Offline with Jon Favreau - Kate Middleton MIA, UFOs, and How Conspiracies Got Fun

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

Kate Middleton sightings have dipped below UFO sightings, and the internet is having a heyday! It’s conspiracy theory week at Offline, with Max and Jon offering up their own takes on the missing Princess of Wales. Then, they break down the latest developments of the House’s proposed TikTok ban––including content creators’ ludicrous theories behind what’s really going on. To cap it off, Max sits down with Vox Senior Correspondent, Dylan Matthews, to talk through a new UFO report from the Pentagon. They tell the story of how UFOs were mainstreamed by an otherworldly alliance between the drummer of Blink-182, a former Senate Majority Leader, and the New York Times.Tour dates & cities: crooked.com/events For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

The news cycle was being dominated by a president who was completely out of control and seemed eager to start a nuclear war. And I think a lot of the reaction I saw to it then was just fun, aliens. And that's a very human thing to want to find something sort of lighter and kind and kind of goofy uh when when the news is like that and i think it also held that it wasn't very polarized um that marco rubio and harry reed both are really into aliens if if we knew what the aliens wanted to do on capital gains taxes maybe there would be like a real divide there but are there aliens seems fairly neutral. Welcome to Offline. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, senior correspondent at Vox, Dylan Matthews. It's conspiracy theory week here at Offline.

Oh my God, is it? We're going to talk about a listener named Kate, who's taken the Offline Challenge a little too seriously. She's doing great, though. Her screen time numbers are amazing. Very low. Because it's been months since anyone has seen or heard from the Princess of Wales and future Queen of England.

Where the hell is she? Why did she post a heavily photoshopped, maybe even fake Mother's Day picture on Twitter? And why can't we all stop talking about it? I can't. I can't give it up. Me neither, man. Then after the break, Max, I know you talked to your old colleague at Vox, Dylan Matthews, about another conspiracy theory that took the internet by storm uh the Pentagon's 2021 UFO

report which is a fascinating story with cameos from former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid the drummer of blink 182 didn't know that and a handful of reporters at the New York Times uh how is the conversation so he's actually the guitarist and lead singer from blink 182. oh wow um misinformation right here in this I it was great so i have been on my soapbox for years that the all of these like ufo stories that have been running in the new york times for the past six seven years like they're just fake they're just not real and i think if you know the story of like the backstory of how this like ufo thing came to dominate news coverage or like how it came into news coverage like this i think it all becomes very clear so i was very happy i'm excited to finally get the backstory that out

there that's great okay cool yeah i've always harry reed was always on this uh rip but he was always this he was like the big ufo guy and when i was in the white house it was always like oh well harry reed is a real he's a real ufo it turns out there's a big money donor story behind his involvement in UFOs too. It's what it all comes back to. Oh, this is fascinating. Okay, I'm going to listen. Before we get to all that, a potential ban on TikTok in the United States

is one step closer to becoming reality. The House of Representatives, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 352 to 65, they don't even vote like that to fund the government. They don't even, to keep themselves being paid. They've been listening to 65. They don't even vote like that to fund the government. They don't even to keep themselves being paid. They've been listening to offline. They know social media is bad. So the past legislation that would force ByteDance to sell the popular, where it must overcome opposition from a horde of angry TikTokers, an army of lobbyists,

and a strange mix of politicians in both parties, including Donald Trump. So, Max, we talked about this last week, but the legislation has moved so quickly. So I think it's worth checking back in. Do you think this will actually end up on Biden's desk? I think the honest truth is that we don't know. A lot of senators have been very mum about whether or not they will support it. The two chairs of the Intelligence Committee, Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, have said they will support it. Offline guest Mark Warner, who talked about this a year ago on this very program. He has been very on this issue. Yeah. But Chuck Schumer will not even say

whether he will bring it up for a votes. So clearly there's a lot of backroom negotiation happening within the Senate. And I think it's just legitimately not clear whether they're going to vote it forward or not. We're not in the prediction business

here at Crooked Media. However. But I'll venture one for this. I think I lean no. Really? For a couple reasons. The Senate is extremely slow. Yeah.

That's just how they are. I do think the political backlash or the concern about the political effects in an election year, I think, like, it went through the House pretty fast, but I think there's going to be some worries on the Democratic side, especially. Do they want to be seen as the party that took away your tiktok yes yeah and so and then i'm trying to count like are there 60 votes right because it's not just 50 votes can we have to be 60 votes in the senate so that's a lot it's a lot of votes it does feel like the kind of issue where nobody wants to vote against you know making the communist

party linked companies sell off the like bad for teen mental health app. But at the same time, nobody wants to be like holding the knife for taking away TikTok, which is extremely popular, especially with young people. And even if you take away the politics, um, there are other competing bills. Like I think Maria Cantwell has another bill in the, in the Senate, the Senate that's floating around that would actually like empower the Commerce Department and it gets into a lot of technical details. But there are different competing versions of what the best way to go about this is. And even the White House has said like they want to keep working on the legislation with people. So

that makes me think it's, and we're in an election year and most business in Congress ends by the spring or summer of an election year. So I don't know. I don't know what happens before the election. If I had to put money down, which again, why am I making predictions? No one is forcing me to put money down. It's just the pundits, the pundits fallacy here. It would be that they come out with some kind of compromise that we're going to do something like this Project Texas thing where they're required to like house the data centers in the US or something like that. So they can say like, look, we solve the problem, but also we're not going to take this extreme step. Yeah. So TikTokers have taken the ban less than well. Yeah. Creators have claimed the Congress is pushing this ban to silence the youth,

de-platform small businesses, and even snuff out pro-Palestinian perspectives. Let's play some clips. They're trying to ban TikTok because this app is pro-Palestinian. This time they're not bluffing, and I wanted to know what was different, and I think it's because we did something that actually worked this time. Think about Starbucks. Think about Kellogg. Think about the fact that there's a list going around for how many other companies we plan on hitting. They are voting to ban the complaint box rather than listen to a single complaint on this fucking app. They see us talking to each other. They see us seeing the humanity in each other's eyes. I don't care if you got a red hat or a fucking septum piercing.

I hear your complaints and I see the world you're standing in. Okay. Wow. Okay. Wow. Okay. Let's take it down a notch. It's definitely a big, like, I make a video on TikTok,

therefore I'm the protagonist of American politics happening here. But also, the, the like, this is a plan to snuff out

pro-Palestinian perspectives. Like, if you want to see horrific images from this awful war, they are everywhere. Sure. They are, as Indian perspectives. Like, if you want to see horrific images from this awful war, they are everywhere.

Sure. They are not limited to TikTok. Yeah. It's all over the news. Yeah. And protesters, actual physical real-world protesters have, I think, been much more effective

at raising awareness around this than the people who are going viral on TikTok. And to all the other points, people are arguing and yelling and seeing, I mean, show me the app where people are seeing humanity in each other. But they're doing that everywhere. They're doing that everywhere. I get it. I get it. I get if your experience and your only experience is your main source of information and entertainment is TikTok. It feels quite existential. I get that. And I think to be fair, my sense is that while there is certainly a faction of TikTok that says we are the most important political actors in the world and therefore if they want to ban this app, it's because they hate how much change we're making.

I do get the sense that the majority of energy on the app is much more reasonably like, I enjoy this app. There are funny videos on it. I don't want it taken away. It's a fun thing that I do to spend 45 minutes a day on. So, you know, don't take that away from me. Yeah. On Twitter, the other hellhole of a social media platform that I'm addicted to. Where we look into each other's eyes and see each other's humanity. Someone tweeted like, there's this very popular thread, please post the TikTok videos that are the best argument for why it shouldn't be banned. Sure. And there have been, yeah, and like I'd say 90% of them are not political at all.

They're just hilarious, funny, great, creative. So like, I get it. I get it. What do you think the arguments against a TikTok ban are that carry the most weight to you? So I think there's actually a few. One is that there's not very much evidence that China would use TikTok to spy on Americans, something a lot of people have pointed out. Even people were very concerned about TikTok. Otherwise, it's like if China wants to get your data, there are better and easier ways for them to do it than using TikTok. Number two, political interference via the app, right? Like China leaning on bike dance to lean

on TikTok to manipulate our politics is certainly plausible, but I don't think it's been demonstrated that that is something that has happened. And so we're kind of, it's kind of a hypothetical concern more than something that's actually happening. The other, like those things aside, like number three, TikTok is just as bad as all the other social apps. So I think there's a very valid question to be raised here legally, as well as just like politically within our debate. Like, why are we focusing on this one and not meta, not Instagram, not Facebook, not YouTube, which are just as bad on every other thing you might criticize TikTok on. This will entrench the dominance of those players. This is just going

to make Meta and Google even more monopolistic than they already are, which is going to make the problems that those apps cause in our society any worse. And number five, it's like, I don't hear people bring this up a lot, but I am very concerned about the escalatory precedent that this sets for relations between US and China. A huge concern that I had and a lot of like foreign policy people had the last couple of years is decoupling between the US and China. Like every tit for tat step where we're breaking away our economic and political links with China and they're doing the same. Where does that lead? Like I think taking another big step in that, and this is going to basically force China to then ban American companies in retaliation, or not force them, but they're full compelled to, and then are we going to do more of that? Are we going to start branding more Chinese companies? And I just like, do not think that

is a healthy direction to send this incredibly important bilateral relationship. Yeah. I keep going back and forth on this like we have had rules in place laws in place for quite some time that limit foreign ownership of American media companies and broadcast networks yeah that is a compelling argument I think TikTok is a broadcast network that 170 million Americans use it is gigantic and you know there's been arguments about like xenophobia or racism, but it's like, it's, it's not about China. It's about the Chinese government. Like, like it's a, it's a, a sometimes brutal authoritarian regime. And it's not often, it's not like, you know, it's not South Korea or Japan that has this company. We wouldn't be having this conversation then.

Or European country, or most South American, like, name your country. There's only a few that are truly authoritarian that we're concerned about, and the Chinese government is one of them. And the other thing I keep thinking about is all these House members went into a, like, classified briefing,

and they came out, and in the Energy and Commerce Committee, they voted 50 to nothing on this. Republicans and Democrats never agree on anything, and they all agreed on this. That said, if you're going to take away this platform for people, for that 170 million Americans are using. You've got to make the case better than they have made the case. And I realize that probably some of this stuff was classified in a briefing. But whatever. You have to make some kind of presentation and convince the American people that this actually is a threat and why it's a threat. Is it the spying capabilities?

Is it the propaganda capabilities? If so, what are they? Or at least you can talk in broad strokes about them. And I think if politicians can't do that, if the president can't do that, if Congress can't do that, then I don't think they should try to ban it. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that that really speaks to

why people feel so upset about this is that we hear these kind of contradictory arguments that it's like it's a foreign policy decision because why would we allow this hostile authoritarian government to own a giant American media company or a giant media company that operates in America? And like I think you're right. I think that's probably the actual motivation for the ban. But a lot of it gets couched and it's like, oh, it's teen mental health. It's phone addiction. And it's like, if that were true, we all know that you would be regulating the American social media companies and you're not. So I think that not only do they have to make a case, and I agree with that, but I think they also need to stop trying to hang the case on things that we know are not the actual reason for it. Because if they were, again, we'd be

regulating meta. Yeah. Well, I also think there's like First Amendment issues with American-based companies that aren't necessarily there for foreign-based companies. That's true. Which is why – and we're not regulating them for a whole bunch of other reasons. But again, everyone knows the position of offline ban all algorithms. Yes. Unironically. No, seriously. I mean that's my position on this. I think something I would love to see them do is like let's pair this with saying we're actually going to try to pass federal data privacy laws.

And let's put those two together and say this is all part of a package where we're trying to protect American consumers rather than saying we're trying to punish American consumers to make this like foreign policy-based decision. I think that's absolutely right on privacy on the algorithms and the influence and all that kind of stuff. I think it's just, it's a tough argument that I don't think a lot of our leaders have made. Why these algorithmic social media apps are bad for you, aside from, like you said, teen mental health and stuff like that. But it's like, you know, we are in this fight for the survival of democracy. Stop sealing people in a cocoon of their own biases and interests, you know, like, because that's like antithetical to democracy, which requires empathy and curiosity and, uh, you know, thoughtful debate in order to survive like that. There's a bigger issue here that I

think if you're going to make an argument about democracy, that you should make that argument. And by the way, if our concern is that, um, an authoritarian government is going to interfere, uh, in our elections or spread propaganda here, you can't go about banning it in an authoritarian like way. If we were to defend democracy, we have to be democratic about it and have the argument, you know? Yeah, I agree. Anyway, that's my thing. All right,

on to the biggest news of the millennium. Oh my goodness. Okay, so we are recording this on Friday, March 15th, just in case anything happens. In Cape Middleton, the future queen of England

hasn't been seen or heard from in public since Christmas, except for two grainy photos of her in cars and a March 10th Mother's Day photo. Or are they photos of her? March 10th Mother's Day, first of all,

one of the low-key weirder parts of this scandal is that I didn't know that Mother's Day was in March in the UK. Yeah, they have their own Mother's Day. That's right. It's all part of the imperial decline. Globalization? Why don't we all just pick a Mother's Day?

Anyway. So, she hasn't been seen since... So, there's the two grainy photos and all just pick a Mother's Day? Anyway. So, she hasn't been seen since the two granny photos and a March 10th Mother's Day photo of her and her children that she posted on Twitter, which she later admitted was photoshopped by her. Well, she, quote-unquote, she admitted. Yeah, she admitted. Yeah, okay.

She posted, or there was a post from her. The palace posted. The palace posted. Yeah. But it said, signed post from her. The Palace posted. The Palace posted, but it said signed C from her, that she just loves experimenting with photo editing and is sorry if anyone took offense. So people saw her in public on Christmas Day. Then on January 17th, Kensington Palace announced that the day before she had gone into the hospital

for a pre-planned abdominal surgery. Pre-planned, but no one had heard about this before. Right. So we're already getting some red flags. And has been putting out periodic statements since then that she's home, recovering well, and will reappear on Easter, which is a good day for that kind of thing, traditionally. Wow. Did we just float a new Kate conspiracy that she is risen? She is risen.

Good for her. I love that. It's like Easter, really? So, but that has not stopped the conspiracy theories, Max, which went from typical internet crazy to full-blown global hysteria after she posted an apology for photoshopping the Mother's Day picture, or an apology for photoshopping the Mother's Day picture. Or an apology for photoshopping the Mother's Day picture was posted. Right.

Allegedly by her. Right. All right. Have you brought me a whiteboard and some red string? We're wheeling it in. We're going to need two or three whiteboards. What is your take on this? When did you start following it?

What do you think is happening. What is your take on this? When did you start following it? What do you think is happening? Like, what is my take? So I became, like, ambiently aware even before the photo, capital T, capital P, came out on March 10th. People had been, like,

kind of aware for a while that Kate Middleton was not showing up, that it was, like, weird, that she hadn't been out there for a while. The surgery announcement was, like, throwing people off a little bit. I think there's a lot of people just like as a hobby have

fun tracking what's going on with the royal family but i will say it did not really like crystallize for me how weird this was until the photo came out was clearly photoshopped yeah the ap put out a like kill notice on the photo where they send out a like a memo to news agencies basically saying don't use this photo because it's faked which is a big deal and that was and it was like oh this is actually like really strange and the like statements that were coming out where they're refusing to elaborate on the abdominal surgery is strange the fact that we haven't seen her except for this one grainy photo where she's faced away from the camera which which is like, this photo

was taken by Abraham Zapruder, apparently. The first, there was another photo where she's in the car with her mom. That's true. Where you can see her. Well, she has very big sunglasses on, but yeah, it does appear to be her. It's all, so I think like a lot of this, of course,

and I think we all know this on some level, a lot of this is probably just like the palace is being really ham-handed about how they manage the publicity around this british tabloids like love to dig into every little detail they've been diverting it very quickly to be like oh this is actually about like prince williams mistress is pregnant which is pretty clear just a thing that they like speculating on and just making up as an explanation. Probably. Rethink. Right.

Look, probably she's just sick. They actually, I didn't know this until I was looking at the research last night. They actually said when she went into surgery, she will be out of communication until March 31st. Yeah. So when you see that, it's like, oh, it's actually not as mysterious as I thought it was. Right. But I think, I really think that just what's going on here is it's just fun. It's a fun thing to like look at the photos

that like anyone can participate. You zoom in on it. It's this kind of like big collective game that we all get to play about like speculating about what's going on. It's a goofy story.

A lot of fun jokes. Yeah. Really, really good content from this. And that's what matters, right? Not Kate Middleton's privacy or health or well-being but we need to have some good fun well i do think that that is part of it is i think that we are all

aware that this is someone who is going to be enormously wealthy and powerful for the rest of her life based on her job of waving to the camera occasionally and like look i'm professional podcaster so like i have one of the all- great bullshit jobs. I'm not like I'm not giving your shit for it. But I think that it it just feels very safe. It's not a controversial topic. It's one of the like last remaining topics we have that is not politically polarized. It's a reprieve from like everything that is terrifying about the news. So I do think it's just like a fun group activity that we get to have on our social media apps that are normally really upsetting and terrifying because it's about the war in Gaza. It's about the election that's coming up.

And I think that it's like the fact that it is kind of news, but in a like for once fun way and way that it's like emotionally a relief and enjoyable and feel socially bonding. I just think that's what's going on here. I don't think it's about lost trust in media. I don't think we're all becoming QAnon. Which is an argument a lot of people make. No, yeah, Helen Lewis in the Atlantic wrote a piece that said,

this is QAnon for wine moms. Which is a great headline. And look, I like wine, I'm not a mom. And my For You feed on Twitter, all Kate content. Are you pouring yourself a glass

and scrolling Kate Middleton? Well, my wife, Emily, and a couple of our friends are on a text chain. They're very interested in it, and I have joined this text chain now a little belatedly. Okay. As you guys, like, exchanging conspiracies. Yeah, Travis Helwig, who was a Crooked Media staffer, he's on it, too. So, yeah, I have no theory.

Here's my thing on this i am not one for conspiracy theories like my first inclination is to always dismiss them because i think that people are either too fundamentally honest and decent or much more likely too stupid to pull them off that is my genuine that is my overall take i worked in the white house i saw firsthand that scandals or mistakes that people attributed to nefarious motivations ended up being just people being stupid fuck ups whatever incompetence and i still think incompetence probably is the explanation behind this one because i cannot imagine something dumber than how the photo was handled from start to finish which is why i am open to the more nefarious theory only because of that like i i just the people who do like these are i realize

that the the the royal family is a very ancient institution, but the PR people around them, they do this for a living. And the tabloids in the UK are maybe the only ones worse than here in the US, especially around the royal family. And so these PR people around the prince and princess and king and queen, they weren't born yesterday. Why post the photo at all? Why post the photo at all? Why fake it?

Why Photoshop it in such an obviously clumsy way? Wait, are you saying you think they deliberately posted a photo that we would notice was altered? No, no, no. I don't think that. But that would be a fun conspiracy. But why would you take that? What are they doing?

Why did they need to post it? And then why did, of all things, why did they follow up? In the original photo, by the way, it says like taken by the Prince of Wales, right? So William supposedly takes the picture. But then on the follow up, they have Kate take the fall and say, oh, it was me photo editing. Why? I think that is part of why this has become such a big story is that because the handling of it has been so ham-fisted, it kind of invites've been doing in terms of like canceling or postponing her events. That because of how many screw ups the PR people have made, they've kind of laid out this game for us where we get to go through and like finding the inconsistencies and like piece together like what are the strains actually connect to. Well, this is just me with my like you know but my my pr press relations background hat

on but i'm like i have never i don't know that i've seen a move this stupid do you know what it actually really reminds me of is do you did you follow the like press tour controversy over this movie a year ago don't worry darling yes okay where that it's like one of the stars like allegedly spit on one of the other stars but but people are not showing up to their events. Clearly, they just all got in a big fight. And the PR for it was handled terribly, much like this. It was very ham-fisted where we get these official explanations that are clearly not true. And that made it really fun to dig into it and try to figure out what's happening.

And I also, I'm pretty close with someone who was heavily involved in that movie. Was it Harry Styles? No, not at the start. The person who wrote it. So I'm hearing Harry Styles. And when they were all over there in Europe, when all this was happening for the president, like none of them

knew exactly what the fallout was. They didn't know until they came back home. And then they saw the person and were like, holy shit, what's been happening over there? So there is a little bit of like, I bring that up because, you know, perhaps the royal family and certainly maybe even the PR people

in the family are not quite as online as we all are. But I find that hard to believe because it's their job. I mean, the palace is a very old institution and they are very accustomed to British media kind of deferring to them

on a lot. So I think it is possible that they were just like not ready for this level of scrutiny. Also just people, like you say, people screw up sometimes.

I will say something that like an argument I have seen a lot of people make that I do want to raise because it's really dominant out there is that this shows that like we are all becoming like QAnon in the sense that we no longer trust institutions and our sense of

reality is fractured and we don't believe in anything anymore. And I think that gets what's happening exactly backwards. I actually think the lesson we should take from this is not that we are all becoming like QAnon, but I think rather what we should learn is that things like QAnon are more driven by this sense of fun, of pulling together a conspiracy than I think we appreciate. They're more driven by the fact that it's just bonding

to come together with your pals on the Discord or the Facebook group or whatever and pull out a photo of Donald Trump and try to figure out what's going on in it. And I think we have underrated how much groups like QAnon that are very scary also, but are also just driven by the fact that like a lot of people are online and this is a way to feel like you have a sense of community and a sense of fun at a time when the news is very scary.

I think that's an excellent point. And it's also like the issue of trust. Sure. You know, low trust, loss of trust is sort of like the defining characteristic of this era. It is. But we've known that for a while. Right. And sort of like, you know, a loss of faith in institutions.

It started that way. It's sort of like trickle down to each other. And I almost think that one response, this is like a response to that. Yeah. And that like, well, we're all going to form a community. We obviously know that they're lying to us. But we can't trust, whether they're lying or not, we can't trust them to tell the truth. Right.

But now we're going to form this community and try to figure out our own truth. Right. Which can go, you know, as we've seen with QAnon and places like that, quite badly. Yeah. Or it can be harmless fun. I think that's true. And I think it's also important to know that like the psychological research into conspiracy belief, something that they really emphasize is that the point of these kind of like conspiracy parsing groups or collective efforts is not necessarily

to try to arrive at an explanation, but because the act itself of like sharing and discussing a conspiracy and like your group chat that in and of itself gives you a sense of control and ownership over what's happening it gives you a sense of like i'm i'm participating in this i'm figuring out what's going on that makes me feel more stable like more control over what's happening in the world especially at a time when like the news is very scary and we feel out of control yeah and so i think it's important to think of it as like the act of like i call the taylor swift stuff like parsing out like where is she going when she's like i think less the point of that is to actually arrive at a conclusion of like what's the secret

message that she's trying to send us and more just the fact that doing that with all your fellow swifties online makes you feel like you have a sense of community and makes you feel like you have a handle on what's going on in the world. I think this is going to end with Kate Middleton reappearing with a well-known London boy, Joe Alwyn, Taylor Swift X, and that's really going to connect it all. I will say one last,

the whole thing about like, I've seen a lot of takes about, you know, this is QAnon for wine moms and what's with, everyone's lost their mind with the conspiracy theories. Again, I lay the blame for this on the palace because of the picture.

It is totally, it's one thing to be like, you know, the poor girl had surgery and like she said, I'm going to need time to recuperate. You won't hear from me. Like, just leave her alone. Totally get that. The picture and the handling of the picture. I'm just a humble podcaster probably have less than one percent name idea in this country if i suddenly disappeared around christmas for a surgery and cricket just put out a statement

and then none of you guys talked about on any of the shows it would be when i was like i'll be back on march 31st and then suddenly i just posted a picture of me and Teddy and Charlie that was just completely fake. That's true. It would invite some questions. It would invite some questions. Especially from a small group of people, but yeah, it would invite some questions. Especially if people kept asking us like, hey, what's going on with John? Right. We just straight up refused to say, refused to tell anyone. And we were also like, it's abdominal, but you can't see his face. People would be like that's fucking weird that's that's suspect and i just put up a picture of myself with like seven fingers and and also the royal children anyway it's it's wild i can't wait to hear what happens um all

right some quick housekeeping before the break there's no need to sit in your house freaking out about november we've reserved a whole theater for that. If you're in Brooklyn, Boston, Madison, Phoenix, Philly, or Ann Arbor, we're bringing our sweet, sweet content directly to you when Pod Save America goes on our Democracy or Else tour this summer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, right? And we're not coming empty-handed.

There's a VIP ticket bundle that includes a signed copy of our new book, Democracy or Else, How to Save Democracy in 10 Easy Steps for book lovers and tyranny haters alike. See all the tour dates and get your tickets now at crooked.com slash events. And you may have heard that Vote Save America launched a little something called the Anxiety Relief Program. So we've been donating the money to some groups in swing states that are helping to mobilize voters. There's a group in Ohio called the Organizing Collaborative. They're trying to register 250,000 new voters.

So we gave some money to them. And there's a group called Power to the Polls in Milwaukee. They're trying to engage 50,000 voters. So we helped with that goal as well. And also groups in North Carolina and Montana, all over the country, all over these in places where there are big Senate races, down ballot races, local races. So VSA needs your help to keep supporting grassroots groups like these. And if you're eager to make a difference and get involved, set up a recurring monthly donation at votesaveamerica.com today. Paid for by Votesave America, votesaveamerica.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. After the break, Max talks to Dylan Matthews about a New York Times UFO series that convinced the internet aliens were among us. Dylan Matthews, welcome to Offline.

Thank you for having me, Max Fisher. It's great to be chatting with my old pal. So, Dylan, you wrote in 2021 a big piece that I still send to people all the time, anytime they tell me that the UFOs are real. And your piece kind of traced the very strange circumstances and personalities that had led to the mainstreaming of the idea that UFOs are here. Announced, of course, via several big New York Times stories. may be breaking, like this long-awaited Pentagon study came out, produced as a result of all of those UFO stories, that concluded, quote, all investigative efforts at all levels of classification concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects of phenomenon and the result of misidentification, and it said there were no aliens. It's very sad, but we have to live with

the reality we have. So I want to talk about how we ended up with this story instead. Go through the timeline from fringe conspiracy to mainstream New York Times. Before we get to that, can you just explain the like three videos that kind of become at the center of all this? Like what are the videos? What do they show? Who recorded them? Sure. So I believe they're all Navy videos from from naval aviators. And these were the sort of focus of the December 2017 New York Times story that that sort of mainstream this story, at least in the current era. saw kind of odd things, either on their radars or their cameras. So there's one that's sometimes

called the Tic Tac incident that was off the coast of San Diego, about 100 miles. These two pilots, David Fravor and Amy Dietrich, saw this object that Fravor described as kind of turning abruptly and mimicking me and then simply disappearing and then he uh he claims that a few seconds later another flight crew um reacquired uh the target um and this was about 60 miles away yeah yeah so this is where you get some of the claims about them having sort of superhuman speed uh having abilities that we don't know of American or Chinese or Russian. So this video is called the FLIR 1 video. It's the one that this other team took based on the Fravor and Dietrich testimony. Which is named for FLIR, the infrared camera they have on all these Navy fighter jets. Exactly. And the second one, Gimbal, is similarly named after sort of the Gimbal camera.

That was a fighter jet off of Florida. And you can listen to it. It's funny to just watch naval fighter pilots talk to each other. It's different from Top Gun, but not as much as you might think. Yes. It's so funny hearing these videos. They do not talk

in the way you think they would. There's one of them, at one point, is like, bro, we're surrounded by drones. And then you think about it, and you're like, yeah, these are like 25-year-olds. Right, yes. Yeah, like, of course they talk like this. Flying billion-dollar airplanes, yeah. Yeah. But one of the pilots says he

sees a whole fleet of these. And then there was a third one, which was recorded also in 2015. So both Gimbal and Go Faster 2015 videos. That one shows a sort of small white object that's going over water. And it appears to be going over the water very, very rapidly. And you can hear the pilots getting very, very excited about this. So these were first written about in December 2017. In March 2018, so a few months later, the Pentagon officially released them, declassified them.

The guy who I think is the crucial source for the New York Times and those stories is a guy named Christopher Mellon. And once you start following the sources from Christopher Mellon, you get into a whole interesting web of people very interested in aliens and sort of motivated by a very strong desire to believe. Well, that's actually exactly what I want to talk about because the videos, of course, are real in that they really recorded these incidents. And then people saw the New York Times stories reporting on these videos several years later. But I think what is really fascinating here in the story that you tell is about Christopher Mellon

and these like four other personalities who kind of convene around these videos. It's very like odd group. Honestly, it would make for an amazing like Hulu miniseries because these four or five very strong personalities come together and they are the people who take these videos

and then construct around them. They wouldn't say construct. They would say kind of help inform the rest of the world about their reading the videos, which is it shows the existence of flying saucers over American coastlines. So we start with Christopher Mellon. He's our first big personality. Who is he? Where does he come from? How does he get into UFOs? So Christopher Mellon is, first of all,

he's a Mellon. So anyone who's gone to Carnegie Mellon or who knows about the banker Andrew Mellon, who was later Secretary of Treasury and kind of caused the Great Depression. He's an accomplished man. He was an accomplished man. But Chris Mellon was sort of a career intelligence guy. He had been deputy assistant secretary of defense for Intel under Clinton and George W. Bush. Serious guy. Serious guy.

Long tenure as a civilian in the intelligence community. He gets very interested in ufos um and he um i has said that he has a long-standing interest in this um but the guy who sort of made him turn pro once he retired from government uh was a guy named tom delong yes that what i i think the most fascinating personality in this whole story this is this is america in one book so tom de long um fellow children of the late 90s will remember is uh the uh guitarist for blink-182 and i really trashed band look i have my disagreements with the man let's not say things about all the small things and what's marriage again that we can't take back yeah let's let's hold in the substance um he and mark hoppus and and travis barker were like a really impressive trio in their

heyday um i i have all their albums look i'm trying to build connections here um tom delong is very interested in aliens um and he had started this group called To The Stars Academy. It almost started to feel like a think tank in that it was a waiting area for ex-government people with an interest in a given topic. And so if you're interested in counterinsurgency, you go to the Center for New American Security. If you're into aliens, you go to To The Stars Academy. And so Christopher Mellon goes to To The Stars Academy. He gets recruited, right? Like Tom DeLonge calls him. And so Christopher Mellon goes to the Stars Academy and gets pictured. He gets recruited, right?

Like Tom DeLonge calls him. Tom DeLonge called me out of the blue one day, Mellon says. Okay, so Tom DeLonge is like the great convener. He pulls in Christopher Mellon to his group, and he also pulls in this guy Luis Elizondo, who is very important in this story. Can you tell us about him? Yes. So Elizondo is also our connection point to some of the early history of these investigations. So Elizondo, like Mellon, is a former civil servant. He's a former counterintelligence officer by background.

And he gets into this around 2010. And he takes over this program that's called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. And so this is a group at DoD that's tasked with investigating these videos. And so anytime that an aviator, spy camera, whatever,

sees an object that seems strange and not easily explained explained it goes to this team uh and you might be wondering why does the dod have a team like this um and uh i mean on one hand it's it's not an unreasonable thing for them to have like uh as we saw with the the chinese spy incident um with the balloon last year there is weird stuff happening in the skies and it's it's the dod's job to to figure out what it is um and so um that was part of their job but also um harry reed who at this point was a senate majority leader and senator from nevada um he had a long-standing interest in ufos himself um and uh he also had a relationship with a guy named Robert Bigelow,

who was a Nevada businessman. Very important to this story. Very important to this story. So Robert Bigelow is in some ways kind of patient zero of this whole phenomenon. Where did he get his money again? It's like hotels, right? Extended stay hotels. He became rich from

budget suites of America. I think we're now familiar with the idea that if you get rich from some means, eventually you will want to build rockets. You kind of advanced this, but he's not building rockets, right? He wants to track the rockets because they're being flown by little green men. He has dreams of building the rockets. He has, um, he wants to build a sort of, he wants to be the SpaceX of space stations. He wants to build his own commercial space station.

Really? Um, himself. This has not gone anywhere, but they've launched, um, a couple experimental things. He also, um, always been interested in the paranormal. So in 1995, he starts this thing called

the National Institute for Discovery Science that's interested in things like UFOs. It's also interested in cattle mutilation, which is a sort of connected to UFOs but a common kind of spooky occurrence in the country. Sort of connected to UFOs, but a common kind of like spooky occurrence in the country.

Sort of like crop circles or other strange phenomena that feels vaguely linked to the paranormal. And as part of these studies, he also bought this cattle ranch in Utah called Skinwalker Ranch and rigged it with all kinds of cameras. Anyway, so Robert Bigelow, into all this kind of stuff, has a lot of money, has a relationship with Harry Reid. Harry Reid, I think, was initially receptive to this himself. Like, I don't want to make it seem like he didn't care. He's a UFO guy. He's a UFO guy.

Harry Reid gets a bunch of money in what's called the black budget, which is the classified part of the intelligence budget where the details aren't made public. It gets about $22 million to set up a section at the DoD. And so that's the section where Luis Elizondo, this career civil servant, starts studying these videos and starts becoming convinced that something um out of the ordinary is happening in them so just to pull these connections together robert bigelow the skinwalker ranch guy the extended stay hotels guy is a donor to harry reed and he wants harry reed to set up funding to study ufos harry reed sets up this 22 million dollar program my understanding most of that money actually goes back to Bigelow. He actually ends up recouping a lot of that in terms of like contracts to like run it out of his ranch. And this is the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that is funded thanks

to Harry Reid and weirdo rich guy Robert Bigelow that employs Luis Elizondo to look at videos like the ones that you mentioned. Luis Elizondo does look at the videos, but he feels his work isn't being taken seriously, which is how, when he leaves his job, and I think it's early 2017, he ends up with Tom DeLonge, the Blink-182 guy, who is running this To The Stars think tank for identifying the little green men. Does that have all that right so far?

That is all right so far. And I think him joining To The Stars, the Tom DeLonge group, where he's working alongside Christopher Mellon, is I think a key pivotal point in sort of the cultural shift we've seen over the last 10 years. They help make the New York Times story possible and publicize these videos that have now become so famous. There's sort of a funny story that Mellon tells about how they got the videos to the New York Times. So he claims that he met somebody in a parking lot who was a source of his from the Pentagon. That they had like this real,

like all the president's men deep throat thing where they met in a parking lot, passed the videos off. And along with documentation showing it was approved for public release and unclassified. And Mellon has never told me, as to my knowledge, never told another journalist sort of who the source was. But that was the point at which he and To The Stars got the videos.

And from him, the New York Times got the videos for their story. Yes. So let's tell the story of how that – so they have the videos and they have Luis Elizondo who worked inside this like black budget program connected somehow to the Bigelow Ranch. So they have this story. They want to get this out to the world and they get Leslie Kane to help them do it. Can you because you've talked to her. Can you tell us about who she is, what her beliefs are? So Kane is like Mellon. She's kind of an East Coast Brahmin.

Her she's the niece of Thomas Kane, who was governor of New Jersey and was the chair of the 9-11 Commission. Wow. Olds like us will remember him. His son, Thomas Kane Jr., Leslie Kane's cousin, is currently a congressman. Really? Wow. So she's very connected. Very, very connected. And she's been interested in UFOs for years. I would describe her as sort of a long-form nonfiction, sort of book nonfiction writer. And she wrote a book in 2010 that was sort of a compilation of firsthand UFO experiences. And I think already there, she was showing off some political connections. One of her, the foreword for the book was written by john podesta um who uh was was chief of staff of the white house also kind of a ufo guy right very much a

ufo guy one thing i i learned saying this is that people who you would think would have been informed about the ufos somehow that he would have to be a conspiracy theorist. Like, can't he just walk down the hall and ask someone if the UFO is real? I feel like they would have told him. I mean, in the X-Files, they hide some things even from the president. Sure. And this is kind of the wavelength that Leslie Kane is operating of. And Two of the Stars pulls her in to help publicize what they believe is evidence of UFOs because she's a true believer herself. And she's been writing stuff like a few months before that. She had like a Huffington Post story about the Chilean Navy saw something that she thinks is a UFO, which is still not someone you

would expect to get you on the front page of the New York Times. And that brings us to the last big personality who does land that for them and does like get them on the front page of the Times is Ralph Blumenthal. Can you tell us about him? So Ralph Blumenthal was a lifer at the New York Times. He worked there for 45 years, which, yeah, you worked there for what, like six or seven? Seven, and that's plenty. Yeah.

God bless. God bless, yeah, Ralph for making it longer. But he retired in 2009 and knew Leslie Kane. And I think most relevantly for these purposes, Blumenthal has also long been interested in extraworldly phenomena. So he wrote a biography of a guy named John Mack. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning... A UFO abduction guy, right? Yes, and.

So he was the chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Med School for decades and was sort of seen as a teen suicide and drug use expert. And so very, very respected guy who toward the end of his career started interviewing people who claimed that they had been abducted by aliens and became deeply convinced that they had been abducted by aliens. And Blumenthal kind of believes this too, right? Or he believes that John Mack was onto something. Exactly. There's sort of like a Russian nesting doll of claims when it comes to UFOs and aliens. And on the very outer layer, the universe is massive. Somewhere out there in the universe, there's another intelligent life form. That seems totally reasonable to believe. Maybe we haven't encountered it yet, but I don't think that's crazy at all. Somewhere in there, there's craft from another civilization has reached us and observed us. I haven't been convinced by the evidence, but that's one thing.

You know, we send craft out into the universe all the time. People might have encountered Voyager or Pioneer or whatever. Aliens have come close enough to Earth to get humans, take them into a craft, and then put them back again. As I think, like, orders of magnitude more outlandish than they have just visited us. Well, okay. So I think this is important because I'm not trying to, like, drag Leslie Kane and Ralph Lubenthal through the mud or anything. I think what's important to understand is these are the two people who pitch the New York Times, who write the story. they're writers and reporters, although they are, but also because they are themselves true believers.

And they think that it's really important to get the word out as this paranormal X-Files stuff is true. And they see their role less as dispassionately reporting on like, what does Luis Elizondo say happened at this program he worked on? What do these videos show? And maybe more bringing awareness to what they have always believed is the truth which is that aliens are arriving at earth so i think i think that's important to like understand for how we now get they get to the point of writing this big story in 2017 for the times can you talk about how how they landed that story yeah i um i mean in

blumenthal said basically what you're you're that I asked him sort of, why didn't you include the stuff about alien abductions if you sort of were persuaded by this? And he said, you know, it's much easier to interest people in the Times about something about UFOs than about alien encounters. Alien encounters seem too weird for them. So he was sort of making an overton window argument strategic yeah you have to to start with the thing that seems a little plausible and then sort of once people are starting to accept the the alien mindset um you can can work them up to to abductions um but uh the process uh was that chrisellon and To The Stars offered Leslie Kane the FO videos on the condition that she was able to place the story in the New York Times. They didn't want her just going to Huffington Post or somewhere, writing on her personal blog or something.

They wanted the imprimatur of a serious news organization of give this credibility as a real story. And so that's when Blumenthal got involved. And Blumenthal took the story directly to Dean Paquette, who at that point was the top editor at The Times. A co-author on many of their initial stories on this is Helene Cooper, who is a very well respected sort of foreign correspondent. The sense I get is that that was mostly Blumenthal had already retired. Leslie Kane was not a New York Times reporter.

Cooper was kind of like their chaperone, like putting someone who was a current staffer on with a byline as a way of sort of integrating these people who are outside of the normal apparatus. We should say that's really unusual. It's unusual to have two outsiders who are not at the paper writing a front page investigative story. It's unusual that one of them is kind of a like a little bit of an activist. It's unusual that they pitched it directly to the executive editor of the paper. And it's unusual that they went from pitch

to the front page in only two months. Having run a lot of stories through that bureaucracy, that's very fast. And I think that's maybe context for how this all landed on the front page when in other circumstances, maybe it wouldn't have. Yeah, and I think one of the things that staggered me i i've never worked at the times and so i i anything i know about their internal processes is secondhand at best but um the they do strike me as an organization that

that moves slow on some things and and that that tries to wait until they have something dead to rights um that uh in 2020 there was the big story on um on trump's taxes for which they they got sort of leaked tax returns and private financial information uh from from trump's niece um and he spent years on it years years and years um to make sure that they had that debt to rights, as they should. And when it came to some of the claims, not just in 2017, but in some of the follow-up stories, the claim that off-world vehicles had reached Earth strikes me as much harder to believe than that Donald Trump cheated on his taxes. And yet receives much less scrutiny. Right.

Does not seem to have received the same level of fact-checking. This episode of Offline is supported by How to Fix the Internet, an original podcast from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Sometimes it can feel like we're lurching towards a digital future

no one wants, but it doesn't have to be that way. There are choices we can make to create an internet that makes a better future for all of us. Technologists and policymakers have real solutions to the problems facing our online world today. Surveillance capitalism, AI, and machine learning, and digital privacy, we can build an internet that has all of the good things we want from tech with none of the creepy stuff. The hosts are Cindy Cohen and Jason Kelly.

Cindy is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has been in the trenches, the courtrooms, and boardroom of tech activism for decades. Jason is EFF's activism director, focusing his work on privacy, free speech, and surveillance. In each episode, Cindy and Jason invite someone with a vision on how to fix the internet, someone with real solutions on how to move the needle towards a better online world. This show will make you feel better about our digital future, be more knowledgeable about what needs fixing, and be more engaged to demand change. I just listened to the second episode of the new season. It's called Open Source Beats Authoritarianism, and it is a fantastic interview with Audrey Tang. She was Taiwan's first digital minister,

which is really cool, and she has done a lot with open source to sort of show how openness is sort of the best antidote to authoritarianism and more transparency in government. It's an excellent episode. Really cool series. If you like offline, you will love this.

So search for How to Fix the Internet in your podcast player. My thanks to How to Fix the Internet for their support. Episodes are available anywhere you will love this. So search for How to Fix the Internet in your podcast player. My thanks to How to Fix the Internet for their support. Episodes are available anywhere you listen to podcasts and at eff.org slash podcast. So the story comes out and it describes these three videos, which again are real. They're real videos that show something happening. We're not sure what. They talk a lot to Luis Elizondo, who wrote at this advanced threat detection thing at the Pentagon and about his program. It also goes a little bit beyond that and talks a lot about like Robert Bigelow's, the weird billionaire who was giving

money to Harry Reid, stuff that's going on at his ranch. It talks about materials recovered from UFOs, but it's all secondhand. And my memory of the way that story was received, even though the story doesn't say this, but when people receive that story as UFOs are here, the Pentagon has known about it for years years it's now been leaked by people who left the pentagon and you know even if it's not aliens it's definitely something that seems beyond what we think humans are capable of and there's a lot of smoke here is that do you think that's that's right that's like is that i think that that is very much the the impression and i think like one of the more important claims that i saw in there was claims that one of Robert Bigelow's facilities

was modified so it could house, and I'm quoting here, metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. And Blumenthal on MSNBC promoting the story said researchers couldn't tell you what these metal alloys were. It was not a metal alloy that humans on Earth were familiar with. And I think that was one of the first points where I was reading this, and I think where a lot of people read it,

where our sort of eyebrows perked up, and a bunch of chemists started to chime in and say, you know, figuring out what alloy something is, is one of the things that chemists are really, really good at. Like, there's a lot of things that they still struggle with, but they have like defined techniques to sort through metal alloys. And the idea that like someone at the Pentagon would not be able to do this for something um that that's a strong claim so congress starts taking this pretty seriously can you talk about some of the things they do in response to these stories the investigations really pick up after after 2017 and uh the newer times stories um so there's something called the unidentified aerial phenomena

task force uh which uh released a sort of preliminary report on this in 2021, which was what sort of my piece back then was pegged to. And I think sort of spurred a lot of coverage and a lot of quarters on this idea because it was sort of a very public examination of this by a Pentagon that has been very, but it didn't end there. There's also the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, the UAP Independent Study Team. And as you said, sort of a number of congressional hearings about this where people like Elizondo and Mellon are called to Congress to testify

and talk about what they know. And I think part of what was interesting about that was there's a very different sort of tactical approach taken by by the pentagon that it wasn't we're gonna just call these guys crazy and i think some of that is a sort of a strategic decision of people have questions about this we shouldn't mock them for having questions about this um we should try to be open about it um but also sort of this was a time when we were getting more hawkish towards both China and Russia. And I think many of the most plausible explanations I've seen for what these things are is that they might be things like the Chinese the things we saw in these videos. But there's just a long history of people getting recordings of aircraft that look super weird that later turns out to be sort

of a secretive military project. And that I think is something that Congress was more willing to hear in the context where they're really sort of eager to have a, or I wouldn't say eager, but except that we have an adversarial relationship with Russia and China. Well, and there's kind of a great irony to all this that as a result of that 2017 New York Times story playing up this now defunct and like kind of fake UFO tracking program that Harry Reid had funded the luis elizondo had worked for that like as a result of that story congress then goes on to push through actually real pentagon programs to examine the evidence around ufo videos so it's this kind of

like self-fulfilling like it goes from fake to real as a result of reporting on the fake thing as if it was real it's it's such a great story about like the fractal complexity of of essentially pentagon bureaucracy um it is a bureaucracy story in a lot of ways yeah i i had some conversation with christopher mellon where i i asked sort of couldn't this be even like a u.s sort of secretive vehicle uh his line was i would have known if if we had a craft like this like i was high up enough that i would have known all of the the different sort of experimental aircraft um and like maybe but i think my one of my takeaways from this story is uh there's no one in the pent who knows everything the Pentagon is doing. That's true. Although we should say that

a lot of these subsequent government-mandated investigations into the videos concluded that it was probably just, or that some of them were probably just like visual artifacts from things that were happening, or if it was like just a commercial plane

taking off that produced something that looked weird on an infrared camera. But I want to get back to the kind of narrative of how this is unfolding. So summer 2020, which is just when a lot of these big government investigations are happening and Congress is getting really involved, Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal do their second big story for the New York Times. And for me, this is when it felt like the wheels were kind of starting to come off on this campaign can you talk about what happened there and why that story started to create some weirdness around all this yes so the 2020 story is is interesting in a lot

of ways um one is that sort of the training wheels are off uh that it's it's blumenthal and Kane. Helene Cooper is no longer involved. They're writing this on their own. And sort of the key focus of the story was that there was this investigation looking into these things and that soon it was going to release a public report on UFO activity. It has a bunch of quotes from Marco Rubio, who is really urging sort of more disclosure about this. But the piece is also sort of talks to Harry Reid about his longstanding interests, talks to Luis Elizondo. And then buried in it are some pretty extreme claims

that this is where sort of the wheels coming off come in that i think went well beyond anything that the times had reported before so they quote a guy named eric w davis we can we say a little more about in a minute but um who was a consultant on the ufo program that that alzondo worked on um and it quotes him as saying that the examination of the materials uh had not determined their source and he concluded that uh that we couldn't make the materials we got ourselves and he further claimed that he had gotten a classified briefing um as recently as March about retrievals from off-world vehicles not made on this earth. So the story is kind of suggesting that the Pentagon has alien UFOs that it's recovered.

But it turns out the basis of this is a contractor who's kind of a weirdo who says he went to a meeting once where someone told him this. But this is, again, a lot of people who are reading the newspaper and believe what it says thinks wow the new york times is telling me that the pentagon has alien ufos now if you read about like weird stuff the pentagon has funded eric davis will come up in stories you find about that he he his sort of uh brazilian detro seems to be starting companies that get consulting jobs to look into sort of strange phenomena. He got a $7.5 million grant from the Air Force to study what he called psychic teleportation or the ability to transport yourself across the earth with the power of your mind. And I definitely understand why that would be militarily relevant. Doesn't mean it's real.

Or that we need to make this guy our source in the New York Times for saying the UFOs are here. And when I talked to Blumenthal about this, he said, you know, we didn't say that we verified it. We just said that he said it. And I don't know. You know what you're doing when you include a line like that. And, yeah, we have UFOs in a storage locker is, like, one of the greatest buried leads of all time. So, okay. So, I think at this point, if you were just, like, a regular casual news consumer, your experience of this story is the New York Times has now confirmed multiple times in a row that the UFOs are here and that the Pentagon thinks they're probably little green men who are just like hanging out on the Southern California coast. But I think if you are like you or me and a like

close follower of weird media stuff, like know how to read between the lines of what happens in coverage, you start to see a lot of indications that the major media institutions have lost faith in this story. Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal only ever have one additional byline in the New York Times. And it's just like an update on a congressional hearing. All of the hearings and the like reports, the government reports that start coming out all keep saying one after another. It's like, no, here's all the evidence. These are just weird visual artifacts in these videos. And it's probably not ufos but that i think the big nail in this story comes like a year ago when leslie kane and ralph blumenthal have their third big story on

this but it runs in this website called the debrief had you ever heard of this website before it was new to me yeah so can you talk about like what the story says and what we should read or what you, I should say, read into the fact that it appeared in the debrief and not say in the New York Times? So at this point, the Times pieces by Blumenthal and Kane have been getting progressively more extreme in what they're claiming. It's not just this unit at the Pentagon has seen some strange things. It's we have off-world vehicles. We have metal alloys that no one understands. And where it really takes off is this story for the debrief.

And I think it's telling, as you say is that they do a lot of sort of satellite espionage stuff. Sure. Look at satellite photos, tell you what they say. Right. And worked on the UAP task force, which wrote these are preliminary 2021 report that was fairly dismissive of the evidence here. And Groucho in this piece tells Blumenthal and Kane that the task force was basically doing a cover-up, that they didn't include everything that they knew, including, he said, there were fragments of an exotic origin reflecting a non-human intelligence that he had learned about as part of his service on the task force, and that this was not mentioned at all in the UIP task force report. And so this fits very well in sort of the narrative that they want to tell of sort of brave truth-tellers

in the military being silenced by the powers that be, that the UIP task force was not the government opening up. It was them sort of silencing people who wanted to vouch for the real evidence that of aliens um and sort of making a hero of this this guy grouch um and i think there were a lot of things about about grouch's uh testimony that that raised red flags um sort of the specifically the idea that there are these specific materials recovered from from other civilizations that were being stored somewhere like that's a big that's a big claim and also like seems like it should be provable like you should be able to produce those those materials

um and i think it got uh even more dramatic when he testified before congress and um uh and he claimed that not only has material from these UFOs been recovered, but life forms, biological life forms have been recovered. And people can watch this hearing online. Maybe you buy them, maybe you don't. I think what's striking about the hearing is that every time a member of Congress asked him to elaborate on this, he kind of deflected. He admitted he had never seen these vehicles or bodies. He said it was just based on witnesses that he had interviewed. And his go-to response when people asked sort of follow-up questions was, I can only tell you this in a SCIF. A SCIF is a sensitive compartmented information facility, which are where sort of some sort of super high security debriefings and things happen in the intelligence community.

And so I think I got the impression from that hearing that this is a guy who's making some really wild claims when pressed on them hides behind confidentiality. And yeah, so I did not personally move my views on this very much in response to him. But I think you're right that as a media story, the fact that he could only get this sort of obscure website to care about it and that Kane and Blumenthal weren't able to place anything in the New York Times or they had been writing was maybe reflective that some higher-ups and sort of the media industry generally is starting to look at this more skeptically. Well, and Vanity Fair reported, too, that Leslie Cade, Ralph Blumenthal, had tried to get this in the New York Times.

The New York Times said no. They took it to the Washington Post. The Washington Post spent weeks on it trying to confirm any of the information on it. They passed. They took it to Politico, and Politico passed. And I think what is really striking to me, kind of looking back over the whole arc of the story took it to Politico and Politico passed. And I think what is really striking to me,

kind of looking back over the whole arc of the story and how it rose and fell, is that everything that was weird about that story last year that nobody wanted to run and ended up having to run on this obscure, kind of fringy website, The Debrief, was also true to some extent of their first stories. Like all the stories in The New York Times,

like a lot of it rested on like one weird guy who was in the government. A lot of it rested on like second or third hand claims. And I think something that I like I'm really left with and I'm really curious for your thoughts on is why did it take us six years to kind of come around to finally being skeptical about something that we should have been skeptical about from the beginning? Was it that we wanted to believe it? Were we just like eager to buy into this despite the evidence? Like, what do you think happened there? So I think one piece of context for 2017 is so much of the news was so bleak that it wasn't just that Trump was president, but that was the fall of Weinstein, that Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohy did their big report that fall. The first initial wave of Me Too, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, louis ck um on and on and so sort of the news cycle was being dominated by a president who was completely out of control and seemed eager to start a nuclear war and sort of collapse of a i don't know if collapse is strong but sort of sort of a key uh sort of misogynistic assumptions in our society being like very weakened um and

and a real like cultural rupture happening on that and i think uh a lot of the reaction i saw to it then was um was just fun aliens like uh and that's a very human thing to want to find something sort of lighter and and um and kind of goofy uh when when the news is like that and i think it also helped that it wasn't very polarized um that's a good point yeah marco rubio and harry Harry Reid both are really into aliens. There isn't an obvious like If we knew what the aliens wanted to do on capital gains taxes, maybe Real divide there but are there aliens seems fairly neutral and a cultural world divide I think was a Story that sort of filled a need that people had at that that

particular moment and it's not just the new york times that i think 60 minutes did a lot with these fighter pilots um yeah uh a lot of of people i mean how like even me writing sort of a skeptical piece on it was participating in this to some degree and I think that's like a real thing in journalism that that isn't always a bad impulse. Like it's fine to entertain people, but you can't let your factual standards lapse as part of that. I think it's a really important point about these stories came out in two moments, like 2017 and summer 2020, when the news was really. And I was scared. Everybody felt really upset. And it's a fun diversion. I think there is also, I think it speaks to something deeper too. I think

when the world feels out of control, as it did in those times because of Trump, because of COVID, we are just much more prone to believe conspiracies in those moments. When things feel out of control, we kind of want to reach for these larger explanations for these hidden forces controlling things and that's why things feel this way it's not just that the world is chaos and there's also a like social media participatory element to this where when we all feel scared and out of control this is something that we can all come together and talk about like like aha now we all see that the aliens are real and now we see that kate middleton is you know the moddy and she's come back and that's why you know we're not seeing photos of her anymore um and i think this sense of it that one that's good well you're hearing it here first we're breaking this news um like i found this

brendan nyhan thing it's our friend you you know, Brendan Nyhan, who's a Dartmouth University political scientist who wrote in 2017, right around the time this story came out, about how conspiracy belief among Democrats were suddenly way, way up because conspiracies, even if they're unrelated to politics, fill this psychological need that gets created when the world seems, you know, very scary or menacing or out of control. And I think it's also important to talk about this as a form of conspiracy belief among people like us, basically, who do not typically think of ourselves as prone to conspiracy belief because, oh, it's not a conspiracy. It appeared in The New York Times. Yeah, it's nice to have your one sort of pet theory. We had a running gag when we were coworkers at Fox about my deep belief that the U.N. Secretary General Doc Hommerskjold was assassinated. And that felt like – and like I kind of do believe that. But beyond sort of the factual sort of stuff there, like it's super safe. It's 60 years ago and no one cares.

Yeah. And I think, like, aliens filled a kind of similar hole for people. I think the other thing is that it's at the one time, one hand, it's kind of silly

and off the beaten track. On the other hand, it's so big that it's, in some ways, like, would be the biggest news story ever if aliens really were here and were interacting with us because the world would turn out to not just be humans.

Right. And I think there's ways in which that's comforting to the way that kind of nihilistic like who even cares about Trump like we're all going to be dead from global warming in 20, stuff can be kind of oddly comforting for some kinds of people. Right. Here's a conspiracy theory that's fun to believe in, that I have permission to believe in because it's in these big media outlets and that makes all the things that are scary in the news like Donald Trump or COVID feel so much more manageable because there's so much smaller in response. I think it's really smart. And I guess it's a case for while I have some complaints for the people who put this story on the front page of major news outlets, I guess it's a case for giving grace to people who let themselves maybe get a little carried away with believing in UFOs, even if there was evidence at the time that we probably should have been more skeptical. Well, Dylan, where can we hear or read you these days? I'm a senior correspondent at Vox, so you can read my stories over there.

Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about this. I found it really helpful to kind of disentangle this story. When you see the whole timeline, it all makes a lot more sense. And even if there are not little green men out there yet, if there are, we would love to have you on offline. So please get in touch with us. We'll invite you on for it. I can't wait. with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor.

Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez,

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who film and share our episodes as videos every week.