Today, Explained - UFOMG

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Congress just had its first hearings on UFOs in over 50 years. We revisit a 2021 episode where the New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus explained why the US government started taking sightings seriously. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro and Cristian Ayala, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. 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

Just about 23 years ago, a band called Blink-182 put out a song about aliens existing. It was called Aliens Exist. But years later something totally unpredictable happened. The Milhouse sounding dude singing that song, Tom DeLonge, he would sort of become an authority on unidentified flying objects. Tom DeLonge's research on UFOs was cited in the New York Times, and the Times' coverage led to UFOs being taken way more seriously than they had been in recent memory, and we are revisiting our episode on that renaissance on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from here with Gideon Lewis Krauss from The New Yorker,

who says UFOs are having a renaissance. 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. On the show today, we're going to try and understand how this sort of conspiratorial mainstay came to be taken seriously in the United States. I mean, Congress just had its first UFO hearing in half a century this May. We're going to start with the best of the best UFO sightings.

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- 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 and 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 tic-tac-looking object,

and it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area. Do you ever drop your phone and it sort of bounces off the countertop and then bounces off something else, and it's sort of like no 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. it starts coming up. So it's mimicking your moves. Yeah, it wasn't where 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 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 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. 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 an 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, 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 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 like if we are talking about this right now in terms of this UFO renaissance and the idea that there's

extraterrestrial life, this isn't humanity at its best, you know? 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. Well, okay. So the first thing that I'll point out is that the UFO issue has rare bipartisan appeal in America. This has not somehow broken down along predictable culture war lines. This is something that, you know, everybody likes to talk about UFOs

and maybe UFOs are going to be the thing that like allow us to heal the divisions in our country. 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. There's this political scientist named Alexander Wendt at Ohio State who's been writing about this for a long time. He has this academic journal article from 2008 called, 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. Gideon Lewis Krauss from The New Yorker returns in a minute, and we're finally going to get to that UFO renaissance and how exactly it happened. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. I'm going to go. Thank you. wire cutter, AuraFrame, to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday

and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the Aura Frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply.

Today, today, explain. today today getting you alluded to the fact that you know ufos are having a renaissance right now 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 like this whole forgotten history that I certainly knew nothing about, about America's longstanding relationship with UFOs. I initially imagined 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. 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 an F4 Phantom to intercept glowing diamond-shaped lights northeast of Tehran near the Soviet border. And, you know, 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? And 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 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, and this stuff is in the water out there.

Over the years, Reid 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 like the videos capture public imagination. And they have the testimony of these very credible seeming pilots. So, you know, there's 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 the program didn't get serious until basically 2018 when Congress mandated it. 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 maybe at least some of these incidents are reducible to drones or drone swarms that are like low rent technologies being used for surveillance. But 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 a really, 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? Especially if you believe that there are extraterrestrial civilizations that are capable of 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 him. 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.