and. with that we'll end the session and we have a table set up in the back for urge to signor you. so ladies, gentlemen, thank you very much and appreciate attention during our book discussion here. thank you very much. thankwe have someone with here who

is a absolute and true friend to the national archives and records administration as well to the gerald rd foundation. how a friend is garrett graff well just to put it in a kind of small perspective garrett is such a friend that whenrett writes out his check every irs, garrett single comes to the national archives for our 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 friend, it's the thought that counts ladies and gentlemen, garrett graff.

it's. yeah. joel is normally my opening joke when i speak at a presideiay which is i'm just a huge fan of. the presidential lri and museums across the country and i've been lucky. i think 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 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. exposure. you moved from that tosonal favorite raven. the the story of the u.s. government's plan to itself while. the rest of us died and you

followed 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 we here to talk about your watergate book and fully remember this. you and i were having a private river. and i every every you've been here, i usually ask yo so, garrett, what's next in your response was? i'm writing a book on response. what? so garrett y say. i'm a very weird person have written this book because i am not 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 last couple of years was the n 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 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 had been run by a

las vegas businessman and space entrepreneur named robert bigelow. 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 ain. and there were a series 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 believe that the us could counter and things that moved at speeds angles that to them defied as we understood it and that was interesting but 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 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, where 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 anbly statement for someone likeoh make. i had covered john brennan. i've about as serious a national

security establishment person as as you can get and i figured there can't be thathat puzzle old john brennan like when he woke up in ing 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 questions. and, you know, there are spies d analysts and operators and satellite surveillance networks 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 at t 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

worthy of diving into deeper. this book tries to pull our two threads that journalists in historis normdifferently. one, that's the military's for ufos here on earth. and then the evolving science and the around are under of the size and scale and scope the universe and what astronomers 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 the same. in part 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 question of whether aliens exist at all anymore. so before i answer, ask or answer, i ask myex i want to do a quick audience poll because it leads into question number two. so here here is the poll. how many of you believe that ufos exist? but they not of alien nature. raise your hand. i'm not of alien region. not okay. how many you believe that ufos exist and they are of a hand. okay. all right. and here's the last. how many of you did not raise your hands because you are 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 about the scientific community early in the ufo experience right a war two and scientists are like human psychology. they're saying one thing in public, but they're saying else entirely in private. can you expand on, please? yeah. so the modern flyingaucer begins in the summer of 1947 and it was in idaho businessmen named kenneth arnold in june 1947, who is flying hisfic northwest, the cascades and. he sees out his window, nine 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 american culture. that point and over the course of that summer, there are sightings 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 the government is deeply concerned about is

that this isspacecraft being built by kidnaped rocket scientists. because what is the united states doing 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, 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, you know, the whole government is sort of reshaping itself for the and we we would use a word, different word than kidnaped. we would tell you that we had opportunities to former nazi rocket scientists in places like

lasalle, moz and the white sands provingfa 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 its first crisis is these saucers and it 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 they 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 moviesar 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 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 thathollywood to sort of new threats and new pop culture use of aliens that then inspires public sightings ofes more national security panics and sort of ad 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 this is just in the real dawn of serious astronomy know astronomy, you know, much more system way than we've ever seen before. again, much of it driven by world war two technologies like ra that scientists. you ow are trying to sort of downplay possibilities of aliens vi earth. the one hand, while beginning to get really excited about the possible of life elsewhere and. sort of the middle third of this book ends up being this. sort of intellectual feud over decades. 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 the search for extraterrestrial intelligence out there while also being the arch skeptic aliens are actuallng us here on earth. so this is a presidential presidential library museum. so i think it's only appropriate that we ask about the presidents and in your book quite some detai dispirit of quite a few american presidents and this the ufo issue gerald ford, 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 theso the the thing that will sort of most

who think that you know something about gerald ford that gerald ford in congress was the leading advocate for studying ufo that actually in the summer of 1966 he was congressman here he was the minority in the house and in the summer of 66, there is, a very famous series of ufo sightings at college here, michigan. and it goes on a period of about a week. there's one sort of very famous sighting at hillsdale, 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 michigan trying to understand what's happening and he eventually a press conference 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 becomes one of the most sort of infamous government dismissals of ufo sightings in history and if you if you don't know your biology gas is a real thing it has to do with like methane melting the winter and then being released through the

ice the thaw happens and gerald ford, the local is incredulous that the government would 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 the first congressional only hearings until the congressional he 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 people in talkg about gerald ford runs of in 76 against jimmy who is has best documented ufo 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 a 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 cloudt up the sky in this very peculiar way. and jimmy in exactly the way you would expect jimmybe dutifully filled out the paperwork to report a ufo sighting and, sent it in when governor and it become sort of part of his presidential campaign because everyone at that point hopes that jimmy carter will win and then open up the government's secret files, which he then does not do.

yeah. so let's let's alma mater harvard, there are a co interesting in your book as well as the great story relating t 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 whether harvard was embarrassed by professor, a harvard spokesman stated that all of its faculty had strange interests and quote, they are all weird another can you talk about not harvard but this with sagan and dr. mach yeah so john mach becomes one most fascinating of ufology in the 1990s as he pioneered is really the scientific study of

people who report abductions. and i spent a couple of chapters of the book looking at the phenomena of alien abduction once what what mark really to understand and there are a couple of people in this world who sort of study thi actually a very famous artist named budd hopkins, who's 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. prudge one way or another what actually happened to these people and that alien abductions come to the fore. this in the late 1960s and then in the 1980s, early ninetiespsychiatrist to study them

really believed that something happens to these people and that they report report all of the signs trauma t with people who have undergone actual trauma. you know they up psychiatrically sort of very similar to abuse victims, you know, war veterans, you know, 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 go on to be a diagnosed as bipolar, that they'rede spectrum of experience. here's and that as far as sort of mental health and atrists can say something to them and we don't know what it is that lea me into my next question, and this is a question this question has never been ask ford presidential museum and i can guarantee never again. so garrett, chapter 41 sex with al. expound, expound, please sir i'm so this is sort of see it to two very different populations of people whoencounters or experience with aliens and

and there's this wave of people in the 1950s is that are 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 someen taken rides with spaceships and, you know, gotten to see tours of the universe an they have been given messages toity. and it's a message about, you know, peace and we should get alg and, not have nuclear war. it's a very50 is sort of psychological report sort you know, basically the of like the alien stops every thursday and we have tea

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 facilities and things that most people would consider cults and things like that. and thcontact these are general really sort of written 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 of aggrieved extra party in their divorce and it's the only known in divorce court that 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 experiencias and that they buy in large are people who have solo encounters and. then just go with their lives. interesting to me phenomenon because most them have no reaso in counter that they have. and actual a lot of reason that you would not want to report the encounters that these people have. and some of them are abduction stories. but then you also have there's there's one sort of, particularly to me credible witness that i talk about in the book. who's, a policeman in socorro,

new mexico, in 1964. his name, lonnie zamora and and he'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 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 bumping up and down through the gullies towards this overturned car. there two figures standing outside of it. and gets closer they get into the craft he describes a sort of football shaped he gets closer and the craft takes off

d something happens to lonnie zamora that desert there is a new mexi up on the scene within a couple of minutes sees lonnie sort shaken and upset by whatever this encounter is t has had there's some circumstantial evidence that the military and fbi respond to the scene and find marks in the desert where the a craft sat or appeared to have sat, where lonnie zamora said that was. and that he is considered to be by the government investigators of one of the most credible witnesses that wee, in part because he has reason to make up this sto and then ju goes on with the rest of his life and never has you know, encounter or experience to report. you know, there's a very simple explanation for what lonnie

morris saw, which this is 1964. it's adjacent to the white sands proving grounds. it's the heart of the apollo program. maybe he stumbled across the air force, a lunar lander in the desert that he just wasn' see. but, you know, we're 50, 60 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. if did not talk about one of the most famous cases in ufo history and. that is the issue surrounding th 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 after the age of the flying saucer begins. it's part of this series of events you see across the country in the summer ofs 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 co 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, his public affairs officer to put out a press

release saying the government recovered a flying saucer, which they do, and they pack up the wreckage and they plane, cargo plane, to the eighth air force headquarters in in fort worth, texas where someone else at it and says, idiots, this is a weather balloon. and and in about three and a half hours, the military puts a second statementknow, our apologies. it's not a flying saucer it's a weather baand the roswell story comes and goes in about 3 hours and is sically for 30 years and really reemerges all in the wake of watergate in the late 1970s. know, one of the things that really surprised me in working on this book was is joel said, my previ 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 conspiracy theorie and collapse of faith and trust and truth in government institutions. and so the ufo conspiracies become, really the first government can spirits these to rise the committee the pike committee the seventies and eighties. and really establish the concept that we would now wreckage as the deep state in the american spectrum and and american politics sort of this idea that there is shadowy perm and government cabal you know secretly working the us government at cross-purposes. its leadership figureheads and the american and that you see this storyw and become darker and more

conspiratorial and sort of more over the course of the 1980s and it morphs into this idea that the government has recovered, you know, multiple space craft, multiple aliens, you know dead aliens, living aliens, that we have peace treaties with alien civilizations. th know, one set of these conspiracies that we actually had a big that the 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 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

ufo sightings this is an american phenomenon as write in your book and quite quite excellent detail. this is a global phenomenon you talk about the siet union investigation ins. you talk about france and belgium and the uk. can you talk a little bit about some of the global community has had with issue? yeah. and also. you know, the question that everyone asks when, i sort of art 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 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 ways probably one of the profound and basic questions up there with. what happens to us after death you know, is there a god, youow these are the the questions that you can amass in basically humans for as long humani existedone of the things that you see as you said, joel, is that, you know this is not just an american phenomenon, but many cultures around the planet sort of have meaningful ufo and that, yo there are government studies in the soviet union. france has a has a big one.

the costa rican has actually ta 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 world. but this question what's also interesting as you get into this is the question of are we alone turns out to modern and also a 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 there. and in fact, actually harry reid in the modern he funds the studies is he's mormon and in 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 this is one of the like the greatest revolution in humaunderstanding we have seen is the math is on taliens is that we, as late as the 1990s did not understand er planet outside of our own solar system now understand that effectively every star in the universe has planets and that a huge number of them not percentage but a huge number just because of 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. as we as we would recognize. and that numbers. the current estimate is that 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 that intel 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 intgent 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 solar system, in a very old universe 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 is that the james webb space telescope has found now 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 yearcivilizations that have risen civilizations so much more advanced that we would not be able to even recognize them that have come and gone before

our solar system evegagather out of dust and. it lea weird of thought experiment which that we totally misunderstood and first contact that hollywood and pop culture has 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 da flying over the white house me to your leade 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 situation and what's most likely to happen is

something we will probably first see in int civilization in a much more 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 we don't know whose it harvard astronomy chair. avi loeb talks about it as being basically equivalent of an empty plastic bag blowing through cosmic backyard that we're ok 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 knowhe 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 of any interest to any intelligence civilization that could master interstellar communication or travel and that anyone bother stopping in on earth is probably wrong and that see carl sagan who again arch proponent of the for extraterrestrial intelligence out there and also arch ' it's 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. 100000 to 200000 yearsy just based on how you would sort of expect patterns of interstellar travel to unfold. and so it's not that aliens 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 their to something 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 2mhiit'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 kind of wow factor. but what really wowed you in all of your research? so i think to me was this

idea, as i said, that the math is on the 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 much it is a scientific one 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 understand as you get into this is that in some ways aliens could be the t g 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 around flying saucers. fast forward. a couple of decades now the government has come up with unidentified anomalous destigmatize the conversation around ufos, but also to capture. two shifts in the perspective. the way that the govers at this one is not all of these are objects some chunk of them are phenomena and not all of them are flying. they'rectually one of the bigrnment 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. and one of the things that the government has actually discovered that we actually on has talked about it is in its study of uap

in last couple of years it discovered a heretofore unknown known trans medium say a chinese drone that comes out of e water and transitions to flight, which is a technology that the us did not realize china had until it began to get this modern uap study. so when you look at what uaps probably 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 is building 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 ended up with with chinese spy balloon last year which is if you turn the northward sort of slightly differently, you pick up a bunch ofnk 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. one of the things we shot down was a hobbyist balloon from, the northern illinois balloon meteorology. 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 is meteorological atmospheric and astronomical

science and phenomenon that we don't understand yet. but i think one of the great lessons of science of the last 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 we think it is. , 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 washington lived and died not knowing dinosaurs existed 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

science and you go to the 1950s we did 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 want to know something fascinating about how we know about the moon? we not even looked on moon to know whether there are other lunarre on, the moon that are not ours. like we've never even done a composite of study of the resolution in detail enough to know whether 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 saying this is how nascent our study of a lot of these phenomenon actually are.

and then you get to the truly weird stuff which is physics that we don't understand and the idea of real revolutions in physics that people theorize right now but that we don't yet understand mean this could be really mind bending stuff you know inter travel parallel 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. 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. everything thing that humanity knows about relativity and quantum physics wasvered

in her lifetime. imagine what we will learn about physics, the next human lifespan. imagine we could learn in 500 years, thousand years, 10,000 years. there's a italian rovelli who has a new book out, i'no about butcher. a very complex it's hisroposal for the idea of white, not black holes, but white holes. we've never seen. but he theand it's his explanation for what he of black hole which hole, he theorizes the. black hole bounces and effectively and time reverses and everything that ever entered into the black hole is then he says, of course we've never seen this, but when

to his first senior level astrophysics appointment in the 2000, his department pulled him aside and said you don't really believe in black holes, do you? because 2000 we've never seen one and we now understand the universe is populated wildly 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, ank you so much. questions from the audience, please have about 15 minutes anyway down here. i think we've got a mikaround. 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 eac there and confirmed. 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 reasons to doubt some of what unfolded there. it's certainly one of the the. it's certainly sort of one of the biggest savings or encounters that we see in the last, you know 25, 30, 40 years. and and i think was a really big part of that flywheel that i was talking 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 is it's back and have reported over the yes because we just don't have the data that one would want be able to sort of trace what actually happened in encounters and. so obviously the harvard astronomy that i mentioned earlier, the tng to do right now is he just last fall opened the first up he observed. three to try to document the like of you know what an ordinary looks like to try to

establish like baselines, data collection that you would want to begin to try to investigate, like, like that one whenever the happen in future. and we'll have a better understanding of sort of like what's weird and what's not weird. like yeah, pilots. yeah. and, and everything was well the navy pilots are this lonnie zamora category of, you know, super, highly credible witnesses. you know, there's a lot reasons if you are a navy aviator, navy pilot, that you, in fact, don't want to be p 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 been turned over to this new pentagon office called arrow that is really to make sense of what the government can sitter's uap sightings. you know part of the challenge there's a what are 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 aird place in the sky, only to come from it. well who's one seventeen's? so what the public considers ufo are often actually also secret us 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 that the years since has been the 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 there. but the the sightings that the u.s.

government thinkssightings and what are the ones that they c't explain and? that number over time as 20% and generally considered closer to about 5% that the government can't explain an arrow in, its work with the navy pilots and other encounters itut 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 gover itself can't explain. i 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? think. i actually roswell one of the least interesting ufo sightings and i find it unhinged. interesting for the followreason 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 lunch with his colleagues at los alamos national lab in the

summer of 1950. with it, edward teller there's a third scientist with them. if you know your oppenheimer movie from l involved names that are familiar, and they're talking about a new yorker. so that's how we're able to date this conversation to the summer 1950 that has there had been a series of stories about, alien or sorry about garbage cans missing from new york city streets and the cartoon is about alien getting offng saucer carrying their souvenirsfrom visiting earth. these new york city trash cans and they're talking lunch and enrico fermi says. if life is so common, where are they at?

and it it's, you 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 missroswell is that in the summer of 1947. if the us government had recovered an alien spacecraft or alien body alive or dead, it wouldn't gone. as a lot of people think to wright-patterson air 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 kept 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 in the united states to address the biggest questions of physics. if we'd encountered an alien spacecraft the summer of 47, incredibly secret by. if there were ten people in the united who knew about that craft and had been asked to provide advice about it, there'so enrico fermi was not one of those ten that if anyone in spacecraft in the summer of 47 fermi in teller would have been among that group and they were at the base where the us government would have almost absolutely put that.

so if in the summer, enrico fermi is sitting there saying, well, we haven't seen any evidence of any aliens yet, have we? to me that's the most convincing evidence 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 in aliens? and if you do, do you think they're more regional or more out there? and then the 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 all my views on this have been shaped by this book

cantlittle, you know knowled this of this such is, you know, the fun of researching and writing a book. i think the intel agent civilizations exist across the 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 th is really important to sort of capture and live in our daily lives, which that these scientists who work on this 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 they getting started in, trying to understand where fit into the scope and sca of the universe and when the group the sort of founding scientists are national radio astronomy. observatory in green bank, west virginia. in the first meeting they 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 for how how common life and intelligent life would probably be across the universe and you know it's how many planets are habitable, what percentage of planet that are

habitable does 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 important is called el and el is the length of time in intelligence civilization lasts lasts and everything in ceti hinges is on 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 coulde 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 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 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 from now. i hope that we are. and i think sort of one of the reasons that humanity should take really like living through es decades and figuring out 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 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 average lifespan for a species on earth is about million and and, youtens of thousands for our species right now. you know, like imagine what, 5 million years of humanity could achieve and what that could mean for what el could look like

across the rest theniverse. well, beforesh andtlemen garrett graff garrett graff.