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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu.
Today, what our fascination with UFOs says about us Earthlings.
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A couple years ago, the Pentagon released some pretty startling footage.
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Undisclosed Speaker: Snickle 6 1 tango. Roger, go ahead.
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Basu, Narrating: It was captured by a Navy jet pilot in 2015.
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Speaker: Woah! Got him! [LAUGHS] Woohoo!
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Basu, Narrating: A little black dot moving shockingly fast over the ocean…
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Speaker: Oh my gosh, dude. Wow, look at that. Look at it fly!
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Basu, Narrating: …so fast that even the pilots
weren't quite sure what they were looking at.
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[PILOTS TALKING INDISTINCTLY]
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The Pentagon released the videos to, quote,
"clear up any misconceptions about whether the footage was real."
But in many pockets of the Internet, the videos and the Pentagon statement
were proof of something else: Alien life here on Earth.
Garrett Graff: The heart of the UFO question is, are we alone?
Basu: That's national security journalist Garrett Graff.
Graff: And that is probably one of the most fundamental
and long-standing questions in human existence.
And it's up there with, you know, "is there a God?"
"What happens to us after death?"
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Basu, Narrating: Garrett's career has been all about investigating government secrets.
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He's written books about Watergate, 9/11, cybersecurity.
His most recent book is called
"UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search
for Alien Life Here - and Out There."
In it, Garrett looks at the history of UFO sightings,
dating back to the flying saucers of the 1940s,
through modern times, where we now call them UAPs,
or Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.
And he talks about what kind of record-keeping
has been made public or kept secret.
Now, to be clear, by taking UFOs extremely seriously,
Garrett isn't saying they're for sure a sign of intelligent alien life.
What he is saying is
there are actually so many possible explanations
for what we're seeing
that somehow alien life might rank among the least interesting theories.
I sat down with Garrett a few weeks ago, before I started my maternity leave.
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Graff: Since 2017, I've noticed this changing conversation
around UFOs and UAPs.
There was a series of blockbuster headlines
from the "New York Times" and "Politico"
about a secret Pentagon effort to study UAPs.
And there was a moment that really made me, as a journalist,
sit up and pay attention, which was in December 2020.
John Brennan, who had just wrapped up the better part of a decade
as the CIA director
and The White House Homeland Security advisor
during the Obama administration,
gave an interview to a Washington economist and blogger
named Tyler Cowen.
And he says, quote:
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John Brennan: 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 that we don't yet understand
and that could involve some type of activity
that some might say constitutes a different form of life.
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Basu: There's so many conditional phrases in there. [LAUGHS]
Graff: So many phrases in it.
Basu: Translate what you're hearing in there.
Graff: But for John Brennan to say, "There's stuff out there
that we don't know what it is and it puzzles me,"
was, as a national security writer, a really startling statement.
Because there's a 60 billion dollar a year intelligence apparatus
that we have to deliver him the answer as soon as possible.
You know, tens of thousands of intelligence officers, analysts,
sensor networks, signal, intelligence intercept systems,
satellites that go out there
and solve the thing that John Brennan is asking about.
And so for John Brennan to have gone through his tenure as CIA director
and White House Homeland Security advisor, and then to say,
"this stuff's still weird to me,"
says that there was something worth digging into for a book.
Basu: Mm.
Graff: And so what I tried to do with this book is pull together two separate threads.
One is the military's hunt and study of UFOs here,
and then this evolving astronomy and science
around the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
And I think historians and journalists
normally talk about these two things totally separately.
Basu: Separately, sure.
Graff: You've got your kooky, weird UFO conspiracy people on this side
and then you have your serious scientists just doing serious science stuff
on the astronomy side.
Basu: Mm-hm.
Graff: They're very related stories,
not least of all because the question of, "are aliens visiting Earth?"
has a lot to do with, "are there aliens at all?"
Basu: Yeah. Yeah.
Graff: And so to me, trying to pull this together
really tells a different history of our evolving understanding
of our place in the world and the universe than we think.
Basu: You know, you've come up with four ways of categorizing
what we see when we're seeing UFOs.
Can you explain your four categories?
Graff: Yeah, so one is adversary technology being tested against us:
Chinese drones, Russian drones, Iranian drones.
Basu: Surveillance-type technology or military-type technology. Yeah.
Graff: Exactly.
You know, Tony Stark in a mountain bunker
building something that the government doesn't know about yet.
Basu: Right.
Graff: And we know that some chunk of what we're experiencing right now is that
because one of the few things that the Pentagon has said in recent years
is that they have discovered
a heretofore unknown Chinese transmedium drone,
which is to say a drone that emerges from the water
and transitions to flight, which was a technology
that the U.S. did not realize China possessed.
The second category is something that I would refer to
with a scientific terminology of "weird stuff."
There's just a bunch of weird clutter and trash up there in the sky
that we do not pay attention to on a normal day.
And this is what we went through with the Chinese spy balloon in February.
You know, you remember the military spots the spy balloon,
does not realize it's up there.
NORAD, the North American Air Defense Systems,
you know, changes its radar settings a little bit,
starts picking up all sorts of UFOs.
The military panics, sends up the world's most advanced fighter jet
to shoot down all of these UFOs with quarter million dollar missiles.
Then you get into two categories
that I think represent probably phenomena, not objects.
And one of them is gonna be relatively normal stuff.
Atmospheric phenomena, meteorological things,
astronomical things
that we don't just really understand at a scientific level yet.
Then you get to the fourth category.
And the fourth category might be small,
but I think that this is gonna be really, really weird stuff.
And it's gonna be physics that we don't understand yet.
things that require us to be humble
about how much we understand,
or really how little we understand about the world around us.
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Basu, Narrating: You might have noticed Garrett is not starting from a place
of totally dismissing the alien life theory.
In fact, he says,
if he took a strictly mathematical approach to the question,
"does alien life exist somewhere out there?"
the math would be on the side of the aliens.
Graff: We now understand, you know, and this is a super rough estimate,
that there are one sextillion habitable planets across the universe.
That's a billion trillions.
Life could be very rare. Intelligent life could be really rare.
But do you really think it's a one in sextillion chance
across the universe?
Basu, Narrating: So if aliens do exist,
of all the planets and all the places to go
what are the chances they're actually visiting Earth
or trying to contact us at all?
Sure, it's a story we see a lot in movies and TV.
Graff: There's the Jodie Foster radio message from space in the movie "Contact."
Basu: In "Contact," yeah.
Graff: This very clear, unambiguous radio message.
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Jodie Foster: Those are all prime numbers and there's no way that's a natural phenomenon.
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Graff: Then you have the "Independence Day."
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Speaker: Welcome Wagon, Echo One. Approaching alien ship.
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Graff: The alien mothership appearing over the White House.
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Speaker: It looks like there's some kind of activity here.
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Graff: "Take me to your leader.
I'm here to either make friends with you or conquer you
and harvest your organs for food or energy."
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The truth of the matter is there's probably life out there.
There's probably intelligent life out there.
It has no idea that we're here. and probably doesn't care if it did.
Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer of the 20th century,
during his lifetime was probably the leading proponent
of what's called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
SETI.
He used to argue that UFOs were not alien visitors here,
not because aliens didn't exist or aliens didn't visit Earth,
but because statistically you would expect aliens to only visit Earth
every couple hundred thousand years.
And that they would be treating Earth as, you know,
basically the equivalent of a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike
when you're driving from, like, one interesting place to another
[BASU LAUGHS]
and you need a place to stop off and refuel,
or, you know, have a picnic or something like that.
Basu: Yeah. "We'll pull off here," yeah.
Graff: And that the idea that anyone will notice us,
anyone would bother visiting us, or in sort of Carl Sagan's mind,
that like, last Tuesday was the day in the last 250,000 years
that the alien flying saucers buzzed the USS Nimitz…
Basu: Right, yeah.
Graff: …is just astronomically low.
Basu: [LAUGHS] Right.
I mean, see, this is the argument that appeals the most to me.
I mean, the math behind it, statistical probability talk
all makes a ton of sense to me.
The idea of, I sort of see these as two mostly separate conversations,
you know, the is life out there, probability of that feeling very, very high.
The other thing you're talking about, right,
the probability that this is how we would get contact,
or get a sign of contact,
that's the one that seems just vanishingly low to me.
Graff: Yes. And when you get into the science, when you get into this math,
what we are probably going to see
as our first sign of intelligent life and intelligent civilization
is something that is much more mundane and much more ambiguous
than either of those two first contact scenarios.
What we're probably going to first see is a piece of space trash.
We're going to see what the Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb
compares to the equivalent of a empty plastic bag
blowing through our cosmic backyard.
And we're not going to have any idea whose it is,
whether that civilization exists at all anymore.
Because one of the things that was just so poignant to me
is life could be very common, intelligent life could be very common,
but we could be alone right now.
That we're actually an incredibly young civilization
in a young solar system.
Our solar system's about four and a half billion years old.
The universe is about fourteen billion years old.
So you end up thinking about the possibility, like,
there could be billion-year civilizations of intelligent life.
I mean, things that would be technically indistinguishable to us
from God.
And we could have missed it by a couple billion years.
Basu: Right, right.
Graff: And yet that civilization's trash
could still be sort of kicking around the interstellar space
and every so often swing through our solar system
and we'll look up one day and say,
"Oh, there's an empty plastic bag from someone else's Walmart."
Basu: Right, right, right.
Well, I think that's what people are most hopeful
that they might be witnessing when they see a UFO, right?
The sign, the very unlikely sign.
And "we better not miss it" kind of thinking.
I mean, you've pointed out in your book how a lot of these clusters,
these flaps, in sightings coincided with moments
when the military was testing some kind of new technology.
So can you talk about the pattern that you identify,
the patterns that we see?
Graff: Yeah, one of the weird things that comes out of trying to trace the history of UFOs
is at any given time,
a big chunk of UFO, UAP sightings are our government's own secret projects.
And this gets to what, to me, is one of my other, sort of,
big, you know, semi-obvious conclusions in the work,
which is there is a government cover up around UFOs.
It's just not the one that you think it is.
There are a couple of layers of cloaks of secrecy
that the government puts over its knowledge and understanding of UFOs.
One is, you know, it doesn't tell us when it's our own project.
The CIA went back and actually tallied
that perhaps as much as a half of UFO sightings in the 1950s
were actually the U-2 spy plane when it was being developed in secret
during the Cold War.
It was a UFO.
If you were a commercial pilot flying across the Nevada airspace
and you looked up,
the U-2 was a plane that didn't look like any plane that we knew existed,
flying at an altitude that planes did not fly at,
at speeds planes were not known to fly.
You landed as that commercial pilot and said, "I saw a UFO today."
And we know that that's sort of still going on right now.
There's another layer, a cloak of secrecy,
that the government puts over this,
which is some chunk of this is adversary technology.
And the government is really squirrelly for obvious reasons
about what its sensors and radars and systems detect, doesn't detect,
what it knows about some of these things.
Basu: Sure. It becomes a question of national security at that point.
Graff: Yes, but then you get to what to me is the core of the government cover-up,
which is I think that John Brennan was telling the truth.
I don't think the government actually knows
what a big chunk of UAP sightings actually are.
And that what they are trying to cover up is actually their ignorance.
And that's a really uncomfortable answer for a bureaucracy to give
when we have a bureaucracy that spends nearly a trillion dollars a year
on national defense and intelligence and homeland security.
Basu: But how much of that can you chalk up to various government agencies
just not communicating things to each other
again in the interest of national security or just top level secrecy going on?
Graff: Yes.
Basu: Versus like incompetence, versus truly not knowing.
Graff: Yes. And there's actually some great historical anecdotes of this
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where you have the government not knowing what the government is doing.
Basu, Narrating: One such example, the Roswell incident,
birthplace of the Area 51 conspiracy theory.
It was the summer of 1947.
There had been hundreds of reported sightings
of flying saucers that year, and people were captivated by the stories.
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Speaker: They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half
with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear.
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Basu, Narrating: With all this going on, a rancher named Mack Brazel came into town
in Roswell, New Mexico, saying he'd found some weird wreckage.
Graff: It would have been a huge crash filled with a bunch of metallic stuff
a hundred feet taller than the Washington Monument.
It was a train of like 30 balloons all strung together
with sensors and electronics.
Basu, Narrating: The sheriff says "This stuff looks military.
Go talk to the guys at the nearby base."
Graff: Air Force Intelligence goes out, brings it back to the base.
The Roswell Air Force Base, at that time,
is the world's most advanced fighting unit.
It is the one unit in the entire world equipped with nuclear bombers,
those silver-plated B-29 bombers that targeted Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Basu, Narrating: But the base commander didn't know what he was looking at either.
He thought, this must be one of those strange flying disks
people keep reporting.
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So he put out a press release.
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Speaker: Headline edition July 8, 1947.
The Army Air Forces has announced that a flying disc has been found
and is now in the possession of the Army.
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Basu, Narrating: Newspapers that picked up the headline
paired it with stories of separate sightings.
Military officials quickly retracted the statement,
saying the debris was from a weather balloon.
But the retraction added fuel to the idea of a government cover-up.
Conspiracy theories and hoaxes bubbled for decades.
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Graff: What we understand about 50 years later,
when the Clinton administration gets sick of the Roswell conspiracy theories
and tries to put out a couple of reports that debunk them,
is that there was this secret balloon project
being tested in New Mexico at the time at the White Sands Proving Grounds
that was the military's attempt to develop a balloon
that could detect Soviet atomic tests.
Basu: Garrett says there are lots of examples of pilots, especially, spotting
secret military projects and reporting a UFO.
Graff: In January 1948,
right at the beginning of this modern flying saucer age,
Captain Thomas Mantell,
who's a pilot in the Kentucky Air National Guard,
he goes up with three or four other pilots
who were all coming back from a training mission.
They're sent off to chase after a UFO.
Mantel actually becomes the only one who finds it.
He sends these incredibly worrisome and ambiguous radio messages back,
you know, "I see this thing. It's enormous. It's metallic.
I'm still climbing."
And then what the Air Force believes ends up happening
is basically, he flies too high, runs out of oxygen.
He passes out and the plane spirals down, tears itself apart,
and he crashes and dies.
And it's this really worrisome moment for the Air Force.
Did this thing shoot him down?
Is there actually hostile intent from these UFOs?
And it took until 1952
for the Air Force to figure out what killed Thomas Mantel.
And the answer was a Navy research balloon.
So there was no hostile intent.
It was, in fact, the government's own secret program
that the government itself didn't know about.
And so dispatched fighters to chase down.
Basu: Right.
So those are examples of UFOs
that ended up being explainable in the end.
But you said you have reason to believe
that there is some large amount of incidents
that the government cannot explain and is not fully transparent about.
Graff: Yeah. So the Navy videos we've seen in recent years,
to me, are very clear examples of it.
I mean, that is the government…
Basu: Super compelling to watch and listen to, too.
Graff: You know, the government being genuinely puzzled
about what some of these things are.
Now, some of these videos and photographs,
they have been able to trace back with further study and identify.
There's a famous photo of green flying triangles.
Those actually, we've now understood, are regular drones, quote-unquote.
But when you photograph them through night vision equipment,
they end up looking different than we thought that they did.
Basu: Oh, that's funny. Again, explainable. [CHUCKLES]
Graff: Again, explainable.
Basu: Right.
Graff: To me, though, there's another category of witness.
The people who have no apparent reason to invent a UFO sighting,
who actually have a lot to lose, reputationally,
for reporting a UFO sighting.
The one that really sort of sticks in my mind is 1964, Lonnie Zamora.
He's a local police officer in Socorro, New Mexico,
actually not that far from Roswell.
And he is chasing a speeder on the outskirts of town
and he, during the pursuit, hears an explosion
and sees off in the desert
what looks to him like a overturned car in a ditch.
So he turns his cruiser off into the desert,
he sees two figures outside of it that are not quite fully human size.
And as he gets closer, they get into the craft,
and the craft flies away.
And we know something happened to Lani Zamora in that desert.
There were other witnesses who arrive within a couple of minutes,
including a New Mexico state trooper,
who see him petrified and traumatized by whatever the thing is that happened.
Military and the FBI respond to the scene.
They see some what appears to be physical evidence
of a craft landing in the place where Lonnie Zamora said it did.
And there's maybe some very simple answers to this.
You know, it's 1964. It's the height of the space race.
He's near White Sands Proving Grounds, that government test facility.
Maybe he stumbled on part of the Apollo program
testing a moon lander.
Except it's 50, 60 years later,
and we've never seen evidence emerge from government archives
of a craft that operates
in the way that the thing that Lonnie Zamora says that he saw.
And there maybe aren't hundreds of Lonnie Zamoras over the years,
but there are scores of them.
And to me, that category of witness feels really credible
and points to me that there's a mystery here
that is, again, weirder and stranger than probably we can imagine right now
as the core answer to at least part of the chunk of UFOs.
The thing that puzzles me and concerns me
is how you have witnesses like these Navy pilots coming back
and the Navy not apparently caring that much
about the fact that their pilots are tangling in the sky
with technologies that we cannot explain
and craft that move in ways that appear to defy the laws of physics.
That, to me, is something our government should be more concerned about.
Basu: Well, let's talk about the recent flurry of activity that we have seen interest,
at least in Congress.
Over the summer, we heard former intelligence officials testify
in a series of hearings,
and some said that they had reason to believe
that the federal government has recovered lots of physical materials
from UAP crashes,
including non-human biological matter, right?
Basically fueling this idea
that the government is hiding something very alien-y related to these crashes.
Graff: Yeah.
Basu: I mean, what stood out to you from those hearings?
Graff: I think it requires untangling a couple of different threads.
One is, since the 1980s, last 40 years or so,
there has been a steady stream of people coming forward
with what Ufologists now call foftales.
Not folktales, but foftales, friend of a friend tales.
"I worked with a guy who said that he saw this thing."
And what we have generally lacked
are people coming forward with first-hand knowledge
and any documentary evidence.
Now, one of the other challenges of this is David Grusch,
who was that intelligence community UFO whistleblower from this summer.
One of his big claims was
the U.S. government has a secret UFO crash retrieval program
that has recovered non-human technology.
We do have a secret UFO crash retrieval program.
It's a group of intelligence officers who go around the world
and collect crashed UFOs.
That's not them saying that they collect crashed alien spacecraft.
I would guess that unit today spends a lot of its time
running around the world collecting crashed drones
from China, Russia, Iran.
I also will believe that that unit has a warehouse somewhere
where they put the stuff that they don't know what it is yet.
Basu: Right.
Graff: I also will believe that there's a man or woman on that unit
who has walked into that warehouse, looked at some of that stuff,
and says, "This doesn't look like anything that we've ever seen on Earth before.
Must be aliens."
So every bit of the following sentence can be true,
that "I talked to someone on the secret UFO crash retrieval program
who says that they have collected unknown technology
that they believe is extraterrestrial.
That can be an entirely true sentence
that doesn't lead to the place where I think the public hears,
which is there was a meeting in the Situation Room
and a general with a lot of stars on his shoulders
stood up and said, "Mr. President,
with a high degree of confidence from 17 intelligence agencies,
we have concluded that we are in possession of alien technology.
And those two things are not the same.
Basu: Not the same, yeah.
Graff: And yet I think when someone hears that sentence
in a congressional hearing or a media interview,
they don't differentiate between those two.
Basu: Yeah, sure, sure. Well, what do you think is behind that?
I do think that we've been told so many times now by our government,
we don't have an explanation for this.
And people have taken it and understood it to mean something else.
Why can't we accept "we don't know" as an answer?
Graff: Because the answers could be so interesting.
Like, we want to believe.
Basu: Yeah.
Graff: This is this question that we started off talking about of, are we alone?
And there is so much magic and wonder wrapped up in that answer
that I think that there's always going to be a chunk of people
who want that answer to be true.
The second half of this book is about this collapse of truth
and trust in government institutions
and the rise of government conspiracy theories.
What you see after Watergate and the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam
and the Church Committee and the Pike Committee,
is this rise,
literally at the end of the 1970s into the 1980s,
of this very dark conspiratorial idea
that the government is hiding knowledge of alien civilizations.
And in some ways, I think this is where the deep state
is really born in our political discussion.
And that you have figures, one of the major ones, Bill Cooper,
who is one of the founding UFO conspiracists of the 1980s.
He was a naval intelligence officer during Vietnam.
He saw the documents
where the government talked about its contact with alien civilizations
and peace treaties with alien governments, yada, yada, yada.
Again, no documentary evidence to back it up,
but these are the tales that he is telling.
He ends up becoming one of the founders of far-right conservative talk radio
where he inspires and becomes, really, the mentor
to a Austin, Texas public access talk show host
named Alex Jones.
I believe that you can actually draw this pretty straight line
from the UFO conspiracies of the 1980s up to January 6th and the Big Lie.
Basu: Yeah.
How do you convince people to sit with that uncertainty
rather than reach for what feels like the sort of fun popcorn answer
that it must be aliens?
Graff: To me, the wonder of it is what it should be all about.
I think of the question of "are we alone?"
as in some ways being a microcosm and a stand-in
for all that humanity still has left to learn.
And for me, what is exciting about this subject
is realizing the potential and possibility of what civilization could be
in 10,000 years, 100,000 years, a million years, five million years.
And one of the things I take away from that
is why it's so important that we take care of ourselves
and our planet and our society and our civilization right now.
Because there's this incredibly famous equation
in all of this SETI work called the Drake Equation,
which is basically this theoretical but real equation
for calculating how many intelligent civilizations out there
might be capable of contacting us.
The major variable in it is what's known as L,
which is the length of time a intelligent civilization lasts.
And as you play out those variables,
it's possible that the ultimate challenge of intelligent life
is that it doesn't last very long,
that it, on the one end of the spectrum,
destroys itself in something like nuclear war,
or the intergalactic equivalent of nuclear conflict.
Or one of the things I worry about in the moment that we're in right now
is that advanced civilizations lose interest in exploring the world.
You know, that you end up living in these virtual reality headsets
filled with misinformation and disinformation and entertainment,
and that you lose that scientific drive to go out and explore the universe,
to learn more about ourselves and our world.
And, what I hope for my children is that they are able,
and future generations are able to retain the curiosity
about caring about solving these questions.
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Basu: Well, Garrett, this was such an interesting conversation
and it made me feel very, very small, but in a good way.
Graff: Yeah.
Basu: [LAUGHS] Thank you so much for your time.
Graff: What a great chat. Thank you so much.
Basu, Narrating: Garrett Graff's book,
"UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search
for Alien Life Here-- and Out There,"
is out now on Apple Books.
We'll link to it on our show notes page.
And if you're listening in the Apple News app,
an excerpt from his book is queued up to play for you next.
If you like what you're hearing,
give Apple News: In Conversation a follow on Apple Podcasts,
and please leave us a review. Thanks.
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