The New Yorker Radio Hour - Are U.F.O.s a National Security Threat?

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

In June, the director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense are expected to deliver a report about what the government knows on the subject of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” more commonly known as U.F.O.s. The issue is nonpartisan: while he was the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat, secured funding for a secret Pentagon project to investigate the subject; John Podesta, a chief of staff in the Clinton White House, argued for government transparency on the topic; most recently, the Republican senator Marco Rubio introduced language in last year’s Intelligence Authorization Act calling for the forthcoming report. This is a shocking turn of events. For generations, U.F.O.s were in the purview of late-night call-in radio shows and supermarket tabloids, not the Department of Defense. Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports on how this change came about. The journalist Leslie Kean, who published a bombshell story in the New York Times, explains how the C.I.A. got involved in casting doubt on U.F.O. sightings. Reid tells Lewis-Kraus that the Pentagon refused to authorize his inspection of contractor facilities which, it was rumored, held U.F.O. crash debris. And a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Christopher Mellon, says that the phenomena observed in many sightings cannot be explained as advanced technology built by one of our rivals. “I really doubt that the Russians or Chinese could be that far ahead of us,” he says. “It looks like centuries ahead.” So, whereas the word “aliens” still seems like taboo in serious conversation, he adds, “it's hard to come up with a hypothesis to explain that without considering the possibility that some other civilization is involved.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously” appears in the May 10th issue of The New Yorker. This segment features scoring by Pablo Vergara. Additional archival clips were provided courtesy of James Fox. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you told me when I took this job that one day I would be publishing a long story about UFOs, I probably would have guessed we were talking about some sort of humor piece by Patty Marks or Ian Frazier. I wouldn't have imagined that we'd be publishing thousands and thousands of words on serious government programs investigating UFOs, or quoting officials on the record to the effect that UFOs are a pressing issue of national security. But times change.

And Gideon Lewis Krauss, a staff writer, has just published exactly that kind of piece in The New Yorker. Here's Gideon. One afternoon in mid-April, I was at the playground with my son when I got a frantic text message from one of my sources. Breaking huge UFO news, it said. And there was a link to a website that had a series of photos. and a video of some green glowing triangles against the starry night sky.

At this point, I'd been working on a story about UFOs for four or five months, and it wasn't so unusual for me to get these kinds of texts with these kinds of links to grainy footage of dubious provenance. But what was really weird about the triangle video was what happened the next day. The Pentagon came out and said, yes, in fact, this was ours. The video was allegedly shot from the deck of the USS Russell, off the coast of San Diego in 2019. In the week since, some people have cast doubt on the video,

and it probably doesn't show a UFO. But the point of the story is, the triangle video made international headlines. In night vision video from a Navy destroyer, a mysterious flying triangle above the deck of the ship, the Pentagon confirming the images obtained by documentary. All of a sudden, UFOs were something that people talked about. Guys, okay, that's crazy.

You know, I don't want to say I don't believe because I don't want them to come prove me wrong. For the first time in decades, it had once again become perfectly reasonable to admit that you were interested in UFOs. You know, it's kind of like you can chase your tail on this story. John Podesto was chief of staff in the Clinton White House, and then he served as an advisor to President Obama. And for a long period of time, he was one of the few visible public officials who was willing to speak out about government transparency and UFOs. I think it was sort of viewed as a career-ending event that you'd be viewed as someone who is a little bit nutty. People would accuse you of seeing little green men around the corner, so people avoided it. Over the last few years, there's been an enormous and rapid change in the way the government addresses the UFO topic.

And all of that is expected to culminate this June, when the unidentified aerial phenomena task force is expected with the participation. of the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to produce a report about what the government does and does not know about UFOs. I give Senator Reid a lot of credit for this. Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader. He pushed to have the Pentagon start a small program to basically collect the information. And lo and behold, there was information collected. and then it was released. And I think Leslie Kane, her dogged reporting on the issue, had something to do with it.

In late 2017, Leslie Kane brought a bombshell story to editors at the New York Times. The article, which appeared in December of that year and was written with two other reporters, revealed the existence of a secret Pentagon program funded by black money that had long looked into the existence of UFOs. She is so proud of her work that she has a copy of the article framed on her wall. Yeah, I mean, the first one was in December 2017, which is over here.

That was the one that blew the lid off. Can you read us that headline? Yeah, well, the print headline is real UFOs, question mark, Pentagon Unit tried to know, which actually is a much better headline than the one that was online, which was kind of stupid.

Of course, I guess that was the one about glowing oros. Glowing oras or whatever. and that's what set the whole thing in motion. Leslie Kane has been on the UFO beat for more than 20 years. Her 2010 book, UFOs, generals, pilots, and government officials go on the record was a bestseller. The office in her apartment doubles as a kind of archive. And if you're looking for any kind of official document about a UFO case or encounter dating back to the 1940s, she almost certainly has it close at hand.

There's actually a photograph, a black and white photograph on the wall behind you. Can you tell us about that photograph? What is that a photograph of? I love this photograph. It's probably the best photograph of UFO ever taken. It was taken in the 70s from a government mapping plane in Costa Rica, which had a camera strapped on the bottom of the plane, and it was like going over the terrain. There was this disc object, and you can clearly see the sun reflecting off this round object. It's got a little dot on the top. And what's important about it is that it was a government photo. There's a clear chain of custody. It's always been the possession of the Costa Rican government. So, you know, you know it's authentic and it's completely unexplained.

It might seem astonishing that the culture has become so open to the UFO conversation. But when the sightings first began, roughly speaking in the late 1940s or so, they weren't dismissed so quickly. This was the beginning of what Leslie calls the golden age of UFOs. In 1947 alone, there were close to a thousand official sightings. Airline pilots, with thousands of hours experience, have reported saucers coming within a few hundred feet of their planes, matching speed briefly, and then darting off at supersonic speed, leaving a glowing exhaust trail. In 1947 alone, there were close to a thousand sightings. They hung there in the sky, and they were, to us, had the appearance of tubes of fluorescent light.

The U.S. was in the grip of a flying saucer mania. A beautiful, silvery, pink-tinged moonlight. This is Edward R. Murrell. We're going to talk about flying saucers. The prevailing scientific attitude was that UFOs didn't exist because they couldn't exist. My thought is simply that the ability of some people to kid themselves is extraordinary. But it was also the beginning of the Cold War, and members of the military, at least in private, took it much more seriously than they were generally willing to let on.

So Lieutenant General Nathan Twining was the commander of Air Force Material Command, so he was a high-level Air Force guy. And he sent a memo around. The title of the memo was Flying Disks. This was a lieutenant general in the Air Force, who later went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He stated that the phenomenon, this is the line that's really famous from this memo, the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictive.

So it was that memo that led to the founding of Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book ran from 1952 through the end of 1969. And for the first few years at least, it really did try to chase down what was going on with these sightings. In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours. The National Archives have 37 cubic feet. of cases from Project Blue Book. Each cubic foot is about 2,000 pages. General Sanford, Air Force Intelligence Director,

confirms that the objects are not secret American weapons and reiterates the Air Force's obligation to investigate. Since 1947, we have received and analyzed between one and 2,000 reports that have come to us from all kinds of sources. Of this great mass of reports, we have been able adequately to explain the great bulk of them, explain them to our own satisfaction.

However, there have been a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. By the time it shut down, Project Blue Book had logged more than 12,000 cases. In the end, 701 of them remained officially unexplained. That's an average of about 40 cases for every year that the project. ran. My understanding, and I think I drew this from your book, is that the view of at least many influential high-level officials, was that it wasn't that UFOs themselves were the problem. It was that the UFO reports were the problem, that there were too many UFO reports, and that

Blue Book had to do something to handle just that volume of UFO reports. Yes, the concern about all the reports and all the attention was really an issue, and that's why the CIA convened this panel in 1953 called the Robertson panel in which they sort of set up a policy to debunk UFOs. And that was sort of the, that's when the train left the station in terms of this sense of ridicule that has, that goes through decade after decade after decade, but it was kind of put in place by the CIA panel. So the CIA was working actively to undermine the belief in UFOs. But by then, a fascination with flying saucers had become just part of the culture. UFOs were being written about all the time in the mainstream media.

One of the times that I visited you, you showed me a bunch of those vintage magazine covers, stuff from Life and Look in the Saturday Evening Post. Can we look at some of those? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right over here. Yep, so let's see. Here's one. Read that headline. This one? Yeah.

Luminous pulsating shapes that hover in the night. It's a pretty good description of a year. UFO. And there were a bunch of great photographs here. That sort of look like beetles in the sky. I know. This is the, this was the, um, swamp gas case. The swamp gas case near Ann Arbor, Michigan in March of 1966 was a pivotal moment. Most spectacular sighting was last Sunday night when witnesses say a mysterious lighted object spent several hours in the swamp land behind this pasture. More than a hundred people reported it. It's third appearance in less than a week.

There's an amazing video of this witness. Are you sorry now that you did tell people what you saw? Yes, I am. I'm sorry because it's not the truth, but it's just the idea of the reaction to the people. They think you're a nut, tell you the truth. That's just what they figure you are. And I'm not going to take it anymore. I don't want nobody down in here.

I just leave me alone. And if the thing lands right there by that pump, I'd never say a word. Project Blue Book's in-house scientist, the astronomer J. Allen Heineck, was dispatched to investigate. He found a community in a state of what he called near hysteria. And the lights were still fluctuating and seemed to be rotating and it was hovering. Under pressure to avert panic, he called a press conference at which he said that the orbs that had been seen were mistaken cases of the planet Venus or other astronomical bodies.

And that other things could be explained by the spontaneous. decomposition of vegetation, or what he called marsh gas. I want it clearly understood that I'm not making a blanket statement to cover the entire UFO phenomenon over the past 20 years in this and other countries. Doctor, could you face this way, Mark? Yeah, all right. Thank you. I emphasize in conclusion that I cannot prove in a court of law that

marsh gas is the full explanation of these sightings. But it does appear to me extremely likely. I am, after all, an astronomer and not a chemist. It was inevitable that there was going to be a clash between a public who generally believed in the existence of UFOs and a government whose official policy was one of skepticism. Swampgas became a kind of shorthand for official contempt. Gerald Ford, who was then the House Minority Leader,

was outraged on behalf of his constituents. He thought that this was an affront to their dignity. And he called for congressional hearings to look into whatever it was that was going on. He thought that the Air Force explanations that had been provided were clearly insufficient. Mr. Secretary, there have been charges that the Air Force is hiding something in the UFO field. What is that, if anything? We have not been hiding anything. And by the end of that summer, it was determined that some independent outside body

should be commissioned to get to the bottom of whatever was going on. Gideon Lewis Krauss. His report on UFOs and how they became somehow a part of the national agenda once again continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In June, the Department of Defense is expected to release a report on unidentified aerial phenomenon. And the report's purpose is to explain what the government does and doesn't know about UFO sightings after 70-plus years. To understand how this got on the national agenda in the first place, we're hearing from Gideon Lewis Krause, who's reporting for the New Yorker. Just a moment ago, Gideon described a notorious incident in Michigan where more than

a hundred people reported hovering lights over a marsh near Ann Arbor. There were public hearings, and eventually Congress authorized a commission to write a report. Gideon Lewis-Crowse takes it from here. The government commission was based out of the University of Colorado. It was headed up by a scientist named Edward Condon, who was a very prominent figure. He was a nuclear physicist. Condon made it quite clear, long before the study was completed, that he thought this whole UFO business was absolute bunk. Dr. Condon, what sorts of things do you think people will be reporting to you that they're seeing? Well, I presume the same sort of things that they have been reporting for the last 20 years, and those are bright stars and meteors and the moon shining

through clouds. By the time the Condon report appeared in 1969, its conclusions were foreordained. But the report itself is something really strange. It's over a thousand pages long, and the only parts that Professor Condon wrote were the summary and the recommendations and conclusions. And it almost seemed like he hadn't read the rest of it. Because of the 90 Blue Book cases that the Condon Committee chose to look up. 30 of them remained at the end unexplained. One of them was attributed to

a mechanical device of unknown origin under intelligent control. There was nothing about the Condon report that suggested that the phenomenon should be dismissed out of hand, and yet that was Condon's recommendation, that there was no reason to entertain further scientific study, that nothing

would be gained by the study of unidentified flying objects, and that it's something the government should just leave alone. It was like, you know, putting the nail in the coffin. That's journalist Leslie Kane again. And so anybody from then on who wanted to stay away from it could just cite the condom report. Hi. Hi. All right. You think that there's some sort of genetic motive, some sort of genetic motive behind all they are doing with human abduction. Is that correct?

From that point on, UFO discourse was dominated by talk of alien abduction. alien corpses, secret hangers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, ancient alien astronauts, alien bases under the sea, massive government conspiracies, the majestic 12, a group of 12 men who had been convened in secret by President Truman in the interest of national security to protect Americans from our true secret dealings with galactic civilizations. You've been a surrogate mother for aliens three times. At least. I think it's more like seven times. Seven times?

Yeah. Yeah. All of this stuff is what dominates UFO discussions for the next 50 years. Until 2017, when Leslie Kane dropped her bombshell report. In October of 2017, you were called to a hotel. bar near the Pentagon. Not really a bar, but anyway. A hotel space. Hotel space, hotel lobby space, near the Pentagon.

And who was there and what did you learn? Well, the main reason for that meeting was for me to meet Luis Elizondo, who was the former head of the Department of Defense program. And Christopher Mellon, who was a former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence at the Pentagon, was there. and a former CIA person. And it was at that meeting that I was first shown the videos, the three videos that eventually came out,

as well as a lot of documents that established the reality of the program. This man, Luis Elizondo, was a former counterintelligence officer. He'd been running a secret program at the Pentagon for years studying UFOs. That program had begun in 2007, when Nevada, Senator Harry Reid had found $22 million in black money appropriations to set up an investigation into the reality of the phenomenon. Well, I came to the realization, in spite of all my staff telling me to stay the hell away from it, that it was something that had to be done.

That's Harry Reid. I think it would have been a legislative malpractice for me not to get involved. And in hindsight, it hasn't heard to be politically. In fact, I can go today in one of the hotels here in Vegas. So I'll say, are you Harry Reid? And I'll say yes. And they'll say, thank you very much for your work on flying saucers. The program that Reed funded did a lot of things,

but one of its chief preoccupations was looking into the futuristic technologies that would have to be behind a UFO with the sorts of flight characteristics that had been observed. The operative question was, if you were the Pentagon and wanted to build a UFO, you know, your own flying saucer. How would you go about doing that? And there were lots of people at higher levels who made it difficult for them, who didn't think this was appropriate, that they were even studying it. People had attitudes. There were also people who had religious attitudes about this, who had a lot of power, who didn't believe that UFOs were something that we should be studying for religious reasons. So, right, because they think that they could be demons.

Demonic or something like that. Louis Alizando felt sidelined by the neglect of his work from Pentagon higher-ups. He never got to brief the Secretary of Defense, and in his mounting frustration, he publicly resigned. A few days later, he met with Leslie Kane at that hotel near the Pentagon. She left that meeting with three videos from the project. One of them shows a small white object moving at a rapid clip against a gunmetal background. What was your experience with the Pentagon in those years? Did it seem to you like the DOD was pushing back against investing in these questions? Or did they seem cooperative?

The Pentagon, yes, they did push back. The higher-ups thought this was who finished. But now the Pentagon has changed dramatically. Now they're asking their pilots to report these things. That's why we learned about the pyramids that were floating around. And captains of ships now are able to speak out. One question that I have has to do with this issue of potential retrieved crash debris that was reported on last summer.

And it certainly seems like many of the figures you've described, like Lou Elizondo, you know, he went on Tucker Carlson. And Carlson said, do you believe that? you know, there's compelling evidence of, you know, that we have retrieved crash debris and Elizondo said yes. Well, I don't know what he knows, but he must know something I don't know because I cannot confirm all that. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like anybody really knows of any, but, you know, certainly, I mean, my guess is that you and I have both heard the same, the same stories. I mean, there are these stories that circulate that some people at least find

pretty credible and compelling. Well, and that's, I have no problem with that. I personally can't confirm that, and I think that it's people can come up with a little more clear foundation on that. I'll like it even more. But right now, I haven't seen that. And I was told, I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials. and I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff.

They would not approve that. I don't know what all the numbers were and what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me. Did they give you a reason for that? No, they didn't have to. It was a yes or no, and it was a no. Okay. clear, Harreid is not saying that he knows for a fact that some private military contractor somewhere

in an obscure hangar has crash debris retrieved from a UFO. He did, however, suspect enough substance in these rumors that he personally tried to get to the bottom of them. And as Senate Majority Leader, he made an effort to secure Pentagon approval to go and visit these military contractors. He was denied. Now, the overwhelming likelihood is that this was just an elaborate, multi-generational game of murky, Cold War, flying saucer telephone. And that at some point we had, in fact, retrieved crash debris from a secret Soviet spy satellite. And that over time in an atmosphere of opacity and paranoia, that became a story of secret UFO crash debris. It could be that, but now we're here. I think some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained.

John Brennan, the former CIA director. And could involve some type of activity that some might constitute a different form of life. John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence. There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. When we talk about sightings, we're talking about objects that have been seen. by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery.

Senators like Mark Warner and Marco Rubio were briefed on all this stuff. So, Senator, what about that? What can you tell us about UFOs? Well, we have things flying over military installations over military exercises and other places. And we don't know what it is. It isn't ours.

It isn't anything that's registered to the FAA. And in many cases, exhibits attributes of things we've never seen technology, the kinds of technology we haven't seen before. or at least that's what it seems like. I think you have to know what it is, or we have to try to know what it is. That's my view of it.

Without any preconceived notions, maybe there's a logical explanation. Maybe it's something that can be explained away. Maybe it's a foreign adversary who's made a technologically. Whatever it is, we need to know the answer to it. That's a former serious presidential candidate talking. But Rubio has gone further.

He oversaw the introduction of language in last year's Intelligence Authorization Act, which was passed in December, that stipulated that the Director of National Intelligence, along with the Secretary of Defense, had 180 days to produce a comprehensive report about what the government did and did not know about UFOs. Part of the problem has been here to four. Nobody was collecting this information, and it wasn't being reported to any central authority. So to this day, we still don't know what we know.

Chris Mellon was a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for both the Clinton and Bush administrations. He helped break Leslie Kane's reporting on the Pentagon's secret program. I don't think they're going to indicate anything to do with aliens. I don't think that hypothesis is going to be referenced at all. But I don't think they're going to be able to say that there's no potential threat to national security. I really doubt that the Russians or Chinese could be that far ahead of us. It looks like centuries ahead. Nobody wants to use the word aliens.

But Mellon says that if our adversaries really had the technology to build the objects that have been observed, we would know about it. So what does that leave? There's no combustion engineering. There's no air intake. There's no exhaust. There's no wings. They fly elevations from from outer space down to the surface and then hovering. One of the things the task force is starting to do is try to want to do is go back and look at some of these databases,

which are actually designed to exclude aircraft that don't meet a conventional known profile, like a conventional missile or jet. So they won't even display that on the radar operator's scope, even though the system's detecting and recording something going, say, 7,000 miles an hour. So it's hard to come up with a hypothesis to explain that without a, considering the possibility that some other civilization is involved. The vast majority of the time, the experience of reporting describes a familiar arc from near complete ignorance to at least the performance of some expertise on a subject. But my experience here has been the complete opposite. That I feel like the more I look into this, the less I know about it.

The more people I talk to, the more confused I feel. become. This is a subject that my experience in reporting this piece has not been that of clearing up a mystery, but of deepening it. Gideon Lewis Krauss. His reporting on UFOs, or as they're sometimes called unidentified aerial phenomenon, is at New Yorker.com. That's our program for today, and I want to thank you for listening. Next time, we'll tag along with critic Hilton Alls, visiting his first museum show since the pandemic started more than a year ago. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Rianan and Corby, Calilea, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle, Moses, Annabel Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison Magadam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann. This week's episode features additional music by Pablo Vergara, and we had additional help from Harrison Keith Line. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.