we have someonea absolute and true friend to the national archives and records administration as well to the gerald r ford foundation. how a friend is garrett graff

well just to put it in a kind of small p garrett is such a friend th garrett writes out his check every year to the irs, garrett loves believe that every single comes to the national archives for our usage. i'm not sure. i'm not sure that isgoes like the tailhook of an f 35, but thought that counts ladies and gentlemen, garrett graff. it's. yeah. t stole what is normally my opening joke when i speak at a museum, which is i'm just a huge fan of. the presidential libraries and museums across the country and i've been lucky.

i think i've done research now at all. but three of them and it's they're just a wonderful network across the country resource for history. so i'm very appreciative of the work that archivists do across the for so you started by writing a book about robert mueller and the fbi getting a kind of sweet gig on cnn. a lot of a national exposure. you moved from that to writing my personal favorite raven. e story of the u.s. government's plan to itself while. the rest of us died and you followedhat with the in my opinion one of the best oral histories editorial ever written and the only plane in t the story of 911 and then not on that success. hugh moved and wrote one o2023

pulitzer prize. his history of the watergate and last couple of years ago, you were here to talk about your watergate book and fully remember this. you and i were having a private dinner across the river. and i every every you been here, i usually ask you so, garrett, what's next in your was? i'm writing a book on ufos. and i know my response. what? so garrett yfos, as you say. i'm a very weird written this book because i am not a i was not raised watching x-files or star trek. i'm not a scicionado. i come this book, as you just outlined covered national security for the and what i noticed indean in the last couple of years was the

convoy procession around changed and that there was a series of blockbuster reporting by the new york times and politico, where i used to work in the fall of 2017. that outline of two threadsng perspective on ufos. one was a series of about a secret pentagon ufo study program that had been funded by then senate majority leader harryd had been run by a las vegas businessman and space entrepreneur named robert and at same time, there were a series of videos that came out that the pentagon released from navy pilots, navy aviators who had encounters with objects in

the sky that they could not explain. and there were a series of three videos that came out taviators the pilots sort of testifsaid was, you knowthey did not believe that the us could counter and things that moved atangles that to them def it and that was interesting but there was a momentin december 2020 that took this a you know something i was sort of vaguely attention to to somethinwhere i was like, okay, i should sit down and dive into this for a book project, which was john brennan who had just wrapped up the better part of a decade at that point as the cia director and the white house homeland security gave an interview, a dc journalist named, tyler cowan, wherence in,

incredibly tortured syntax. there's stuff out there we don't what it is it us and it may ripper isn't a phenomenon that some might say might constitute a new form of life. and that's an incredibly statement for someone like john brennan to make. i had covered john brennan. i've interviewed brennan. he's about as serious a national security establishment person as as you can get and i figured there that puzzle old john morning and was cia director and white house homeland advisor. if he had a question, we have a $60 billion a year intelligence pa went out and tried to answer his questions.

and, you know, and analysts and operatorsance networks and signals intelligence intercepts systems all dedicated to ansring whaver random questions john brennan wakes up in the morning with. an if he is leaving office at the end of eight years as white house homeland security advisor and and cia director and he says, man, this ufos stuff is really puzzling. that to me felt like something that was worthy of diving into book tries to pull our two threads that journalists in historians normally treat differently. one, thas hunt for ufos here on the evolving science and the aro under of the size and scale and call the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

study and that journalist and normally try to treat these as like two totally separate unreal rated topics. you know you have the wacky ufo people here who are all crazy and then you have this serious astronomers doing serious work, studying the universe. but to%+ me very much thet because you see the same figures sort of moving back and forth between two worlds and arguing with one another, but then also at an incredibly level, the question of are aliens visiting us here on earth has a lot to do with the ques of whether aliens exist at all anymore. so before i answer, ask or answer, i ask my i want to do a quick audience poll because it leads into question number two. so poll. how many of you believe that ufos exist? but they not of alien nature.

raise your hand. i'm noton. not okay. how many you believe that ufos exist and they are of aliens nature. please raise your hand. okay. all right. and here's the last. how many of you did not raise your hands becre you a concerned about being stigmatized? one way or the other? all right that's not very fair, a very fair raising of your head. so garrett, in your book, you write quite a bit early in the ufo experience right after the war and after world war two and scientists are like common human psychology. they're in public, but they're saying entirely in private. can you expand the modern flying saucer

begins in the of 1947 and it was in idaho businessmen named kenneth arnold in june 1947, who is flying his private plane up in the pacific northwest, the cascades and. he sees out his windo object moving at tremendous speed. lands. tell some friends about it on the ground. it gets picked up by the media. the media sensationalizes and it kicks off the sum flying saucer. flying saucers are entirely to american culture. that the course of that summer, there are sightings across 34 states up into north ame sighting almost every day in the country there. you know this like front page newspaper, four stories, day after day after day that summer tw this phenomenon,

there's a in roswell, new mexico. so that becomes part of the of this saucer. and in that early moment there's no one who thinks that these are the government is deeply concerned about is that this is is secret soviet spacecraft being built by kidnaped rocket scientists. e in the summer of 1947, this is theawn summer when the war in some ways of peaks in its early years that yo the passage of the security act of 1947, almost the same day as the roswell crash, that this is the act that creates the cia the joint chiefs of staff, creates the defense department, creates the air force as an independent military branch

creates the national security council, y k whole government is sort of reshaping itself for the the war. and we we would use a different word than kidnaped. we would tell you thate had presented some unique employment opportunities to former nazi rocket scientists in places like lasalle, moz and the white sands grounds and were them build you know, the next generation of v-2 rockets to help launch the space race and thyou know the force as a independent service its first crisis ist needs to figure out what things are and security and they arbaffled as anyone else. in the summereventually figure out it's not secret soviet and in a very weird way the us and the us air force then loses interest in

whatever the flying saucers actually are once they determine not the national security threat about and instead have hollywood come along. and in the late forties and early fifties the sort of alien invasion movies familiar with that begin to link for the first time. the idea, you know, flying aliens, know, visiting earth invasion etc. etc. and it creates this fascinating feedback loop that then plays out decade next 80 years where have the public sightings drive? national security panics by the government that then inspire hollywood to sort of new threats and new pop culture use of aliens that then inspires public

sightings of that inspires more national security panics and sort of adum and this is a point where i actually come in to answer your question, the what you see is sort of science begin to have this really difficult dance where. this is just in the real seriousported radio astronomy, you know,a much more system way than we've ever seen before. driven by world war two technologies like radar and that scientists. you know are trying to sort of downplay possibilities of aliens visiting earth. the one hand, while the possible of life and. sort of the middle third of this book e being this. sort of intellectual feud over

decades. aids between j. alan hynek, who is astronomer who, leads the government investigation of ufos sagan, who is, of co famous, most famous astronomer of the 20 century and is simultaneously the lead ceti, for the search for extraterrestrial while also being the arch us here on earth. presidential presidential library museum. so i think it's only appropriate that we ask about the presidents and ufos. so you write in your book quite some detail with regard to kind of the dispirit of quite a few american presidents and this the ufo issue gerald ford, jimmy ronald reagan, bill clinton. can you expound and talk a bit about each of those presidents and what they did or did not do

for the ufo? yeah. so the the thing that will sort of most surprise is most of you who think that you know something about gerald f in this room is that gerald ford in congress was the leading advocate for studying ufos that actually inhe summer of 1966 he here he was the and in the summer of 66, there is, a very famous series of ufo sightings here, michigan. on a period of week. there's one sort of very famous this glowing orb out inz forest behind one of the dorm that's witnessed dozens and scores of students in college adnistrators and police officers. then a series of othersightings across

central far ends, a couple of other locations. hynek, astronomer, is investigate it and and he spends a couple of days going around the army andice across michigan trying to understand what'spening and he eventually a press conference at the detroit press and it's the largest press event ever at where. he dismisses them as swamp a f ufo sightings in and if you if biology gas is a real thing it has to do w melting the winter and then being r thawand gerald ford, the loc is

incredulous that thed so quickly dismiss his obviously correct constituents who saw ufos and so he pushes the first ever congressional hearings on ufos in the summer of 1966. that being t9zhe first congressional hearings and only hearings congressional hearings. two summers ago, when congress sort of picked back up this this issue. as i said in my opening answer as we sort of began to see serious peoplesly about gerald ford runs jimmy who is has best documented ufo of any american president. he when he was governor of georgia saw a thought was a ufo outside

of an elks club one ght while he was speaking as governor. and it until about a decade ago to out what he actually saw which he saw a military missile test over the horizon that released a barium cloud that of lit up the sky in this very peculiar way. and jimmy in exactly the way you would expect jimmy carter be dutifully filled out the paperwork to sighting and, sent it governor and it become sort of partcampaign because everyone at that pointopes that jimmy carter will win and then open up secret files, which he then does not do. yeah. so let's let'syour alma mater harvard, there are a couple of interesting in your book as well as sagan and his

career track nearly being ruin earned by his initial interest. ufos as well. another famed harvard psychologist dr. mach, you asked whether when asked at the time whetherái harvard was embarrassed by professor, a harvard that all of its faculty had strange interests and quote, they are all weird and one way or another can you talk about not harvard but this with sagan and dr. mach yeah so john mache most fascinating of in the 1990s as he pioneered is really the scientifictudy of people who report abductions. and i spent a couple of chapters of the book looking at the phenomena of alien abduction once and what what mark really

to understand and there are a couple of people in this world who actually a very famous artist named bu a writer in his own way, who gets interested in this, a couple of others. and and john mack calls them experi answers because he does not want to. prejudge one way or another what actually happened to these and that alien abductions come to the fore. this in the late 1960s and then really peak in the 1980s, early nineties and the the psychiatrist to study them really believed that something happens to these peoplehat they report signs trauma that would be

consistent with people who have undergone actual trauma. you know they psychiatrically sort of very similar to abuseictims, you know, war sort of other people who have variations ofptsd. and that they are have no interestingly, no share sort of psychopathy befoexperi ence and no shareso is not a situation where you see, you know, people are schizophrenic,hoalien or people who report alien abductions then go on to be a diagnosed as bipolar, that they're are sort of this very wide spectrum of experience. here's and that as far as sort of mental health and psychiatrists can say something

to them and we don't know what into my next question, and this is a this question has never been asked at the gerald r ford presidential museum and i can guarantee it. it never garrett, chapter 41 sex aliens. expound, expound, please sir i'm so this is sort of see it to two very different populations of people who report encounters or aliens wave of people in t called contact these and and they are people who come forward to sort of say like i have i have this encounter with an alien some of

them say that they, you know been taken rides with spaceships and, you know, gotten to see tours of thed that they have been givene with humanity. and it's a message about, you and, not have nuclear war. it's a very specific 1950 is sort of psychological moment. and a lot of them report sort you know, basically the of like the alien stops every thursday and we have tea together and and they for the most part go on to attempt to like monetize this experience. you know, they there's a lot of grifting in this of, you know, ome, you know facilities and things that most people w consider cults and things like and the contact these are general off as as kooks and and

dismissed. one of them sort of very famously. his wife ends up divorcing him and sites the alien being that he says continues to visit him as the sort of aggrieved extra party in theire only known an has ever been cited in legal papers as the sort of of other proceeding. and then you have this other population of of the experiencias buy in large are people who have solo encounters just go with their lives. and it's a much more interesting to met phenomenon because most them have no reason to report the in counter that theytually a lot

of reason that you would not want to report the encounters that these people have. and some ofstories. but then you also havethere's one sort of, particularly to me credible about in the book. who's, a policeman in socorro, new his name, lonnie zamora's a small town cop chasing a speeder in the desert on the road out into the desert. he knows who the speeder is, you know, a good small town he knows, like the kid that he normally a lot of trouble with. he hears an explosion off in the desert and what thinks is a overturned white car o in desert. so he abandons his pursuit. he that kid's house leader and, get him, and he sort of turns this pontiacer and is like

bumping up and down through the gullies towardsturned car. there two figures standing as he gets closer they get craft he describes a sort of football shaped hecloser and the craft takes off and something happens to lonnie desert there is a new mexico state trooper who shows up on the scene within a couple ofutes sees lonnie zamora sort shaken and upset by whatever this encounter is that he has had there's some circumstantial evidence that the military and fbi respond to the find marks in the desert where craft sat or appeared to have sat, where lonnie zamora said that was. and that he is considered to be by the govert investigators of one of the most credible witnesses that we have, in part

because he has reason to make up thishen just goes on with the rest of his life and never has another you know, encounter or experience to report. you know, there's a very simple explanation for what lonnie morris saw, which is this is 1964. nds proving grounds. it's the heart of themaybe he stumbled across the air lander in the desert that he just wasn't supposed to see. but, you know, 50, 60 years later and there has never emerged evidence of any craft that the us governmentas created that behave as anything like the capable cities of what he says that he saw in the desert that day great. thank you very much. i think it would be remiss if did not talk about one of the most famous cases in ufo history

and. that is the issue surrounding the roswell. can you talk a situation in 47 and then the roswell situation and much later? yeah, so was well is almost instantly it occurs as i said, about two weeks after the age of the flying saucer begins. it's part events you see across the coun summer of 47, this rancher city of roswell and found of a crash ranch the air force sends two officers out to investigate it, bring the wreckage back to the roswell army air force base and. the commander of the roswell base looks at it and says he this is a really great moment wait, the

government has finally newspaper every day. and he tells, his public affairs officer to put out a press release saying thenment recovered a flying saucer, which they do, and they pack up the wreckage and they put on a plane, cargo plane, to the eighth air forceeadquarters in in fort worth, else at it and balloon. and and in about three and a half hours, the military puts a second statement saying, you know, our apologies. it's not a flyingr it's a weather balloon. and the roswell story comes and goes in about 3 hours and is basically for 30 years and really reemerges watergate in the late 1970s. and, you know, one of the things that really surprised me in working on this book was is joel said, my previous was a

history of watergate. and this book, in some ways being a weird sequel toergate because the second half of the book ends upt the rise of ufo conspiracy theories and collapse of faith and trust and truth in governments. and so the ufo conspiracies become, really the first government can spirits these to rise in wake of watergate the covietnam, the pentagon papers in the seventies and establish the concept that we would now wreckage as the deepe american spectrum and and american politics sort of this idea that there ishad perm and government cabal you know secretly working at the heart of the us government at

cross-purposes. its leadership figureheads and the american public. and that you see this story grow and become darker and more conspiratorial and sort of more poisoned. it's over the course of1980s and it morphs into this idea that the government has recovered, you know, multiple space craft, multiple know dead aliens, living aliens, that we have peace treaties with alien civilizations. there's, you know, one set of these conspiracies that we actually had a big that the us special forces have a big alien base southwest that leads to troops and that this really becomes i think the beating heart of the conspiracy movement that we now

you know poisoning a lot of our politics. so the ufo conspiracy issue, the not only an as write in your book and quite quite excellent detail. this is a global phenomenon you the soviet union investigatio france and belgium and the uk. can you talk a experiences that the global community has had with and was you know, the question that everyone asks when, i sort of start talking about working on this book is are ufos real? and the answer is like, of course like all a ufo actually is is an unidentified flying object. and there are lots of those. the question that they are ufos real is are we alone?

and that becomes in many ways the the, you know, intellectual philosophical beating heart of this book and alone is in of the two or three most profound and basic questions of existence. you know, it is up there with. what happens to us after death you know, is there a god, you know these are the the questions that you can amass in basically humans for as long humanity has existed and. one of the things as you said, joel, is that, you knowamerican phenomenon, but many cultures around the planet sort of have meaningful ufo and that, you know there are government studies in the soviet union.

france has a has a big one. the costa rican has actually taken the clearest photo of a ufo anyone has ever seen. it was an. and this becomes sort of that you see really take all over the but this question what's also interesting as you get into this is the question of are wet to be a very modern very aistian one because many eastern traditions have sort of always assumed that there are other and intelligent life and sort of a multitude worlds out there. and in fact, actually harry reid in the modern incarnation and one of the reasons he funds themodern pentagon ufo studies is the faith tradition, you believe actively

in possibility of other worlds and other beings and. one of the things that you really see change in last 25 years, which i talk about in the book, because to me this is one of the like the greatest revolution in human understanding we have seen is the math is on the side of the aliens is that we, as late as the 1990s did not understand there was a single planet outside of our own solar system and that we now understand that effectively every star in the planets and that a huge number of them not necessarily a large percentage how huge and vast. the universe is fall into what scientists call the goldilocks zone which is that are not too hot, not toor could support an

atmosphere or could support life. asuld recognize. and that inthere. are 1 sextillion habitable planets across the universe which. 1,000,000,000 trillion in have habitable planets. so you can believe that life is rare you can believe that intel giant life is rare. but is it really a one in sextillion and? then you get into sort of these interest setting and sort of related questions, which is life be common in, intelligent life could be common and it could stil too far away for us to know right now or we could be functionally#r sort of part, the mind bending math of the is we are an incredibly civilization in england, incredibly young solar

system, in a very old universe that solar system is about years old in a 14 billion year old universe. and the way that james webb space telescopeas our understanding of stars and for star formation and planetary formation is that the james webb space telescope has found stars that began to form. 300 million years of the start of the uni you're with this possibility that there could be billion year civilizations that have risen and fallen civilizations so much more advanced that we would not be able to even recognize them that have come and gone before our solar system ever began to gather out of dust and. it leads to this really weird of

thought experiment which that we totally misunderstood and first contact given us sort of the three scenarios for what our first sci sign of an intelligent alien civilization would be and they are sort of all unarmed us and clear there's the independ since day flying over the white house me to your leader i'm for friendship or to harvest your organs for energy. there's the jodie foster contact radio message from outer and there's the e.t. sort of string did lone traveler what's most likely to happen is probably first intelligence civilization in a much ambiguous and puzzling way. and we are most likely to first see a piece space trash, but

we're going to have some, you know, telescope photo. so where we see something that we recognize is not ours, but w is and that it's a harvard astronomy chair. avi loeb talks about it as being basically equivalent of empty plastic bag blowing through 're going look up and we're going to say wal-mart. who's wal-mart? do you think that's, from? not going to know whether it's civilization that's close by. we're not going to know whether it's ar whether it's friendly or not friendly. but that or idea that aliens are actually going to cross interstellar space and come visit actually is probably wrong, that we are probably not interest to any intelligence civilization that

could master interstellar communication raor t that this idea that sort of anyone bother stopping in on earth is probably wrong and that see scientists like carl sagan who again arch proponent of the for extraterrestrial intelligence outlso arch skeptic the ufos visiting us his argument was never aliens that would treat earth the way we treat a rest area on the jersey turnpike that it's a place you stop on the way from one interesting stop to and that statistically aliens probably visit earth. just based on how you would sort of travel to unfold.don't visit earth was carl sagan's argument. it's the thinaw out your window last tuesday night is unlikely to the one night of

these 200,000 years that an alien happened to stop by on far more interesting than us. so i asked oo the audience guys. garrett this book is quite lot of things. it's part cold war history, part science, part of an examination of conspiracies that you had. but what is the one thing that throughout all of your research in doing this great book was part of that kinof wow factor. but what really wowed you in all of your resear me it was this idea, as i said, that the math is on side of the aliens, which is just a sort of tremendous revolutionary idea in and that understanding how much of this is really a spiritual question as a scientific one or national security one and and, you know

to to sort of cut to the the the. you know, one of the things that you really begin to ou get into this is that in some ways al cleast interesting answer to what ufos actually are. an what y i now calls these uaps ed phenomenon. the the irony of course is started off as flying saucers the government, the with and popularized term ufos destigmatize the conversation around flyin forward. a couple of decades now the government has come up with unidentified anomalous phenomena on to destigmatize the conversation around ufos, but also to capture. two shifts in the perspective.

the way that the government looks at this one is not all of these are objects some chunk of them are phenomena and not all of them areg. they're actually one of the big things that the government is now focused on as part of its renewed interest in ufos and uap is is uso's unidentified submerged objects or an unidentified sin and one of the things that the government has actually sc actually because the pentagon has talked about it is in its study of uap in the modern in last couple of years it discovered a heretofore unknown known trans medium chinese drone which is to say a chinese drone that comes out of the water and transitions to which is a technology that the us did not realize china had until it began to get this modernso when you look at are i think it's four categories.

it is advanced adversary being tested against us which are chinese drones, russian drones, you know whatever tony stark isbuilding some mountain lab that we we know about. some chunk of it is highly scientific term called weird stuff. and that's the there's just a bunch of weird stuff floating up there in the sky that we don't really pay attention to on a daily basis and this is what we with chinese spy balloon last year which is if you turn the northward sort of slightly differently, you pick up a bch of balloon guns and junk and we panic a country. and we sent up the world's most advanced fighter jet to shoot it all down with, a quarter million dollar missiles and this is real. we shot down.s we shot down was a hobbyist balloon from, the

balloon ology. that just we didn't know was up there and. then you get into sort of two other categories that interesting stuff which is meteorological atmospheric and astronomical science and phenomenon that we don't understand but i think one of the great lessons of science of the lastcouple of year, the last few decades, is that we should be reallyumble about our understanding the worldy much weirder than weand we, i think, have a bias that we understand a lot more of the world than we actually do. and then when you begin to go back, you realize how just how much of our knowledge is really new. you know, george knowing dinosaurs exist until.

47. the gorilla by western science was considered a mythical creature akin to the yeti or the unicorn before it was ever actually spotted by western and you go to the 1950s not. plate tectonics. you know the basics. how are are our own earth moves? we still know? you know, as everyone says, know less about the bottom of the ocean than we do the surface the moon. and you wantabout how we know about the moon? we not even looked moon to know whether there are other lunar landers elsewhere on, the moon that are not ours. like we've never even done a composite of study of the moon's surface at aesolution in detail enough to knowther are other lunar landers from

civilizations on our own. this not me saying i think that there are other lunar landers on the moon. this is me study of a lot of these phenomenon actually are. and then you get to the last which is the truly weird stuff which is physics that we don't understand and you real revolutions in physics that people theorize right now but that we don't yetbe really mind bending stuff you know universe is time travel from the past or future things that would to us be even weirder than visiting, but that we don't get necessary really understand at a theoretical level. like no we get physics like we know there are no parallel dimensio travel. the world's oldest woman died last year. she was a french nun. she was 118 years old. everything thing that humanity

knows about relativity and quantum physics was discovered in her lifetime. imagine what we will learn about he next human lifespan. imagine we could l years, 10,000 years. astrophysicist, carlo rovelli who has a new book out, i'm not a physicist, so i'm aboutbu a very complex theory that he has, but proposal for the idea of white, not black holes, but white holes. we've never síbeen. but he theorizes they exist and it's hhappens at the bottom o which at the bottom of a black hzes the. black hole bounces and effectively and time reverses everything that ever entered into the black hole is then expelled. and he says, of course we' when came

to his first senior level astrophysics appointment in the 2000, his department pulled him aside and said you don't really black holes, do you? because w never seen one and we now understane wildly them and yet t don't understand about this could be, again, far weirder than mere aliens. gerard, thank you so much. questions from the audience, please have about 15 minutes anyway down here. mike around. like looking around. i was just wondering what you thought the travis walton incident, if you know about that. yeah, all the different studies of each person that was there

and confirmed. yeah. this is the incident. the fire in the sky, the was originally based on on. it. you know it's a it's a it's a weird incident, you know, there's reass to doubt some of what unfolded there. it's certainly one of the certainly sort of one of the biggest savings or encounters that we see in the last, you know 25, 40 years. and and i think was a really big part of that flywheel that i was ing about of how pop culture incidents sort of inspire more sightings that inspire more pop culture and that but, you know,

i don't part of the challenge with a lot this is it's going to be really hard to goand untangle any of the encounters that have reported over the years because we just don't have the want be able to sort of in encounters obviously the harvard astronomy that i mentioned earlier, the thing that he's trying to do right now is he just last fall opened the first up he observed. three to t to document the like of you know what an ordinary looksf like to try to establish like baselines, data collection that you would want to begin to try to investigate,

sort further encounters like, like that one whenever they happen in better understanding of sort of like what's weird and what's notweird. like yeah, but the navy pilots. yeah. and, and eveg documented and yeah. so the, you know, to me fall intoie zamora category of, you know, super, highly credible witnesses. you know, there's a a navy aviator, a navy pil, that you, in fact, don't want to be the person who comes back, and you wouldn't believe the ufo. i just ran across and that, y they they have what are sort of considere credible witness backed up wexternal,

you know, video radar or, you know, instrument readings and they are you know, they have been a big part of restarting thi conversation since 2017 when and there work is those those encounters. take place or they've sort of been turned over to this new pentagon office called arrow that is really to make sense of what the gt can sitter's uap sightings. you know part of the challenge there's a wh considered public ufo sightings are generally not that interesting you know the vast majority of public ufo sightings are easily explained. you know the planet venus is actually a really large percentage of public ufo sightings because it's just such a bright star in a weird place in the sky, only to come from

it. well who's one seventeen's? so then you knowiders ufo are often actually government test projects a big chunk of what we now understand were ufo sightings in the 1950s were the u-2 spy plane being tested and developed by? the cia and the air force? and you know that the years since has been the you s.r. 71 the a-12 oxcart, the stealth fighter, the stealth bomber. you know, the stealthbomber just had its test flight inr last fall. so these programs are still out there. but the question me is, what are the sightings that the u.s. government thinks are ufo sightings and what are the ones that they can't explainime is, somewhere between as high as 20% and generally considered closer

government can't explain an arrow in, its work with the navy pilots and othe encounters it finds about 2% of ufo sightings. it can not explain with you know known known known phenomena on known test flights known you know other manmade technology. and to me of course like whatever is interesting the answer to the mystery of ufos a new ap is in 2% of sightings that the government itself can't explain. was wondering what your access is to find out things like it was a video online or on cable of these figures that were supposedly photographed at roswell. they look like aliens.

do you get to look into that? do you do you have access to anything like that? yeah. so i think. i actually roswell one of the least interesting ufo sightings and i find it unhinged. interesting for the following reason which a lot of people don't put together, which is the most famous conversation in in ufo ology is something the fermi paradox, which is a enrico fermi th physicist a is havingch with his colleagues at los lab in the summer of 1950. with it, edward telr there' a third scientist with them. if you know yourer movie from last, these are all the people who wered names that are familiar, and they're talking about a new

yorker. so that's how we're able to date this summer of 1950 that has there had been a series of about, alien or sorry about garbage cans ssew york city streets and the cartoon is about alien getting off a, flying saucer carrying their souvenirs from visiting ear. city trash cans and they'reunch and enrico fermi says. if life is so common, where are they at? and it it's, you know now known as the fermi paradox which is if life is as common as we think it is, why don't we see more of it? why don't we? why know? why do we have no sign of it and thing that people miss about?

roswell is summer of 1947. if the us government had recove or alien body alive orwouldn't gone. as a lot of peopl force in dayton, ohio which where the air force intelligence is located. and there's sort of this long standing conspiracy that there's a hangar at wright-patterson. the alien spacecraft are it it would have gone to the national lab, which was right up the road from roswell and which was where the government had already all of the smartest physicists in the united states to address thens of physics. if we' an alien spacecraft the summer of 47,

even if that had been kept incredibly secret by. if there were ten people in the united who knew about that craft and had been asked to provide advice about there's no enrico fermi was of those ten america that we had recovered or the summer of 47 fermi in teller would have en among that group and they were at the base where the us government would have almost absolutely put that. so if in the summer, 1950, three years later, enrico fermi is sitting there saying, well, we haven't seen any evidence of any aliens yet, havee? to me that's the most convincing ce that nothing interesting happened in roswell in 47. one more question.

finds kind a dual question. the first one is i'm going to ask you back. you ask us about do you believe in aliens? and if you do, do you think they're more regional ore out there? and then the other one is, what are your thoughts from before you wrote the book, what you thought about aliens and ufos two after you wrote? yeah so i'm i think that and and basically have been shaped by this book came into this book with very knowledge or understanding of this of this subject, which is, you know, the book. i think thed intel agent civilizations exist across the universe. i'm pretty dube enough, that we will know. and to me, the oh, there's this

sort of amazing hope and optimism that uerlies the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that i think is important to sort of capture and live in our daily lives, which that these scientists whosubject, you know, are e probably of them will ever live to see to fruition, you know, that these. are 10,000 year, 100,000 year million year projects that they getting started in, trying to understand where fit into the scope and scale of the the group the sort of founding scientists are setting came together at the astronomy. green bank, west virginia. in first meeting they came up with what's called the drake

equation, which is sort of the most famous equation in in guy, frank drake, comes up with it and it's an equat lays out the variables how how life would probably be across the universe and you know it's how many planets areabat percentage of planet that are habitabl life evolve? you know what, what on what percentage planets that are habitable do it doesn't intelligent life evolve out of and on through this equation the most important is called el and el is the length of time in intelligence civilization lasts lasts and everything in ceti hinges is on el and if el is a few 10,000

years, 100,000 years we are functionally alone. you know the life could happen all the time. intelligent life could happen all the time. and time. it appears it's going to be functionally alone in the universe because civilizations just last long enough to overlap with one another. if el. a million years or billion years our universe will teeming with intelligent life to me from the human experience. now where we're sitting in reasons to be pretty wary that long and th you know, which is like half of a joke and like half not a joke which is, you know, you're looking around today. there's a lot of reasons to think like we're not here 10,000 years fromi hope that we are.

and i reasons that humanity should take living through these next couple of the really questions that we have to figure out to keep this planet live it live livable and habitable over the next couple of decades. centuries is we have a lot invested in to make el as big possible and are right now just a total radar and and there's a lot of pretty amazing stuff that humanity figure out if we give ourselves the chance forther thousand years, another hundred thousand years, another million years, you age lifespan for a about million years. and and, you know, we're in the tens of thousands for our

species right now. you know, like ine what, 5 million years of humanity could and what that could mean for what el could look like across the rest the universe. well, before gleaves closes the dies and gentlemen garrett graff garrett graff. hello, new york. hello, upper west side.