we have someone with here who is ■$

a absolute and true friend to the national archives and records administration as well to the gerald r ford foundation. how a friendgraff well just to put it in a kind of small perspective garrett is such a friend that when garrett writes out his check every yea to the irs, garrett loves believe that every single comes to theat our usage. i'm not sure.

i'm not sure that is true garrett in fact, it probably goes like the tailhook of an f 35, but my friee thought that counts ladies and gentlemen, garrett graff. it's. yeah. joel just stol joke when i speat a presidential library or museum, which is i'm just a huge fan of. the presidential librariesss thd i've been lucky. i think i've done research now at all. they're just a wonderful network across the country resource for history. so i'm verypp that archivists ds the country. so thank you so much 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 natl exposure. you moved from that to writing my personal favorite, raven. the thegovernment's plan to itsf while. the rest of us died and you followed that with the in my opinion one of the best oral histories editorial ever written and the only plane in the sky. the story of 911 and then not on that success. hugh moved and wrote one of 2023 pulitzer prize. his history of the history of watergate and last couple of years ago, you were here to ta d fully remember this. you and i were having a private dinner across the river. and i every every you've been

here, i usually ask you so, garrett, what's next in your response was? i'm writing a book ond i know m. what? so, garrett y ufos, as you say. i'm a very weird person have written this book because i am not a watching x-files or star trek. i'm not a sci aficionado. i come this book, as you just outlined, as someone who has covered national security for the last 20 years and what i noticed in watching dean in the last couple of years was the nvoy procession around changed and that there was a series of

ing by the new york times and politico, where i used to work in the fall of 20 outline of two threads of a changing perspective on ufos. one was a series of about a secret pentagon ufo study program that had been funded by then senate majority leader harry reid and d en 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 ths of three videos that came out the the aviators the pilots sort of testified about these encounters said was, you know, technology. they did not understand that they did not believe that the us could counter and things that moved at speeds angles that to them defied as we understoodandt there was a moment for. in december 2020 that took this a you know something i was sort of vaguely attention to to something where ie, okay, i should sit down and, dive into this for a book project, which was john brennan, who decade at that point as the cia director and the white house homeland security gave an named, tyler c,

where he, in essence in, incredibly tortured there's stuff out there we don't what it is it usripper isn't a t some might say might constitute a 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 can't be that many things puzzle old john brennan like when he woke up in the morning and was cia director and white house homeland advisor.

if he had a question, we have a $60 billion a year intelligence apparatus that went out and ied to answer his questions. and, you know, there are spies and analysts and operators and and signals intelligence intercepts, systems all dedicated to answering whatever random questions■< john brennan wakes up in the morning with. and so if he is leaving office white house homeland security advisor and and cia director and he says, man, this puzzling. that to me felt like something that was worthy of diving into deeper. so t book tries to pull together. our two threads that journalists

in historians no&lrmaldifferent. one, that's the military's hunt for ufos here on earth. and thenhe evolving science and the around are under of the size and scale and scope the universend call the search for extraterrestrial intelligence study and that journalist a■6nd noal these as like two totally separate unreal rated topics. you know you have the wacky ufo people here who are allthis sers astronomers doing serious work, studying the universe. but to me very much the same. in part because you see the same figures sort of moving back and forth■éd arguing with one another, but then also at an incredibly level, the question of are

■aliens visiting us here on earh has a lot to do with the question of whether aliens exist at allre. so before i answer, ask or answer, i ask my next i want to do a quick audience question nur two. so here here is the poll. how many of you believe they no. raise your hand. i'm notqo of alien region. not okay. how many you believe that ufos exist and they are of alien nature. raise your hand. okay. all right. and here's the last. how many of you did not raise your hands because you are concerned about being stigmatized? one way or the other? all right that's not very

head. so, garrett, in your book, you write quite a bit about the scientific community early in the ufo experience right after the war and after world war two and scientists are like common human psychology. they're saying one thing in public, but they're saying else rely in private. can you expand on, please? yeah. so the modern flying saucer begins in the summer of 1947, and it was in idaho busin arnole 1947, who is flying his private plane up in the pacific northwest, the cascades his wine saucers shaped object moving at tremendous speed. he$ lands.

tell some friends about it on the ground. it gets picked up by the media. the media sensationalizes and it kicks off the summer of the flying saucer. flying saucers are entirely new to america culture. that point and over the course of that summer, there are ■nsightings across 34 states up into north america. you know, a sighting almost every day in the country there. you know, this like front page newspaper, four stories, day after day after day that summer two weeks into 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

t the government is deeply concerned about is that this isspacecraft being buy kidnaped rocket scientists. because what is the united stat in the summer of 1947, this is the dawn of the cold war. this is actually the summer when the war in some ways of peaks in its early years that you have the passage of the security act of 1947, roswell crash, that ths 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, you know, the whole government is sort of reshaping itself for the the war. and we we would use a word, di word than kidnaped.

we would tell you that we had presented some unique employment opportunities to former nazi rocketlasalle, moz and the whits proving grounds and were them build you know, the next generation of v-2 rockets to help launch the space race and the you know, the force as a independent service its first t needs to figure out what things are and are a threat to national security and they are just as baffled as anyone else. in the summer of 47 and and eventually 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 th determine

not the national security threat they are most concerned 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,aliens, knowh invasion, etc. etc. and it creates thisnating feedback loop that then plays out decade by decade for the next 80 years where have the public sightings drive? national security panics by the government that thollywood to ss and new pop culture use of

inspires public sightings of ufos, that inspires more national security panics and sort of aditum 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 dawn of serious■6upported radio astronomy, you know, exploration, the heavens in 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 begniut the

possible of life elsewhere and. sort of the middle third of this book ends up being this. sort of intellectual feud over aids between j. alan hynek, who is the astronomer who, leads the government investigation of ufos and, and carl sagan, who is, of course, sort of famous, most famous astronomer of the 20th century and is simultaneously the lead voice for■ ceti, for te search for extraterrestrial intelligence out there, while also being the archke us here on earth. so this is a presidential presidential library museum. so i think it's only appro■lprie 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, bill cli. can you expound and talk a bit about each of those presidents and what they did or did not do so the the thing that will sort of most surprise is most of you who think that you know something about gerald ford in this room is that gerald ford in congress was the leading advocate for studyingfos that actually in the summer of 1966 he here he was the minority in the house and in the summer of 66, there i a sero

sightings at college here, michigan. and it goes on a period of about a week. there's one sort of very famous e, this glowing orb out in the forest behind one of the dorm that's witnessed dozens and scores of students in college administrators and police officers. then a series of other ufo sightings across central michigan at far ends, a couple of other locations. jalen hynek, astronomer, is dispatched by the air force up to investigate it and and he spends a couple of days going around the army and police across michigan trying to understand what'sap eventually e

at the detroit press and it's the largest press event ever at the detroit press club where. he diagnoses the ufo sightings and dismisses them as swamp and it)k becomes one of the most sot of infamous government dismissals of ufo sightings in úg and if you if you don't know your biology gas is a real thing it has to do with like thane melting the winter and then being released through the ice as the spring thaw happens and gerald ford, the local is incredulous that the government wouly 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 end being the first congressional hearings and only hearings until the con ago, whes sort of picked back up this this issue. as i said in my opening answer, as we sort of began to see serious people in talking seriously about gerald ford runs jimmy who is has best documentedfo of any american president. he when he was governor of georgia saw a ufo what he thought was a ufo outside of an elks club one night while he was speaking as governor. and it until about a to out whaw

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 too sighting and, sent it in when he was governor and it become sort of part of his presidenalcampait that point hopes that jimmy carter will win and then open up the government'ss, which he then does not do. yeah. so let's let'st your alma mater, harvard, there are a couple of interesting in your book as well as the■reat sagan s 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 whetherarrassed by professor, a harvard spokesman stated that all of its and quote, they are all weird and one way or another can you this with sagan and dr. mach yeah so john mach becomes one othe most fascinating of ufology in the 1990s as he pioneered is really the scientific study of people who report abductions. and i en 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 whoorof actually a very famous artist named budd hopkins, who's a writer in his own way, who gets interested in and and john mack calls them experi answers because he does not want to. what actually happened to these people and that alien abductions ■b$ come to the fore. this in the late 1960s and then ly in the 1980s, early nineties and the the psychiatrist to study them really believed that something

happens to these people that they report report all of the signs trauma with people who hae undergone actual trauma. you know, they psychiatrically sort of very similar to abuse victims, you know, war sort of other people who have variations of what we now call ptsd. and that they are have no interestingly, no share sort of psychopathy before reporting in experi ence and no shared psychopathy after. so is not a situation where you see, you know, people who are schizophrenic, who then report

alien or people who report alien abductions then /9go on to be a diagnosed as bipolar, that they're are sort of this very wide spectrum of experience. that as far as sort of mental health and ■(psychiatrists can say somethig to them and we don't know what it is that leads me into my next question, and this is a question i guarantee that this question has never been asked at the gerald r ford presidential museum never again. so garrett, chapter 41 sex with 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 experience with aliens and and ere'thisin the 1950s is thad contact these;■ and and they are people who come forward to sort of say like i have i encounter with an alien some of them say that they, you know, been taken rides with gotten toe tours of the universe and that they have been given messages to share with humanity. and it's a message about, you know, peace and we should get along and, not have nuclear war. it's aery specific 1950 is sort of psychological moment.

and a lot of them report sort, you know, basically stops everyy 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, setting up some, you know facilities and things that most people would consider cults and things like that. and the contact these are general really sort of written off as as kooks and and dismissed. one of them&@■3 sort of very famously. his wife ends up divorcing him anden being that

he says continues to visit him as the sort of aggrieved extra party in their divorce and it's the only known in divoe court an has ever been cited in legal papers as the sort of of other party in a divorce proceeding. and then you have this other population of of the experienciasnd buy in large are people who have solo encountersen just go with . and it's a much more interesting to me most them have no reason to report the in counter that they have. and actually a lot of reason that you would not want to report the encounters that these

people have. and some ofstories. but then you also have there's there's one sort of, particularly to me, credible witness that i talk abt book. who's, a policeman in socorro, new name, lonnie zamora, and and he's a small town cop chasing a desert on the road out into the desert. he knows who the speeder is, you know, a good small town cop, so he knows, like the kid that he normally a lot of trouble with. he hears an explosion off in the desert and sees what thinks is a overturned white car off in desert. so he abandons his pursuit. he knows he can show up at that kid's house leader and, get him, and he sort of turns this

pontiac cruiser and is like dowe gullies towards this overturned car. there two figures standing outside of it. and as he gets closer, they get into the craft he describes a sort of football shaped he gets closer 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 of min s sort shaken andy whatever this encounter is that he has had there's some circumstantialdence that the military and fbi respond to the scene and find marks in the desert where craft sat or appeared to have sat, where

lonnie zamora said that was. is considered to be by the government investigators of one of the most credible witnesses that we have, in part because he has reason to make up this story and then just goes on with the rest of his life and /cnever has another you know, encounter or experience to report. you know, there's amorris saw, s 1964. it's adjacesands proving grounds. it's the heart of the apollo program. maybe he stumbled across the air fo lander in the desert that he just wasn't supposed to see. years later and there has never emerged evidence of any craft

that the us government has 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 t casy and. that is the issue surrounding the roswell. can you talk a little about the roswell 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 flying saucer b. it's part of this series of events you see across the country in the 47, this rancher comes in to the city of roswell and reports i

found of a crash on my 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 and goes, you know, wait, the government has finally found of these flying saucers that's in the newspaper every day. and he tells, hipu a press release saying the government recovered a flying saucer, which they do, and they pack up the put on a plane, cargo plane, to the eighth air force headquarters in in fort worth, tex else at it a, idiots, this is a weather balloon.

and and in abo hours, the milita second statement saying, you know, our apologies. it's not a flying saucer it'andd goes in about 3 hours and is basically for 30 years and really reemerges all in the wake of watergate in the know, one os that really surprised me in working on this book was, is joel said, my watergate. and this book, in some ways ends being a weird sequel to a book on watergate because the second half of the book ends up being a lot about the rise of ufo and collapse of faith and trust and truth in government institutions. ufo cos

become, really the first government can spirits these to rise in wake of watergate the committee the pike committee vietnam, the pentagon papers in the seventies and eighties. and really establish the concept that we would now wreckage as the deep state in th american spectrum and and american politics sort of this idea that there is shadowy■, 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■z gw and become darker and more

conspiratorial and sort of more 's over the course of the 1980s and it morphs into this idea that the government has space craft, multiple aliens, you know dead aliens, living aliens, th wtreaties with alien civilizations. there's, you know, one set of these conspiracies that actual h us special forces have a big shootout with a alien base in the us southwest that leads to dozens deaths of us troops and that thial beating heart of the conspiracy movement that we now, you know poisoning a lot of our politics. so the ufo conspiracy issue, the

ufo sightings this is not only an american phenomenon as write in your book and quite quite excellent detail. is ia global phenomenon you talk about the soviet union investigation ins. you talk about france and belgium and the uk. can you talk a little bit about some of the experiences that the global community has had with issue? yeah. and was also. you know, the question that everyone asksmf when, i sort of start talking about working on this book is, are ufos real? and like all a ufo actually is is an unidentified flying object. and there are lots of those. the question that people mean when they are ufos real is are

we alone? and that becomes in many ways the the, you know, intellectual and sort of philosophical beating heart of this book and this question of are we alone is in many wa p 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 humans fg humanity has existed and. one of the things that you see as you said, joel, is that, you know, tamerican phenomenon, buty cultures around thegful ufo and,

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 world. but this question what's also interesting as you get into this is the question of are we alone turns out to be a very modern and also a very and christian one because many eastern traditions have sort of always assumed that there are other and intelligent life and sort of a multitude worlds out actually hd

in the modern incarnation and one of the reasons he funds the modern pentagon ufo studies is he's mormon and in the faith tradition, youctively in possibility of other worlds and other beings and. one of the thingsjx 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 we, as late as the 1990s did not understand there was a single planet outside of our own solare now ut effectively every star in the

planets and that a huge number of them not necessarily a large percentage but a hugebe how huge and vast. the universe is fall into what scientists call the goldilocks zone, which is planets that are not too hot, not too cold. support water could support an atmosphere or could support life. aswould recognize. and that in numbers. there. 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 thatl? intl giant life is rare. but is it really a one in sextillion and? then you get into sort of these very interest setting and sort

of related questions, which is life be common■a■ in, intelliget life could be common and it could still be too far away for us to know right now or we could be functionally alone right now, that sort of part, the mind bending math of the universe we now understand it, is we are an incredibly young civilization in england, incredibly young systee that solar system is about billion, four and a half billion years old in a 14 billion year old universe. and the way that james webb space telescope has our understanding of stars and for star formation and planetary formation telescope has found nw

stars that began to form. 300 million years of the start of the universe. so you're with this possibility that there could be billion year civilizations that have risen and fallen civilizations so much morewould not be able to even recognize them that have come and gone gather out of dust and. it leads to this really weird of thought experiment, which that we totally misunderstood and first contact that hollood and pop culture has given us sort of the three scenarios for what our first sci sign of anlization wod

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 organs for energy. there's the jodie foster contact radio message from the e.t. sorg did lone traveler situation and what's most likely to happen is something we will probably first see in■ ■a intelligence civilizn in a much more ambiguous and puzzling way. and we are most likely piece spt we're going to have some, you know, telescope pso where we set

we recognize is not ours, but we don't know whose it is and that it's a harvard astronomy chair. avi loeb talks about it as being basically equivalent of an empty plastic bag blowing through cosmic backyard that we're going look up and we're going to say, that's not from our wal-mart. who's wal-mart? do you think that's, from? and we're not going to know whether it's civilization that's close by. we're not going to know whether it's around. we're not going to know whether it's friendly or not friendly. but that or idea that aliens are actually going to cross interstellar space and come visitwe are probably not of any interest to any intelligence civilization that could master interstellar

communication or travel and 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 out there and also arch skeptic the ufos his argument was never aliens don't earth it's that would treat earth the way we treatmçesarea t it's a place you stop on the way from one interesting stop and that statistically aliens probably visit earth. 10 t just based on how you would sort of expect patterns of interstellar travel to unfold. and so it's not thatliens don't visit earth was carl

sagan's argument. it's the thing that you saw 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 ng far more interesting than us. so i asked one more question and we're going to turn it over to 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. one thing that throughout all of your research in doing this great book was part of that kind of wow factor. but what really wowed you in all of your research? so i think to me it was this idea, as i said, that the math is on the side of the aliens, which is just a sort of tremendous revolutionarya in

and that understanding how much of spiritual question as much it is a scientific one or national security one, and and, you know, to to sort of cut to the the the. know, one of the things tht you really begin to understand as you get into this is that in some ways aliens could be the least interesting answer to what ufos actually are. and that what i you know so the government now calls these uaps unidentified phenomenon. the the irony of course is actually that they started off as flying saucers the government, the military came up with and popularized term ufos

to destigmatize the conversation around flying saucers. fast forward. a couple of decades now the government has come up with unidentified anomalous phenomena on to destigmatize the conversation aroundñu ufos, but also to capture. two shifts in the looks at this one is not all of these are objects some chunk of them are phenomena and not all of them are flying. 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 swimming objects. agat the government has actually discovered that we 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 flight, which that the us did ne china had until it began to get this modern uap study.so when ys probably are i think it's four categories. it is advanced adversary being tested against us which are chineses, russian drones, you know, whatever tony stark is building some mountain lab that we we know is highly scientific term called weird stuff. ■.■yand that's the there's justa

bunch of weird stuff floating up there in the sky that we don't really pay attention t on a daily basis and this is what we ended up with with chinese spy balloon last year which is if you turn the: differently, you k up a bunch 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 shot down. one of the things we shot down was a hobbyist balloon from, the meteorology.in7ois that just we didn't know was up there and. then you get into sort of two other categories that i think are the real interesting stuff, whichatmospheric and astronomicl

science and phenomenon that we butlessons of science of the lat couple of year, the last few decades, is that we should be really humble about our understanding the world and the world is probably much weirder than weand we, i think, have a s 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 ne know, george washington lived and died not knowing dinosaurs existed until. 47. the gorilla by western science was considered a mythical

yeti or the unicorn before it was ever actually spotted by western science and you go to the 1950s, we did not. plate tectonics. you know the basics. how are are our own earth moves? know, as everyone says, know less about the bottom of the ocean than we do the surface, the moon. and you want to know something g about how we know about the moon? we not even looked on moon to know whether there are other lae moon that are not ours. like we've never even done a composite of study of the moon's surface at a resolution in detail enough to knowhe from civilizations on our own.

this not me saying i think that there are other lunar landers on the moon. this is me s study of a lot of these phenomenon actually are. and then you get to the last which is the truly wei stuff, which is physics that we don't understand and the idea of you real revolutions in physics that people theorize right now but that we don't yetndd be really d bending stuff you know inter travel parallel universe is time things that would to us be even weirder than visiting, but that we don't get necessary really understand at a theoretical level. and you say like no we get physics like we know there are no parallel dimensions, there's no time travel. the world's oldest woman died last year.

she was a french nun. she was 118 years old. ything thing that humanity knows about relativity and quantum physics was discovered in herimagine what we will leart physics, the next human lifespan. imagine we could learn in 500 years, 10,000 years. there's a italian astrophysicist, carlo rovelli, who has a new book out, i'm not a physicist, so i'm about butcher. a very complex theory that he has, but it's hi proposal for the idea of white, not black holes, but white holes. we've never seen. but he theorizes they exist and it's his explanation for what happens at the bottom of black hole, which at the bottom of a black hole, he theorizes the.

black hole bounces and time reverses and everything that ever entered into the black hole is then expelled. and he says, of course we've, never seen this, but when came to his first senior level astrophysics appointment in the 2000, his department pulled him aside and said you don't really believe es, do you? because 2000 we've never seen one and we now understand the universes pulated4l wildly them and yet there's of still so much that we don't understand about this world around us the answers of which could be, again, far weirder than mere aliens. gerard, thank you so much. questions from the audience, have about 15 minutes

anyway down here. i think we've got aaround. like looking around. i was just wondering what you thought the travis walton incident, if you know about that. ah, all the fferent studies of each person that was there and confirmed. yeah. this is the incident. the fire in the sky, the movie was originally based on on. it. you know it's a it's a it's a weird incident, you know, there's reason to doubt some of what unfolded there. it's certainly one of the the. it's certainly sort of one of

the or encounters that we see in the last, you know, 25, 30, 40and ag part of that flywheel that i was ■7■talking about of how pop cule 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 go back and untangle any of the encounters that have rtyears because we j'e the data that one would want be able to sort of trace wt in encounters and. so 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 try to document the likedcw! of you know what an ordinary looks like to try to baselines, data collection that you would want to begin to trysort further enc, like that one whenever they happen in future. and we■u'll■! he a better understanding of sort of like what's weird and what's not weird. like, but the navy pilots. yeah.

and, and everything was lldocum. so the navy pilots are the, you know, to me fall into thisnnie u know, super, highly credible witnesses. you know, there's a lot reasonsa navy pilot, that you, in fact, don't want to be the person who comes back, the aircraft carrier and you wouldn't believe the ufo. i just ran across and that, you know, they they have what are sort of considered best types of encounters because you have a credible witness backed up with external, you know, video radar or, you know, instrument readings and they are you know, they have been a big part of restarting this conversation since 2017, when and there work

is those those encounters. take place or they've sort of be t to this new pentagon office called arrow that is really to make sense of what the governmentas can sitt's uap sightings. you know part of the challenge there's a whatre 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 a bright star in a weird place in the sky, only to come from it. well, who's one seventeen's? so then you know what the public considers ufo are often actually

■zal s government test projects a big chunk of what we now understand were ufo sightings in plane being testedd 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 stealth b 21$ bomber just had its test flight in november last fall. so these programs are still out 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 explain and? that number over time is, somewhere between as high as 20% and generally considered closer to about 5% that the government

can'txp in, its work with the navy pilots and other encounters it finds about 2% ofot 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 is2% of sightings that the government itself can't explain. i was wondering what your access is to find out things like it was a video online or on these e supposedly photographed at

roswell. they look like 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 the physicist, a is havingunch with his colleagues at los alamos national lab in the summer it, edward teller there'a third scientist with them. if you know your oimer

movie from last, these are all the people who were involved names that are familiar, and they're talking about a new that's how we're able to date this conversation to the summer of 1950 that has there had been a series of stories about, alien or sorry, about garbage cans missg new york city streets and the cartoon is about alien getting off a, flying saucer carrying their souvenirs from visiting earth. these new york city trash cans and they're lunch 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? y do we have no sign of it and thing that people miss about? is that in the summer of 1947. if the us government had recovered an alien spacecraft or alien body alive or dead, it■5 wouldn't gone. as a lot of people think to wright-patterson air force in dayton, ohio, which w 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 asylum national lab, which was right up the road from roswell and which

was where the government had already all of the smartest physicists■ ithun states to address the biggest questions of physics. if we'd encountere■ an alien spacecraft the summer of 47, even if that had been kept incred■ibly secret by. if there were ten people in the united who knew asked to provide advice about it, there's no enrico fermi was ten that if ann america that we had recovered or n the summer of 47 fermi in teller would have been among that group and they were at the base where the us

goould have almost absolutely put that. so if in the summer, 1950, three years later, enrico haven't seen any evidence of any aliens yet, have we? to me that's the most convincing ence that nothing interesting happened in roswell in 47. 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 orore out there? and then the other one is, what are your thoughts from before you wrote theook, what you thought about aliens and ufos two after you wrote? yeah so 'm i think that and and

basically all my views on this 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 the intel agent civilizations exist acrose universe. i'm pretty dubious that they are close enough, that we will know. and to me, the oh, there's this sort of amazing hope and optimism that underlies the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that i think is al important to sort of capture and live in our daily lives, which that these scientists who work on thi■js

subject, you know, are embarking on studies that 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 staro understand where fit into the scope and scale of the uveen thf founding scientists are setting came together at the astronomy. observatory in green bank, west virginia. in theirst came up with what's called the drake equation, which is sort of the most famous equation in in setting. and frank, this guy, frank drake, comes up with it and it's an equation that lays out the variables how how common

life and intelligent life would probably be across the it's howy planets are habitable, what percentage of planet that are habitable do life evolve? you know what, what on what percentage planets that are habitable do it doesn't intelligent life evolve out of life and on and on through this equation the most 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 ayears, 100,000e

functionally alone. you know the life could happen all thelife 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. ifs>s or billion years our universe will teeming with intelligent life to me from the human experience. now where we're sitting in 2024, there's a lot of reasons to be pretty wary that el is very long and that you knohihalf of a jokt 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 from now. i hope that we are. and ihi reasons that humanity should take really like living through these next couple ofut the realy questions that we have to figure out to keep this planet live it live livable decades. centuries is we have a lot invested in to make el as big possible and that you know we are right now just a total blip on the cosmic radar and and there's a lot of pretty amazing stuff that humanity figure out if we give ourselves the chance for another thousand years, another hundred thousand years, another million years, you know, the aver lifespan for a

species on earth is about million years. and and, you know, we're in the tens of thousands for our species right now. you know, like imagine humanityd achieve and what that could mean for what el could look like acss rest the universe. well, before gleaves closes the show, ladies and gentlemen, garrett graff garrett graff.