Fresh Air - UFOs: Conspiracy Theories, Secrets & Mysteries

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

We talk with journalist Garrett Graff about his new book, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search of Alien Life Here – and Out There. It's about reported sightings, how they've been investigated by the military, what secrets the military keeps and why, and the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He says that the government is absolutely covering up information about what's in the skies, but not for the reasons you may think. Later, John Powers reviews the new romantic comedy, Fallen Leaves.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. 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, 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. gave a interview to a Washington blogger and economist named Tyler Cowen. And he says,

in very tortured syntax, quote, some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don't yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life. 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 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 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 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 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 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 and early entries in the space race. So these sightings of flying saucers cause concern for the government and the military. They think it might be like Soviet spycraft. At the same time, it goes wild in pop culture. I mean, I grew up with so many of like flying saucer movies and stories and, you know, and it's interesting that at the same time people have the same image and it spreads all over pop culture. But it certainly makes me wonder whether it's the power of suggestion

that people think they're seeing this specific shape in the sky. Yes, absolutely. And actually, ironically, it is the government and the Air Force that first popularizes the term UFOs in the late 40s and early 50s to try to de-stigmatize the conversation around flying saucer sightings, because very quickly people begin to, you know, laugh and make fun of people reporting flying saucers. And then, as you said, this becomes a huge part of pop culture. In the early 1950s, you have the first wave of alien invasion movies. And it becomes this very obvious feedback loop that plays out across decades of the pop culture interest in flying saucers and UFOs and aliens driving sightings, which drive national security concerns, which then drives and inspires more pop culture that then inspires more sightings.

And this is a self-perpetuating phenomenon and puzzling mystery that continues for the next 80 years. 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 Mack 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 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 know, ever larger and darker and include, you know, the possibility, 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 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, 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 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, you know, 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 Ros, 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 around Roswell was testing ejection seats and parachute dummies. And so there were bodies falling from the sky that the military was then going out into the desert

and collecting and trucking away. It's just that they were parachute dummies, not alien bodies. All right, let's take a short break again and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Garrett Graff, and his new book is called UFO, The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here and Out There. We'll be right back after a break.

I'm Terry Gross, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nesper, producer at Fresh Air. And this is Seth Kelly, also a producer at Fresh Air. If you like the Fresh Air podcast, we think there's a pretty good chance that you'll also like the Fresh Air newsletter. It's a weekly newsletter written by us, the people who help make the show. You'll get all the week's interviews and reviews in one place. Plus, staff recommendations, interviews from the archive, bonus audio, and what's coming up on the show. Imagine, an email you enjoy getting. To subscribe, go to whyy.org slash fresh air.

Let's get back to my interview with journalist and historian Garrett Graff, author of the new book UFO, the inside story of the U.S. government's search for alien life here and out there. It's about reported UFO sightings since the 1940s, how the military investigates sightings, what the military knows and what it keeps secret and why, and how UFO conspiracy theories start and spread. The book is also about how scientists and astronomers are searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. I asked Graf about what he describes as the most convincing UFO sighting. It happened in 1964 when a local police officer in New Mexico named Lonnie Zamora saw something strange while chasing a speeder. What did he say he saw?

So he's chasing a speeder and hears an explosion off in the desert and sees what he thinks is an overturned car in a ditch. So he begins driving towards it, you know, turns off into the desert, is bumping up and down through some gullies. So the thing is coming in and out of view. He sees two figures standing next to it. And as he gets closer, he sees them get into the craft and the craft flies away. He as he gets closer, he ends up describing it as, you know, a football shaped white craft with red type writing or symbols on the outside. And he is very Lonnie's more is traumatized by whatever this thing is that he encounters. And there are corroborating witnesses who appear moments later, including a New Mexico state trooper who arrives on the scene a couple of minutes later, you know, sees Lani Zamora shaken up by this. And he, the FBI, the military end up getting involved. Investigators from Project Blue Book respond to the Air Force UFO hunting unit. They find some physical evidence stories because you have this small subset of witnesses who have no reason to make up a UFO encounter. And in fact, actually a lot of possible credibility to lose for reporting a UFO encounter.

People who lead, you know, totally ordinary and respected lives before the encounter and after the encounter. This isn't something that sends Lonnie Zamora off on an odyssey where he says that aliens visit him every Thursday afternoon for tea for the rest of his life. He just has this one weird encounter and goes on with the rest of his normal life. Did that remain unexplained? It remains unexplained to this day. There's a possible very simple explanation for it that this is 1964. It's the heart of the space race. He's right next to the White Sands Proving Grounds, an Air Force testing facility. that he happened to come across. But we haven't seen any evidence emerge in 50 or 60 years of a craft that behaves anything like what he says that he saw. And there are, you know, not a lot of Lonnie Zamora's over 80 years, but enough of them. And I would put actually the Navy pilots that we have seen come forward over the last decade to talk about their own encounters in that same category.

You know, people who have no apparent reason to make up their story, people who have a lot of credibility to lose for coming forward to talk about an encounter with a UFO, and some corroborating evidence. You know, in the Navy's case, we have some puzzling videos that their planes picked up, or radar signatures, or other sensor readings that show that they came across something that we don't know what it is yet. So have these mysteries turned you into a believer about extraterrestrials visiting Earth or their aircraft visiting Earth? Part of, I think, the challenge of talking about this topic is I think it's entirely possible that there are important and insightful and meaningful answers to what UFOs and UAPs are that still stop short of the answer being aliens from Alpha Centauri happening to come by in a flying saucer. One of the biggest revolutions I think that we have had in human knowledge and understanding in the last 25 years is just how likely it actually is that there is life and intelligent life out there across the universe, and probably actually quite a bit of it. The math to me is very much on the side of aliens existing. The challenge is the chances that they are anywhere near enough that we would ever notice them or that they would notice us, I think is vanishingly slim. So you haven't become a believer that extraterrestrials are probing Earth? us in the first place. The most likely answer is that nobody knows that we are here and that

nobody would care, that we are a pretty young and immature civilization on a pretty ordinary solar system. And that there's no, you know, the idea that aliens would bother flying across the vastness of space in their flying saucers to come and befriend us or invade us or harvest our organs for energy and food, I think, you know, ends up being basically a creation of pop culture and Hollywood. Well, if anybody from another planet wanted to take over Earth, Earth at this point is a real fixer-upper. Exactly. And I think that, you know, Carl Sagan, who was the, in the 20th century, youth century the leading astronomer behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, was also the leading skeptic about aliens visiting Earth. And it wasn't in his mind because he didn't think that aliens visited Earth. His argument was that statistically, you would only expect aliens to come by every couple hundred thousand years, that basically they would use Earth like a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike as they are passing from one interesting place to another. And so in Carl Sagan's mind, it wasn't that aliens didn't visit Earth. It's that, you know, last Tuesday night, that thing that you saw in the sky was unlikely to be the one of the U.S. government's search for alien life here and out there. We'll be right back.

This is Fresh Air. You're also interested in the science end of this and what scientists and astronomers are researching related to the question of is there other life, is there intelligent life in the universe? So where is SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, headed now? What direction is it taking? Right now, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, what scientists call SETI, has made some really startling jumps in our understanding of the universe in astronomy in the last 20 or 30 years, because we have come to understand just how big and just how probably populated the universe is across the vast breadth of outer space. That, you know, we now understand that probably every star in the universe has planets,

that a chunk of those are habitable, you know, existing in the so-called Goldilocks zone of places that could hold an atmosphere and water and life as we understand it. And that across the universe, there are probably something like a sextillion, that's a billion trillion habitable planets that life and intelligent life could develop on. Have the SETI scientists and astronomers found anything that resembles life other than microorganisms? No, but what they are beginning to understand how to search for are what they call techno signatures which is uh atmospheres that would look like ours elsewhere in the universe or um signs of what an intelligent civilization would look like from a distance um and that that's something that we are actually very, very early on in understanding

and beginning to study. I mean, we've looked at a tiny, tiny percentage of the sky and other stars. Are there things you've really changed your mind about now that you've done all the research for this book? Well, to me, the idea that intelligent life is out there is, I think, almost a foregone conclusion at this point. I mean, it's moved scientifically in the last couple of decades, I think, not just from a possibility but to a probability. And then I think the other thing that I came away from this book really fascinated by is the way that we misunderstand how we will probably someday discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, which is, um, you know, we have these two first contact scenarios that are, you know, seem so clear and unambiguous. You know, you have the Jodie Foster contact idea of, you know, a very clear radio message from outer space, or you have the Independence Day, take me to your leader, alien spacecraft

appearing over the White House kind of scenario. Wait, let me add, you've got E.T., the cute and friendly, you know, alien. Exactly. Who befriends a child. And what we are probably going to see instead is something that's much more ambiguous and puzzling because no one knows we're here and probably no one cares. And so what we're probably going to first discover is a piece of space trash. What the Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb, you know, equates

to the idea of like an empty plastic bag blowing through our cosmic backyard. And, you know, we're going to see something that we're like, hey, that's not from our Walmart. Like, whose Walmart did that come from? And that it's going to be, you know, an old space probe or, you know, a literal piece of space junk from some intelligent civilization out there that we're going to see and we're not going to have any idea who it's from how long it's been out there or whether that civilization still exists because again you know part of this is there could have been a lot of intelligent civilizations that have come and gone uh and we might be alone right now. You know what I find fascinating? How a lot of like 1950s paranoid alien invasion movies, that the space aliens were kind of just like humans,

but they had like really big foreheads or really big ears. Like Dr. Spock later on has like really big ears. It's just like, it's a reimagining of humans in a slightly alien form, but it is very unlikely that if there is intelligent life in the universe, they'd look like a slightly deformed version of us. And that actually ends up being a interesting part of this whole thought experiment is if there was intelligent life elsewhere, would we even notice it? Would it be in a form that we recognize as life or intelligent life? And or is it possible that it's already all around us and our technology is not sophisticated enough to detect it? Almost any civilization that is exploring interstellar

distances and intergalactic expeditions, you would expect to be able to travel at a fraction of the speed of light. We don't really have any technology on Earth that would be able to detect most craft that would be moving through our solar system at a fraction of the speed of light. And so, you know, one of the weirder answers to this mystery is it could be that there are interstellar visitors passing through our solar system, you know, every day, every week, every month, every year, and we just don't have the technology yet to notice. You've been on our show several times in the past. And one of the times was just a few weeks before Trump's presidency was over. You had written about the dangers that he posed, the dangers he posed to democracy in his final weeks in the White House. Right now, he's the frontrunner in the Republican primary.

And in a lot of polls, he wins against Biden. So I'm wondering what you're thinking now about Trump and what happens if he does manage, in spite of all the indictments, to get reelected. Let me give you an answer that unexpectedly is going to connect to UFOs. Okay. Which is the... Give it a shot. The scientists who work on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, have this thing called the Drake Equation.

It's an equation that is supposed to predict the number of intelligent civilizations out there and how many there are at any given time. The main variable scientists call L, which stands for the length of time that an advanced civilization lasts. To me, the challenge is L could turn out to be, based on where humanity is heading, a pretty short number. challenges of technology and AI and misinformation and the challenges to democracy that Donald Trump poses, you know, the challenges of climate change, there's no guarantee that human civilization is around for that much longer. And certainly not at a level where, you know, we would have the capability and the interest to explore the rest of the universe. So to me, you know, when I look at Donald Trump's possible return to power, you know, what I'm thinking about right now is what it does to the L of American democracy and human civilization

and how it could and almost certainly would accelerate the unwinding of modern American life. That was maybe more apocalyptic than I expected. Well, but this is what you have me on for, Terry. You have me on as the, here's how you're going to die in a nuclear attack. Here's how Donald Trump is going to unwind democracy. I just didn't want you to think I had given up my apocalyptic brand.

Oh, good point. Good point. Yes, and the reference to how you're going to die in an apocalypse is your book, which we had you on to discuss, about how government leaders had prepared to save themselves in case of like nuclear war. Exactly. Raven Rock.

Raven Rock. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, pleasure to have you back again. Glad I was able to be just as depressing as I usually am in the end. Thank you so much for coming back. Thanks so much for having me.

Garrett Graff's new book is called UFO, the inside story of the U.S. government's search for alien life here and out there. After we take a short break, John Powers will review a new romantic comedy he describes as a refined art movie that's also a crowd pleaser. This is Fresh Air. The new romantic comedy Fallen Leaves tells a story about love on the margins of society. The film has won several big international prizes. It was written and directed by Aki Karasmaki, who first put movies from Finland on the map in the 1980s. Our critic-at-large John Powers says, Fallen Leaves is a rare bird, a refined art movie that's also a crowd-pleaser.

Most filmmakers take time to discover their artistic identity. But there are a few, like Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, and Wes Anderson, who seem to have popped from the womb knowing exactly the kind of films they were born to make. Their vision is so distinctive that, from the very beginning, every frame of their work bears their signature. One of this handful is Aki Korismaki, the 66-year-old Finnish director who may be the world's great master of cinematic terseness. He believes that no movie should ever be over an hour and a half. Ever since he emerged four decades ago with a terrific adaptation of Crime and Punishment, it ran a whopping 93 minutes,

Coris Mackey has been creating taut, funny, quietly poetic movies that usually start off doleful and wind up heartening. A nice example is his latest, Fallen Leaves, which the international film critic group has voted the best film of 2023. Clocking in at a commendable 81 minutes, it tells a simple story that gives off the magic glow of a fable. Set in present-day Helsinki, Fallen Leaves is a melancholy romantic comedy about two lonely souls who sleepwalk through life doing dead-end jobs. A wonderful Alma Pershti stars as the soulful Ansa,

a 40-ish woman who earns minimum wage at a supermarket that treats his employees as if they were thieves. She returns home every night to her flat, where the radio plays either dire news from Ukraine or pop songs that suggest a richer, a more expressive world than her own. These same messages of misery and escape are simultaneously being heard by Holapa, that's Yusy Vatanen, a middle-aged construction worker whose depressive boozing gets him bounced from job to job. The two first meet each other at a karaoke bar that could come from a David Lynch film.

Eventually they go out, fittingly to a zombie movie, and although they barely speak, they click. But it's not clear that they can make it work. Ansah doesn't like drunks. Her dad and brother were alcoholics. While Jalapa never met a glass, he didn't finish. Naturally, she's put off by his almost self-righteous boozing. When her friend Lisa declares, all men are swine, Ansa disagrees. Swine, she says, are intelligent and sympathetic. Now, the risk of making movies with an unmistakable stylistic signature

is that audiences start finding them redundant. I've sometimes felt that way about Coris Mackey, whose movies, with their hard-drinking loners and art-directed doldrums, have a sameness that can make it feel like he's phoning it in. Happily, he's fully engaged in Fallen Leaves, a sentimental tale saved from soppiness by its rigorously dry style. Like his cinematic hero, Robert Bresson, Karasumaki cuts to the essence of things, with crisply straightforward shots, intensified color schemes,

and editing so tight you could dance to its rhythms. There's not an ounce of fat in Fallen Leaves, whose deadpan one-liners have the droll precision of Samuel Beckett, and whose acting is deliberately low-key. Without ever doing anything that feels like emoting, Vatanen and Pershti forge a romantic connection that, for all of Korosmaki's irony, the film respects. Early in his career, Korosmaki's work was too eagerly hipsterish, as if he wanted to be known as the world's coolest Finn. Over the years, his work has become inspired by something more humane, a big-hearted sympathy for the unfortunate and the forgotten, be they the unemployed couple in the film Drifting Clouds,

or the undocumented African immigrants in Layov. While Fallen Leaves is nobody's idea of a political movie, it pointedly captures the bullied, soul-killing tedium of the work done by the millions and millions of Ansas and Jalapas, the fallen leaves of a society who were swirled by the winds of fate. Where those winds carry Ansa and Jalapa, I won't reveal. But I will say that their story builds to a gorgeous ending, with a great and revelatory final joke. Fallen Leaves is not a big movie. But then again, bigness is beside the point.

While the film may be small, Karasumaki understands that his character's yearning for love is not. John Powers reviewed Aki Karasumaki's new film, Fallen Leaves. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, we'll talk about the coded gaze. It's a term Dr. Joy Bwalamwini coined as a graduate student at MIT after discovering that as a black woman, the facial recognition software she was working on couldn't detect her face until she put on a white mask. Dr. Joy is founder of an organization that raises awareness about the social implications of AI. I hope you'll join us. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.