Ologies with Alie Ward - UFOlogy (UNEXPLAINED AERIAL PHENOMENA) with Sarah Scoles and Kate Dorsch

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

UFOs are real. Straight up. There are unidentified objects flying around — but does that mean they’re aliens? Two experts in the research and culture of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) -- science journalist/author Sarah Scoles and Dr. Kate Dorsch, a scholar in the History and Sociology of Science -- joined Alie moments after Friday’s breaking news of the Pentagon’s UAP report. Strap in for “tic tacs,” space rocks, black triangles, fighter pilot sightings, Roswell, abduction trends, secret military missions, surprising conclusions, and the -ologists’ own wacky field experience researching UFOs … and the people obsessed with hunting town the truth. Which is out there.Follow Sarah Scoles and Kate Dorsch on TwitterLearn more about Sarah ScolesAnd Dr. Kate DorschBuy Sarah’s new book, “They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers”Or Sarah’s previous book “Making Contact”A donation went to Friends of the Denver Public LibraryMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts & bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, totes, masks… Follow @ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @alieward on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's your old Dad Ward Von podcast, whispering into a ham radio about UFOs today. Did you know that UFology was the thing? Maybe you didn't. I did because it's been on my list for years, but here's how I envisioned this episode, okay? I thought I would be lurking in the back of a basement meeting, maybe looking for people with ponytails who hunt extraterrestrials,

and then just adding a grip of a side telling you to take their stories with a very large hunk of salt. But that is not how this episode turned out. It is very oddly, bizarrely, mind-bendingly, more legit. Because breaking news people, last Friday, June 25th, the Pentagon released a long-awaited, decades-in-the-making really report about UFOs, unidentified flying objects, more modernly rebranded as UAP, unidentified aerial phenomenon.

So we have been waiting six months for this report to drop, and I just so happened to have on my calendar an appointment to chat with twoologists about UFOs. One, a science writer and an editor for Wired, Astronomy, Popular Science, Interpast, and author of the 2018 book Making Contact, Jill Charter in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and her brand-new 2021 release, They Are Already Here,

UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. Now, the otherologist, that's right, there's two of them this episode. She got her PhD in history and the sociology of science in 2019 with a dissertation titled, Reliable Witnesses, Crackpot Science, the UFO and American Cold War Science. What?

And it studied 30 years of UFO research in America. She's now the acting associate director for undergraduate studies in the history and sociology of science, technology, and medicine at UPenn. You're gonna meet them shortly, both of them, but first, a quick thank you to all the patrons who come in peace at patreon.com slash ologies and contribute a dollar or more a month

to the making of the show and submit questions ahead of time for theologists. We got a lot for this one. Thank you for sending links to episodes to your friends and into the Twitterverse and making new oligites all the time. And thank you to everyone rating the show and leaving reviews,

which keeps us hovering at the top of the science charts. Also, I read all of your reviews because I care what you think. And this week's fresh ass review, let's do two. Two, one is from thank you, windowsill for the review that included the sentence, insert chif of Eleanor from the good place

saying, my brain is horny. And thanks to Black Plastic for writing in that the show is all-encompassing, intersectional, and appropriate for all audiences as long as you don't mind swear words. I hope you don't, because sometimes this shit's bananas, you gotta swear a little.

Okay, ufology, a real word, a real study. And ever since 1947, when this private pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine round objects near Mount Rainier up in the Pacific Northwest, our eyes have been scanning the skies for more flying saucers. So in this episode,

we're gonna cover everything from Roswell to abduction trends, alien parades, secret military missions, surprising conclusions, the oligists own wacky field experience, researching UFOs, energy vortexes, UFO statistics, global sightings data, tic-tacs, space rocks, black triangles,

fighter pilot sightings, Jimmy Carter, and of course the just released Pentagon Report on UAP, unexplained aerial phenomena with ufologists, Sarah Skolls and Dr. Kate Dorsch. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha! I know time is of the essence. Ha ha ha! What a day. What a day to talk to you both. Um, yeah, I'm gonna have you first

just really quick if you could say your first and last names and your pronouns for me. Ah, sure. I am Sarah Skolls and my pronouns are she, her, hers. And I am Kate Dorsch and my pronouns are she, her, hers. Awesome. Um, what a day to gather you all. The, a long-awaited report just came out, what, an hour ago? What time did it come out?

It feels like a million years ago, but it was probably a little over an hour ago. So that was Sarah, soft-spoken lilt and a little higher register voice. Yeah, I would agree with that, roughly an hour or so. And that was Kate with a mild and endearing Midwestern twang. Oh my gosh, what a time. I did not realize when we scheduled this

that it might drop today. No idea. Yeah, you had good timing. The aliens must have been subliminally communicating with you, perhaps. I mean, my name auto-corrects to alien a lot, so there you go. First, before we address capital T, capital R, the report, I'd love to get a little bit of background on you both.

I would say that you are UFologists. How did you end up studying UFOs or the people who study UFOs? So I'm actually a historian of science and technology. And in professional gatherings, I usually introduce myself as a historian of science who works on knowledge-making processes and expertise. But I came to the UFO question

through first of research seminar project while I was still in grad school that really rapidly spun up into my dissertation. I am admittedly a big nerd. So obviously as a big sci-fi nerd, the UFO thing held some attraction, but also what drew me to it is that I'm really interested in sort of big picture ontological

and epistemological questions. That is, what kind of stuff exists? And how do we know things about the stuff that exists? And UFOs are these objects that in the 20th century, and I'm sure we'll talk about this more, but in the 20th and 21st centuries are both real and totally unreal. And they're sort of mythic and legendary and religious

and sort of fantasy objects, but they're also really important artifacts deserving serious scientific study, at least for a certain period of time and apparently today. So those bigger picture questions really drew her. And she says, if you're gonna work on a dissertation for five or six or 10 or 50 years, pick something you're really into.

And how did Sarah gravitate toward floating objects? So I am a science journalist and I have written about astronomy and space exploration and military space technology for a number of years now. And I had never really thought very much about UFOs. I thought a lot about the more traditional scientific side of aliens looking at the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI or astrobiology, you know, looking at the atmospheres of other planets or the geology of other planets to learn about potential microbes there. But I had always kind of put UFOs just in this other category of things that were not for me. Even though, like Kate, I am also a big nerd.

Then in 2017, The New York Times published a big story about this Pentagon research program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which purportedly researched UFOs. And I thought, you know, that's interesting, like everybody else does. And so I just kind of started going through that story, trying to confirm or to fail to confirm everything

that was in it. And it was really in the process of that that I talked to, you know, historians and anthropologists and then also people inside Ufology who had been studying this for decades. And I thought, you know, there's more here than I thought there was when I dismissed it. And a lot of the people I was talking to

were interested in UFOs, despite the fact that they didn't really hold any beliefs about them. They were kind of agnostic about what UFOs were or were not, but they were interested in them from their human perspective, in part in their historical perspective. And so I couldn't let it go.

And I'm a writer, so when you can't let something go, you write a book. And so I wrote, they're already here, UFO culture and why we see saucers, which is kind of an attempt to look at the different things that motivate people to be interested in UFOs and how that's influenced by the, you know, the politics and culture of the time

through portraits of different people. And here we are. It seems like people are really, really vocal and considered crackpots or it's incredibly confidential. And it's this big secret field of study that maybe only like internal government people know about and are hiding from us.

Yeah, I think that that is true. I think that there are a lot of high profile kind of celebrity speaker circuit ufologists. If we ever encounter aliens, they're not gonna speak English or French or German. We'll speak and we'll communicate via mathematics. Who would like to, you know, say a lot of things in public. And then there are people who say, I have an NDA

or if I talked about that, I'd have to kill you. They don't say that literally, but I kind of got around that by focusing more on the people who are somewhere in the middle who are just regular people researching UFOs in their spare time or maybe who have had UFO experiences who, you know, the only thing stopping them

from talking to me is, you know, maybe not liking the media or some of the stigma around talking about UFOs. So the way I got around that was just being very upfront about where I was coming from. You know, I would say I'm a science journalist. I'm coming at this from a skeptical perspective, but I really want to hear what you have to say

and I promise to treat it respectfully, even if I disagree with your interpretation of what it is. Kate says that as a historian, she's less interested in abduction narratives and actual sightings than she's fascinated by the culture surrounding them. Because just the words UFO convention, those are enough to intrigue

the most armchair social scientists. UFO festival in Roswell, July 2nd through 4th, anyone? Featuring an abduction parade, talks from the alien hunter, a former military police officer and a CIA operative considered the world's leading expert on alien abductions. Also a talk from the author of the book,

UFOs and the murder of Marilyn Monroe. There's also a screening of the film, Spaceballs. Anyway, Kate's research was like the New Mexico Desert. Fascinating and sometimes very dusty. I'm looking for sources, right? Do you have this pamphlet from 1974 and someone almost always does and that's what I'm after. But I will say, thinking about these sort of different camps,

I've studied the US Air Force investigations, the Project Sign, Grudge and Blue Book period, and have also gone through a lot of the papers of professional scientists who study these things. And I do want to just say that I think that today it's sort of accurate to describe at least the two most visible groups as being the sort of like crackpot, fringy group,

and then the sort of military, if I told you what I knew, I would have to kill you group. But there is a group in the middle and there's been a couple historical groups in the middle. For my specific periodization, that is professional scientists who had very prolific professional establishment science careers as atmospheric physicists, other kinds of physicists,

astronomers, engineers, et cetera, who also had an interest in UFO phenomena. On the assumption that they represented some kind of terrestrial or in some cases, extraterrestrial technology. And what have you found, both of you, about the timeline and when people started thinking that they saw flying saucers or aliens, has this been going back from the 1700s or did it really start around the advent of sci-fi

and after World War II? So people have been seeing things in the sky as long as we have written human records. What I think has changed over time and what we need to be careful of, at least as scholars who study this and as historians perhaps, is identifying everything that's been seen

over the centuries as UFOs. In my interpretation, in my understanding, UFOs or flying saucers are a particularly post-World War II thing. They are driven by, if you'll excuse the pun, a sort of atomic anxiety, concerns about an unknown enemy, about surveillance states, about nuclear threats,

about the unrestrained progress of science and technology and these powers being in the hands of a sort of mysterious military. And that's not a milieu that you have in say the 18th or 17th or 6th century, if you will. So while people are seeing things, perhaps in the medieval age or in the Renaissance, they're describing things as being angels or acts of God

or some sort of demon or monster. We interpret the things we see through our cultural lens, through the things we expect to see. And so I think UFOs in that way are very, very much a product of, you know, the sort of post-World Cold War era. So although not all glowing flying objects are identified, perhaps they offer, if nothing else,

a blinking, pulsing reflection of our own anxieties. What does Sarah think? I feel like a lot of times, and something that UFO people who have been in UFO world for a long time point out is that, you know, what we see when we look up at the sky and see something unidentified is often just like a slightly better,

like the next next generation version of something we already have, because it's something we can already imagine and interpret that way, which I think maybe aligns with what Kate is saying. I was nodding, which is like, the podcast is an excellent visual medium, I know. So I was agreeing.

And because I am here to ask all of our shameless questions, what are most UFOs? What are these unexplained flying things? Oh, let's Sarah take this one first. Great. I have all the answers to all the UFOs. So that's great. Excellent.

I mean, I think something important that gets lost, especially lately when we're talking about UFOs is that they do have myriad explanations. A lot of times recently you will hear people saying like the phenomenon to refer to UFOs, but UFOs have always been a lot of different things. Looking at, you know, previous military studies or civilian studies through groups

like the Mutual UFO Network that analyze large volumes of UFO reports. They're anything ranging from, you know, just regular balloons, birthday balloons in the sky, weather balloons, surveillance platforms, sometimes like Venus looking really weird on the horizon. This is my favorite. Which I never understood until I saw Venus

when I was at a high altitude right on the horizon. And I couldn't tell if it was something that was moving and coming toward me. And it was shimmering and changing colors. And I was like, oh, I get it. Glad I'm not flying a plane toward it right now. Did you know that before he became President of the United States of America,

a young governor of Georgia, Jimmy Jams Carter, spotted a UFO, he described it thusly. There were about 20 of us standing outside of a little restaurant and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown, he says. It got brighter and brighter and then it eventually disappeared.

It didn't have any solid substance to it. It was just very peculiar looking light. None of us could understand what it was, end quote. And Carter said publicly, he never really suspected aliens. Many folks speculate that he might have just seen a very bright Venus on the winter horizon. How does that work?

Because Venus is closer to the sun than Earth. It looks like it jumps from either side of the sun and it can appear to hover or dart around. So it's not Martian's out for a joy ride, but just looking up and seeing another planet, which is pretty cool on its own. I mean, there's things like ball lightning or other atmospheric phenomena, just jets.

Maybe like a commercial plane flying straight towards you. Military aircraft can look very strange, especially the ones we don't know about yet. And, you know, now drones all over the place. So, and there are more, but there has always been a small percentage that remain unidentified, whether that's due to something extraordinary

that we don't understand or just lack of data to actually figure out what's going on. Sarah has it dead on pretty much and I would agree. I always try to frame this by saying, and this part of this is, you know, I have a lot of respect for the UFO community. While I may not know what all UFOs are, I do believe that in most cases,

people are seeing something that they can't explain, right? So yeah, in many cases, it's misidentified what are called and misidentified common objects. Airplanes, birds, bugs, trash, caught in the wind, right? All kinds of common things, but also aerial phenomenon. Interesting clouds, meteors, Venus is a great one or Jupiter,

astronomical bodies you don't see all the time. One of the first questions I got when I started researching the subject was, oh, so I assume that UFO sightings went up after Sputnik was launched. And in truth, UFO reports went down around the launch of Sputnik because people were looking up at the sky,

but they had been told what to look for. It's a rocket, a rocket. So they were reporting having seen the satellite. So I would be really curious, there is probably no way to get this information, but now that we're more acquainted with drones, for example, and the way drones move, and the way they look,

what UFO experiences that share similarities between drones and what they saw, like what those numbers have done if there are less UFO reports that we could account for with drones. People report UFOs less when they are looking up expecting to see something. Huh.

And what about in different areas? There are people who say parts of Utah or the Florida Panhandle or Marfa, Texas, or even parts of Joshua Tree, like the more people have sightings in those areas, is that because they've gone there expecting to see something? That's a hard question to generalize about,

and I don't have the latest, you know, sighting and geography statistics, but I think if you are someplace that is dark, then has a good view of the sky. It helps if you're near a military installation. You, I think, are on average more likely to see something just because you can see more of the sky and more of what's going on there.

For my book reporting, I took a trip out to area 51, I mean, to the area outside of area 51, they don't let me in there, but, you know, people go there expecting to see either some kind of alien test or a military test, and I think, you know, the people who go there expecting aliens and see something weird, I have heard anecdotally,

see what they interpret as that, and, you know, I went there, saw some weird stuff, and I thought that was a cool military test, you know, and so I do think expectations play into it. What kind of weird stuff did you see? Very glad I asked. All right, buckle up. I saw right when I was driving into the valley

where it is this set of three or four just orange orbs kind of just appear out of nowhere in the sky in this shape of a saucer and float there and then disappear, and then I kept on seeing things like that as I was driving, and eventually I realized that it was military flares, so jets doing exercises, chasing each other,

and then one will fire a fake missile, and the other one will send off these flares to distract the fake missile, and, you know, the flares, when you see them, your mind connects them into a shape, and sometimes the shape looks like a saucer. And then there was this set of many tiny white lights that would also just appear kind of taking over

somewhere between like a half and a quarter of the sky in this kind of perfect matrix, and then all move in unison and then disappear. So, I mean, it's weird. There's weird stuff out there. Raise your tiny gray arm if you have goosebumps. Sir, can I ask a question? Is that okay?

Please do. Bring it on. I'm just curious. Like, I know how I feel about UFOs, right, and the potentiality of seeing one. Was it a weird, even knowing, sort of in your like rational journalist, writer brain, you know what you're there for,

you know what you're looking for, and you know you probably have a rational explanation. Did it still grab you somewhere? Was it still like a weird experience? Was it unsettling in some way, or did you just like manage to embrace it? No, I think I tried to embrace the unsettling nature of it. Cool.

I mean, the flares experience, I didn't get an explanation for till the next day, and right now, you know, I still don't know what the white lights I saw were, and it's even though like, I think those were, you know, regular military things, there was something very cool about seeing something new and strange

and very outside of my experience, that I was, you know, maybe one of a few dozen people seeing, and it felt very special, and like it was mine, and like I had caught a secret, I guess, that I wasn't supposed to see. And I think that that is not dissimilar from the way people who might interpret UFOs differently would feel.

It was thrilling, I probably had some extra adrenaline. That's so cool. That is very cool. So looking at a map of UFO sightings, it's easy to see most are in the continental United States, and there are more and more of them in areas like Roswell, and one exasperated news headline from May 2021 just reads, it's happened again, people in Southwest US

report strange lights in the sky, which is like, okay, fine, but don't be a bitch about it, news source. Anyway, that story was regarding the recent launch of dozens of SpaceX Starlink satellites that will ring around the Rosy themselves around our planet, literally forever. And for more on that, you can see the space archeology episode

with Dr. Spacejunk, Alice Gorman. Lot of shiny garbage up there, folks. So first of all, we have a colleague, Greg Ighegan, who has been looking at the sort of modern history of the flying saucer from an international perspective. He's got a book coming out later this year. It's a crazy ambitious project, and I am really psyched to read it.

He and I have been in touch for years about this. So this is Penn State University history professor, Greg Ighegan, who has penned papers like, making UFOs make sense, ufology, science, and the history of their mutual misunderstanding, as well as a transatlantic bus, flying saucers, extraterrestrials,

and America in post-war Germany. And he's been one of the people who's been trying to unpack this from that international perspective, right? So he talks, for instance, about sightings over Germany in the Cold War period. The Germans assume that they're American and Russian, right? Like, it's not like they're aliens or something.

These are the Americans and the communists testing weapons over German airspace. Likewise, there's the Swedish ghost rockets, which are a historic case taking place in the late 1940s. And the Swedes assume that they're Russians, right? It's Russian missile testing. And that's what we can account these ghost rockets to, these sort of transparent technological artifacts

that appear and disappear in the sky. Interestingly, historically, it's very rare that you see two sightings that are described in identical or near identical ways in different parts, even just in different parts of America, let alone in different parts of the world, simultaneously or within a day or two of each other. What is much more common is that there is a sighting

that has either one really credible witness or a number of witnesses that gets a lot of attention in the press. It hits the newspapers, first local, then it's in the New York Times and the LA Times, and then maybe it gets picked up by the Guardian. And now there are a lot of copycat sightings taking place. So now people all over the world are seeing the same thing.

I mean, as soon as you give something a name and kind of a category, like it's human nature to fit what we see into that category, you know, the first arguably being flying saucer. And then, you know, a couple of things that come to mind for me are people talk about, you know, seeing the black triangle. So these are black triangles

that are described as shadowy, hovering, and noiseless. And this part really got me sometimes bigger than a football field. What? I guess no big deal, huh, not alarming. The black triangle spacecraft. Yeah. And, you know, once you see one, you read about it, you see a bunch.

And then I think most recently, you know, from the military sightings. There's a whole fleet of them, look on the F.A. Oh my God. They're all going against the wind. The wind's a hundred and point out to the west. The whole thing, dude. Well, if there's a good thing, it's rotating.

An object in one of the videos is called a tic-tac. And so people have started talking about, you know, the tic-tac UFOs, like as if it is a thing, a strict category. And so, yeah, I think it's just our nature to fit things into that. Which is so interesting because my assumption was that it would immediately, the tic-tac thing

would get drawn to the sort of historic cigar. UFO, the cigar-shaped thing, but they seem to be persisting as discrete objects, if you will. There's not a lot of overlap in the sort of lore happening between the tic-tac and then like the metallic cigar that seems very popular in the late 50s and early 60s. Well, that one was paid for by big cigar

and this one is paid for by big tic-tac. Nice. Okay, so these 2004, 2014, and 15, and 2019, tic-tac sightings were recorded through the instrument panels of US Navy fighter jets aboard the USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt off the Southern California coast. And according to official reports, they are described as an elongated egg

or a tic-tac shape that is solid, white, smooth, with no edges and uniformly colored with no wings. But it gets weirder. This footage was leaked by a UFO research group started by a guy from Blink 182. If you ask me, that's the weirdest fact in this whole episode, but it does get you sear. So in late 2017, The New York Times published three videos

and the world has just been waiting for a big report that came out one hour before we recorded this on Friday, June 25th. Okay, let's get to the report that was just released today. Again, I cannot believe that I'm talking to you both. On this day, we've waited generations, perhaps, for this. Can you tell me what so far you've been able to glean from it?

Sir, have you taken a look at it yet? I have, yeah, let's see. And it's nine pages from what I understand. Yes, it's nine pages and it looks like they looked into 144 different reports and were only definitively able to explain one of them? One, only one. Which was a deflating balloon.

I believe in Kate, please correct me if my memory of this thing I just read is wrong. And that the rest of them, they were not able to definitively identify, but they were able to fit them into five potential categories or imagine them fitting five potential categories of basically trash in the sky. I think like actual trash or drones,

atmospheric phenomena, US technology, foreign technology, and then what they call the other catch-all category. And of the 143 reports that they couldn't pin down, there were 18 different incidents and 21 reports that seemed to perhaps display some kind of advanced flight characteristics. But then they said, you know, that could be some kind of sensor malfunction

or personal misperception and that they needed to dig into it more. So to recap, because numbers, 144 reports and they knew what one was, it was balloon. The other 143 were just big old shrugs that could have been garbage or drones, but about 20 seemed to fly really weird and really fast, making the experts say, what?

I guess the biggest conclusion of the report for me, and then I'll turn it over to Kate, is that they don't know. They think people are seeing real things. They catch them on sometimes multiple sensor systems. They don't know what most of them are. They want to investigate further and they would like to have funding

and systematized ways for people to report and then investigate what's going on. Got it. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good, pretty great summary. So important to note that they're only looking at reports that have come from US government sources, which is a pretty self-selective. This has always been the case,

like when we look at these government reports, they have been very self-selective. And for the early years, we're really just military and governmental personnel. They only expanded outwards sort of in the project, Okay, so these are investigated sightings seen and reported by government personnel, not like your cousin who lives in a yurt

and drinks his own pee, but Project Blue Book. What was that? So between 1952 and 1969, the US Air Force investigated and analyzed over 12,000 incidents of UFOs. What we now call UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. And they finally concluded, no UFO reported, investigated,

and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security. They found there was no evidence submitted or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as unidentified represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge.

And that there's no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as unidentified were extraterrestrial vehicles. Even back then, there were some believers like former Marine Corps naval aviator Donald Kehoe, an author who was considered a leader in the field of UFology in the 50s and the 60s who disagreed with Project Blue Book's mild,

nothing to worry about findings. He wrote a book with a really kind of wishy-washy, vague title called Flying Saucers Are Real. Major Kehoe as author of the book Flying Saucers Are Real. What is your opinion of these new sightings of unidentified objects? With all due respect to the Air Force, I believe that some of them will prove to be

of interplanetary origin. During a three-year investigation, I found that many pilots have described objects of substance and high speed. One case, pilots reported their plane was buffeted by an object which passed them at 500 miles an hour. Obviously, this was a solid object that I believe was from outer space.

But that was then, and this is now. But so these are sources coming, or reports coming from governmental sources. UAP sightings tended to cluster around U.S. training and testing grounds, but we assess that this may result from a collection bias, which I think is interesting, as a result of focused attention,

greater numbers of latest generation sensors, unit expectations, and guidance to report anomalies. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it is not surprising to me that these various government bodies, these Navy, and in many cases the Air Force, have test craft, right? They have these bases, they're doing all kinds of testing

on various kinds of technology, manned and unmanned, and we should want them to report the things they see. We should want them to tell us if they're experiencing anomalous performance in their own aircraft or in the aircraft of others, or if they're having strange physiological reactions to things. But I do think that it's worth pointing out

that the sightings tended to cluster around testing grounds and other sorts of places. But again, people have been asking me for weeks what I expected as someone who has read a lot of governmental UFO reports in my day. It pretty much, it's exhilarating to me and probably boring to everyone else how cookie-cutter it is.

It's been 80 years and so much of the language is still so the same, and I love it. I am totally here for it, so I'm very excited. And honestly, she says, in the last century, our warfare has been airborne. So it's not crackpot for the military to investigate weird things in the sky. It's a matter of security for governments,

all over the world, and not just a burning existential curiosity that melts our brains and fucks with our whole sense of reality. Do you think there's a reason why they released it now? On Friday? Or? Well, on a Friday too. Like Friday just after the news cycle ends on the East Coast.

Yeah, it's just the news dump, right? Like it's a Friday night news dump. But as far as this particular Friday, they had 180 days from the passing of the act that mandated this report to do it, and today is the 180th day, so deadlines. It was an obligation that was put into the COVID relief bill that was called for, and yeah, I think that,

man, they really walked that right up to the wire, but that is historically what they've done. So again, nothing really shocking about the timing or that it's a Friday night at all to me, really. Part of the COVID relief bill? Really? Indeed. It just slipped it right in there.

And former Senator, Democrat Harry Reid of Utah, was a big proponent of getting behind the science of UAPs, and one government investigative program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program ran from 2007 to 2012, but it was cut for funding. And five years later, the head of that program, Louis Elizondo, publicly said that he personally believes there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.

So this updated report just dropped on Friday, which delivers a big ol' we don't really know what the shit is conclusion. It's pretty thrilling. Does the report make you excited for possibilities? I mean, as a, I will not like hardcore history nerd out on you on this podcast. Please do.

Okay, well, you'll, all I will say is that I'm really obsessed with reporting forums. I'm with like how over the last 80 years, the military has tried to collect data, like tried to collect better data about these things because there's always the concern that they represent some kind of national security threat, right? So even if you have 10,000 cases and 9,999 of them are BS.

There can be a hundred people in the room and 99 don't believe in you. If one of them is a nuclear missile, you have a problem, right? So we have to continue investigating them, we have to get better data. Always a search for better data. And so right away on page three, this report from today is like, oh, we need to come up with a better way of collecting data.

And I'm like, yes, I love it. What struck me in the report is right, the Navy being like, we haven't had a formalized process before now for collecting this data where, you know, the Air Force had one in 47, did it work? I mean, the Air Force sort of tapped out of this in the early 1970s and was like,

we were never going to solve this problem. We can't square the circle, if you will. And so what I find sort of hilarious is that in a fun historian way is that the Navy is going through a lot of the same challenges and issues and growing pains and struggles and hopeless battles that the Air Force went through in the 60s. I just want to tell them, like, you can't win.

You're not going to win this one, right? Like, you will never write a state enough report to convince people that, you know, it's not aliens. So the Navy is learning the Air Force's lessons of, oh man, like, UFOs, really hard. So frustrating, Link, what is it? But what about Sarah? Is she excited about this report?

I mean, I agree with Kate. I think that, you know, data is good. It's important, especially if you're coming at this from the perspective of national security or flight safety perspective, to understand, like, how common is this? And, like, with this report, the instances they looked at were from 2004 to 2021,

but they said that most of them were from the past couple of years once the Navy and then later the Air Force did create specific reporting systems for people. I think that getting an actual handle on the scale of what people are seeing is important. And I'm going to draw an alien parallel, even though I am not endorsing the extraterrestrial hypothesis

for flying saucers. But when a topic has a certain stigma associated with it that kind of inhibits research into it, like with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, part of the way that became a respected discipline was doing things like systematic surveys of the sky to, like, create statistics of how far away a civilization could we detect around what kind of star,

how many would we expect to see based on what we've surveyed. Now, just kind of bringing it out of the realm of anecdote and into the realm of something that you can analyze more categorically. So the first thing to do is to nix the stigma, because where there is silence, there is a lack of data. And where there's a lack of data, there are a lot of unknowns, a lot of hypotheses,

a lot of fear, a lot of flimflam. So ignoring UFOs, it's kind of like the abstinence-only education of the cosmos. Now, Kate says, One thing if I can be critical about even just the immediate reporting coming out right now around the report, right? That, like, oh, the government is confirming that UFOs are real or whatever.

A, I think they've always kind of been real. Like, sometimes they are real things in the sky that we don't know what they are, and so that means they're UFOs. Again, one takeaway, UFOs are real. We don't know what a lot of airborne objects are. Doesn't mean they're blood-drinking squid people, piloting hovercraft, but it's certainly UFOs.

That's so rad, it makes me sweaty. I love a mystery. All of that aside, the military has an interest in investigating these things and in figuring out what they are and in figuring out if we as citizens or their pilots, right, are at risk or in harm's way. Even if it's from the trash, right, airborne clutter. When you generate the stigma around these things,

for example, in the reporting that's coming out right now, right, UFOs are real, that disinclines serious pilots from making reports in many cases. It may make them less likely to report having seen something or, you know, airline pilots, people who are up there looking at things. The Air Force grapples with this throughout their history of the projects.

Pilots are now telling us that they're not reporting, that they didn't see anything and even if they did, they wouldn't tell us. And that's a problem. Even if it's just for national security or the health and safety of our pilots. And I think that continues to be the case and I think that's a real struggle

and one of the reasons why I like to encourage the people I'm talking to, especially journalists, to like be careful about how you frame this thing, right? Like if it is a national security issue, let's treat it seriously as one. See something, say something. And can I ask a few questions from listeners who wrote in? Definitely, sure.

Okay, they wrote in great questions. Of course, we always like to take American money and shower a charity of the experts choosing. And this week it's going to the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation. When you invest in the library, they say you invest in critical support for free literacy programs,

lifelong learning workforce development and equitable access to resources for the millions of adults, children and youth of Denver. So if you're looking for intelligent life, find it at a library. So that was Sarah's choice and we did such a tight turnaround on this that I don't know case yet,

but we will throw money at them and update the show notes with a link when we have it. So those donations were made possible by sponsors of the show. Thanks so much, you might hear about them now. Okay, let's get some answers to your unidentified queries. Kelly Dotson wants to know, have we ever found a crashed UFO?

Well, if we mean UFO as alien spacecraft, to my knowledge, no. We have not found one of those, but the classic example of something that went unidentified for a long time that did crash was the balloon that crashed outside of Roswell and one was part of the secret project mogul, which was to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

It was a balloon that flew high and then it crashed. And, you know, at first it was reported that that was a flying saucer, then that was taken back. There was confusion about what it was at the time. Then, you know, the military said it was a weather balloon and then only later did we get the true story. So I think there's stories like that and probably people have seen things in the sky

that they couldn't identify that then crash, but in terms of alien spacecraft, if you find out Kelly, please let me know. Same, same. I also don't know anything about alien spacecraft, but yeah, the Roswell case is great and started a great job telling it. Like, yes, a balloon crashed.

The version I've heard had the sort of junior military personnel come out and tell people, right, like, oh, it's just a balloon, don't freak out. And then his higher ups freaked out because it was, you know, there was press interest and it was a highly classified project that was built for spying on Russians, right? And so it was like, oh, no, no, no, it's not that.

It's anything but that. It's like a weather balloon or we don't know what it is. Maybe it's not a balloon at all. But yeah, we know almost, you know, we know for certain that it was a surveillance balloon. And if you're not up on this Roswell incident, quick overview is that in 1947, a rancher was rambling about his land in New Mexico

and found a bunch of rubber in tinfoil looking debris and gathered it up, took the sheriff, and then Major Jesse Marcell, a Roswell Army Air Field Intelligence Officer, I guess did the world of flim flam and we're still talking about it. So what became of him? Was he banished to a hut on the fringes of society?

Well, he retired from the Air Force in the 50s and he went on to become a TV repairman. He's like, you know what, screw this, I'm gonna go work on a TV and have a beer with lunch. But it said that he maintained that what he saw was not of this earth, but the military made him recant his statements to look like a real jagoff and take the fall.

That's what he says. A lot of people think that something's still fishy. Oh, speaking of. Two patrons, a salmon like the fish and Malika wanna know your thoughts on umama. I always wanna say umama mama. That is not how it's pronounced, but al-mua-mua. A pair of Harvard scientists say a massive,

fast-moving visitor to our solar system may have been a probe sent by an advanced alien civilization. Astronomers were excited to discover the interstellar object last year. It was named a mua-mua. That's Hawaiian for messenger or scout. Yeah, I am not fully up on all of the latest science of it, but my understanding is that the scientific consensus

is that it's an interstellar rock and there's one very prominent scientist who would like us to at least consider the idea that it is an alien probe, but that most other scientists don't agree with him. And I do not have enough information to hold a fully informed opinion, but maybe Kate does. I do not, unfortunately,

but I fall in the same sort of position that Sarah does. A lot of folks, such as RJ Deutsch, as well as Becca and Olivia Alex, who asked, why are people so horny for aliens? Why is it everyone automatically goes for probing when talking about being abducted? What's the deal? You did mention a space probe.

Is there something about just feeling like invaded, like space invaded? No, you're not putting those in my butt. Do you find that a lot of folks do mention probing? Is it all psychosexual, maybe? Everything is psychosexual, probably. But I would say that at least in my anecdotal reporting, lots of alien things are linked to some kind of feeling

of the fear of outsiders or fear of the unknown. And I would be afraid of probing. And so I think there's a little bit of, maybe fear of malicious things, fear of the outsider, things like that. And I'm gonna stop before I get myself in any more trouble. I will go out on a limb and then push a colleague of mine even further out onto that limb.

In the interest of total transparency, as I said earlier in the beginning, I don't really work on the alien question. My interest in the extraterrestrial hypothesis is really sort of 50s, 60s, ETH type stuff. ETH, side note, is the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which is that UFO wasn't just a balloon or Venus or another country casing the joint.

Them things got aliens in them. That's the ETH. Maybe the aliens want to party with our butts. We don't know. But I will say this colleague of mine who I've already named up once, Greg Igiglian, once we were in a conference together and he was sort of also postulating

that a lot of this alien abduction stuff seems to kick up at a time, or at least it really comes to the forefront in the late 1970s. It becomes a phenomenon that has taken much more seriously in the mid to late 1970s. Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, we can tie some other things into this.

Post-Vietnam PTSD, the rise of the social sciences in psychiatry, and second wave feminism. Female taking back of the body, exploring our traumas through psychiatry, and so on that these things might have something to do with the rise of the abduction narrative. I don't know if that ever went anywhere. I thought it was really compelling at the time.

Thinking sort of, I'm always obsessed with context, right, historical context around these phenomenon, phenomenon, excuse me. But yeah, again, I don't have much, I don't have much insight into the sort of history of the probe. Moving away from probes and toward history though, patrons Kathleen Sacks, Jade Pollard,

first-time question-asker, Bregi, Georgia Ploderal, Max Aubrey, Danielle Fougere, Meg, Billy Bynum, and... And a few people, Rowan Ridley and Anna Thompson, wanted to know a little bit about ancient art that has been uncovered, your thoughts on ancient aliens. Does that ever come up in terms of pictorial representation of UFOs in art?

How far back does that actually go, and how much are we just seeing what we want to see? I'll take placement first. I will sort of caveat this by saying I have some strong personal opinions about ancient alien theory that I have been outspoken about on my Twitter more than once. So if you really want to come at me, like I've said some things on Twitter about it.

I shall read you one of her ancient alien tweets. I went and found it. She said, ancient aliens is scientific racism, masquerading is nonsense entertainment. And people are always so sad when I'm like, you're not allowed to like ancient aliens. It's scientific racism, to which Dr. Lisa Monroe, a PhD historian, concurred and said,

we're kindred spirits, ancient native people of the Americas built monumental structures and had science and writing, she wrote. That last part was in all caps, rightly so. I think a lot of it is us seeing what we want to see. It comes down to this question of expectation, right? And yes, like chariots of gods had a lot to do with that. Stargate certainly didn't help.

It's not that easy. This is a replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza. And I say that as like a Stargate fan, gently. There's been some sort of big pop culture stuff around this that has really driven some of this narrative. But I think a lot of it comes down to seeing what we want to see, expecting to see something in ancient art.

And then you say, okay, well, this one image of this, what looks to be an airship and ancient South Asian or Indian art, it could be a UFO. Now I'm going to go back through all of the other art from the period, from all over the world and see if I can find similar things. If that's what you're looking for, that's what you're going to find.

And so I am, besides my sort of strong feelings about ancient aliens theory in and of itself, I think for many people, it's just, you see what you want to see. Is it possible that this incredible dagger has some sort of an extraterrestrial connection? Jamie Pickles has a great question. Wants to know, why is aerial footage always so grainy?

When can those million dollar jets get a video upgrade? Great question. Yeah, I mean, UFOs are always about military budgets and this report and otherwise. For sure. It would be great to have some clearer footage. And I have few doubts that among the 144 cases in this most recent report,

there are probably better sensor data than we ourselves have seen. But also as the report says, I don't have it exactly in front of me, but it notes that these cameras and systems that catch other wavelengths like infrared or catch radio transmissions, they're not designed to pick up

an identified aerial phenomenon. They're designed to help someone fly their plane and do so in combat. So you wouldn't ask a spatula to do a knife's job. Also, you shouldn't be talking to spatulas, period. That's not the point. Point is, these are plane flying tools. They are not UFO photo booths.

And so they're not optimized for taking pictures of UFOs or UIP, just like your cell phone camera is not. And you know, if you go outside and try to take a picture of the moon, which I keep doing, despite knowing that it doesn't work very well, it just looks like a bad bright dot and it makes me mad.

And so I imagine if I saw a UFO and tried to take a picture that the same thing would happen and it's not totally dissimilar maybe from a jet where that's just not what it's optimized to do. And I will say, again, like it's always kills me when I have to be like, in defense of the military,

in defense of the military, they've tried. Like they have tried at various junctures to build sensors, cameras, and otherwise, devoted to capturing UAP. Like back then it was UFO phenomena, right? Like back then devoted to trying to capture these things when pilots see them and like build them into the wings of planes

so that when a pilot saw something, he could just hit a button and it would take pictures with a bunch of different chemical filters and be able to account for various distances and temperatures and chemical makeups of whatever was out there. I mean, they've tried this at multiple stages

and it turns out that, A, it's incredibly expensive for something that seems to have, appears to have very little payoff, right? Very hard to justify budgetarily. And then even when you do get budget approval to do it, turns out that it's very hard to attach a camera to a jet plane and then like get a good picture, period, let alone of something that is potentially engaged

in some sort of high speed maneuver. It's been virtually impossible to pull off, even with all of the resources ready at hand to the U.S. military. Do you think that this report is a little bit of a, hey, we could use a little more money in these departments? I think, I mean, I can't say exactly what the motivation was,

but that is explicitly part of its conclusions, is that this would benefit from more funding that would support more data gathering and analysis programs. If the higher-ups listened to that, that is what will result from it, whether it's what was intended or not. That makes sense.

I always ask the last few questions of your favorite and your least favorite things about your job, instead, I would love to ask if either one of you has like a favorite UFO story, either in history or is there one that really drew you in into rabbit holes? Who should go first?

You go first, I'm talking. I'll tell, I'll just tell like the Lubbock Light story really concisely. So the Lubbock Lights is actually a pretty famous sighting in sort of the history of UFO experience. And what makes it really jump out to me is because some of the biggest questions that I have loved to engage with

in the process of working on the history of these things is professional scientists in military grappling with the questions of like, who's a credible witness? Who do we trust? What counts as good evidence? And how much evidence do we need before we declare something unidentified?

How do we know for certain that we don't know what something is? How can we rule out every known phenomenon in the world? So the Lubbock Lights, they take place in the 1950s in Texas. And the first sighting is made by four physical scientists who are tenured faculty at the local university. They have like weekly or monthly stargazing parties

and they're out back with their big telescopes, drinking beer, looking at the sky and they see these lights go overhead in formation. And they're like, wow, that's really wild. And they tell people about it. And then they come back again, like a few nights later and they see these lights again, flying in formation, silently overhead,

these sort of small lights. At the same time, some, like on the other side of town, a junior high kid with a camera takes pictures of these things, right? So now you have credible witnesses, right? Trained physicists and astronomers making these sightings across multiple nights. As they tell people more and more people

are seeing the Lubbock Lights, we now have video. There's some sort of sensor return, like we're trying to get radar returns of these things. People are tracking their paths, right? Across various directions. They always seem to be going, I can't remember if it's west to east or east to west, right? But these sightings are happening

night after night after night. And you're gathering more and more data. So first, the Air Force is saying, we need credible witnesses. Well, you have credible witnesses, right? You have these scientists. Well, now we need pictures. Okay, well, you have pictures.

Well, it has to happen more than once. Well, now it's happening nightly, right? And so all of this data is sort of piling up. And for a substantial period of time, months into years, the Lubbock Lights goes unsolved. At the end of the day, the Air Force is like, we don't know what this is. Like we can't rule anything out.

And at some point down the road, an ornithologist is looking through some other case files and comes across these Lubbock Lights and says, oh, I know what these are. These are ducks. Are you dying? I'm dead. Someone play the bagpipes and post a blurry picture of me

from our last hangout because I'm deceased. It was ducks. This is a specific type of migratory duck that like migrates over this area. And because now we have city lights, right? Like Lubbock is in a small place. What you're seeing is the lights, the street lights reflecting off the silvered breasts

of these ducks as they fly overhead, which is why they're silent, which is why it's regular, which is why they're flying in that V-shaped formation. Oh my God. And what I think is so interesting about the story is that like the Air Force keeps setting these bars, right? We need X, Y, or Z to be incredible, exciting, to be worthy of investigation.

It needs this much evidence to go uns... Like to be an unidentified flying object. And Lubbock continues to hit those bars. And the Air Force is always sort of trying to ramp up and say, well, okay, okay, like we need more. And they continue to get that. And at one point they do. They say, we don't know what this is.

Well, like we can't explain these sightings, but eventually you get the right expert in front of them and solved. I love it. It's one of my favorite. The pictures are so good. It's like great. There's tons of great data.

It's really, it's a beautiful, beautiful piece of young history. Oh my God. What the duck is that? I know. It's amazing. The folks write themselves. That's the best.

I've never heard that story. It's good. I love it. What a huge threat. They're investigating us. They're going to poop on us. Yeah, I was going to say, hide your cars. I looked at these photos and imagine a black and white image

on a very grainy, dusty chalkboard. And it has a V-shaped constellation of white dots. Kind of a blurry arrow of terror. And then you go, oh, it's ducks. And it becomes hilarious. And Sarah, what about you? I think I'm going to take a different and maybe controversial tack and say

that the most interesting sightings to me are the ones that I feel like are the most kind of common kind for just a regular person not flying a fighter jet. And I think a lot about three people's sightings and their short show, so I'll share all three. But one is just a like a 16 or 17-year-old boy I met at a UFO conference who lived just over the Colorado border in New Mexico, who saw like a regular military aircraft

that he said was followed by like a weird blue light just kind of accompanying it that then flew away and disappeared. Another woman who's been researching and gathering other people's UFO sightings for years and years and got into it first when she saw kind of like a pink half moon light in the sky that appeared, flew fast and then disappeared.

And then a person I met who worked at this place, who works at this place called the UFO Watchtower in Colorado where I am. And she said she was talking on the phone to her mom. She saw a kind of light in the sky that maybe had that classic cigar shape. And then it was flying along. And as soon as she hung up the phone, it disappeared.

And I think these all kind of illustrate something that the historian Kate has mentioned a few times, Greg Akige, and said to me early on in my reporting about UFOs is that what people find so personally compelling about them in their individual experiences is not that something weird appears and does something weird, but that then after that, it disappears. And it's just gone.

It was, yeah. And so I think that that is the experience of most people. Maybe it's not what we find hovering above us, thirsty to suck at our human juices, but it's the earthlings we've met along the way. Do you both have any lifelong friends you've met through UFO conventions or reporting or research? Any unexpected friendships come out of this?

In my personal life, sure, in that you meet people and you say work on UFOs, and then they're your friend for life, right? But I think one of the things that I'm just so I'm endlessly grateful for is the community of scholars. When I first picked up this project, I did get some side eye, right? People that were like, you've got to be careful with this.

There's a reason that these files have been sitting in the archive for 50 years, but you should be careful. And I sort of was like, well, screw it. I think it's interesting, so I'm going to do it. And I just like the people you meet from all over and all different walks of life with all different interests, both academically and otherwise, I think has just been such a gift.

Like, what a kick-ass community to get to be part of. And I'm sort of forever grateful to the UFO as inconvenient as it can be at some times. I'm really just glad to be part of this. There, do you have so many people saved in your phone with a UFO or an alien emoji? Yeah, but right before the A names in my phone are just a bunch of flying saucer emoji people.

No, I mean, I think one of the people I met in my reporting queue had the biggest impact on me was a woman named Annie Eideker, the one I mentioned who worked at this place called the UFO Watchtower, which is a place where you can go camp and stand on this platform and look for UFOs. She had been, for a while, homeless, just kind of trying to figure out what she was doing and had come to this place where the UFO Watchtower was and gotten a job there,

gotten a place to stay there. And it had really just kind of changed her life a lot and the people she had met and the experiences they shared and the experiences she had, you know, it was just very meaningful for her. And I think that that really illustrates the kick-ass community aspect of the whole thing, that just like, if this is an interest that you have in common with people,

especially if you have a personal experience, I think that it can really bring people together. And yeah, it was cool to see that happen for her. The UFO Watchtower, side note, sits at the end of a remote road and there's a small domed shelter with a rooftop patio built, kind of like a scaffolding. And then the rocky driveway is home to some alien figurines and a Yeti mannequin and a sculpture garden made

by a collaboration of visitors who stack things like bent license plates and Mardi Gras beads and probably a handful of spent glow sticks. And there's a printed plaque, I looked it up, and it says, since the opening of the UFO Watchtower in 2000, over 25 psychics have visited and told the same story. There are two large vortexes located on the east side of the tower.

A vortex is described as an opening to a parallel universe and is full of energy. It continues, we encourage visitors to leave something in the garden to get their energy there as well. And quote, it made me wonder how I would feel if I went there. And what would I leave behind? What if you had to pee and you unknowingly peed into the center of a vortex?

There are more questions than answers, but not for long. And the last question I'll ask you both. I'm sure you get this one a lot. Do you consider yourself more of a molder or more of a scully? Are you suggesting that the Philadelphia experiment used alien technology? Or are we all somewhere in between?

I want to believe. I do, but I think that I'm more of a, I don't know. I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I would say I'm probably more of a scully, but like I said, I try really hard to be, to remain agnostic. I believe that UFO witnesses have, I think their experiences are real. And I think that an overwhelming number of cases,

they've seen something. And I think they deserve our respect and our good faith. But I'm probably more of a scully if I'm being honest. No, this is why people are different, which is wonderful. What about you, Sarah? I think that I would say I am a scully who indulges molder tendencies. Like I think sometimes, especially not, not just in UFOs,

but in any kind of, you know, reporting on investigating topics. Like there's, there's something to be said for like indulging some of your wilder thoughts and then calling upon the scully to come say, wait, let's take this back down. So I, I would say I'm molder and then I like ran it in. So Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I guess. Well, what a day to get to talk to you both. Your phones must be blowing up.

I can't imagine how many emails have absolutely pinged you while we've been chatting. So thank you so much for accidentally confirming this appointment weeks ago and having it fall on the perfect day. No, I'm glad it worked out. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, it's been super fun. And like I said, what an auspicious day.

So ask intelligent life forms crackpot questions because the truth is out there and we're all going to die one day. So you might as well ask. But the TLDR from theologist experts, we don't know what a lot of stuff is, but that doesn't make it Martians. Do you know how long people, smart people,

doctor people thought that germs were made out of ghosts and that washing your hands before doing surgery was superstitious and witchcraft? So when you think of science, you think of all facts and answers. But the truth that is out there is that we don't know shit. We understand a literal fraction of the universe. Dark matter, dark energy, which make up well over 90% of stuff in the universe.

A mystery to our blobs of brains. So maybe ESP has an explanation. Maybe aliens exist. Maybe they like to hang out over Arizona. Who doesn't? We don't know. But for a long time, we also thought that lightning happened because God saw us jack off.

So there's a lot to learn. But keep learning by following the links in the show notes to Sarah on Twitter at Skoll Sarah. Kate Dorsch is at HPS Kate. You can buy Sarah's new book, and I encourage you to. So good. It's called They Are Already Here, UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers.

That was just released a few weeks ago. And many more links will be up at alleyward.com slash olgis slash ufology. We are at olgis on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at alleyward with one L on both. Thank you to Aaron Talbert, who I've known since we were four, for admitting the olgis podcast Facebook group for great, wonderful earthlings.

Hello to all the olgis subredditors. Olgis Merch is purchasable via alleyward.com or olgismerch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. Emily White of The Wordery is a professional transcriptionist who makes our transcripts. Caleb Patton bleeps my potty mouth and transcripts. And bleeped episodes are available for free to anyone

who needs them for any reason at the link in the show notes. And stay tuned. Big news. Hot news. I'm hiding this at the end. For an olgis spinoff show. Just for you littles or smologites. Yep.

We have been working super hard behind the scenes to launch Smologies, which will be bite-sized episodes of your favorite topics that are suitable for classrooms and kiddos and just a refresher for your brain all ages. So those will be burst into the olgis feed in a few weeks. Thank you, Zeke Thomas Rodriguez of Mind Jam Media for working so hard on those. Susan Hale makes the Instagram quizzes.

Noel Dilworth does the scheduling and the olgis merge posts. The mayor of Babetown. And my soon-to-be-not-fiancé, impending husband, Jared Sleeper, has been cranking on edits. Thank you so much. And of course, big thanks to Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts The Percast and C. Jurassic Wright. Nick Thorburn of The Very Good Band Islands

wrote and performed the theme song. They have a new album that just came out. Elemaniacal Listen. And if you do listen through the end of the credits, I divulge a secret. And this week, I'm going to update you with some wedding stuff. It's fun. It's drama. So we're getting hitched July 10th.

And to be safe, I just bought a few thousand dollars worth of self-tests for folks to make sure that we are a COVID-free gathering. So shove it up your nostrils, loved ones. It's going to happen. Also, I still don't have shoes, but the rings in my dress are in the mail. Also, we're not registered anywhere

because we're very lucky to have everything we need. We are not fancy people. People's presence is a present. So instead, we started a travel jar. So if any guests are hell-bent on giving something, especially local folks, they could just toss in a contribution that we could disperse to folks traveling

because weddings are not cheap to get to. So I don't know. Maybe wedding travel jars will become a thing. We shall see. Just throwing the idea out there. Anywho's all, thanks for listening. May your contacts list be filled with emojis.

Bye-bye. Hack-a-dermatology. Homiology. Cryptozoology. Litology. Metrology. Pneumatology. Meteorology.

Pneumatology. Pneumatology. Cereology. Pneumatology. I woke up in a dirty metal dome and 40 little gray aliens watched me pee in a steel bowl.