Tech Won't Save Us - Are UFOs Really Out There? w/ Kelsey Atherton

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Kelsey Atherton to discuss the renewed interest in UFOs, where the conspiracy theories of aliens in the sky came from, and whether flying saucers might really be watching us. Kelsey Atherton is a military technology journalist. He contributes to Popular Science and has written for Slate. Follow Kelsey on Twitter at @AthertonKD.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Kelsey has written about how the military’s culture of secrecy breeds UFO conspiracy theories, why sensors are an important aspect to consider, and the truth of Area 51.A U-2 pilot took a selfie with the Chinese balloon shot down earlier this year.The military later confirmed the Chinese balloon was not actually spying on the United States.One of the balloons that were shot down likely belonged to a hobbyist group called the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade.In 2019, a bunch of people online planned to hold a “Naruto run” at Area 51.Support the show

Because of the culture of secrecy and the military understanding of secrecy, you can't say the honest thing first, and you create this room for the mostly true thing to be completely dismissed. Hello and welcome to Zach Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And wow, do I have an interesting show for you this week. It's a bit different from what we usually talk about, but hey, there's still a tech angle here, and I think it will be a lot of fun. My guest is Kelsey Atherton. Kelsey is a military technology journalist who contributes to Popular Science, has written for Slate, and a number of other publications. You might have noticed recently that there's been a lot of new talk about UFOs

or UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, especially in the United States, because there has been kind of, I guess, more effort and more resources given to investigations into these phenomena, whether they're real, whether there are really aliens, you know, up in the sky who are surveilling us. And listen, I have long been kind of fascinated by this topic when I was younger. I used to love watching like documentaries and shows about aliens and UFOs, you know, videos on YouTube, of course, wondering whether that was something that was real and actually happening and actually affecting us. And so now to see it kind of in the conversation again, and to see some of the

writing that Kelsey has been doing about this topic, not just, you know, kind of the recent revelations or the recent discussions around this, but also going back to the history and kind of where these original myths and ideas came from and how they really entered into the pop culture. So there are so many kind of fascinating elements of this, including getting into what is Area 51, you know, whether there are really alien spaceships held there and what actually goes on. So, yeah, if you've ever had like an inkling of interest in UFOs and the conspiracy theories around them, I think that you'll find this episode pretty fun. And you know what? Maybe you will disagree with our conclusions and how we feel about whether there are really UFOs out there.

But I think either way, you'll have a good adventure, a good time listening through this conversation. And I'm sure that you'll learn some things as well. So with that said, please enjoy my conversation with Kelsey. If you like it, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media

or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you wanna support the work that goes into making the show every week so we can keep having these in-depth conversations, exploring a whole range of issues, even things like UFOs, you can become a supporter by joining existing supporters like Hamza in Minneapolis, Josh in Edmonton, and Thomas from Berlin by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and signing up there to help us out. Thanks so much

and enjoy this week's conversation. Kelsey, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Happy to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you. I think this episode is going to be a little bit different from some of the things that we usually cover on the show. But hey, there's a tech angle to UFOs, so we can certainly take that on.

Yeah, there absolutely is. It feels cultural. And then it goes back to how do you explain tech you don't want to explain? Absolutely. So I want to start with kind of a basic question, right? Because I think people will be very familiar with the term UFO. You know, it's something that's been around for decades that, you know, we constantly hear about kind of in the public conversation. People have certainly played video games about it and watch TV shows about it and all this kind of stuff.

Right. We have movies about UFOs, all that kind of stuff. But recently, there's a newer term that I feel like we're hearing a bit more often called the UAP, which is the unidentified aerial phenomena. Is there any real difference between these or is this just a rebranding of something that has been around for a long time? It's, I think, 90% a rebranding. The military, which is the origin of UAP as a term, there's a whole committee on it. There's a push to identify it. We can get into some of the stuff of why there's sort of a renewed interest in a new acronym slapped on this. But the big reason to rename it is that UFO started as a military acronym and took on a pop culture connotation.

And by going back to the drawing board and saying, no, no, no, no, no. These are not the flying saucers or the sci-fi villains you are accustomed to. This is stuff in the sky that we don't understand or can't understand or at least label. Maybe we would understand it if we could the sky, but you can't have a calm press conference saying we are studiously examining the unsorted pile of mysterious, unclear objects photographed that might just be blurry pictures of mylar balloons. Yeah, and I guess if you have a press conference now and you say, we're examining these UFOs, immediately people are going to say, oh my god, they're looking at flying saucers in the sky. So you can't reuse that term. Yeah, UFO is a term that's kind of a victim of its own success. It moved squarely from the Pentagon into the halls of conspiracy theorists and the tropes of pop culture.

And so instead we have a different term that's functionally identical. Absolutely. And we'll get into how much we both love ancient aliens and its accurate depiction of all of these things, right? Which is my favorite television show. So you mentioned how there's a big kind of renewal in, I guess, interest in UFOs or UAPs in the last number of years. And I'm, of course, going to use those terms interchangeably through the conversation, just so people are aware of that. What do you attribute all of this

kind of recent coverage and interest in UFOs to as we see the Pentagon releasing more information? We seem to have these kind of public groups that are kind of pushing for more action or more information to be revealed on this. Why now is that all happening? There's two, I think, big factors. And the first is it's easier to get video public. There was a big news story. It was one of those things that felt like, oh, it's just one of the stories that got buried in the day-to-day minutiae of the chaos of the Trump era. But in, I think, 2017, the New York Times released videos, and some of the videos included had already been on the internet. One of them had been on the internet for like nine years. But the news that really hit in 2017, this is sort of why the big shift is, is not just that these videos exist, but that the military has decided to,

with some nudging from Congress and some kind of cultural change in there, they've decided it's better to talk about them now than not, rather than have videos exist to not acknowledge them, or have evidence exist to not acknowledge them, which had been a standard practice for a very long time. One of the things we'll touch upon, and I wrote about this fairly recently at Popular Science, is Area 51, which has this sort of big cultural place as, oh, well, that's where they keep the aliens, and no, that's where the Air Force tests spy planes.

But the Air Force was happier having people believe other things and didn't formally acknowledge the flight test area at Groom Lake in Nevada, which may have been known as Area 51 at one point or colloquially referred to as such. They made a really terse, dismissive acknowledgement of it in the 90s. But that's a big shift from the previous decades of not acknowledging it at all. Absolutely. As a site that was set up in the 50s, right? Imagine it being around for 40 years and being like, yeah, that doesn't really exist out there. You can see how that whips up some conspiracy theories, right? What are they hiding from us? And that's sort of the fundamental thing when it comes to UFOs and when it comes to UAPs, is that it's not just that there are things that can be spotted in the sky. The military can spot

in the sky. The military tends to have lots of aircraft and lots of sensors in there, but other people can sometimes observe or report. But you have this whole thing of like, well, there's stuff, and then there's what we can talk about from what we know. And so one of the things that came up with the Area 51, that's where they tested the U-2 spy plane. The U-2 spy plane was very secret for a long time, and then the Soviets shot one down in the early 60s. So it had a secret window, and then it still tried to keep some of its stuff secret, but you don't scream to the world, by the way, we have a high altitude spy plane that's going to be taking photographs of your stuff. Even if it's a plane, right? It's hard to hide things in the sky, but it is kind of easy to

say, no, no, no, that's the glare off of an airliner coming at you weirds. Yeah, totally. It's something else. It's definitely not our spy plane up there you're you're seeing something different i want to go back for a second to this kind of recent interest in ufos and like obviously i will be completely honest that like it was something that i was interested in as like a kid and a teenager like you know the conspiracy theories of area 51 and ufos and like i was totally into that shit right more recently i've come around to your kind of viewpoint and i find that you you know outline theories of area 51 and UFOs. And like, I was totally into that shit. Right. More recently, I've come around to your kind of viewpoint and I find that you, you know, outline it really well, which is why I wanted to have you on the show. And like, I rewatched independence day recently

because it was recently independence day. I figured why not, but it's so fascinating just to see like how all of these like elements of these conspiracy theories have made it into popular culture in such a dominant way, in such a way that so many people are aware of, not just in North America, but around the world, and how that also then influences, I guess, the opinions and views of people in political positions of power because they also don't know. And then that kind of pushes them to want to find out more themselves. Yeah. So one of the other big reasons that we have this is the late Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, champion of Nevada and its interests and its peculiarities, was friends with a guy who had a company that was working on contracting out for development of

spacecraft to sell to the military and also happened to have an interest in this. And he had like a personal interest in it. And so this kind of is congealing where you have this push from, especially like this certain older generation of senators, this sort of passing generation of senators, but you had enough pilots there or former military and then some possessive from pilots. They're like, they'd seen some stuff. And're like well i'd what if i saw weird things

out of a plane i would want that to be believed which is part of the thing that came out with there were three videos that the new york times had stories of fascinating as news and also as an artifact about how to tell a story where the guy at the center of it also happens to be this former military go-between between contracting about studying it and also going to it. It's like, well, we have these things and we need to be telling a fuller truth about it. And when they're asking about it, there's a few places you could go. And it's the fuller truth that Earth is being visited by beings from another world.

And that's the flashiest one. That's what gets the clicks. That's how you write it. As someone who has eked out a freelancer living writing about how, well, not really. It's not going to be aliens. We should start with terrestrial causes. That's some clicks. It's not all the clicks.

But it's one of the things where you have this interest among the Senate and among military types, especially among like pilots. It's like, no, no, no. We should believe what they see and what their censors see. And so we should then acknowledge that what the mystery is not, oh, they interpreted it wrong, but the mystery is what was accurately captured. And if you're starting from a position of confidence in the human observers and certainty that they are in the

right to be observing things, then you have either a public conversation about what they're observing, or you have to maintain silence internally. Obviously, the military is an institution of keeping secrets, but it's also bad at it. There are degrees at which you can keep secrets, but you can't keep all of them all of the time or expect them to die in there. And you'd much rather, I think in this era, the military, generally speaking, prefers to have people trust its pilots and assume that there's a process for reporting these things, rather than when pilots get out and start talking about stuff they've seen, there's this whole doubt on not just what the pilots saw, but on the whole military for either covering it up or not believing them. Absolutely. And we know, I think we've been having these conversations in the past number of years about the over-classification that occurs within the US government more broadly.

And so we know that this is an issue. And so it's no surprise that obviously it's going to happen with military secrets more than anything else. And UAP as a term comes about because one, it's obviously it's a rebranding, but the other is that there's a place in the military now to report things. And there's sort of always like reporting mechanism, chains of commands have places for that, but there's a term they like to use called stove piping, but basically means things flow one way or through one channel. And so if you had a pilot in the 80s who saw something weird, they reported it, it would go to their fleet commander. And then the fleet commander would have to decide if it gets shared with other parts of the military, even other fleets.

And now there's a central place where the pilots can file their reports and say, oh, we saw this thing. And then that sort of lets that part of it take it on. And so it's very funny that there's sort of a hubbub around this thing. And then that sort of lets that part of it take it on. And so it's very funny that there's like sort of a hubbub around this one. It's basically just like an accounting term so that the military could go, oh yeah, we revisited your footage and that was definitely a high altitude balloon. Or, oh, you were flying weird and you saw the stars in the place in the sky you didn't expect to see. And to jump a little into history, we kind of had this before, where Project Blue Book, which exists as one of those big objects in pop culture that was really a collection of reports from people, but it shows up in Twin Peaks.

It's sort of everywhere. And just define that for us, what Project Blue Book is. Sure. So yes, Project Blue Book was an effort by the military, sort of a predecessor to See Something, Say Something, where they asked people to send in reports of things they had seen. And then they collected them, and then there was a study done by the University of Colorado Boulder, I believe, in the late 60s that looked at the reports. They were given access to the data and they were able to present an unclassified version of it. We'll get to why the secrecy of it matters in a second, but they published a version and said, okay, 90% of everything is explainable. And when we see things explainable, it's people would see

Venus in the morning in the light and go, that's got to be a UFO. There's this great academic, Kate Dorch, who does a lot of wonderful work. One story I learned from her was at a university in Texas, they kept getting weird lights that would show up. There was a geographer who was noting this. It was over my yard. There's a stretch where I always get these weird lights at night. And they just brought people over.

And then when they had an ornithologist over, it was like, that's geese. You're seeing geese on the migratory path at a weird time for you. But sure, of course they're silent and in formation. That's how that is. There's other stuff. There's the moon there. There's certainly lots of balloons. My favorite revelation in Project Blue Book is that Project Blue Book said 90% could be dismissed as natural or observable phenomena. But it's really 95% because of that remaining 10%, half of it was people accurately seeing things they weren't supposed to see.

So that U-2 spy plane, again, you fly them over the US. And when you have a look at the skies, and if you see something, send it into the government to report it so that we can catalog what's in the skies, you eventually get a critical mass of people reporting our own spy plane flights. And so in compiling Blue Book and in compiling the report, they would check with the National Security Agency or with the Air Force, and they go, okay, we can't tell you what it is, but we can tell you we know it's ours and you don't have to worry about it. And that's one of the reasons, really, that they stopped sort of doing this. The collection ends.

It doesn't happen in the 70s. It doesn't happen in the 80s. There's not really a public facing thing. The pivot goes from, oh, we're going to tell people we're going to trust our fellow citizens to look at the sky and send it to the military, and we'll come back with a clear scientific answer. And for a host of reasons, including the changed cultural moods and the perhaps history of military's bad job with public trust, owing to literally everything regarding the Vietnam War, we just won't talk about it, because if we talk about it, they'll believe we're kooky. And we'd rather just button down and pretend this isn't happening.

And we'll stop asking people to report things because they're getting too good at finding our own stuff. Which is so telling of how this all goes. I think it's fascinating as well because you talk about Project Blue Book, which just to be clear is like through the 50s and 60s is when this kind of reporting is happening. And you say in 1992, there was a declassification, which showed that again, you know, that final 10%, a bunch of that was the U-2 spy planes and stuff that people were just seeing up in the sky. But you wouldn't know that in the 60s, because it wasn't declassified. But then 20 odd years later,

or whatever whatever it does and then it's like oh okay this was just things they didn't want us to know and that we were seeing up there and it's also one of the things too where with that gap it goes from things they don't want us to know for a very mundane reason which is oh it's a spy plane and if you observe planes this is certainly uh there's a big fear of, oh, what if foreign agents are in the U.S. and they're taking good photographs of our planes? Then they can figure out how to solve our planes and shoot them down. These are extraordinarily mundane reasons to be secret about it, but it means you create this space. Oh, well, they don't want to talk about it because it's obviously aliens.

Roswell is the other really, really standout example of this. 1947 is quite the year for this stuff because there's a big flying saucer panic with a pilot who, again, pointing to his military experience. And he's a commercial pilot and he's flying alone. He's like, I saw three flying saucers in the Pacific Northwest. And there's been no conclusive thing there, but like clouds do weird shapes. It's one guy flying. There's all sorts of explanations you could have

that aren't just, obviously these are real and we need to be on the lookout. But early Cold War, 1947 is the same year that the whole US military gets rearranged. We pull the Air Force out of the army. We set up the NSA. NSA is listening for all the signals the Air Force out of the army. We set up the NSA. NSA is listening for all the signals, all the communications through the wires. Out of the country, the Air

Force is justifying its existence as we need to be looking for Soviet bombers, because that's how nuclear war will come. At that point, bombers were the only thing really that could do it. There's this whole effort to sort of like, oh, well, we know that we did something devastating with a plane. Anyone could be doing this. That's where you get the Cold War paranoia in. And Flying Saucer Panic hits in the middle of that,

and there's no clearer example than the object that crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico, where a rancher saw it before there was reporting of the Flying Saucers in the Pacific Northwest. And he goes back after seeing that report, collects it, goes, well, obviously this must be an alien thing. And then he brings it to the sheriff in Roswell, because that's what you do. And they're like, all right, well, we're going to call up the Army Air Force, and they're

going to send someone over. And to the delight of conspiracy theorists forever, the first guy the Army sent said absolutely a flying saucer. And the army corrected it and it's like, no, no, no. Balloon. Weather balloon. And that's where Roswell is, right? There's Deep Space Nine episodes about it. There's a whole soapy teen show about it.

There's a whole bunch of stuff that takes that whole incident. And the military was more truthful with the second explanation that it was a weather balloon. But the, again, declassified in the 90s explanation was it was an acoustic balloon. It was there to listen for the sound of Soviet nuclear tests. were familiar. So they got most of the way there, and then they had to do a follow-up explanation later, all of which is fairly mundane. But because of the culture of secrecy and the military understanding of secrecy, you can't say the honest thing first, and you create this room for the mostly true thing to be completely dismissed, and then the true thing to be kind of a fun trivia that you may be hearing for the first time today, rather than something you've known that sort of seeped into the whole myth of Roswell. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm happy you told that story because I found it so fascinating in reading your articles about it, how like, you know, this military guy comes out, he's like, oh, yeah, we can't tell them that it's like a balloon to pick up Soviet nuclear planes or

whatever. So yeah, it's a flying saucer. You found one. Good job. And then they're like, what have you done? Like, why did you do this? But the other thing I found really interesting was that the Declassified story comes out in the 90s. I was born in 91. And so my whole life, you know, when I was a kid and a teenager hearing about this stuff, I was like, oh, man, that Roswell story is so fascinating. They found the aliens there, blah, blah, blah. The truth of it never worked its way into the actual story. You could just continue dismissing that even though it was out there. about this. It's one of my favorite stories. It's a little indulgent to tell it, but I tell it basically every time I get to when I'm talking about this, because it predates the Flying Saucer Panic, and it provides a similar

example. I'm going to talk about the Kettering Bug, which is an aerial torpedo, which is a predecessor to both drones and cruise missiles. This was developed for World War I. It was about to be shipped off in November 1918, and the war was over, so it never saw action. But they had developed this for a year, and it's a secret weapon. It's a bomb that flies and crashes. It has a gyroscope to measure how far it's fallen, and at a certain

point, the wings fall off, and it dives into the ground. And it goes basically in a straight liner. That's how it's supposed to go. It's stabilized. It's very steampunky, dieselpunky. It's very rudimentary, but it's a secret military project, and they're testing it in Pennsylvania. On one of the test flights, it takes off, and rather than going its set distance's a live bomb and it's a secret project. And you don't want the Germans or the Pennsylvania Dutch or whoever to stumble across it. So they go out and they look for it. And they talk to people. And the people who were in the area, they're farmers or it's rural, they're talking.

And they say, oh, well, did you see a plane? It's like, yeah, the pilot must have been drunk. I saw him the way it was flying. It was crazy. It was wild. I saw him jump out. Must have seen a parachute. But the people who observed it invented for themselves a pilot that they saw parachute out. And when asked, they'd say, oh, yeah, that's what happened. He's at the army hospital. He's recovering. Because the other alternative they have in that moment would be to be honest and say, you didn't see a pilot. We just put a bomb in the sky without a pilot on board and we want to know where it crashed. And you get why the military doesn't want to tell that story, though it's the honest story. But divorced from a UFO panic, this is something that I,

I've written about the Kettering bug for a decade. I cover drones primarily. It's a big part of my beat, and I learned that story several years into the beat. I'm someone who thinks to know a lot about this thing. It's a minor trivia fact of this that could have been a UFO panic if it had hit in the right environment. Absolutely. And I guess at the time that that came out, it was not really a thing that was associated with aliens or anything, I would imagine, right? I don't think so. It predates even the War of the Worlds panic. So there's like, I mean, it's out there, but the idea that you'd have a rural farmer who would associate that same thing when the likely explanation is you saw a plane at a distance and the pilot must have jumped out. Sure, plausible, but eyewitness testimony is unreliable for reasons. You mentioned Kate Dorsch earlier, and there was an interesting quote in one of the articles that

you wrote where I guess you spoke to her for it. She said, UFOs don't exist without the post-war national security state and the totalizing consequences of nuclear weaponry. And you've been talking about that a bit, but can you talk about how kind of the establishment of the Air Force and the interest in what is going on in the sky also kind of creates this reason to be paying attention to the sky and what's up there and kind of spins off this interest in what might be there, I guess. Yeah. So one of the most sort of remarkable moments of that, World War II, it was a sort of massive accelerator of technology and also of understanding of the world for Americans, right? The old quip of this is how Americans learn geography, but it was really also how we figured out what was actually on hand to nations. In the

war, you can poke any World War II dad or history buff and they'll tell you, oh yeah, they started the war with biplanes and horse-drawn logistics was a bigger part than anyone remembers. But you end the war, at least in the telling of the war, in the pop culture telling, in the US telling of the war, it ends with bombers that could fly for thousands of miles, drop a single bomb that could destroy a city. There's a separate piece about the degree to which the actual atomic bombing does that. There's great writing by Alex Wallerstein on the Journalist's Guide to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings that I highly recommend everyone read that talks through all that. people in September 1945 are now aware that planes can travel between continents, that there are

bombs that can fit in those planes that can destroy cities, and that this has happened in the space of a very short time from where things were. This is still, if we draw it to where, there's still rural electrification happening. These are the, if we draw it to where, there's still rural electrification happening. These are the same world where this is all happening. You have this sense that the world is small and changed. You also have to go with that. The War Department and the Department of the Navy get merged into the Pentagon. There's this whole idea of a permanent national security state, which is a huge change for the United States. The Navy had taken on before the war. The Navy had permanently done the managing conflict overseas with the Marines, and then the Army gets spun up and spun

down as wars happen. Instead, we have this permanent thing, and we have this new Air Force. The Air Force's whole stated mission really is they're the ones who can carry those big bombs. We have strategic command and there's other stuff that go and they expand and it's the nature of a bureaucracy to fill whatever niche it can and take on and secure its own survival. But you get this sense that the Air Force exists to protect the United States from a threat that could come at any time and from the sky. And that's a huge change in the sense of American vulnerability. And it's also a change of, it's particularly acute in the US because to the extent that US was a battlefield,

the places where the war was fought on US soil were Alaskan Islands, the territory of the Philippines, which becomes independent in 4G6. People forget or don't know that it was part of the U.S. and invaded the same day or hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. And Pearl Harbor was still a territory. Hawaii was a territory, not a U.S. state. FDR's notes, he debated whether or not to also include Philippines in the statement where he says they hit us on our soil there. And he instead just leaves it as we're making Hawaii,

or identifying Hawaii with that. But that's where this vulnerability comes. There's all this new tech, and there's a brand new bomb that can come from the sky. And that's when people start getting real jumpy. Absolutely. And I guess, obviously, you're talking about the later part of the 40s there, as the Air Force is established, and the Second World War starts to wind down and all this kind of stuff. But then very quickly, early in the 50s, we start to have the space race and, you know, the Soviets and America going up into space and blah, blah, blah. And I'm imagining that kind of also plays into this kind of fear as to like what's out there and whatnot. And absolutely. It's one of the things where, as the Soviets took their German scientists and we took our German scientists in every way, pretended that the entire V1 and V2 programs were definitely not built on concentration camp

enslaved labor. And we just throw Wernher von Braun into army research and then quietly over to NASA. And we have this wonderful public face of rocketry. The early Cold War is wild. But you have this space race. You have this wonderful public face of rocketry. The early Cold War is wild. But you have this space race. You have this notion. Sputnik, the Sputnik moment is often cited as the foundation for why the US sets up DARPA,

which is like, oh, well, we were surprised by someone else's technology. Never again, we're going to do things like invent the internet and robots that hunt caves and a bunch of other stuff. Decades. But Sputnik is one where the sky changed because another nation did something with a rocket. Now that's a lot. And then the sky changes all the time. We have satellite constellations now,

but in that moment, right, that's a first that's very different. And it's not just that it's changing, but it's a being thought of, seen and described. And there's this media environment in which this is something that's done as a threat. And the subtext of Sputnik and the space race is that these rockets can go very far and put things in orbit, and they can put things on the moon, and you can carry probes to other planets.

That's much later. But if a bomber flying to another continent in a long hours, hours long flight is a surprise, then rockets that can close that gap in a few hours or an hour, the ICBM flight time is basically roughly, we assume an hour from launch, you could have an ICBM impact anywhere on the world. And some of those rockets are the same, and that's happening. It's not so much in the 50s, but it's certainly by the 60s. That's what's going on out there. And there's just a big interest in what are we doing with space. If we, in our own level, if we could have had horses and biplanes in 1939 and we have rockets with nuclear weapons in the mid-60s how quickly could we be a star-born species how quickly could other planets have developed life that could travel to us and that's at the same time that the military is like trying to

be hush-hush about like a dry lake bed where it's flying spy planes in Nevada. That's like, it's a harsh desert, but it's not uninhabited. You can go there. And I think that's a really good transition to talk a bit more about Area 51. Obviously, you know, we've talked about it a bit, you know, this base that set up in 1955, where a lot of kind of spy plane work is being done, but in kind of the public imaginary, it's where the aliens are being stored from Roswell and whatnot, right? Can you talk to us a bit more about that base, like why it's established and why this kind of conspiracy theory is developed around that place in particular?

So there's a lot that goes into it. But basically, the origin of it is that there's a spy plane contest. The Air Force wants a new spy plane. We get the U-2. It's an early Lockheed, before Lockheed Martin contract. They deliver it under budget, they always like to say. And then they've been coasting on that for decades ever since. So they did one. Still in use, right? Still in use. So the fun kicker we can put on all of this is that it was a U-2 that took pictures of China's giant balloon that crossed the United States. There's a selfie of a U-2 pilot. Public domain, because military photos are either released or public domain, which is a fun thing.

But you can see the picture of an anonymous U-2 pilot taking a selfie with the Chinese balloon that flew across the US.S. in February. It's wild. I'm going to have to put a link to that in the show notes for listeners. Yeah, no, it's wild. I wrote about it for PopSci. It's an incredible moment. But so this plane has been in use forever.

It's a really good design. It turns out if you make a plane that can just stay aloft for hours and hours at a time, that's an enduring feature. That's aerodynamics more than any of the other kind of stuff you need that could be changed with technology. But they're looking for a place to test it. They want something. The military already has dry lake beds in California where it does

testing. The Groom Lake area in Nevada had been artillery testing. They cleared it up. They made it a place to test other planes. It's also where the United States tested a lot of stealth technology when it was working on that. And that's another one where the feature, like, so the U-2's big feature, right, is it's a very, very long wing and a narrow body. And that's how it can stay aloft for 10 hours, 12 hours at 70,000 feet above air level. It's,

they have to wear pressure suits to be in there. You also test the SR-71 Blackbird, the A-12 Oxcart, which are supersonics by planes that were designed to be faster than missiles after the U-2 was shot down. And then we test stealth there. And these are things where you cannot hide the geometry of the vehicle, but you can put it far away from people where you're flying. And that's what you do. That's what they did. And they would test things out there and then

they would look for other places to actually do the work on them once you had enough out there. It's a small base in the scheme of things, but it's a large air perimeter around it. What makes it extra weird is that it was acquired by the Atomic Energy Commission, which sort of predates the agency that's responsible for monitoring and safeguarding nuclear stockpile stuff. And it's adjacent to Air Range and adjacent to the Nevada Proving Grounds, where the United States did most of its nuclear testing when it was done devastating the Pacific and after it moved out of New Mexico. And so you have this thing, and then it just kind of there's an air of mystery around it. It's not super inhabited. It's there, but it's also people be flown in there

to do work, and then you'd have flying commutes in to do work and to do testing. Then it just ends up in the pop culture. People would go, and you get the conspiracy theories. You get the people who are watching for planes, and they start writing about theories. You get the people who are watching for planes. And they start writing about it. They start talking about it.

There was a really interesting – this is just something I didn't know, but I get to one of my favorite things about writing for Popular Sciences. I use it as an excuse to dive into the archives. And in the 90s, they had a feature on Area 51 where they purchased Russian commercial satellite photography of the thing to sort of acknowledge, like, no, no, no, there's absolutely a base here. We can see what's the publicly released stuff from the 60s and we could take a recent picture from the 90s and show you here's what's actually been built up here.

And then we get somewhat more public acknowledgement of it as a base for testing things. One of the other things they would test there is they would, if the U.S. got a hold of a, usually a Russian-made, but basically any aircraft made by another country that we might fight at some point, we would take it out there and test it where it could be observed and then trade against U.S. stuff and we could bread team and adversarial. There's a whole thing about it.

But so there's a lot of secrecy going on. There's people going to it and there's not a public acknowledgement. Again, it's not formally acknowledged really that it exists or has a role until the 90s. And when it is, it's because there's a fight over the military trying to secure more land around it to keep photographers and tourists away. Not tourists, but people who would go in and just scout it out.

Absolutely. It brings to mind what was a few years ago when there was that kind of meme about people who were all going to go to Area 51 at one time. I can't remember exactly what it was. There was a big Naruto run at Area 51. I should look up a more serious one, but the Wikipedia on that one, one of those very matter-of-fact things, this was a planned event, there were this many sign-ups, and there were this many people who showed

up, and there were a few arrests, and no one made it in, because you have it at every stage of it. It's, again, it's a harsh desert. It's far from things. If you are there, you can assume you are being surveilled by the military because it's a secret facility and they just have been in the habit of watching people who watch that site under the assumption that there's a plausible chance that they're either a dedicated weirdo hobbyist or they're a foreign spy posing as a dedicated

weirdo hobbyist. And it's not great, but it is what it is. And so it turns out that you couldn't just do a Facebook group and assemble enough people to storm a military base, but you could still get a meme out of it. Absolutely. And you talk about how at the Groom Lake facility at what we call Area 51, the U-2 was tested there, the SR-71 Blackbird, a bunch of other ones. These are the ones that are declassified. I'm sure that we can imagine that there are other things that are tested there that we don't know about and that they're probably in use right now. But the military doesn't want us to know that they're using until sometime in the future.

And it's one of the things where even if we knew everything that had been tested there, everything had been public and disclosed at this point, the nature of the facility and the nature of the secrecy around it makes it impossible to be accepted. If they had said, no, no, no, we've tested all of our things. Now you know where there are. There's programs here. It's the line in Independence Day, which is, if it doesn't exist, we just siphon off parts of the other budgets, and

that's how we fund this. And that's more clever than what the military actually does. There's just formally black budget lines, which is like, oh yeah, here is an amount in a classified budget for a thing. The B-21 Raider, the new stealth bomber that

the United States is buying and is built by Northrop Grumman. I think that was at Edwards. It wasn't there. It's big. The Groom Lake facility is also on the smaller side of where we test these things. But it's a similar one where for a long time, this was a thing that could be reported on. I've reported on it for a decade. But it was an acronym and the Black Budget amount. And we had a number that was given in a public statement in like 2014 or something to go in. It was like, well, in these year dollars, this is the amount of it. And they just kept that number for a decade saying, oh yeah, that's what it's going to

cost. It's going to stay that price forever. And that's one that we know about. That's one that's big enough where there's enough people working on it when it's a high enough profile thing that you have senators and representatives asking about it and saying, oh, well, we need this. It's very, very important that we have stealth bombers for all the stealth bombing needs we will have in the future. And there's other stuff that's smaller. They could be testing all sorts of drones and things. They could be testing aircraft we don't see yet when there is stuff. It's one of the things where it will be announced.

It's like, oh, it was tested there. It's like, yeah, that makes sense. I mentioned this in my Popsire 51 piece, but there's sort of a white whale of plane watchers, which is the Aurora, which is supposed to be a ramjet or scramjet powered airplane, which is a very, very fast way to fly, but it's really hard to get to the speed

where you are pushing enough air through that you can eject it out that fast. When we talk about hypersonics, you could do hypersonic testing there. They're also pretty overt that we're doing hypersonic testing at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, but I wouldn't be surprised if we also do flight testing of it there. One of the things that was fun in trying to poke around this is there's a public domain library of military photos that was created during the Iraq War to make sure that media could have things that the military curated for them to have. It's weird

in existence, like the military is obligated as the government to produce things into the public domain if they're declassified. And so sometimes you can search around and you go, I would like to see everything that's at an undisclosed location in Nevada. And you can, but you can't actually get things that are at Area 51, unless someone messed up in their labeling and you find a weird thing and it doesn't work well for a story. Not that this is what happened in image selection, but there is stuff out there that just gets sort of, oh, it's at Nellis Air Force Base or it's something else. Yeah, and I believe the military says that this facility is not actually called Area 51. Right, it's the Groom Lake testbed. They're very, as is the general cultural thing, the military is happy to not use pop cultural things

unless they really like them. One of the funnier parts to me specifically, I have no idea if this is funny to anyone else, about choosing UAP as the new UFO acronym is it sounds like all the failed acronyms the military tried to get people to use for drone, like UAV or UAS or RPV or whatever. They're going to do acronyms. They're going to have this sort of internal, you must know the lingo to talk about this

for us to take you seriously kind of bit. Totally. There's one other piece of this that I want to touch on. And that is, obviously, we've talked about how there was all this examination of these things that were seen in the sky in the past. Most of them were found to be explainable or classified military planes that they didn't want you to know about. or what people assume are UFOs when they show up on these videos and stuff is actually issues with sensors and sensors not picking things up properly. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and how that would work? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things is we see these videos released. There's these videos. They're black and white. Oh, well, that's familiar because we've seen military release videos of like, here's what an airstrike looks like. So an airstrike, we know that it's being shot've seen military-released videos of, like, here's what an airstrike looks like.

So an airstrike, we know that it's being shot in infrared. It has this thing to it. It's changing very, very recently that sometimes they'll tell you you have things that are in cameras that are designed to show, capture in visual light and produce video in visual light. But by and large, what we're seeing is functional cameras and functional sensors. And so if you have a camera, it may have a recording function, they often do, but what you will be doing is it'll be trying to look for heat against cooler textures. That's how you're doing your infrared. And then if you have that and you have it, say, linked to a missile camera or to a missile launching system, then what you're really having is an aiming system. And the calibrations

of how it's designed and how it's worked is to help you fire a missile from a plane at another plane or fire it at something on the ground. What that doesn't do is make it very good for filming in the air necessarily, because the parameters are different. You have it built to figure out how a missile goes into a place and have all that in there. And so that's a certain possibility of it. When the three big videos released by New York Times in 2017 have that feature to it, they're black and white. They look like the camera might be reading something wrong. There was a theory for a long while that one of them was perhaps capturing either a drop of water or a bug on the inside of the lens, which could certainly have an outsized effect, right?

We're certainly familiar in 2023 with you can do all sorts of things with computer-generated stuff, but we forget that there's a whole century plus of practical effects and weird tricks and weird ways that cameras get things wrong. And that's just the start of it. You could have speed tracking on it, but if you're trying to track the speed of an object with a camera designed for a missile against the ocean, and you don't have a good grasp of the size of the

object, then you could be wholly off. One of the things I think that came to light with the whole balloon panic of 2023, there was obviously the very, very large balloon from China that had a massive solar panels. It was a very big observable thing.

Then the U.S. Air Force shot down three other things. Those things, there's a really incredible reporting by Aviation Week, which tracks one of those objects to – it's a beautiful, charming, twee name straight out of a 50s Cub Scouty Go Science America project thing. Like Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, that's what it is. It's North Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade. And they had been tracking a high-altitude mylar balloon that they had put up and they put sensors on it. These are relatively new. Think of like a party balloon like you see in the grocery store. Like who buys these? But apparently there's a company that makes them for scientists.

And you put your sensors on it, and the sensors can transmit. They get the signal out there. It's light electronics. It's lighter than air. And it's big in the sense that it's a few feet, which is enough to get to the jet stream, 30,000, 40,000 feet up. And then you can have a balloon that you can launch in your backyard and make it around the world.

And that's a fun science project for an after-school bottle cap balloon brigade. But they tracked one of theirs to Alaska, and then they stopped tracking after the U.S. reportedly shot down a balloon over Alaska. And what might have happened, and what probably happened, is that the United States saw a balloon and shot it down. And these balloons have been happening for a decade. But it didn't seem clear in a lot of the reporting that the Pentagon was super familiar with this happening.

Turns out the community of niche hobbyist scientists and war planners are not necessarily as much of an overlap as they'd like to think. And one of the things that factors into that too with back to center error is NORAD, which is famous for tracking Santa, but is a network of radars designed to look for Russian nuclear bombers and missiles coming to the US. We're told after China's balloon arrived in the US to expand the parameters of their sensors. And so these are radar.

And radar, we think of it, oh, it sends out the radio wave. It hits the blip. It comes back. We know where it is. And as the plane moves, it tracks where it is and changes position and turns that into useful information. But it's sending out that radio wave and it has to, it's also processing it. How the tech works really matters for how we understand the world. And they filter stuff out. You have to filter stuff out or else you get everything and you don't have information. You

have to set your parameters of what are you looking for. And if you're looking for planes, they're big. Russia's nuclear bombers specifically are massive. They've been the same since the 50s and they have giant prop engines. Those are noisy on radar, so you can discriminate pretty much anything smaller than just this very loud thing. But if you expand your parameters, suddenly you're seeing more in the air. And there's a fun example of this where NORAD is also responsible for the defense of the US Capitol. And in 2015, a disgruntled postal worker upset about the state of democracy chose April 15th to deliver a set of letters and petitions calling for changes to the Capitol lawn. And he decided to make a spectacle of it by flying a gyrocopter, which he launched from

Northern Virginia and flew over the Potomac and onto the Capitol lawn. And the radars didn't see it. A gyrocopter, to back up just a little, is an ultralight plane-like thing. Instead, it looks like a helicopter. It flies like a plane. Instead of having fixed wings, it has a blade that spins. That's where it provides the lift. That lets it fly pretty slow and pretty low.

It's small. It basically looks like if a go-kart was a helicopter. And so he flies this little plane, this little flying machine there, and he gets arrested promptly. Guy flies a weird thing to the Capitol, sure. But there were congressional hearings. They're like, why didn't we see him? Why was our radar not there? There were three big reasons. One is he flew very low. That's out of sensor range.

The other is if the radars that they do have have to filter out things that are small, because otherwise, if someone brought several party balloons, or you had a flock of geese, or you had a particularly foggy morning, you would have an alert that there's an aerial attack on the Capitol when it was nothing. And so that's part of where you get this big sensor error in the pictures. You have to set the parameters and suddenly you're going to have gaps. And if you don't know about the gaps, you suddenly have this weird panic about what's happening. And so I think a lot of what we see with UFO sightings is we have tools that are not designed to capture them. And so I think a lot of what we see with UFO sightings is we have

tools that are not designed to capture them. And this is an old problem. In the 1950s, the Air Force went to Kodak and said, could you help us develop a camera we can put on planes to take pictures of unidentified flying objects? And they're like, great. What are the parameters of what we're trying to take pictures of? And they spent some time on it. And it turns out the problem was impossible to solve by definition, because you can't figure out the parameters to capture something unidentified. You can figure out how to capture something otherwise, but you can't do it. Fundamentally, it's unidentified. And if you don't know what you're looking for, you will create a sensor that can capture something, but it might not capture what you want. And that's a lot of work to put on a guess.

Absolutely. I appreciate you outlining that because I feel like when I read your stories, that was not a potential explanation for this that I had ever really considered. And then I read it and I was like, yeah, of course, that makes perfect sense that the sensors sensors will be picking up some janky things sometimes because, you know, they're not tuned properly or they're seeing something they're not used to seeing or whatnot. Right. And that doesn't mean that it's a flying saucer from another world that's up in our atmosphere that's coming to try to attack us and surveil us and whatnot. As we close off our conversation, I want to ask you a few more things kind of to wrap it up as we've had all this context around, you know, the conspiracy theories around UFOs, the relationship to the military and kind of the, their classification and how a lot of that kind of mixes up

these stories and makes it possible for those stories to continue. You know, why do you think there has been this kind of lasting interest in UFOs over all of these decades to the point where, you know, we have all these shows about them. I mentioned ancient aliens earlier and all this kind of stuff. And like, you know, it's very common in pop culture to be like interested in the alien stories and for these specific Roswell and Area 51 and all this stuff to continually show up. Like, why has that been so captivating for us? Why have we followed that for such a long period of time to the point where we see this renewal in it

in the past few years, where it seems to once again be capturing the imagination? So there's a few reasons. I think one of the most obvious ones is the idea of technological surprise is sort of a compelling American story that what if someone showed up from a faraway land in a way that was devastating to us and they also happened to be armed in ways we didn't know how to deal with and they had other intentions they were able to rain surprise devastation from the sky.

There's conscious or unconscious a lot of like, oh, what if US history happened to Americans instead? It happened to settler Americans instead of to Native Americans. What if US wars happened to people in the States rather than the people on the receiving end of the U.S. military. There's some of that in there. But it's also a great, vast possibility space. It's very easy to tell stories where the military is silent. And once the military has been silent on it, it's a hard thing. I don't think the military could come forward and say, oh, you're right, we admit this was censored error. These were the things that we can conclusively prove were hobbyist projects,

and these were the ones that we actually think are like Chinese aircraft that were somehow in our airspace that we don't want to acknowledge as such, or didn't want to. But now we are because we're honest Pentagon, which is not a thing we'll say. There's space for that. I don't know if we could believe there'd be a way for the public to accept it, even if it were told straight. But the military has to sort of rely on the fact that it is able to collect privileged information

and keep it such that it has a picture of the world that is different from how civilians and citizens see the world. That accurate may not be the case, but certainly different from it that they're acting on. And that's sort of the kind of just a side effect of a sort of permanent national security state. It's very much, I think, also downstream from the nuclear arsenals because the grim reality that any given moment is at most an hour away from nuclear launch should a handful of world leaders, including our president, decide to do so, it's not super comforting and it carries the whole devastation and ruin of all that we know. But the fact that, oh, well, there's a mystery out there that could come with rapidity and

change the world in a smaller or a tangible way, where it's an alien we talk to or it's a machine we see, at least lets you think about what it means to have that kind of surprise and technological disparity without then immediately going into a fit of despair about the continued existence of nuclear weapons and sort of a permanent low-grade nuclear alert state of modern life. Absolutely. And I feel like the piece that you outlined first about the kind of concerns that what we have done through history will now happen to us in the future seems to be something that always kind of returns in my mind when we look at these stories.

Like even watching Independence Day again the other day, it was like you kind of saw that motive. And of course, with so many of these stories, it's not like, will the aliens come and will they be our friends? It's like, they're coming and they want to destroy our way of life and take our stuff and blah, blah, blah, right? There's no chance that these are like a peace-faring people that we're going to interact with or whatnot. Right. Or it's certainly, I mean, it's one of the things where even Star Trek in its most optimistic says, well, you can get to a point, but you have to prove that you're a worthy explorer of space. And whatever they're doing with the timeline, they keep playing with it, but you have to get through some real devastating struggles to get to the point where like, oh, we converted the missile into a spaceship that can break the time barrier or what have you. There's a whole lot out there. And there's not a ton of space for optimism, but there's a ton of space for intrigue in UFOs,

though you can certainly write it that way. And sometimes errors reflect it. Totally. And final question to close off this very fantastic and intriguing conversation. Do you think there are UFOs out there? Are they up there? Or is this something that we just like to have some fun believing every now and then? I think when we are examining the possibility of life, I think it's fun to speculate, but I put my professional and personal energies into focusing on things with terrestrial origins. I will let the science fiction be the science fiction until first contact day,

and then I'll be sorely disappointed. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, for me, I think aliens are definitely out there somewhere, right? The universe is way too big for there to not be some other intelligent species somewhere. But do I think that they're in our atmosphere flying around in little flying saucers?

I'm not really buying that one. That's my view. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things where we can observe terrestrial things. When we've ruled out all terrestrial explanations, maybe we can start going to other ones. But boy, have we not ruled out all terrestrial explanations. Totally. Well, Kelsey, this has been a fantastic conversation. It's great to be able to chat about something that's a little bit different for our show, but still very kind of technologically relevant, just with a bit of a different spin on it. Thanks so much for taking the time. A pleasure. Slate, and many other publications. Twitter is imploding, so I'm not going to promote that, but you can follow the show or you can follow me or even Kelsey maybe on platforms like Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Instagram, you know, wherever else you might be getting social media these days, you can probably find us there. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week,

you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.