-medium drone which is to say a drone that came out of the water and transitions to flight that we did not know about before the Pentagon actually began to look at UFOs. That's category two. Category three is a highly technical category that I call weird stuff we're not paying attention to, which is the exactly what we lived through in February with the Chinese spy balloon, which is there's just a bunch of weird stuff floating around in the sky that we're not paying attention to on a daily basis. That it turns out if you sort of turn the NORAD radar slightly differently than they're normally turned, we start turning up. And it was, you know, yes, the Chinese spy balloon, but it was also the Ohio weather balloon hobbyist club balloon that we weren't looking for that then we saw on the radar and shot down with a quarter million dollar missile from the most advanced fighter plane on earth over Lake Huron just because we sort of hadn't noticed that it was there in the first place. The fourth category is the weird answer and this is where I sort of absolutely agree with you, which is there's a level of physics that we don't yet understand that we will learn about and evolve in our own understanding over the next hundred years, over the next thousand years, that I'm very convinced some chunk of the UAP phenomenon is housed in that category. And it might be, and the answers there might be sort of even weirder than what you're talking about, which is, you know, parallel dimensions and extra dimensionality. It could be time travel, you know, it could be wormholes through space that we don't yet understand. But this is sort of this question of, you know, when you think about physics, almost everything that we know about physics we have learned in the last hundred years. And if you think about just this summer, literally this summer, for the first time we recognized that there are gravitational waves moving through outer space that bend space time as they roll through outer space. Literally this summer, we discovered that for the first time. And that to me, sort of some chunk of the UAP phenomenon is going to end up being in this sort of corner of the pie chart and, you know, how big of a corner of the pie chart that is, you know, very much an open question. But the answer is going to be sort of much weirder than I think we're ready for. Well, just as a one-off example, Alan C. Jacques Vallet was playing with the idea, which he wasn't sure he could document, that human consciousness, when you get enough people believing in something, may exactly, that may actually create a physically observable phenomenon, like Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. That if enough people simultaneously believe in even something more expected to appear, that it may actually appear. That has one of the other, you know, sort of edge of possibility. That is certainly the belief of the Republican caucus right now, as they are searching for a speaker of the house. If we just believe enough, we can manifest the existence of a speaker. So, yeah. Maybe two more questions. Yeah. I want somebody who hasn't spoken much. I don't want to talk time. Another possibility is that these, speaking of time travel, that these aliens, quote unquote, that people have described thousands and thousands of people over the years, look too much like us to not be somehow of us. They're not for another planet. It just happened to have gone through all those evolutionary hoops that you describe, and come out looking so much like us, two eyes, two ears, a little nose, a little mouth, two arms, two legs, like, too much like us, even despite the existence of conversion evolution where, you know, seahors can look like a horse, so maybe on another planet, it seems that there's something about us. And if people are interested in that idea, this guy named Michael Masters, someone to look at, he wrote a book called Identified Flying Object, where he proposes that these are future us, coming back to somehow assist us in not fucking up the planet. Well, and there's actually, there's a bunch of interesting writing and thinking around this in the context of would we recognize a truly alien? Aliens as alien. And sort of the example of this is actually, and there's sort of, there's some interesting sort of thought work behind this, of sort of the, positing the idea, like, maybe cats are aliens. Like, would we, like, this species sort of delivers itself here, figures out that like, we'll take care of it, and, you know, sort of like, cats sort of could approach intelligent, you know, being intelligent life, right? And like, would we recognize that if it turns out that cats are aliens? All right, last question. Yeah. How are you gaining the intelligence you need intelligence in to write a book about something that is you can only do this much later on? Yeah, and I think, so that was a really interesting challenge for this, which is, you know, I think to me, one of the most interesting aspects of writing a book is you, there's sort of, every book I've ever written, there's like a central challenge of writing the book that you didn't estimate going into it. My sort of other example is like, I did not understand stupidly how emotionally taxing it would be to write a book about 9-11. And like, that was like the central challenge of that book in a way that I don't understand. Did you move through any of that? Oh, yes. Yes. For UFO, to me, what was the interesting central challenge of this book is you don't know at the end of the day whether at the core of the book is something or nothing. Which... I think it's intelligence hidden by the Navy, the Air Force, although... Well, so part of it, so that's a related question, which I'll get to in a second, which is, you know, there's this sort of interesting challenge at the heart of the book, which is like, there are... And this gets to, you know, you mentioned John Mack, who's this Harvard psychiatrist who did some incredible work in the 1990s on alien abduction. And alien abduction turned out to be a very real phenomenon. The question is, do aliens have anything to do with it? But that there is a sort of very documentable and sort of traceable subpopulation of people who have shared experience and shared experiences with no sort of shared psychology behind them. You know, that crosses culture, crosses age, crosses race, ethnicity, you know, religious understanding and that sort of studied as a subpopulation, they are sort of most clearly identifiable as akin to trauma victims and abuse victims. So, like, there are a lot of people who believe that they have been kidnapped by aliens. Whether or not aliens have anything to do with that is like a very different question, but it's like a documentable phenomenon. And so, you know, as you're going through, you know, as I went through, you know, thousands of sightings at one level, but dozens at more close detail, you know, there are a lot of people who report UFO sightings who are by all meaningful measure mentally sound fit members of society. Pilots. Pilots is actually a really interesting different subset, which I will exclude from this for reasons that are clear if you read the book. But who have sort of nothing to gain by reporting their sighting, about it, and then sort of just go on with their lives, like people who are like, yes, I saw this alien here, and then just go on and have a totally normal life for the rest of their lives. And it's a really interesting, I think, sort of psychological question that underpins a lot of the book. And certainly underpins a lot of our fascination with this thing. The sort of more technical answer to your question ends up being, like, a vast amount of this has been declassified over many, many years, some of which being, some of which is the government's attempt to disprove the idea that it's hiding any vast conspiracy is the government has done enormous amount of work actually in the 1990s trying to debunk the Roswell sightings by actually declassifying that they were a series of highly classified projects at the time, which is why, you know, it was a weather balloon that didn't look like any weather balloon that anyone knew was because it wasn't actually a weather balloon, it was a balloon that we were trying to develop to then float over the Soviet Union to try to do nuclear tests, blah, blah, blah, blah, but that it ends up, you know, the literature and sort of government information that's available at this point is actually quite voluminous on a lot of these sightings. All right, thank you all for coming. Really appreciate the talking through all of this.