Fresh Air - Best Of: AI's Prejudices / UFOs & Gov't Conspiracies

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

Computer scientist Joy Buolamwini coined the term the "coded gaze" while in grad school at MIT. As a brown-skinned woman, the facial recognition software program she was working on couldn't detect her face until she put on a white mask. She's written a book about the potential harms of AI — which include the social implications of bias and how it affects everyone. Also, we'll talk about UFO conspiracy theories with journalist Garrett Graff. He talks with us about how they've led to other conspiracy theories about the government.And Justin Chang will review the latest film by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Mosley with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, computer scientist Joy Bulumwini. She coined the term the coded gaze while in grad school at MIT. As a brown-skinned woman, the facial recognition software program she was working on couldn't detect her face until she put on a white mask. I just didn't think it would be so literal where I was changing my dark skin face to be made visible by a machine. And I thought the last place I would be coding in white face would be MIT. She's written a book about the potential harms of AI, which include the social implications of bias and how it affects everyone.

Also, we'll talk about UFO conspiracy theories with journalist Garrett Graff. He talks with us about how they've led to other conspiracy theories about the government. And Justin Chang will review the latest film by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. You've probably heard of the male gaze or the white gaze, but what about the coded gaze? Computer scientist Joy Bolognini coined the term while in grad school at MIT. As a brown-skinned Black woman, the facial recognition software program she was working on couldn't detect her face until she put on a white mask. This experience set Bollamwini on a path to look at the social implications of artificial intelligence, including bias in facial analysis technology and the potential harm it could cause millions

of people like her. Everything from dating app glitches to being mistaken as someone else by police. She's written a new book about her life and work in this space called Unmasking AI, My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. Last month, after meeting with Bollamwini and other AI experts, President Biden recently reissued an executive order aimed at making AI safer and more secure. This landmark executive order is a testament to what we stand for, safety, security, trust, openness. American leadership and the undeniable rights endowed by a creator that no creator, no creation can take away. Proving once again that America's strength is not just the power of its example, but the example of its power.

Joy Bollamwini is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization that raises awareness about the implications of AI. She is also a Rhodes Scholar and has a Ph.D. from MIT. Her thesis uncovered large racial and gender bias in AI services from companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Bollamwini's research was also featured in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias. And Dr. Joy Bollamwini, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. The coded gaze is this term that you coined a few years ago after an experience you had with a program that you were building called Aspire Mirror. Can you explain what the tech was supposed to do and why it

couldn't detect your face? Sure. So at the time, I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, and I took a class called Science Fabrication. The idea was to make something fanciful. So I made a kind of art installation that used face tracking technology to detect the location of a person's face in a mirror and then add a digital mask. And so this is what I was working on when things went a little sideways. So in that experience of working on the class project, which was an art installation, I found that the software I was using didn't detect my face that consistently until I put on a white mask in my office. So when I was debugging and trying to figure it out, that's how I came to see that my dark skin wasn't detected, but the white mask was. And that led to all kinds of questions. Is it just my face? Is it the lighting conditions? Is it the angle? Or is there something more at play? And so for me, this was really my first encounter with what I now term the coded gaze. And so you've likely heard of the male gaze or the white gaze. This is a cousin concept really

about who has the power to shape technology and whose preferences and priorities are baked in, as well as also sometimes whose prejudices are baked in. Well, when you first started to speak about this, people said stuff to you like, well, I mean, it could be the camera because there wasn't a lot of light. There is no bias in math algorithms. You break apart this idea through your research on cameras. Can you briefly describe what you found? Yes. I, too, wanted to believe that tech was completely neutral.

That's why I got to it. I thought, okay, I can escape the isms and messiness of people. But when it came to the type of tech I was exploring, computer vision, technology, detecting a pattern of a face. I really had to ask myself, okay, let's go back and think not just computer vision right now, but camera technology in general. And when you look at the ways in which camera technology and particularly film photography was developed, it was optimized for light skin. And in particular, the chemical compositions used to expose film used to be calibrated by something called a Shirley card. Now, a Shirley card was an image of a white woman named Shirley. Later on, there were others, but it became known as the Shirley card. And that was literally the standard by which the chemical composition would be calibrated.

And the issue is that people who didn't look like Shirley weren't as well accounted for. And some people might argue, oh, it's just the limitations of the technology. But actually, when furniture companies complained and chocolate companies complained, I can't see the difference between the milk chocolate and the dark chocolate, right? Or the fine grain in my mahogany. They updated the chemical composition. The darker skinned among us got a little bit of a windfall, but it showed that it wasn't necessarily just just floors me because of what the mask represents in our day-to-day lives. I mean, the figurative mask has been used to describe what Black and brown people wear in order to fit the norms or expectations of the dominant culture. And from the very start, this was not lost on you, although you wanted to find a reason that wasn't social. I really did. I was hoping that it was just down to technical issues. And as I was having that

experience of coding in the white mask, I really thought about the book, Black Skin, White Mask, which is talking about the ways in which people change themselves to fit a dominant group. And I just didn't think it would be so literal where I was changing my dark skin face to be made visible by a machine. And I thought the last place I would be coding in whiteface would be MIT. You talk quite a bit about the different spaces that you work in and you've worked in in technology. Language is very important to you when talking about all of this, especially when we talk about facial recognition technologies, there are two types, right? So there's facial verification and facial identification. Can you break down the differences? Oh, absolutely. So when we're thinking about the ways in which computers read faces, I'm thinking of a set

of questions a computer might be asking. And so first, there's actually face detection. Is there a face at all? And so the experience I had of coding in a white mask to have my face detected was an example of face detection failure. So that's one kind of way a computer can analyze a face. Another kind of way a computer might analyze a face is guessing an attribute of the face. So let me guess the age, let me guess the gender. Some might try to guess ethnicity and others might try to guess your emotion, but like we know you can put on a fake smile. The guess doesn't mean what is being displayed on the face actually is true to how somebody feels or identifies

internally. And then when we get to what's more technically known as facial recognition, to your point, there are two flavors. So facial verification is also known as one-to-one matching. So this is the type of facial recognition you encounter if, say, you're trying to unlock a phone. So there's a face that's being expected. Then there's a face that's attempting to have access. And there's that one-to-one match. Now, when we get to facial identification, also known as one-to-many matching, this is when you might think of Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise being detected in an airport among a ton of people. So that's the surveillance kind of use case.

And so one of the things I really tried to do in the book was to walk people through different ways in which AI systems can be integrated into various types of technology. So there's a deeper understanding when people are hearing about news headlines or new breakthroughs in AI. So I really appreciate you asking about the nuances between these things. Right, because once you started speaking about this, you had a TED Talk a few years ago. You started getting a slew of letters from people whose lives were really impacted, in some cases almost ruined. One person wrote you from jail believing that they were locked up because of false facial recognition. There was a false facial recognition match.

Can you go into more detail on why something like this could happen? Yes. So even after the people who would actually send me letters, there were also news stories. One recent one that sticks with me is the arrest of Portia Woodruff due to facial recognition misidentification. Portia was eight months pregnant when she was falsely arrested for committing a carjacking. And I don't know anyone who's eight months pregnant jacking cars. So there's also this question of this over-reliance on machines, even when common sense might indicate there could be other alternative suspects. And to your question,

how does it happen? How is it that someone can be misidentified by a machine? So we have to look at the ways in which we teach machines to recognize the pattern of a face. And so the approach to this type of pattern recognition is often machine learning. And when we talk about machine learning, we're talking about training AI systems that learn from a set of data. So you have a data set that would contain many examples of a human face. And from that data set, using various techniques, the model would be trained to detect the pattern of a face. And then you can go further and say, okay, let's train the model to find a specific face. What my research showed and what others have shown as well is many of

these data sets were not representative of the world at all. I started calling them pale male data sets because I would look into the data sets and I would go through and count, right? How many light-skinned people, how many dark-skinned people, how many women, how many men, and so forth. And some of the really important data sets in our field, they could be 70% men over 80% lighter-skinned individuals. And these sorts of data sets could be considered gold standards, the ones we look to, to judge progress in our field. So it became clear to me that, oh, the data that we're training these systems on, and also the data that we're using to test how well they work, don't include a lot of people.

And so it's not then so surprising that you would have higher misidentification rates for people who were less represented when these types of systems were being developed in the first place. And so when you look at people like Portia Woodruff, who was falsely arrested due to facial recognition misidentification, when you look at Robert Williams, who was falsely arrested due to facial misidentification in front of his two young daughters. When you look at Najir Parks, when you look at Randall Reed, Randall was arrested for a crime that occurred in a state he had never even set foot in. And all of these people I've mentioned, they're all dark skin individuals. There's something else that your research also found. And I want to get a clear understanding of why this happens, too. Why is it that in some cases, this technology misgenders people with dark skin? This has actually happened to me, I admit, while playing some of those TikTok facial recognition games. It always thinks that I'm a guy.

So this was what I ran into after my TED Talk. So I did my TED Talk you mentioned a bit earlier. And I had my TED profile image. And I was showing the example of coding in a white mask, face detection failure. And so I decided to use my TED profile image and just upload it to the online demos of a number of companies, some well known companies. And I noticed that some didn't detect my face, but the ones that did detect my face were labeling me male. And that's when I started actually looking at gender classification. And as I went and I looked at the research on gender classification, I saw with some prior studies, actually older women tended to be misgendered more often than younger women. And I also started looking at the composition

of the various gender classification testing data sets, the benchmarks, and so forth. And it's a similar kind of story to the dark skin. Here, it's not just the proportion of representation, but what type of woman is represented. So for example, many of these face data sets are face data sets of celebrities. And if you look at women who tend to be celebrated, women who tend to be- Yeah, they're lighter skinned women. Lighter skinned women, but also fit very specific gender presentation norms and stereotypes as well. And so if you have systems that are trained on some type of ideal form of woman that doesn't actually fit many ways of being a woman, this learned gender presentation does not reflect the world. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, we're listening to my conversation with computer scientist,

researcher, and poet Joy Bulumwini about her new book, Unmasking AI, My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to my conversation with computer scientist Joy Bulumwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization that raises awareness about the impacts of AI. She's written a new book titled Unmasking AI, My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. You know, Dr. Joy, I was really struck by how honest in the book you were about at first you were hesitant about this idea of being an activist and taking on issues of race within AI and computer science more generally,

because you were at MIT to create groundbreaking technology. You did not want to be labeled as someone who was taking on issues of race and racism. That or sexism or any of the isms, as the work is intersectional. And so when I got into computer science, I wanted to build cool future tech. And that's what took me to the media lab. I was not trying to deal with various types of isms. And I also understood it would make my life harder, you know, if I needed to speak up about these types of issues. And so my thought was graduate school is hard enough. You know, why add the added burden of being that person, that person pointing out the flaws, critiquing everything when we're out here just trying to have fun. And so that was my initial viewpoint until I just saw how harmful these systems could be and who would be harmed, particularly people like me, people from communities of color, women, marginalized identities of many forms. And I realized that I had a platform, I had the skills and technical

know-how to do deep investigations of these systems. And that maybe in fact, I did have some kind of duty and certainly I had the opportunity to say something and have it be heard. Even in saying something, though, you were very aware of the perception of you as a Black woman. I was struck by a story you tell in the book. When you started to speak about the coded gaze, you would practice before speaking to an audience. That's, all people do that, but not exactly what to say. Of course, that was very important, but also just as important as how to say it. You didn't want to come off like an angry Black woman. Oh, yes. I actually remember when I was recording this video for an art installation called Hi Camera. And in that video, I'm having a playful conversation with a computer vision system.

And I'm saying, hi, camera, can you see my face? You can see my friend's face. What about my face? That's not how I initially said it. How I said it, I was like, hi, can you see my face? What about my friend's face? You can't see my face? And so because I certainly felt a certain kind of way about the situation.

And so I was wearing my own mask to be heard. Because I understood that if I were perceived as being angry or bitter, that might block certain people from understanding what I was saying. And understanding what I was saying actually had implications for everybody because no one is immune from being harmed by AI systems. Also, by that time, I had quite a bit of experience navigating as a black face in very white places. So I also had an understanding from those experiences at how easily concerns can be dismissed because of tone policing and so many other factors. And so

part of the strategy was to speak in a way that would allow people to hear me. As I mentioned earlier, you met with President Biden this past summer as part of this roundtable with several other experts in this space. What was the most urgent message you were able to impart to him? For me, it was that we have an opportunity to lead on preventing AI harms. And the subtitle of the book is Protecting What is Human in a World of Machines. And when I think of what is human, I think about our right to express ourselves, the essence of who we are and our expectations of dignity. So I challenge President Biden for the

U.S. to lead on what I call biometric rights. So when I'm talking about our essence, our actual likeness. So right now, and I do various examples throughout the book, as you know, someone can take the voice of your loved one, clone it, and use it in a hoax. So you might hear someone screaming for your name saying someone has taken something. And you have fraudsters who are using these voice clones to extort people. Celebrity won't save you. You had Tom Hanks, his likeness was being used with synthetic media with a deep fake to promote a product, you know product he had never even heard of. And so we see these algorithms of exploitation that are taking our actual essence. And then we also see the need for civil rights and human rights continue. And so it was very encouraging to

see in the executive order that the principles from the blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, such as protections from algorithmic discrimination, that the AI systems being used are effective, that there are human fallbacks were actually included, because that's going to be necessary to safeguard our civil rights and our human rights. Dr. Joy Boulamwini, I really appreciate this conversation. I appreciate your knowledge, and I appreciate this book. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Joy Boulamwini's new book is Unmasking AI, My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. Ten years ago, the revered Japanese director and animator Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement. Now at the age of 82, Miyazaki has returned with a new animated feature called The Boy and the Heron. Our film critic Justin Chang says it's a gorgeously drawn and deeply moving work from an undisputed master of storytelling. Those of us who love the work of the anime master Hayao Miyazaki have happily learned not to take his retirement announcements too seriously.

In 1997, he claimed that Princess Mononoke would be his final animated feature. In 2001, he said the same about his future Oscar winner, Spirited Away. Still, there was a greater air of finality in 2013 around The Wind Rises, a mournful drama of love and loss that felt like a fitting swan song. But Miyazaki clearly had more to say. A decade after The Wind Rises, he returns with The Boy and the Heron, which combines the excitement of a child's grand adventure and the weight of an older man's reflection. The boy of the title is 12-year-old Mahito, whom we first meet on a fateful night in 1943. Bombs are falling on Tokyo,

and his mother dies tragically in a fire at a hospital. A year later, a still-grieving Mahito moves to the countryside with his father, who's about to marry a woman named Natsuko. Some but not all of this is drawn from Miyazaki's own life. While his parents both survived the war and lived for decades afterward, Miyazaki has spoken of his memories of fleeing Tokyo during the war when he was just a child. His father ran a company that manufactured airplane parts, a backstory that Mahito's father shares as well. But that's about as close to reality as the movie gets. If this is a partial self-portrait, it's also a beguiling fantasy, in which Miyazaki's

flair for wondrous characters, bewildering plot turns, and gorgeous and grotesque imagery is on inventive display. As he explores his new home, Mahito gets to know his stepmother-to-be, and a gaggle of gossipy grannies who help look after him and the house. In time, he also crosses paths with a mysterious grey heron that keeps trying to get his attention, at one point poking its head in through his bedroom window. Your presence is requested, it says. The heron is voiced by Robert Pattinson in the English-dubbed version,

which also features actors including Christian Bale, Gemma Chan, and Florence Pugh. If you can, though, I recommend seeking out the subtitled Japanese language version. Better yet, see them both. Miyazaki's story is too rich and strange to be digested in a single viewing. In one of those bizarre transformations all too common in the filmmaker's work, the heron soon reveals itself to be a man in avian disguise. He becomes a prickly companion of sorts to Mahito as they journey into an otherworldly realm that could be located at the center of the earth or perhaps just at the core of Miyazaki's subconscious. At one point, Mahito meets a girl whom he gradually realizes is a younger version of his mother. He comes across a group of smiling, floating little puffballs known as warawara,

who are so adorable that they made my seven-year-old daughter squeal in delight. Along the way, he's pursued by a menacing army of giant green parakeets. If there's one ground rule in The Boy and the Heron, it's that birds are clearly not to be trusted. I confess that I found much of this mystifying when I first saw it, and that I couldn't have minded less. Miyazaki has never been bound by narrative logic, and his imagery here exerts its own hypnotic, hallucinatory pull. But there's a clue to the movie's meaning in its original Japanese-language title, How Do You Live? It shares

that title with the famous 1937 coming-of-age novel by Genzaburo Yoshino, a copy of which surfaces in the story as a gift to Mahito from his late mother. The question, how do you live, is one that Mahito must confront as he deals with wartime trauma and loss, and also as he forges a bond with his future stepmother. But Miyazaki is also asking us how we live, how we push past our own despair and find balance in the instability of life. Over the years, his movies have provided their own hopeful answers.

Set in worlds ravaged by greed, conflict, and environmental destruction, they remind us that there's redemption in acts of kindness and love. It's that sincere belief in the possibility of goodness that draws me back to Miyazaki's work again and again, and that makes The Boy and the Heron such a powerfully affecting addition to his legacy. Justin Chang is the film critic for the LA Times. He reviewed the new film by Hayao Miyazaki. It opens in theaters nationwide December 8th.

Coming up, we hear from journalist Garrett Graff. In his new book, UFO, he describes how some conspiracy theories about the deep state have roots in UFO conspiracy theories. This is Fresh Air Weekend. Terry has the next interview. I'll let her introduce it. As a journalist and historian who has covered the White House and issues related to national intelligence, my guest, Garrett Graff, thinks that some of the conspiracies about the so-called deep state have their roots in conspiracy theories about UFOs. His new book, which begins in the 1940s, is about the history of reported UFO sightings, how the government investigates those sightings, what the military knows and what it keeps secret,

and how UFO conspiracy theories start and spread. The book is also about how scientists and astronomers are searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. What pop culture has had to say about UFOs and extraterrestrial life is also covered. The title of his book is UFO, the inside story of the U.S. government's search for alien life here and out there. Graff is the author of previous books about the history of the FBI, the Cold War plans to protect government leaders in case the U.S. is attacked with a nuclear weapon, and an oral history of 9-11. His book Watergate was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history. Graff is the former editor of Politico magazine and a contributor to Wired. Garrett Graff, welcome back to Fresh Air.

It's a pleasure to be back with you. Thank you. So do people start backing away when they found out you were writing a book related to UFOs? Do they start saying, oh, excuse me, I'm late for an appointment. Gotta go. It is a really funny topic to start talking about with people. Everyone has this like very nervous laugh the moment that you start talking about UFOs. And then they immediately lean in and start asking, you know, well, what did you find? What do you believe? Because this is a topic that in some ways I think is one of the most inherently fascinating and biggest questions of human existence. How else do you explain yourself to make it clear that you're sane and rational,

even though you're writing a book about UFOs? So my background is as a national security writer. And for me as a writer, there was one specific moment that really stood out. There was an interview that John Brennan gave in December 2020. Brennan at that point had just wrapped up the better part of a decade as the CIA director and White House Homeland Security Advisor for President Obama. He was a career intelligence officer, and he gave a interview to a Washington blogger and economist named Tyler Cowen. act be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don't yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life. Now, that's a very- You could qualify that a little bit more, don't you think?

Exactly. It's heavily caveated. It's very tortured. But that comment really made me, as a national security writer, sit up and pay attention because I figured there probably aren't that many things that puzzle John Brennan. You know, when he woke up in the morning with a question, there was a $60 billion a year intelligence apparatus that was charged with delivering him the answers. You know, tens of thousands of intelligence officers, analysts, signals, intelligence, intercept systems, sensors, satellites, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if John Brennan is sitting there saying there's stuff out there that's flying around that we don't know what it is, and it puzzles me. That was probably a topic worth diving into.

Your book starts during World War II, when some pilots see something very mysterious. So is that the very beginning of UFO sightings? It's the beginning, at least, of the modern age of UFOs. Humans, going back as far as we have recorded history, have seen weird things in the sky. There's a reference in the Bible in Ezekiel to wheels inside wheels flying in the sky. But the modern age of UFOs begins in the summer of 1947, and there was an Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold who was flying in the Pacific Northwest near Mount Rainier who spotted what he later reported as nine saucer-like objects moving at tremendous speed. He landed, told some friends about it,

it ended up getting picked up in the media, and kicked off this huge wave of what were then called flying saucer sightings. And it was a really important moment in national security and pop culture and the media. This was right after World War II, the dawn of the Cold War. And at the time, these flying saucer sightings were reported in dozens of states. There were 34 states, ultimately, that reported flying saucer sightings in the summer of 1947. The infamous Roswell crash happens in July of 47, just a couple of weeks after Kenneth Arnold's original sighting. And was actually one of the

historical side notes is the Roswell crash was instantly forgotten at the time because it was just part of this big national wave of sightings. And the government really starts to panic over these sightings, not because anyone at the time imagines that these are extraterrestrials, but because of the fear that these represented secret Soviet spacecraft being built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists. Where does the kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists come in? Well, this was exactly what the United States was doing in the summer of 47, was we had brought all of these Nazi rocket scientists over to places like Los Alamos and the White

Sands Proving Grounds and captured V2 rockets. And we were embarking on our own race to build missiles and rockets at the dawn of the space race. And our fear was that the Soviets were ahead of us with this flying saucer technology, that it represented some secret craft that their own side of kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists had achieved before the U.S. had unlocked this technology. And this was a huge moment in the dawn of the Cold War. The summer of 47, the entire U.S. government is reorganizing around how to fight the generational battle of the Cold

War. The National Security Act of 1947 that summer creates the modern Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council at the White House, the CIA is the nation's first peacetime intelligence agency, and creates the Air Force as a standalone military branch for the first time. Of course, up until then, the Air Force had been part of the Army still. And so you had the Air Force confronting for the first time this crisis. Its literal first crisis was the summer of the flying saucers and the fear that these represented, you know, some secret Soviet technology.

And but the U.S. wasn't kidnapping the former Nazi scientists, right? But they were feared that the Soviets, to get the scientists there, had to kidnap them? Yes. So we had brought them over as part of what was known as Operation Paperclip, where we basically forgave their World War II war crimes, which were extensive and awful. I mean, tens of thousands of people dying in slave labor camps as part of the Nazi rocket programs. And we brought them over and, you know, basically let them live peacefully in post-war America, people like Wernher von Braun. And our fear was that the Soviets had, you know, kidnapped their own set of Nazi rocket scientists and were forcing them to create their own rockets in early entries in the space race.

A turning point in the early history of UFO sightings is, of course, Roswell. This was, as you said, in the summer of 1947 when mysterious debris is found near Roswell, New Mexico, what did a local rancher find? Yeah, the Roswell story is just an incredible one because of how it represents that feedback loop and the world of conspiracies that grows up around it. Early July 1947, a rancher named Mac Brazile comes into Roswell and says, I found some weird wreckage on my ranch. The sheriff says, oh, it's probably military. You should go talk to the local army airbase at Roswell. The army airbase at Roswell at that point was the world's most elite and technologically advanced fighting unit

in the world. It is the home of the silver-plated B-29 bombers, the only nuclear-equipped fighting force in the entire world. Roswell is an important base filled with very talented personnel. Its commander was actually one of the backup pilots to the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Very serious guy. He sees this wreckage that Mack Brazel has discovered. And they're about two weeks into this summer of, you know, day after day of flying saucer sightings around the country. And the commander says, you know, basically, great news. We found our first flying saucer. And he tells his public affairs officer to put out a press release saying the Air Force has recovered a flying saucer. Then the local paper picks it up.

It very quickly becomes a national story. They put the wreckage on a plane to Fort Worth to the headquarters of the 8th Air Force. At that Air Force headquarters, someone else looks at the wreckage and says, oh, this isn't a flying saucer. This is actually a military weather balloon. And in a couple of hours, the military puts out a second statement saying, you know, sorry for the confusion, this is actually just a weather balloon. And Roswell comes and goes in the space of a single afternoon and is entirely forgotten by ufologists for the next 30 years.

What brings it back 30 years later? So what brings it back is in the 70s, in the wake of Watergate, Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, there becomes this rise of conspiracy theories that the government is covering up alien spacecraft and even alien bodies. And Roswell becomes the center of these conspiracy theories because the government, after all, put out a press release saying that it had recovered a flying saucer. And it becomes this, you know, core tenant of ufology that Roswell was where the u.s first recovered crashed alien spacecraft and even bodies it grows and morphs over time from not just one craft but multiple craft that crashed in and

around roswell during that time these conspiracy theories grow you, ever larger and darker and include, you know, the possible, include the idea that the government has made peace treaties with alien civilizations, that the government has, you know, turned over the possible, you know, given permission for alien civilizations to kidnap and abduct humans, incredibly dark and strange conspiracies that I actually think represent the first place where we see the emergence of the deep state in American politics. That in some ways the foundation, I think, of our modern conspiratorial age in our politics begins in the wake of Watergate with UFOs. Why do you think UFOs are the foundation of deep state conspiracy theories? Because this becomes, again, this important part of pop culture where people are super fascinated with extraterrestrials, alien contact. There's this wave of books and so-called whistleblowers in the 70s and 80s who come forward to say that

they have knowledge of these crashed spacecraft and, you know, alien bodies hidden away in places like Area 51 in Nevada. This actually in some ways becomes this very clear link to our modern age. One of the original founders of these UFO conspiracies in the 1980s is this figure named Bill Cooper, who writes this book, Beyond the Pale Horse, just a terrible book of conspiracies. I mean, a big chunk of the book is just reprinting the protocols of the elders of Zion. He talks about, you know, that he was a naval intelligence officer in Vietnam and saw the documents about our contact with alien civilizations. He becomes one of the founders of conservative talk radio. He has this wildly popular program in the 1980s and 90s that then inspires a local Austin, Texas public access host named Alex Jones. He and Alex Jones have this ongoing feud

through the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. They split after Alex Jones begins to embrace what we now recognize as 9-11 trutherism after 9-11, the 9-11 conspiracies. And Bill Cooper actually ends up dying in a police shootout in December 2001 when police officers came to arrest him as part of some of his anti-government moves. He opens fire on the deputies, shoots one of them, and the police fire back and kill him. But I think in a very weird way, you don't get January 6th and the big lie in the 2020 election without the foundation of those UFO conspiracies in the 80s and 90s. Yeah, so the military's attempt to correct a mistake ends up being interpreted years later as a huge cover-up. Yes, and part of what becomes clear with the passage of time is that there was a government cover-up about Roswell, that the Clinton administration puts out two big reports as the 50th anniversary of that Roswell crash rolls around that tries to explain, for anyone who will believe it, that there was a cover-up at Roswell just not about aliens, that in fact that the balloon that was recovered was a secret development project known as Project Mogul that was trying to develop a giant balloon that could detect Soviet atomic tests.

Kind of like the Chinese spy balloon. Exactly. And that it was, in fact, it would have looked like a UFO to the Air Force personnel looking at it. It was a giant series of balloons. It was like 30 balloons. It was 100 feet taller than the Washington Monument packed with sensors. It did not look like a regular weather balloon at all. So, you know, it was in some ways a literal UFO. And then the confusion around reports of bodies being recovered actually had to do with a series of other secret government tests at the time, where the U.S. in the White Sands Proving Grounds then going out into the desert and collecting and trucking away. It's just that they were parachute dummies, not alien bodies.

Garrett Graff, thank you so much for coming back. Thanks so much for having me. Garrett Graff's new book is called UFO. He spoke to Terry Gross. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. I'm Tanya Mosley.