Today, Explained - The truth is out there

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

UFOs are having a renaissance. The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus explains what we stand to learn from an expected government disclosure, and why we want to believe. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. When I was a teenager, I was not impervious to the charms of a sophomoric popular punk trio that went by the name Blink-182. I wasn't alone. The band's third album, Enema of the State, sold something like 15 million copies, making them one of the biggest bands on the planet at the turn of the century. The record came out almost 22 years ago to the day, on June 1st, 1999. It featured songs about girls, about parties, about being super immature around girls at parties,

and one song about aliens. Hey mom, there's something in the back room. As a 14 year old, it didn't strike me as particularly strange to hear one of Blink's songwriters, Tom DeLonge, confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life. But things did take a surprising turn some years later. Tom DeLonge would leave Blink-182. He'd eventually found an organization dedicated to studying UFOs. And that organization, founded by a guy who once wrote a song called Dysentery Gary, would become credible. So credible that it was cited in a sort of game-changing article about UFOs that ran in the New York Times a few years ago. And any time now, sort of because of that article in the New York Times, the federal government is expected to release a trove of data on UFOs.

It'll be the first time such information will be seriously discussed in public by the United States government in decades. UFOs are having a real serious moment in America. I mean, even in just the last couple of weeks, it's been just an explosion of attention to this topic. So yes, I think we can confidently say we're in the midst of a UFO renaissance. The question is, who knows how long this will last? I mean, there have been times where this kind of thing has flared up in the past and then dissipated fairly quickly. But for now, yeah, absolutely. Gideon Lewis Krauss wrote a big, huge New Yorker piece about UFOs. We asked him if this government report is going to fundamentally change our

understanding of the universe or what. I mean, the people that I talk to who know the most about this said to me, look, the odds are very, very slim that there's going to be anything earth-shattering in this report. This report is not going to reveal that the government has been in secret league with some intergalactic federation for 70 years. The government is not going to reveal that we have, you know, crash saucers, that we've been reverse engineering. Extremely disappointing. So what will this report be? It seems like, I mean, there are certainly some people who think that this report is just an important kind of introductory wedge to pursue further investigations of the topic.

I think that's just like a good first step. There are other people who have stressed that one of the functions of this report is to draw together lots of disparate agency data that could be put to use in, you know, gaining a better awareness of what's going on in our airspace. Part of it is really just a data collection issue. But fear not, dear listener, this will not be an episode about data collection issues. This episode will be about UFOs. I mean, by far the best known case at this point, and one of the cases that motivated a lot of this renewed interest was the so the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was training about 100 miles

southwest of San Diego. For a week, the advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, had detected what operators called multiple anomalous aerial vehicles over the horizon, descending 80,000 feet in less than a second. And these were showing up for about a week, and then finally after about a week, they said, well, we might as well have this checked out. So they vectored two F-18As to go see what was going on, to intercept one of these. So these two planes with four pilots,

most notably this commander, David Fravor, who's shown up in 60 Minutes, a bunch of this stuff. And most recently now his wingwoman, Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, who had never spoken in public before. These four pilots give the same story, that they showed up and there was kind of a roiling shoal beneath the water about the size of a 737, as if there had been some subsurface

disturbance. And we saw this little white, tick-tack looking object, and it's just kind of moving above the white water area. Do you ever drop your phone and it sort of bounces off the countertop and then bounces off something else and then it's sort of like no predictable movement, no predictable trajectory? Yeah. It was just... It was predictable movement, no predictable trajectory. Yeah. It was just...

It was just like a ping pong ball. Then Commander Fravor descended. The Tic Tac registered his presence, swerved, kind of mirrored his feints for a few minutes. So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up. So it's mimicking your moves. Yeah, it was aware we were there. And then this Tic Tac just darted off at some ultrasonic velocity. You know, I think that over beers we've sort of said,

hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything because it sounds so crazy when I say it. Subsequently, a fifth pilot went out with an infrared pod and recorded this video known as FLIR 1. I don't know who's building it, who's got the technology, who's got the brains, but there's something out there that was better than our airplane. Okay, so this Nimitz encounter features some pretty credible-seeming pilots who we just heard on 60 Minutes talking about seeing some UFOs darting around,

descending at 80,000 feet a second. It's pretty persuasive stuff, but I'm guessing there's a reason to be skeptical here? So there are reasons to be skeptical of each component in isolation. So some of the skeptics, most notably this guy, Mick West. Today, the Navy officially released three videos of UFOs. He's a retired video game designer and he's made a living out of debunking a lot of these videos. The internet immediately took this as meaning that aliens are real, but the videos are not actually new. He's pointed out that, like, actually this really could have just been an error on the part of the pilot who didn't flip the zoom, and that really... This object doesn't actually move on screen, except when the camera moves, and it resembles an out-of-focus, low-resolution, backlit plane.

I don't know what the pilots saw, but this video does not show anything really interesting. You know, in Mick West's version of this, well, there had been this radar upgrade, and maybe the radar wasn't calibrated very well, and so all of a sudden the radar was picking up clouds, or it was picking up birds, and then, well, what did these pilots see? A target balloon, and then what did the subsequent pilot film? Well, the subsequent pilot filmed a commercial plane. These videos don't show evidence of any kind of advanced technology. So unfortunately, the real explanations, while fun to investigate, are probably pretty boring.

That all seems perfectly persuasive when you watch Mick West's videos, but he can only determine that by essentially writing off the rest of the evidence. Well, that actually sounds a lot less persuasive. That just sounds like this perfect storm of alternate theories. I mean, that's one of the things that the UFO people often say in reply is that like in a weird way, Occam's razor would be, oh, it's much likelier that there was some kind of actual UFO, whether it was extraterrestrial or whether it was developed by some adversary, than like this string of crazy coincidences that have to be put together to mount this alternative explanation. So, you know, at a certain level, there's just this argument over like the basic attitude toward the data, where one side says, this is a whole bunch of randomness assembled to mean something. And the other side says, well, like, if you're going to say that that's a plausible explanation,

why won't you even grant that there's like the plausible explanation that this in fact was one thing that was seen and we don't know what it was? I mean, if we are to take these pilots seriously and to trust their accounts, what are we accepting exactly? Are we accepting that they saw something real that we can't explain? Or are we saying aliens exist? Well, so, you know, certainly even the pilots themselves will be the first people to say, like, the far likelier explanation is that this is either our own classified technology or the classified technology of an adversary.

Clearly, that's going to be the explanation you reach for before you reach for extraterrestrial explanation. Now, there are problems with those explanations though, right? So if we are to believe what has been the flight characteristics attributed to these things, it seems hugely unlikely that they would be a foreign adversary's technology because we would know about some of those interim steps. That there's no way that you make

that kind of overnight leap and there's no trace of the interim steps there. And if you pursue that even further, this Nimitz encounter was in 2004. So you think that this was developed 20 years ago. They had functional prototypes 20 years ago, that, you know, they had functional

prototypes 20 years ago, and then they've never used them? Because it seems like if you have that, you would probably want to use it to demonstrate, like, your complete technological dominance. Right. Like when the United States dropped the atomic bomb or something like that. Exactly. I think it's pretty rare to find a time lag where you've developed some super secret technology and then you don't use it for 20 years. So what you're saying is, if you accept that these pilots saw what they think they saw, what you are accepting is that there is extraterrestrial life that has visited our planet? The problem is that, like, all of these arguments are arguments by process of elimination. Process of elimination is just not a great style of argumentation.

It's not airtight. It's subject to all kinds of bad initial assumptions. But yeah, I mean, lots of people follow that logical path you've just laid out, and that's the conclusion they come to. You can't help but acknowledge the fact that or we just had a bunch of rioters stage an insurrection on our Capitol building. I just, the first thing I think when something like that happens is,

man, we're not ready to discover some sort of intelligent life out in the world because we look like shit right now. What would it mean if humanity all of a sudden had to acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrial life? I mean, in a particular time where it seems like we truly cannot agree on anything. bipartisan appeal in America. This has not somehow broken down along predictable culture war lines. This is something that everybody likes to talk about UFOs, and maybe

UFOs are going to be the thing that allow us to heal the divisions in our country, because everybody likes UFOs. But, I mean, on a more serious level, Ezra Klein wrote a very nice column that was kind of a follow-up to my piece talking about, you know, exactly that question as like, what would this look like?

Sorry, who's that? Ezra Klein. But seriously, imagine tomorrow you have an alien craft. It crashes down in Oregon. There are no life forms in it. It's, I guess, a drone, basically. But it's undeniably extraterrestrial in origin. So we have the knowledge that we're not alone, that we're maybe being watched,

and we have no way to make contact. How does that change human culture and society? You know, I talked to this guy, Avi Loeb, who is the Harvard astrophysicist who had determined that this object that passed through our solar system a couple of years ago might have been the detritus of some alien civilization might have been a light sail or something and in his book he says look what would the consequences be if we believed that this could have been an artifact of an alien

civilization and he has a very sunny, optimistic view, which is that this would immediately weld us together as a species. We would let go of our petty tribal divisions and jealousies. It would represent a global kind of Sputnik moment where all of a sudden we would be motivated to stop arguing about stupid bullshit and come together. And once we had seen a demonstration that this kind of thing was possible then we would pour all of our resources into becoming ourselves a cosmic civilization but this could just as easily go the other way right

the superpowers could potentially just turn on each other like in the amy adams alien movie arrival problem is not everyone shares our policy of being open with the aliens. Have you met General Shang? The call sign for him is Big Domino. Whatever Shang does, at least four other nations will follow. Right, which was vastly, vastly inferior to the novella it was based on. Tonight, China becomes the first world power to declare war against the aliens. And that we can't, like, the reason for the UFO taboo is because the existence of extraterrestrials would just fundamentally undermine, like, our anthropocentric ideas of what sovereignty even is. And that, like, the whole geopolitical order would go to hell because people would think, like, why am I paying attention to my government when there are aliens out there?

So it could go either way. Seems like it could go either way, yeah. Fingers crossed. Teksting av Nicolai Winther Thank you. back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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But obviously that implies that this isn't the first time. This isn't this unprecedented moment of attention on the possibility of aliens and unidentified flying objects in our atmosphere. Well, I mean, that's really why I did this story. In the first week of looking into this, I discovered that there was this whole forgotten history that I certainly knew nothing about, about America's longstanding relationship with UFOs. I initially imagined that this story was about how a completely fringe topic that nobody had ever taken seriously had all of a sudden become a creditable topic. Turns out that actually it was kind of a reversion to the historical mean. From 1947 to 1970, this was something people talked about all the time. It was on the cover of

not just Life magazine and Look magazine, but Saturday Evening Post. And there was a copy of the New York Times magazine that had a flying saucer on the cover and a really sober treatment of it inside. Where was all that mainstream attention coming from in what, like, the post-war period onwards? The first thing was that our pilots came back from the Second World War with reports of having seen what were called Foo Fighters. Which were fiery trails that seemed to be following them on their sorties.

These were reported not just by American pilots, but by pilots on both sides. And then in 1947, there was a private aviator flying near Mount Rainier who saw these nine undulating boomerang-shaped objects. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with sort of a convex triangle in the rear. But then a media headline used to conjure up the notion of the flying saucer, which became this kind of contagious meme.

Well, Kenneth, thank you very much. I know that the Press Association has been right after you every minute. The Associated and United Press all over the nation have been after this story. And by the end of 1947, the Associated and United Press all over the nation has been after this story. And by the end of 1947, the government was looking into it. There were people who thought that in the context of the early Cold War,

that the Soviets had made some kind of unimaginable leap forward that we had to be on top of. There were other people who even then were crediting a potentially interplanetary origin for these sightings. This was all happening in the context of the fact that we had to project strength and awareness of everything going on in our airspace. So the government really didn't want to come out and say like, yeah, there's stuff up there, we don't even know what it is, because that would look weak. So there's kind of this debate in the government between 1947 and 1953 about how seriously to take these and what kinds of origins we might possibly ascribe to them. Then in 1953, the CIA convenes this panel

that gets a bunch of experts together and says, the problem that we face here is not that there are too many UFOs. The problem is that there are too many UFO reports. And we really need to do something about this because it's going to clog up our information networks, that we're going to miss out on valuable intelligence if people are just reporting all kinds of hallucinatory nonsense that they see in the sky, that we need to train people and we need to debunk this phenomenon. We need to infiltrate civilian groups and we need to enlist the media in a campaign to ridicule these things. To ridicule them, to straight up ridicule them.

To straight up ridicule them, yeah. I mean, at the same time, the government is kind of talking out of multiple sides of its mouth because it came out later that they were also very happy for the fact that for counterintelligence reasons, UFO sightings gave them cover that they could develop the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird, which were both highly classified projects that were often reported as UFOs. And if they were being reported as UFOs, then it was much easier to keep them secret from the Russians. But every couple of years, some really important eminent official would pop up in the media to say, we need to take these things seriously. There's this famous quote from Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkotter, who was the first director of the CIA, saying, in public, we might ridicule these things, but in private, these are taken very seriously. So all of this comes to a head in the spring of 1966, when there's a wave of sightings near Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Washington County authorities this morning are taking a close look at last night's flurry of reports of flying saucer activity northwest of Ann Arbor. Two weeks of reporters' sightings came to a climax when a farmer reported a saucer touchdown on his property. The Air Force comes in and they basically dismiss this. But Gerald Ford, who's the House minority leader at the time, calls for congressional hearings. Congressional hearings lead to a government-funded commission to look into the truth of this. A couple years later, in the fall of 1968, this commission report comes out. It's 1,000 pages. The introduction is written by a physicist who was leading the study. And he says, there's nothing to see here, no value in studying this.

It's all bunk. But he had only a glancing familiarity with the other 900 pages of the report, where in fact, 30% of the sightings that it examined were still unexplained. But still, this licenses the media, licenses the government, everybody to say, look, we looked into this, we did our best, and there's nothing going on here. So, between the 1970s and essentially the aughts, this is mostly relegated to this fringy conspiracy place, fueled in part, let's say, from a few Will Smith movies? Welcome to Earth.

I mean, yes, except for the fact that there's also all kinds of evidence to show that behind the scenes, the government was still interested. I write about this famous four-page memo written by a DIA source in Tehran in 1976 after the Shah's generals had sent somebody up in a F-4 Phantom to intercept glowing diamond-shaped lights northeast of Tehran near the Soviet border. And this came back to Washington in this communique with a cover letter saying that this was an outstanding example of the phenomenon. So clearly, even though publicly they weren't taking this seriously, privately there were plenty of people taking this seriously. How long is it before the U.S. government prominently starts taking this seriously,

perhaps in a public way again? Well, public way again? Well, public way, not until they're forced to in 2017. Privately, what happens is in 2007, Harry Reid, along with the late senators, Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, fund this secret black money project, $22 million going to an outside contractor to look into UFOs. Harry Reid, like a formerly very powerful person.

Yeah, absolutely. He was the Senate Majority Leader. Where does his interest in UFOs come from? Is it just because Area 51's in his backyard or something? Yeah. I mean, he's from Nevada, like this stuff is in the water out there. Over the years, Reed visited Area 51 several times, but whatever he saw out there, he's never commented. He had been interested in this stuff for a long time. I mean, since at least the 90s. He hasn't been shy about that. In my opinion, this is something that we should be studying. It's a worldwide phenomenon, not just here. He's himself said, like, there were many times over the years when my staff members said, like, stop associating yourself with this UFO stuff because it's going to make you look like a lunatic. And he said, no, I want to be associated with this stuff. Harry Reid, ahead of his time.

And a decade later, it doesn't seem so embarrassing to be associated with this stuff. How does that happen? The primary reason is that it appears in the New York Times, which just legitimizes the whole thing overnight. Today, military footage of flying objects that can't be explained. A decade of hidden funding in the government budget, a Times investigation discovers a secret program inside the Pentagon to investigate the threat of UFOs. The next reason is that they have these two videos. And of course, like the videos capture public imagination, and they have the testimony of these very credible seeming pilots. So, you know, there was nothing in the time story that

like was particularly outlandish. I mean, in fact, the time story was criticized by a lot of UFO types who said like, who were really disappointed by it because they said, well, on the one hand, it's great that we're talking about UFOs again in public. On the other hand, this whole story is framed not as the phenomenon is real, but it was the Pentagon was studying UFOs and has been continuing to study UFOs. So it was framed as a story about a DOD program and a story about government resources rather than framed as like UFOs are real. And what does that story do to the Pentagon study of UFOs? So the thing that I found was that even if the people who wrote that New York Times story thought that they were exposing a really formidable, serious UFO program,

what they were actually doing was functionally creating one. Which is to say that the program they exposed was, you know, essentially one guy with some, you know, with a very small cohort of people that had all been interested in UFOs for a really long time, who had, like, faced tremendous headwinds at the Pentagon. But that basically what happened was the people who were interested in pursuing the issue realized that they weren't going to get anywhere internally and that the way to make the Pentagon care about this issue was to make Congress care about this issue and the way to make Congress care about this issue

was to make people care about the issue. So they knew that if they went public in a big enough way, there would be, you know, growing public awareness of and interest in the issue. And that would lead to Congress people taking the issue seriously. And that once it was taken seriously in the legislative branch, that they would push the DOD to take it seriously, which is exactly what happened. So even if the Times kind of purported to reveal this really important program, basically, from what I

understood from my reporting, is that, like, the program didn't get serious until basically 2018 when Congress mandated it. And now we get this report. Maybe. It's unclear. I mean, the report is not mandated. The report is a suggestion. And, you know, there's always the possibility that anything interesting in the report is going to be in a classified annex

that nobody's going to see. Well, it's not like our government to disappoint us. Gideon, after spending months researching and reporting on UFOs, where do you land? Do you believe? I mean, where I land is that, like, whatever is going on seems to be, like, considerably weirder than people give it credit for being. Something weird is going on. And, you know, maybe at least some of these incidents are

reducible to drones or drone swarms that are, like, you know, low-rent technologies being used for surveillance. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff that just can't be all that easily explained. That's hard to dismiss. Did your investigation and your reporting bring you to a deeper understanding of why it is we so desperately want to believe? Whether we're Democrats or Republicans or Americans or Russian or Indian or Cote d'Ivoirean, why is it that we want to believe that there's something else out there?

I mean, to me, that's an easy question to answer. And in fact, I think it's like a somewhat harder question to ask the opposite, which is that why are people not inclined to believe it? I mean, why wouldn't people want to believe it? Like, especially if you believe that there are extraterrestrial civilizations that are capable of, you know, intergalactic travel, it radically expands

the horizon of what would be possible. In a time that can feel like such a dismal grind, it can feel like all of a sudden the universe is radically open-ended again. Thanks to Gideon Lewis Krauss, staff writer at The New Yorker. His big piece on UFOs is a must for everyone who wants to believe.

It's called How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously in True New Yorker Fashion. It's like 18 pages long. I'm Sean Ramos for them. It's Today Explained. We had some music today from Blue Dot Sessions, some cooperation from the New Yorker Radio Hour, and a cameo from Ezra Klein. Also, I miss you all, and I love you, and I miss you.

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