December 21, 2025 • 45 mins
We didn't always assume the government was hiding aliens. The Manhattan Project was a crash course in how to run a secret program. Some secrets were real and necessary. Some were real and needing exposure - The Vietnam War, The Pentagon Papers, Watergate. So now people distrust everything the government tells us -- from UFO's to 9/11. Bestselling author and historian Garrett Graff has been reporting on this phenomenon via oral histories.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm
John Cipher.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world, and.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. Today's guest is
Garrett Grat. Garrett is an award winning historian, best selling author,
and journalist, and like our colleague Edam, he's a Vermonter.
He's written excellent all histories of the Atomic Bomb, UFOs
and nine to eleven, and books on Watergate in the
Cold War, which would give us a lot to dig
(01:03):
into today. So thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Garrett, my pleasure.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
You know you've written about some of America's most secretive
and mythic subjects, from Watergate to UFOs to the atomic bomb.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So what's your fate?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yeah, why do you think conspiracy Why do you think
conspiracy theories take such deep route in American psyche?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Well, you know, America has always had a uniquely conspiratorial bent.
This is the going back to Richard Hofstedler's paranoid style
of American politics. But to me, where it really takes
off is after Watergate in the nineteen seventies, and that
(01:42):
you see this period that we shorthand as Watergate, And
as you said, I wrote a book about it, and
I think it is less accurately thought of as an
event and more as a mindset umbrella for about a
dozen inter related but overlapping scandals that unfold across the
(02:03):
Nixon presidency. And so when we talk about the loss
of trust and faith in institutions, you know, what we're
really talking about, I think, is a series of events
that includes the Pentagon papers, the war in Vietnam, the
Watergate and the investigation itself, and then what spawns out
(02:26):
of Watergate with the Church and Pike committees thereafter. And
to me, what is in the wake of that is
when conspiracism really begins to move from the fringe of
American politics to the mainstream, and that you see this
in actually the rise of UFO conspiracies in the nineteen eighties.
(02:52):
You see it in you know, the sort of idea
of the Bermuda Triangle becomes a best selling book in
the nineteen seventies, the Philadelphia Experiment and teleportation becomes a
best selling idea in the seventies and eighties. And then,
as you mentioned, I wrote another book about UFOs, which
(03:15):
in a weird way turns out to be a all
too appropriate sequel for a book on Watergate, because the
rise of UFO conspiracism is really what happens when Americans
begin to lose trust and faith in government. And you
see in that nineteen eighties period the beginning of in
(03:39):
the UFO world what we now would recognize and call
the deep state. But that was sort of the first
hints in conspiracy Land in the nineteen eighties of you know,
this shadowy cabal of professional military and intelligence people working
(04:01):
at cross purposes to the American public and the elected officials.
And you see that really begin to take off in
in the late nineteen eighties, actually rooted in UFO land.
As you guys probably know because this was unfolding a
little bit during your respective careers. You have guys like
Bill Cooper, who are the big UFO whistleblowers quote unquote
(04:27):
whistleblowers of the nineteen eighties. Bill Cooper goes on to
become one of the real founding voices of right wing
talk radio in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, he gave Alex Jones his stars.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Exactly, and so he has two hugely important people that
he influences. One is a guy named Tim McVay who
in the spring of nineteen ninety five, he and his
buddy Terry Nichols drive out to Bill Cooper's house in
(05:04):
Arizona and end up talking with him in his driveway
in Arizona, and Bill Cooper's like, who are these weirdos
in my driveway and sends them on their way, and
Tim McVay says, as they are pulling out of the driveway,
watch Oklahoma City. And Bill Cooper goes back into his
(05:25):
house and has no idea what any of this means,
and YadA, YadA, YadA. A few weeks later, a few
months later, Tim McVay and Terry Nichols blow up the
Alfred Pimura a federal building in Oklahoma City. And then
the other person that Bill Cooper really inspires is a
young Austin, Texas public radio or public access host named
(05:48):
Alex Jones. And Bill Cooper and Alex Jones have this
sort of very rough mentor mentee relationship that fractures on
September eleventh, when Alex Jones begins to embrace what we
(06:08):
would now call ine eleven Trutherism and sets off on
this old, this new path for him that leads, in
many ways, I think, straight from nine to eleven Trutherism
to Sandy Hook crisis actors up to January sixth. And
one of the things that I came away from my
(06:29):
books on Watergate and UFO really thinking a lot about
is the extent to which there is this almost straight
line from Watergate to UFOs to January sixth. That is
not to say that sort of everyone who believes in
UFOs is a January sixth anti government terrorist, but that
(06:52):
sort of the intellectual framework and foundation really does scaffold
across this entire fifty year history of American politics.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
So when I was in high school back I was like,
I hadn't fought the Civil War yet. Is it. But
there was if you remember, there was Chariots of the gods, right,
Eric con done, and there was the UFOs had built
the pyramids, the Miyans, you know, all religion was based
off of the UFOs. Everybody in high school reant it,
all the teachers. It was very influential. But it was
also goofy. Right, you could still read this and get
(07:26):
along with the US government or your religion or whatever
it is. And yet somewhere along the line this got insidious.
So one of the big grand daddy of conspiracy theories
is the JFKSS section just as compelling to include some
people former agency officers who like fall down these rabbit
holes that I have to admit I don't quite grasp JFK.
(07:46):
When did it start becoming like this incredible conspiracy theory.
Like when I was young, I don't remember it as
a conspiracy theory, and I actually I was four years old.
I actually remember vaguely JFK getting shot at least people
the reactions around it. But it wasn't until maybe the
nineties that it started being like people were taking serious.
(08:07):
It's like the government and they're hiding it. Some of
the crazier conspiracies come around it. So where did things
get ugly?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
And I think that the difference is Americans and people
all over the world have long believed in aliens and
alien abductions and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What
changes in the eighties is the idea that the government
is lying to you, that the government knows about these
aliens and they're not telling them about it, They're not
(08:37):
telling you about it. That's the sort of twist in
the belief system is you know, there are flying saucer
sightings throughout history, but and back to the late nineteen
forties and fifties and sixties, and what changes is really
the sort of increasingly widespread belief that the government is
covering up the truth. And you see that really take
(09:01):
off in the nineties with the X Files. One of
the things a lot of people don't understand is the
Roswell story really only takes off in the nineteen eighties
for almost forty years, like, no one cares about the
Roswell incident at all. And then what turbocharges it is
the Will Smith movie Independence Day.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
We're fighting for our right to live to exist. Then
should we win the day.
Speaker 5 (09:31):
The fourth of July will no longer be known as
an American holiday, but as the day when the world
declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into
the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're
going to live on. We're going to survive. Today we
(09:54):
celebrate our Independence.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
Day because you know, remember that's the whole twist in
Independence Day. Spoiler alert for anyone who has not watched
one of.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
The nineteen nineties great.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Movies, But you have in that movie the representation of
the deep state. You have the conspiratorial White House aids
and Pentagon leaders who are like, mister President, time for
us to tell you the truth. And underneath area fifty
one we actually have all the alien bodies and alien spacecraft.
(10:34):
And it's really just begins to develop this very dark
edge where it's not just that there are these like wonderful,
benevolent alien beings out there, it's that these are government
leaders who are in league with aliens. They're hiding the
truth from even the President, and some of these theories
get really dark. The nineteen late seventies and eighties are
(10:58):
the age of cattle mutilations as well, and this idea
that the US government has peace treaties with certain alien species,
and in exchange for that, x number of humans get
to be abducted and probed and experimented on by aliens
per year kind of thing. I mean, it's you.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Can come from another planet, right, and they come here.
Why would they need a treaty with us to like
stick an anal probe right to figure out what I mean?
It seems to me they could just you know, are
people are people so credulous that they not asking basic
questions they don't want to know the answers?
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Or I think it's a little bit of everything, right.
And if at some point in this you want to
transition to talking about what the actual reality of aliens
visiting Earth would be, I'm happy to switch and talk
about that. But where a lot of this emerges is
with these UFO whistleblowers, these people who are purporting to
be the I was a member of the deep state,
(12:00):
I was working in naval intelligence. I read the files,
and now I'm blowing the whistle. And I think, by
the way, some of that is still what we are
seeing and experiencing right now where we're living through this
age where you're seeing Congress holding its first hearings on
UFOs in decades, actually literally the first ones since Gerald
(12:25):
Ford was a congressman from Michigan and led the sort
of last round of congressional hearings on UFOs before he
became vice president. But what you're seeing is that the
people who are interested in UFOs in Congress are the
Tim Burchetts and the Anna Paulina Luna folks, for whom
(12:52):
the UFO conspiracy fits into their ideological framework of the
deep state. That this is more, that this is less
about the truth of aliens, and it's more, if we
can expose the UFO conspiracy, we can expose the deep state.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Let me tie those two things together. So just today
on Twitter, Anna Paulina Luna, who's a congresswoman, tweeted today
about the Kennedy assassination. I've received a hard copy of
the report on JFK's assassination from the Ambassador of Russia.
A team of experts is en route to my office
in the morning to begin translation and review of the documents.
(13:30):
Thank you gun to everyone involved, to include the Russian embassy,
for making this happen. And this is a massive historical significance.
Now I'm sure they already passed this stuff to Oliver Stone,
but like this stuff just keeps going. This is a
congresswoman today. If she's not talking about UFOs, she's talking
about the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
And by the I really welcome these new revelations straight
from the studio that brought you the protocols of the
Elders of Zion and are now going to blow the
lid off of the JFK assassination, which surely has just
been lying around in the Russian archives until Anna, Pauline
and Luna thought to ask for them.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
You had real success in recent years with your oral histories,
and you've also had success with regular investigative journalism and
research history. When you do oral histories, is that something
that brings in more of these things conspiracy theories because
people are talking about events through their own filter rather
than as a historian who can weed that stuff out.
What do you learn in these oral histories and is
it something we learn more about how people see these things.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
It's a great question. So, as you said, I've done
just published my third book length oral history, which was
of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. Did one
last year on D Day? Did a previous one on
nine to eleven. Have done a bunch of magazine oral
histories as well, and I think the power of oral
history to me is that it gives you a chance
(15:14):
to go back and live through events in the eyes
of the people experiencing them before they know the outcome.
That I think sort of part of the challenge of
narrative history. And I love narrative history. I read narrative history,
I write narrative history. But narrative history often makes events
(15:36):
seem deeter, cleaner, simpler, and more preordained than they felt
to anyone at the time. And you guys know this
from the intelligence world. None of us know how our
stories are going to end. And there's a sort of
apocryphal classical story that I think a lot about of
(15:57):
Solin being asked by Caesar Augustus, am I lucky? And
Solan's answer is hard to tell, You're not dead yet,
And that so much of our sort of successes and
failures are only ever visible in hindsight, and for the
(16:18):
people who are living these events, experiencing them is totally
different than the way that history gets written. To illustrate that,
I'll talk about nine to eleven, where we with my
first oral history project in an event you guys both
lived through and as I did, and forty percent of
America is now too young to remember nine to eleven.
(16:43):
They were either too young in two thousand and one
or have been born after, and so they only read
about nine to eleven in history books, and the history
that they read goes something like this. The attacks begin
at eight forty six in the morning. The whole thing
is over one hundred and two minutes later, at ten
twenty eight, with the collapse of the second tower. There
(17:05):
are four attacks, four hijacked planes, and three thousand people die.
And that is an entirely factually true summary, but is
not the day that any of us remembered living through
on nine to eleven. We didn't understand when the attacks began.
We didn't understand when the attacks were over. There was
(17:28):
no real sense for much of the day how many
hijacked planes there actually were. I mean, the US government
believed that there were still a dozen hijacked airliners in
the sky over North America at one pm Tuesday, September
of the eleventh, and there was no sense that there
was quote unquote only three thousand people dead.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
That day.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Those initial death tolls were ten twenty thousand, and there
was no sense that these events were confined to just
New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Wherever you were in
the country, it felt you were under attack as well.
If flights were grounded all across the country. Skyscrapers were
evacuated in Boston and Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles.
(18:09):
Disney shuts down in Florida, the Toronto Subway is evacuated
on nine to eleven. And so if you only read
about nine to eleven in the history books, what you
miss is all of the fear, the chaos, the confusion,
and the trauma that we experienced living through nine to eleven.
(18:31):
And to me, that really matters because and you guys
lived this in your professional lives. If you miss the fear,
the chaos, the confusion, and the trauma of nine to
eleven to America, you miss entirely why America responded in
the way that we did in terms of the military response,
(18:51):
the intelligence response, the law enforcement response, like we were
responding to the national trauma of those events, not the
facts of those events. And what I think you really
see when you begin to get into these oral histories
is that personal experience and the way that sort of
(19:12):
people can have authentic and meaningful personal experiences that day
that are disconnected from the history and the events of
the day. And so let me give you a specific
example that you two will probably remember, and I had
when I was doing my book. I had a tussle
with the staff of the nine to eleven Commission about
(19:35):
this incident where I feature in my book the story
of the DC Air National Guard pilots being scrambled into
the air to shoot down Flight ninety three. They are
it's Heather Lucky Penny, Mark Sasphil and actually, interestingly enough,
(19:55):
our new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan raising cain Caine,
was part of this unit and was part of the
nine to eleven response from the DC Air National Guard
that day. But Heather Lucky Penny and Mark sas sass
Phil are scrambled into the air from Andrews Air Force
Base that morning and they go up without any weapons
that they go up with these unarmed planes to crash
(20:19):
into Flight ninety three because that's the only thing that
the US government is able to get into the air
that quickly. So they have a whole plan. SaaS is
going to crash into the cockpit, and Heather Lucky Penny
is going to crash into the tail, and that's how
they're going to bring down Flight ninety three as it
approaches Washington. Now, they don't get off the ground until
(20:42):
about ten thirty seven that morning, so more than a
half hour after Flight ninety three has actually crashed in
the fields outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. So the nine to eleven
Commission sort of writes them out of history because in
the Commission's view, which is not wrong, they're irrelevant to
(21:04):
the history of that day. They are not an effective
countermar by the US government. The event is over, and
had flight ninety three continued on to Washington, it would
have already reached Washington by the time their plane got
into the air. Anyway, But from my perspective, from an
oral historian's perspective, their experiences are authentic because they don't
(21:29):
know that they are relevant to history. As their planes
are scrambled into the air, they are taking to the
air thinking that they are the last line of defense
for the country and for the US Capitol or the
White House. And I think that sort of to me
That's part of the power and the experience of being
(21:49):
able to tell history through oral history is you get
all of that emotion that is often stripped away from
the narrative history as we teach it.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Nine to eleven was a big part of my life,
right when John's as well, every agency officer, pick anybody
in our generation. When it happened, I was in Germany.
It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. And when
it happened, I knew it was Kaida, and I knew
our lives were about to change. But when I see
and I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan chasing
a six foot five Saudi guy unsuccessfully up and put
(22:19):
the Hindu kush and it was you know, it was
clear it was him. And he's been a lot and
in El Kaida, and they there's something they were proud
of and something they admitted to eventually, and we have
all the proof of it. And yet just yesterday, I
live on a Wahu. I was driving down a back
road and there was a stop sign and someone had
put a sticker on it. Someone had printed this up
and it said nine to eleven was an inside job.
(22:42):
Now I don't know what the fuck that means. I'm
sorry to use an explotive, but it was like, like
this taken up a huge part of my life. Friends
of mine were killed reacting to this. And you've got
I don't know, somebody printing stickers saying it's an inside
I don't even know what inside job means. It's this
vacuous term. And I've heard everything from the Jews got
out in time, Right, it was the Mosad, or it
(23:04):
was the US government. Why we would do this so
we could successfully invade like a penniless place in Afghanistan? Yeah,
there's a plan for it. Right, It's like sometimes Ahams Raiser,
things are simple. You say, there's this trust in the government.
This isn't like passive distrust. This is proactive. I Am
going to create distrust and if something ban happened, it
(23:25):
must be somehow these dark forces, which tells me more
about the people and their mindset and their inability to
accept straightforward facts. Right, these would be the people burning witches. Right,
So help me out here, what the what is a well?
First of all, I don't like the word term truth
or because it's an Orwellian lie. Right, these are the
basically nine to eleven liars or the January sixth liars right.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
To me, of all of the conspiracies of the last
half century or sixty seventy years of American politics, the
nine to eleven Truthers are the most vile. The idea
that the US government was actively complicit in the deaths
(24:12):
of thousands of Americans is as terrible a conspiracy theory
as I think we have seen. And I'm not totally
excluding QAnon from it, because I think you see the
roots of what we now call QAnon in the beginning
of nine to eleven Truthers and Alex Jones and how
that evolves into Sandy Hook crisis actors and Pizzagate and QAnon.
(24:37):
But the challenge that I as someone who has written
about the federal government and intelligence and national security and
federal law enforcement for twenty years at this point, the
challenge that I always say that I have is that
government conspiracies presuppose a level of competence, foresight, and planning
(24:59):
that is not on display in the rest of the
work that the government does. And this is the part
that you guys can argue with me about if you want,
But to me, the government is capable of keeping two
kinds of secret, big secrets for a short period of time,
which is the Manhattan Project, which is the time and
place of D Day, and small secrets for a long
(25:24):
period of time, you know, the Argo mission, where you
know you have maybe a couple dozen people who know
that and are able to keep it for twenty years whatever.
I'm totally open to the idea that there are super
audacious and awesome CIA missions that we don't know about
(25:47):
that are known by a very small community of people,
the aliens exactly. But where nine to eleven truthers and
aliens fall apart for me is this idea that the
government is keeping a really big secret for a really
long period of time. Do I think we know everything
about what the US government knew about nine to eleven
(26:09):
before nine to eleven? No, I still think that there's
weird stuff, probably having to do with the Saudi connections
and what the Saudi government knew about the nine to
eleven plot beforehand, and all of that.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
That.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Like, I am open to the idea that the government
is hiding meaningful knowledge about nine to eleven from us
still here twenty five years later. What I'm not open
to is the possibility that there was some major conspiracy
that it involved, and you can pick any of your
(26:42):
sort of lanes of nine to eleven conspiracy. That it
was a controlled implosion of the Twin Towers, that it
was a missile into the Pentagon and not a plane.
You know that all the Jews stayed home on September.
You know, like you can pick any of a dozen.
You know, Popular Mechanics put out an entire book on
(27:04):
nine to eleven conspiracies, debunking them one by one, but
like there are enough of them that you can pub
entire book. And similar with the UFO conspiracies, where David Grush,
who's the sort of most recent of the UFO whistleblowers,
he was saying in media interviews when he first came
out that there were five thousand people in the US
(27:28):
government read into the sort of UFO conspiracy and that
the conspiracy dates back to the nineteen thirties. So those
are the two bookends of his thing. So, you guys
worked in government, Like five thousand people in government generate
an incredible amount of paperwork, like even before you get
(27:51):
to the like power point briefing in the situation room.
That's like, mister President here is our UFO cover up
power point Like you're talking budgets, personnel files, performance reviews,
procurement requests, sort of, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Sulf getting drunk and talking, praying at parties, people get divorced. Oh,
I'm going to lend a book.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
And you're talking about five thousand people today in a
conspiracy that stretches across ninety years. So in round numbers,
you're talking thirty thousand people over the last ninety years
who have been read into or known some slice of
that program. And not one of them, on their deathbed
has sort of said, guys, I just got to tell
(28:37):
you about this thing underneath area fifty one. Not one
of them has accidentally sent their PowerPoint briefing to their
roommate as an email attachment. Not one of them has
cause has decided to Edward Snowden and walk out of
the workplace in a hut after not getting a promotion.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
We totally agree with you, because having worked inside, that's
so unlikely. But let me go the other way with
you on this. So, like a lot of your UFO
conspiracy narratives, they assert the government's hiding something alien bodies
technology in your research. What is the strongest evidence you've
found for a cover up, or what's the strongest evidence against.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
I think a lot of this also falls apart in
people mishearing how government works. So one of the sort
of David Grush's sort of main claim when he came
out was effectively, and I'm slightly oversimplifying this, effectively, what
he was saying is the US government has a UFO
(29:41):
crash retrieval program that has retrieved technology that the US
government has assessed is not of this world, is not
human technology. I believe every single individual part of that fact.
But I think people have misheard what that means. And
(30:02):
so let me start to pick that apart in ways
that you guys will understand. The US government absolutely has
a UFO retrieval program. We have had one dating back
to World War One. It was housed at right Patterson
Air Force Base, the Air Technical Intelligence Center. These are
the guys who go around and when something falls out
(30:22):
of the sky on friendly territory or lead audacious missions
into denied territory to try to recover weird things that
fall out of the sky. And that's how we got
our hands on Japanese zeros in World War two. And
that's how we got our hands on bigs in the
Korean War and in Vietnam and the Cold War. And
(30:46):
so that part of the statement is true. The next
part is, I also believe we have a warehouse somewhere
that is full of things that the government has retrieved
that we don't know what it is. And like one
hundred percent, I'm sure that the US government has like
a weird intelligence warehouse, you know, at Area fifty one
(31:07):
or right Patterson or you guys, I'd have even been
in it at some point in your career where it's like,
here's sort of our you know, Indiana Jones archive of
like weird stuff we've found and we don't really know
what it is. I also believe that there's some guy
who works on that program who has walked into that
warehouse and looked at some of that stuff and says
(31:31):
to other people, man, I don't think all that stuff's
from earth. The government workforce, you guys know this better
than I do, is like any workplace, you have those
weird guys who are like a standard deviation or two
outside of the other people on the team. And that
I absolutely believe that sort of someone said to David
(31:51):
Grush at some point totally truthfully. I've talked to some
of those guys on the UFO crash retrieval program, and
they say, there's some stuff there that's not from Earth.
But that's different than what I think the public heres
when you say that, which is the idea that the
Director of National Intelligence has stood up up in the
situation room and said, mister President, with high confidence, the
(32:15):
seventeen intelligence agencies of the United States have concluded that
we have retrieved the technology that is not which I
do not think has happened. And I think that sort
of so much of this is just about like people
not really understanding that sort of translation from what are
like normal government operations and like the normal divergence of
(32:40):
views in the intelligence or military community versus there's an
official conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
But David Grush, by the way, if I understand, I
looked at it pretty closely. He never said he saw
any of this stuff right. He basically said, my job
was to investigate unidentified stuff. UFOs doesn't mean anything. It
just means it's unidentified. So let's just presuppose and I'm
making this up that a North Korean satellite goes down
(33:07):
in Tajikistan, and of course it's not sitting there, it's
like scanned over a couple of acres. We want to
go get it to see what they're doing. And people
we send in, we're not probably won't tell them that
will say, go in and what you find? And what
do they find? They find wires and bits of material
and they gather it up and they bring it out.
We may not. In fact, we probably wouldn't want to
(33:28):
even tell them what it is when they're doing, at
least all of them, because people will talk. So it
comes back and now we've got this material that's unidentified,
and David Grush says, hey, I'm with this office that's
investigating this, and yeah, we know what this is. This
is North Korean saleite pieces of it. But they're going
to tell him, hey man, you don't have to worry
(33:49):
about this. We got it covered. And he takes it
as you are preventing me, David Grush, from finding out
the truth. It's like, no, the US government knows the
truth of what that is. But David Grush when he
went before Congress, he said, I wasn't given access. Is
if you must give me access? So yeah, there are programs,
and then he named an off that I actually know about,
(34:11):
and like they all laugh because there's like only a
couple dozen of them, and these are not people who
collects in it, and you've gotten things wrong in translation.
But when you look at somebody in the outside taken this,
they can build it into an almost rock solid conspiracy theory.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
Yeah. And to that end, there was this fascinating report
that came out from Ode and I about a year
and a half ago after the sort of first wave
of these stories, where the report said, we have tracked
down all the SAPs, the special access programs that David
Grush and the other whistleblowers say are UFO programs, and
(34:47):
we have found them and they are not UFO programs.
And it was a report that sort of instantly was
denounced by both sides because the skeptics were like, see,
there was no truth to it. The believers said, see,
this is just part of the cover up. And to me,
there was like this much more interesting question at the
heart of that report, then, which is what are the
(35:11):
special access programs that the US government runs that the
people who like share the office kitchen with mistake as
being UFO alien cover ups? And that's a super fascinating
thought experiment. Is it propulsion systems that we have discovered
(35:31):
that we haven't talked about publicly. Is it propulsion systems
that our adversaries have discovered that we don't understand yet
that we're trying to reverse engineer. Is it material sciences?
Is it types of math that like we don't understand
yet and are like struggling our way through. Is it
(35:54):
weapons systems? It's actually much more interesting to think about
what are the secret programs that the US government is
working on? They just stay secret. I'm just that are
still secret. That sort of everyone who all works on
that hallway goes home, and it's like, I think my
buddy's working on a flying saucer.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Let's go back to one of the early Cold War
things you wrote about it in the Atomic Program. Do
you think the secrecy around the Atomic Program set the
blueprint for a lot of these modern government conspiracies, everything
from Area fifty one to Kem Trails to deep state stuff,
because obviously that was a conspiracy, one that was obviously sanctioned,
but it was hidden from the public for the good reason.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
Yeah, and I think it, And this has been one
of the things I've talked a lot about on my
book tour over the last couple of weeks. We often
think of the legacy of the Manhattan Project as the
atomic bomb. To me, it's not the most important legacy
of the Manhattan Project is this entirely new way of
(37:13):
the US government understanding that science and technology and innovation
is a core source of national strength. Along with the
work at the mit Rad Lab on radar and the
proximity fuze in World War Two, it sets up this
whole new way of doing science, and this relationship between
(37:36):
the higher education and the national labs, which is what
Los Alamos and Berkeley and Oakridge grow into after the war.
It helps jumpstart the National Science Foundation, it turns nih
into a big grant making organization after the war. It
helps jump start DARPA later, And it's really just this
(37:57):
way of looking at government, science, technology, education, and by
the way, a lot of good immigration, and how that
delivers this model of economic innovation and prosperity that helps
power the next half century of American daily life. One
(38:18):
of the things I worry a lot about now is
the extent to which we are very actively dismantling that system.
At the exact moment that we are about to live
through a technological revolution in artificial intelligence that is potentially
as transformative as the you know, sort of a rival
(38:42):
of atomic energy was in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Can you run a government by conspiracy theorist have conspiracies
about their own organization?
Speaker 5 (38:52):
Well?
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Tried it right or pol pot right?
Speaker 4 (38:55):
I mean, and like that to be as part of
the really amazing thing, you know, like let's release the
Epstein files. Sort of all of these people who came
to power like Cash Battel and Dan Bongino as conspiracy
theorists and are now in these positions of power and
(39:15):
continuing to rail against the government and the deep state
and the conspiracies. And you're like, dude, calls coming from
inside the house now, like you're.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
They're in a tough position because they railed and railed
against the deep state while they were outside and said
the FBI has all these things blah blah blah, and
now they're there and the people who actually believe them
are now like, Okay, you're there. Let us see, Like
how do you choose the subjects you do for oral
history or even for your narrative histories?
Speaker 4 (39:42):
It's a great, great question, and the sort of short
answer is, I don't have any specific model for me
the fun of journalism, and in some ways this I
think journalists and intelligence professionals have a lot in common.
The fun of journalism and writing history is that you
get to wake up in the morning and think of
questions that you're interested in and then go out and
(40:03):
find the answers. And because you do the work that
you do, you can call up people and they'll talk
to you for a really long period of time and
tell tell you everything that they know about a subject.
And that to be is always where your world and
my world overlap is. If you're super curious and enjoy
learning new things and learning about the world around, you
(40:26):
do what we do.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
And the thing about our former job is everything we
did was secret, and it was secret for a reason,
not for big conspiracies, but because we had sources and
we were collecting intelligence. We had to protect those people.
So secrecy mattered in that case. But when you don't
understand what an organization does and they tell you that
they're doing something secret, it's just easy, as General Hayden
used to say, to go to the darkest corner of
(40:47):
the room and create your own sort of thought experiments
on what's going on. So of our age, Watergate seems
to be the place where people turned against it. It's
like the government is actually doing things that are not
in my interest. I think even if you look at
polling before Watergate, at least people generally trusted what the
president said or the government said, or the military. And
afterwards it was very different. It's never really caught up.
(41:09):
You talk about these big secrets that started and led
to our views of the deep state. The atomic program,
which we talked about, was this huge secret, and you
said people could keep a big secret for a short time.
Actually we couldn't. Like the Russians. Stalin knew more about
the atomic program than Truman did when he came and
we became president, because they had sources riddled through White
(41:31):
House and the OSS and the atomic program and all
these other kind of things. And so even the big
secrets are the secret to everybody.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Are we uniquely prone as Americans because of our history
and our makeup to conspiracy theories? Is this just a
human thing or is this uniquely American?
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Or I think it's a profoundly human thing. I think
it is a way the storytelling is the sort of
most fundamental of human existence, back to campfires and stone age,
and I think I don't want to get myself too
much in trouble here. The overlap across human history between
(42:10):
sort of religion and what we would now call conspiracy
theories is non zero. And in some ways, as you say,
like the idea of the deep state comes to the
United States late in our politics, that is a concept
that is far more familiar to a lot of countries
like Turkey and South America with different terms than it
(42:34):
was to the United States. And I think every culture
has their own types of conspiracies, has their own types
of tall tale telling. What I do think has changed
it and turbocharged it in our time has been the Internet,
and it's been the way that algorithms and social media
(42:59):
spread these information and the way that people could do
their own research and publish their own research and reach
more people now and reach other lives like minded people.
I do a history podcast called Long Shadow, and we
did a season this summer on the rise and fall
of social media, and one of the things we spend
(43:21):
some real time looking at is how YouTube and its
algorithm and Facebook and its newsfeed algorithm drive people into
adjacent conspiracy. The sort of biggest sign that you will
believe in a conspiracy theory is that you believe in
a different conspiracy theory, and that sort of the way
(43:42):
that YouTube algorithms and Facebook algorithms. You know, are you
interested in the jfk assassination, then you might also like
flat earth, but you might also like, you know, COVID
anti vaxxers. One of the challenges was until twenty five
thirty years ago, it was much harder for these conspiracies
(44:05):
just spread and be published. And these conspiracies theories in
the pre Internet age were really growing at the rate
of sort of one pamphlet at a time, as opposed
to people sitting down at their computer every night and
being like, what conspiracy am I going to rab it
hole myself in tonight?
Speaker 3 (44:23):
It used to be hard to find each other if
you believed in some weird conspiracy. Now like you can
find each other easily. But we want to thank you
very much for spending time with us today, and things
you write about fit right into the wheelhouse of what
real history with conspiracies that come to them.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
Well, it was a pleasure spending time with you guys
today and this is always fun to see our overlapping world.
Speaker 6 (44:46):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible.
It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for
iHeart Podcasts.
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm
John Cipher.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world, and.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. Today's guest is
Garrett Grat. Garrett is an award winning historian, best selling author,
and journalist, and like our colleague Edam, he's a Vermonter.
He's written excellent all histories of the Atomic Bomb, UFOs
and nine to eleven, and books on Watergate in the
Cold War, which would give us a lot to dig
(01:03):
into today. So thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Garrett, my pleasure.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
You know you've written about some of America's most secretive
and mythic subjects, from Watergate to UFOs to the atomic bomb.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So what's your fate?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yeah, why do you think conspiracy Why do you think
conspiracy theories take such deep route in American psyche?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Well, you know, America has always had a uniquely conspiratorial bent.
This is the going back to Richard Hofstedler's paranoid style
of American politics. But to me, where it really takes
off is after Watergate in the nineteen seventies, and that
(01:42):
you see this period that we shorthand as Watergate, And
as you said, I wrote a book about it, and
I think it is less accurately thought of as an
event and more as a mindset umbrella for about a
dozen inter related but overlapping scandals that unfold across the
(02:03):
Nixon presidency. And so when we talk about the loss
of trust and faith in institutions, you know, what we're
really talking about, I think, is a series of events
that includes the Pentagon papers, the war in Vietnam, the
Watergate and the investigation itself, and then what spawns out
(02:26):
of Watergate with the Church and Pike committees thereafter. And
to me, what is in the wake of that is
when conspiracism really begins to move from the fringe of
American politics to the mainstream, and that you see this
in actually the rise of UFO conspiracies in the nineteen eighties.
(02:52):
You see it in you know, the sort of idea
of the Bermuda Triangle becomes a best selling book in
the nineteen seventies, the Philadelphia Experiment and teleportation becomes a
best selling idea in the seventies and eighties. And then,
as you mentioned, I wrote another book about UFOs, which
(03:15):
in a weird way turns out to be a all
too appropriate sequel for a book on Watergate, because the
rise of UFO conspiracism is really what happens when Americans
begin to lose trust and faith in government. And you
see in that nineteen eighties period the beginning of in
(03:39):
the UFO world what we now would recognize and call
the deep state. But that was sort of the first
hints in conspiracy Land in the nineteen eighties of you know,
this shadowy cabal of professional military and intelligence people working
(04:01):
at cross purposes to the American public and the elected officials.
And you see that really begin to take off in
in the late nineteen eighties, actually rooted in UFO land.
As you guys probably know because this was unfolding a
little bit during your respective careers. You have guys like
Bill Cooper, who are the big UFO whistleblowers quote unquote
(04:27):
whistleblowers of the nineteen eighties. Bill Cooper goes on to
become one of the real founding voices of right wing
talk radio in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, he gave Alex Jones his stars.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Exactly, and so he has two hugely important people that
he influences. One is a guy named Tim McVay who
in the spring of nineteen ninety five, he and his
buddy Terry Nichols drive out to Bill Cooper's house in
(05:04):
Arizona and end up talking with him in his driveway
in Arizona, and Bill Cooper's like, who are these weirdos
in my driveway and sends them on their way, and
Tim McVay says, as they are pulling out of the driveway,
watch Oklahoma City. And Bill Cooper goes back into his
(05:25):
house and has no idea what any of this means,
and YadA, YadA, YadA. A few weeks later, a few
months later, Tim McVay and Terry Nichols blow up the
Alfred Pimura a federal building in Oklahoma City. And then
the other person that Bill Cooper really inspires is a
young Austin, Texas public radio or public access host named
(05:48):
Alex Jones. And Bill Cooper and Alex Jones have this
sort of very rough mentor mentee relationship that fractures on
September eleventh, when Alex Jones begins to embrace what we
(06:08):
would now call ine eleven Trutherism and sets off on
this old, this new path for him that leads, in
many ways, I think, straight from nine to eleven Trutherism
to Sandy Hook crisis actors up to January sixth. And
one of the things that I came away from my
(06:29):
books on Watergate and UFO really thinking a lot about
is the extent to which there is this almost straight
line from Watergate to UFOs to January sixth. That is
not to say that sort of everyone who believes in
UFOs is a January sixth anti government terrorist, but that
(06:52):
sort of the intellectual framework and foundation really does scaffold
across this entire fifty year history of American politics.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
So when I was in high school back I was like,
I hadn't fought the Civil War yet. Is it. But
there was if you remember, there was Chariots of the gods, right,
Eric con done, and there was the UFOs had built
the pyramids, the Miyans, you know, all religion was based
off of the UFOs. Everybody in high school reant it,
all the teachers. It was very influential. But it was
also goofy. Right, you could still read this and get
(07:26):
along with the US government or your religion or whatever
it is. And yet somewhere along the line this got insidious.
So one of the big grand daddy of conspiracy theories
is the JFKSS section just as compelling to include some
people former agency officers who like fall down these rabbit
holes that I have to admit I don't quite grasp JFK.
(07:46):
When did it start becoming like this incredible conspiracy theory.
Like when I was young, I don't remember it as
a conspiracy theory, and I actually I was four years old.
I actually remember vaguely JFK getting shot at least people
the reactions around it. But it wasn't until maybe the
nineties that it started being like people were taking serious.
(08:07):
It's like the government and they're hiding it. Some of
the crazier conspiracies come around it. So where did things
get ugly?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
And I think that the difference is Americans and people
all over the world have long believed in aliens and
alien abductions and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What
changes in the eighties is the idea that the government
is lying to you, that the government knows about these
aliens and they're not telling them about it, They're not
(08:37):
telling you about it. That's the sort of twist in
the belief system is you know, there are flying saucer
sightings throughout history, but and back to the late nineteen
forties and fifties and sixties, and what changes is really
the sort of increasingly widespread belief that the government is
covering up the truth. And you see that really take
(09:01):
off in the nineties with the X Files. One of
the things a lot of people don't understand is the
Roswell story really only takes off in the nineteen eighties
for almost forty years, like, no one cares about the
Roswell incident at all. And then what turbocharges it is
the Will Smith movie Independence Day.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
We're fighting for our right to live to exist. Then
should we win the day.
Speaker 5 (09:31):
The fourth of July will no longer be known as
an American holiday, but as the day when the world
declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into
the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're
going to live on. We're going to survive. Today we
(09:54):
celebrate our Independence.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
Day because you know, remember that's the whole twist in
Independence Day. Spoiler alert for anyone who has not watched
one of.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
The nineteen nineties great.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Movies, But you have in that movie the representation of
the deep state. You have the conspiratorial White House aids
and Pentagon leaders who are like, mister President, time for
us to tell you the truth. And underneath area fifty
one we actually have all the alien bodies and alien spacecraft.
(10:34):
And it's really just begins to develop this very dark
edge where it's not just that there are these like wonderful,
benevolent alien beings out there, it's that these are government
leaders who are in league with aliens. They're hiding the
truth from even the President, and some of these theories
get really dark. The nineteen late seventies and eighties are
(10:58):
the age of cattle mutilations as well, and this idea
that the US government has peace treaties with certain alien species,
and in exchange for that, x number of humans get
to be abducted and probed and experimented on by aliens
per year kind of thing. I mean, it's you.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Can come from another planet, right, and they come here.
Why would they need a treaty with us to like
stick an anal probe right to figure out what I mean?
It seems to me they could just you know, are
people are people so credulous that they not asking basic
questions they don't want to know the answers?
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Or I think it's a little bit of everything, right.
And if at some point in this you want to
transition to talking about what the actual reality of aliens
visiting Earth would be, I'm happy to switch and talk
about that. But where a lot of this emerges is
with these UFO whistleblowers, these people who are purporting to
be the I was a member of the deep state,
(12:00):
I was working in naval intelligence. I read the files,
and now I'm blowing the whistle. And I think, by
the way, some of that is still what we are
seeing and experiencing right now where we're living through this
age where you're seeing Congress holding its first hearings on
UFOs in decades, actually literally the first ones since Gerald
(12:25):
Ford was a congressman from Michigan and led the sort
of last round of congressional hearings on UFOs before he
became vice president. But what you're seeing is that the
people who are interested in UFOs in Congress are the
Tim Burchetts and the Anna Paulina Luna folks, for whom
(12:52):
the UFO conspiracy fits into their ideological framework of the
deep state. That this is more, that this is less
about the truth of aliens, and it's more, if we
can expose the UFO conspiracy, we can expose the deep state.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Let me tie those two things together. So just today
on Twitter, Anna Paulina Luna, who's a congresswoman, tweeted today
about the Kennedy assassination. I've received a hard copy of
the report on JFK's assassination from the Ambassador of Russia.
A team of experts is en route to my office
in the morning to begin translation and review of the documents.
(13:30):
Thank you gun to everyone involved, to include the Russian embassy,
for making this happen. And this is a massive historical significance.
Now I'm sure they already passed this stuff to Oliver Stone,
but like this stuff just keeps going. This is a
congresswoman today. If she's not talking about UFOs, she's talking
about the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
And by the I really welcome these new revelations straight
from the studio that brought you the protocols of the
Elders of Zion and are now going to blow the
lid off of the JFK assassination, which surely has just
been lying around in the Russian archives until Anna, Pauline
and Luna thought to ask for them.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
You had real success in recent years with your oral histories,
and you've also had success with regular investigative journalism and
research history. When you do oral histories, is that something
that brings in more of these things conspiracy theories because
people are talking about events through their own filter rather
than as a historian who can weed that stuff out.
What do you learn in these oral histories and is
it something we learn more about how people see these things.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
It's a great question. So, as you said, I've done
just published my third book length oral history, which was
of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. Did one
last year on D Day? Did a previous one on
nine to eleven. Have done a bunch of magazine oral
histories as well, and I think the power of oral
history to me is that it gives you a chance
(15:14):
to go back and live through events in the eyes
of the people experiencing them before they know the outcome.
That I think sort of part of the challenge of
narrative history. And I love narrative history. I read narrative history,
I write narrative history. But narrative history often makes events
(15:36):
seem deeter, cleaner, simpler, and more preordained than they felt
to anyone at the time. And you guys know this
from the intelligence world. None of us know how our
stories are going to end. And there's a sort of
apocryphal classical story that I think a lot about of
(15:57):
Solin being asked by Caesar Augustus, am I lucky? And
Solan's answer is hard to tell, You're not dead yet,
And that so much of our sort of successes and
failures are only ever visible in hindsight, and for the
(16:18):
people who are living these events, experiencing them is totally
different than the way that history gets written. To illustrate that,
I'll talk about nine to eleven, where we with my
first oral history project in an event you guys both
lived through and as I did, and forty percent of
America is now too young to remember nine to eleven.
(16:43):
They were either too young in two thousand and one
or have been born after, and so they only read
about nine to eleven in history books, and the history
that they read goes something like this. The attacks begin
at eight forty six in the morning. The whole thing
is over one hundred and two minutes later, at ten
twenty eight, with the collapse of the second tower. There
(17:05):
are four attacks, four hijacked planes, and three thousand people die.
And that is an entirely factually true summary, but is
not the day that any of us remembered living through
on nine to eleven. We didn't understand when the attacks began.
We didn't understand when the attacks were over. There was
(17:28):
no real sense for much of the day how many
hijacked planes there actually were. I mean, the US government
believed that there were still a dozen hijacked airliners in
the sky over North America at one pm Tuesday, September
of the eleventh, and there was no sense that there
was quote unquote only three thousand people dead.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
That day.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Those initial death tolls were ten twenty thousand, and there
was no sense that these events were confined to just
New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Wherever you were in
the country, it felt you were under attack as well.
If flights were grounded all across the country. Skyscrapers were
evacuated in Boston and Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles.
(18:09):
Disney shuts down in Florida, the Toronto Subway is evacuated
on nine to eleven. And so if you only read
about nine to eleven in the history books, what you
miss is all of the fear, the chaos, the confusion,
and the trauma that we experienced living through nine to eleven.
(18:31):
And to me, that really matters because and you guys
lived this in your professional lives. If you miss the fear,
the chaos, the confusion, and the trauma of nine to
eleven to America, you miss entirely why America responded in
the way that we did in terms of the military response,
(18:51):
the intelligence response, the law enforcement response, like we were
responding to the national trauma of those events, not the
facts of those events. And what I think you really
see when you begin to get into these oral histories
is that personal experience and the way that sort of
(19:12):
people can have authentic and meaningful personal experiences that day
that are disconnected from the history and the events of
the day. And so let me give you a specific
example that you two will probably remember, and I had
when I was doing my book. I had a tussle
with the staff of the nine to eleven Commission about
(19:35):
this incident where I feature in my book the story
of the DC Air National Guard pilots being scrambled into
the air to shoot down Flight ninety three. They are
it's Heather Lucky Penny, Mark Sasphil and actually, interestingly enough,
(19:55):
our new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan raising cain Caine,
was part of this unit and was part of the
nine to eleven response from the DC Air National Guard
that day. But Heather Lucky Penny and Mark sas sass
Phil are scrambled into the air from Andrews Air Force
Base that morning and they go up without any weapons
that they go up with these unarmed planes to crash
(20:19):
into Flight ninety three because that's the only thing that
the US government is able to get into the air
that quickly. So they have a whole plan. SaaS is
going to crash into the cockpit, and Heather Lucky Penny
is going to crash into the tail, and that's how
they're going to bring down Flight ninety three as it
approaches Washington. Now, they don't get off the ground until
(20:42):
about ten thirty seven that morning, so more than a
half hour after Flight ninety three has actually crashed in
the fields outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. So the nine to eleven
Commission sort of writes them out of history because in
the Commission's view, which is not wrong, they're irrelevant to
(21:04):
the history of that day. They are not an effective
countermar by the US government. The event is over, and
had flight ninety three continued on to Washington, it would
have already reached Washington by the time their plane got
into the air. Anyway, But from my perspective, from an
oral historian's perspective, their experiences are authentic because they don't
(21:29):
know that they are relevant to history. As their planes
are scrambled into the air, they are taking to the
air thinking that they are the last line of defense
for the country and for the US Capitol or the
White House. And I think that sort of to me
That's part of the power and the experience of being
(21:49):
able to tell history through oral history is you get
all of that emotion that is often stripped away from
the narrative history as we teach it.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Nine to eleven was a big part of my life,
right when John's as well, every agency officer, pick anybody
in our generation. When it happened, I was in Germany.
It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. And when
it happened, I knew it was Kaida, and I knew
our lives were about to change. But when I see
and I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan chasing
a six foot five Saudi guy unsuccessfully up and put
(22:19):
the Hindu kush and it was you know, it was
clear it was him. And he's been a lot and
in El Kaida, and they there's something they were proud
of and something they admitted to eventually, and we have
all the proof of it. And yet just yesterday, I
live on a Wahu. I was driving down a back
road and there was a stop sign and someone had
put a sticker on it. Someone had printed this up
and it said nine to eleven was an inside job.
(22:42):
Now I don't know what the fuck that means. I'm
sorry to use an explotive, but it was like, like
this taken up a huge part of my life. Friends
of mine were killed reacting to this. And you've got
I don't know, somebody printing stickers saying it's an inside
I don't even know what inside job means. It's this
vacuous term. And I've heard everything from the Jews got
out in time, Right, it was the Mosad, or it
(23:04):
was the US government. Why we would do this so
we could successfully invade like a penniless place in Afghanistan? Yeah,
there's a plan for it. Right, It's like sometimes Ahams Raiser,
things are simple. You say, there's this trust in the government.
This isn't like passive distrust. This is proactive. I Am
going to create distrust and if something ban happened, it
(23:25):
must be somehow these dark forces, which tells me more
about the people and their mindset and their inability to
accept straightforward facts. Right, these would be the people burning witches. Right,
So help me out here, what the what is a well?
First of all, I don't like the word term truth
or because it's an Orwellian lie. Right, these are the
basically nine to eleven liars or the January sixth liars right.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
To me, of all of the conspiracies of the last
half century or sixty seventy years of American politics, the
nine to eleven Truthers are the most vile. The idea
that the US government was actively complicit in the deaths
(24:12):
of thousands of Americans is as terrible a conspiracy theory
as I think we have seen. And I'm not totally
excluding QAnon from it, because I think you see the
roots of what we now call QAnon in the beginning
of nine to eleven Truthers and Alex Jones and how
that evolves into Sandy Hook crisis actors and Pizzagate and QAnon.
(24:37):
But the challenge that I as someone who has written
about the federal government and intelligence and national security and
federal law enforcement for twenty years at this point, the
challenge that I always say that I have is that
government conspiracies presuppose a level of competence, foresight, and planning
(24:59):
that is not on display in the rest of the
work that the government does. And this is the part
that you guys can argue with me about if you want,
But to me, the government is capable of keeping two
kinds of secret, big secrets for a short period of time,
which is the Manhattan Project, which is the time and
place of D Day, and small secrets for a long
(25:24):
period of time, you know, the Argo mission, where you
know you have maybe a couple dozen people who know
that and are able to keep it for twenty years whatever.
I'm totally open to the idea that there are super
audacious and awesome CIA missions that we don't know about
(25:47):
that are known by a very small community of people,
the aliens exactly. But where nine to eleven truthers and
aliens fall apart for me is this idea that the
government is keeping a really big secret for a really
long period of time. Do I think we know everything
about what the US government knew about nine to eleven
(26:09):
before nine to eleven? No, I still think that there's
weird stuff, probably having to do with the Saudi connections
and what the Saudi government knew about the nine to
eleven plot beforehand, and all of that.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
That.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Like, I am open to the idea that the government
is hiding meaningful knowledge about nine to eleven from us
still here twenty five years later. What I'm not open
to is the possibility that there was some major conspiracy
that it involved, and you can pick any of your
(26:42):
sort of lanes of nine to eleven conspiracy. That it
was a controlled implosion of the Twin Towers, that it
was a missile into the Pentagon and not a plane.
You know that all the Jews stayed home on September.
You know, like you can pick any of a dozen.
You know, Popular Mechanics put out an entire book on
(27:04):
nine to eleven conspiracies, debunking them one by one, but
like there are enough of them that you can pub
entire book. And similar with the UFO conspiracies, where David Grush,
who's the sort of most recent of the UFO whistleblowers,
he was saying in media interviews when he first came
out that there were five thousand people in the US
(27:28):
government read into the sort of UFO conspiracy and that
the conspiracy dates back to the nineteen thirties. So those
are the two bookends of his thing. So, you guys
worked in government, Like five thousand people in government generate
an incredible amount of paperwork, like even before you get
(27:51):
to the like power point briefing in the situation room.
That's like, mister President here is our UFO cover up
power point Like you're talking budgets, personnel files, performance reviews,
procurement requests, sort of, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Sulf getting drunk and talking, praying at parties, people get divorced. Oh,
I'm going to lend a book.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
And you're talking about five thousand people today in a
conspiracy that stretches across ninety years. So in round numbers,
you're talking thirty thousand people over the last ninety years
who have been read into or known some slice of
that program. And not one of them, on their deathbed
has sort of said, guys, I just got to tell
(28:37):
you about this thing underneath area fifty one. Not one
of them has accidentally sent their PowerPoint briefing to their
roommate as an email attachment. Not one of them has
cause has decided to Edward Snowden and walk out of
the workplace in a hut after not getting a promotion.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
We totally agree with you, because having worked inside, that's
so unlikely. But let me go the other way with
you on this. So, like a lot of your UFO
conspiracy narratives, they assert the government's hiding something alien bodies
technology in your research. What is the strongest evidence you've
found for a cover up, or what's the strongest evidence against.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
I think a lot of this also falls apart in
people mishearing how government works. So one of the sort
of David Grush's sort of main claim when he came
out was effectively, and I'm slightly oversimplifying this, effectively, what
he was saying is the US government has a UFO
(29:41):
crash retrieval program that has retrieved technology that the US
government has assessed is not of this world, is not
human technology. I believe every single individual part of that fact.
But I think people have misheard what that means. And
(30:02):
so let me start to pick that apart in ways
that you guys will understand. The US government absolutely has
a UFO retrieval program. We have had one dating back
to World War One. It was housed at right Patterson
Air Force Base, the Air Technical Intelligence Center. These are
the guys who go around and when something falls out
(30:22):
of the sky on friendly territory or lead audacious missions
into denied territory to try to recover weird things that
fall out of the sky. And that's how we got
our hands on Japanese zeros in World War two. And
that's how we got our hands on bigs in the
Korean War and in Vietnam and the Cold War. And
(30:46):
so that part of the statement is true. The next
part is, I also believe we have a warehouse somewhere
that is full of things that the government has retrieved
that we don't know what it is. And like one
hundred percent, I'm sure that the US government has like
a weird intelligence warehouse, you know, at Area fifty one
(31:07):
or right Patterson or you guys, I'd have even been
in it at some point in your career where it's like,
here's sort of our you know, Indiana Jones archive of
like weird stuff we've found and we don't really know
what it is. I also believe that there's some guy
who works on that program who has walked into that
warehouse and looked at some of that stuff and says
(31:31):
to other people, man, I don't think all that stuff's
from earth. The government workforce, you guys know this better
than I do, is like any workplace, you have those
weird guys who are like a standard deviation or two
outside of the other people on the team. And that
I absolutely believe that sort of someone said to David
(31:51):
Grush at some point totally truthfully. I've talked to some
of those guys on the UFO crash retrieval program, and
they say, there's some stuff there that's not from Earth.
But that's different than what I think the public heres
when you say that, which is the idea that the
Director of National Intelligence has stood up up in the
situation room and said, mister President, with high confidence, the
(32:15):
seventeen intelligence agencies of the United States have concluded that
we have retrieved the technology that is not which I
do not think has happened. And I think that sort
of so much of this is just about like people
not really understanding that sort of translation from what are
like normal government operations and like the normal divergence of
(32:40):
views in the intelligence or military community versus there's an
official conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
But David Grush, by the way, if I understand, I
looked at it pretty closely. He never said he saw
any of this stuff right. He basically said, my job
was to investigate unidentified stuff. UFOs doesn't mean anything. It
just means it's unidentified. So let's just presuppose and I'm
making this up that a North Korean satellite goes down
(33:07):
in Tajikistan, and of course it's not sitting there, it's
like scanned over a couple of acres. We want to
go get it to see what they're doing. And people
we send in, we're not probably won't tell them that
will say, go in and what you find? And what
do they find? They find wires and bits of material
and they gather it up and they bring it out.
We may not. In fact, we probably wouldn't want to
(33:28):
even tell them what it is when they're doing, at
least all of them, because people will talk. So it
comes back and now we've got this material that's unidentified,
and David Grush says, hey, I'm with this office that's
investigating this, and yeah, we know what this is. This
is North Korean saleite pieces of it. But they're going
to tell him, hey man, you don't have to worry
(33:49):
about this. We got it covered. And he takes it
as you are preventing me, David Grush, from finding out
the truth. It's like, no, the US government knows the
truth of what that is. But David Grush when he
went before Congress, he said, I wasn't given access. Is
if you must give me access? So yeah, there are programs,
and then he named an off that I actually know about,
(34:11):
and like they all laugh because there's like only a
couple dozen of them, and these are not people who
collects in it, and you've gotten things wrong in translation.
But when you look at somebody in the outside taken this,
they can build it into an almost rock solid conspiracy theory.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
Yeah. And to that end, there was this fascinating report
that came out from Ode and I about a year
and a half ago after the sort of first wave
of these stories, where the report said, we have tracked
down all the SAPs, the special access programs that David
Grush and the other whistleblowers say are UFO programs, and
(34:47):
we have found them and they are not UFO programs.
And it was a report that sort of instantly was
denounced by both sides because the skeptics were like, see,
there was no truth to it. The believers said, see,
this is just part of the cover up. And to me,
there was like this much more interesting question at the
heart of that report, then, which is what are the
(35:11):
special access programs that the US government runs that the
people who like share the office kitchen with mistake as
being UFO alien cover ups? And that's a super fascinating
thought experiment. Is it propulsion systems that we have discovered
(35:31):
that we haven't talked about publicly. Is it propulsion systems
that our adversaries have discovered that we don't understand yet
that we're trying to reverse engineer. Is it material sciences?
Is it types of math that like we don't understand
yet and are like struggling our way through. Is it
(35:54):
weapons systems? It's actually much more interesting to think about
what are the secret programs that the US government is
working on? They just stay secret. I'm just that are
still secret. That sort of everyone who all works on
that hallway goes home, and it's like, I think my
buddy's working on a flying saucer.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Let's go back to one of the early Cold War
things you wrote about it in the Atomic Program. Do
you think the secrecy around the Atomic Program set the
blueprint for a lot of these modern government conspiracies, everything
from Area fifty one to Kem Trails to deep state stuff,
because obviously that was a conspiracy, one that was obviously sanctioned,
but it was hidden from the public for the good reason.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
Yeah, and I think it, And this has been one
of the things I've talked a lot about on my
book tour over the last couple of weeks. We often
think of the legacy of the Manhattan Project as the
atomic bomb. To me, it's not the most important legacy
of the Manhattan Project is this entirely new way of
(37:13):
the US government understanding that science and technology and innovation
is a core source of national strength. Along with the
work at the mit Rad Lab on radar and the
proximity fuze in World War Two, it sets up this
whole new way of doing science, and this relationship between
(37:36):
the higher education and the national labs, which is what
Los Alamos and Berkeley and Oakridge grow into after the war.
It helps jumpstart the National Science Foundation, it turns nih
into a big grant making organization after the war. It
helps jump start DARPA later, And it's really just this
(37:57):
way of looking at government, science, technology, education, and by
the way, a lot of good immigration, and how that
delivers this model of economic innovation and prosperity that helps
power the next half century of American daily life. One
(38:18):
of the things I worry a lot about now is
the extent to which we are very actively dismantling that system.
At the exact moment that we are about to live
through a technological revolution in artificial intelligence that is potentially
as transformative as the you know, sort of a rival
(38:42):
of atomic energy was in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Can you run a government by conspiracy theorist have conspiracies
about their own organization?
Speaker 5 (38:52):
Well?
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Tried it right or pol pot right?
Speaker 4 (38:55):
I mean, and like that to be as part of
the really amazing thing, you know, like let's release the
Epstein files. Sort of all of these people who came
to power like Cash Battel and Dan Bongino as conspiracy
theorists and are now in these positions of power and
(39:15):
continuing to rail against the government and the deep state
and the conspiracies. And you're like, dude, calls coming from
inside the house now, like you're.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
They're in a tough position because they railed and railed
against the deep state while they were outside and said
the FBI has all these things blah blah blah, and
now they're there and the people who actually believe them
are now like, Okay, you're there. Let us see, Like
how do you choose the subjects you do for oral
history or even for your narrative histories?
Speaker 4 (39:42):
It's a great, great question, and the sort of short
answer is, I don't have any specific model for me
the fun of journalism, and in some ways this I
think journalists and intelligence professionals have a lot in common.
The fun of journalism and writing history is that you
get to wake up in the morning and think of
questions that you're interested in and then go out and
(40:03):
find the answers. And because you do the work that
you do, you can call up people and they'll talk
to you for a really long period of time and
tell tell you everything that they know about a subject.
And that to be is always where your world and
my world overlap is. If you're super curious and enjoy
learning new things and learning about the world around, you
(40:26):
do what we do.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
And the thing about our former job is everything we
did was secret, and it was secret for a reason,
not for big conspiracies, but because we had sources and
we were collecting intelligence. We had to protect those people.
So secrecy mattered in that case. But when you don't
understand what an organization does and they tell you that
they're doing something secret, it's just easy, as General Hayden
used to say, to go to the darkest corner of
(40:47):
the room and create your own sort of thought experiments
on what's going on. So of our age, Watergate seems
to be the place where people turned against it. It's
like the government is actually doing things that are not
in my interest. I think even if you look at
polling before Watergate, at least people generally trusted what the
president said or the government said, or the military. And
afterwards it was very different. It's never really caught up.
(41:09):
You talk about these big secrets that started and led
to our views of the deep state. The atomic program,
which we talked about, was this huge secret, and you
said people could keep a big secret for a short time.
Actually we couldn't. Like the Russians. Stalin knew more about
the atomic program than Truman did when he came and
we became president, because they had sources riddled through White
(41:31):
House and the OSS and the atomic program and all
these other kind of things. And so even the big
secrets are the secret to everybody.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Are we uniquely prone as Americans because of our history
and our makeup to conspiracy theories? Is this just a
human thing or is this uniquely American?
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Or I think it's a profoundly human thing. I think
it is a way the storytelling is the sort of
most fundamental of human existence, back to campfires and stone age,
and I think I don't want to get myself too
much in trouble here. The overlap across human history between
(42:10):
sort of religion and what we would now call conspiracy
theories is non zero. And in some ways, as you say,
like the idea of the deep state comes to the
United States late in our politics, that is a concept
that is far more familiar to a lot of countries
like Turkey and South America with different terms than it
(42:34):
was to the United States. And I think every culture
has their own types of conspiracies, has their own types
of tall tale telling. What I do think has changed
it and turbocharged it in our time has been the Internet,
and it's been the way that algorithms and social media
(42:59):
spread these information and the way that people could do
their own research and publish their own research and reach
more people now and reach other lives like minded people.
I do a history podcast called Long Shadow, and we
did a season this summer on the rise and fall
of social media, and one of the things we spend
(43:21):
some real time looking at is how YouTube and its
algorithm and Facebook and its newsfeed algorithm drive people into
adjacent conspiracy. The sort of biggest sign that you will
believe in a conspiracy theory is that you believe in
a different conspiracy theory, and that sort of the way
(43:42):
that YouTube algorithms and Facebook algorithms. You know, are you
interested in the jfk assassination, then you might also like
flat earth, but you might also like, you know, COVID
anti vaxxers. One of the challenges was until twenty five
thirty years ago, it was much harder for these conspiracies
(44:05):
just spread and be published. And these conspiracies theories in
the pre Internet age were really growing at the rate
of sort of one pamphlet at a time, as opposed
to people sitting down at their computer every night and
being like, what conspiracy am I going to rab it
hole myself in tonight?
Speaker 3 (44:23):
It used to be hard to find each other if
you believed in some weird conspiracy. Now like you can
find each other easily. But we want to thank you
very much for spending time with us today, and things
you write about fit right into the wheelhouse of what
real history with conspiracies that come to them.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
Well, it was a pleasure spending time with you guys
today and this is always fun to see our overlapping world.
Speaker 6 (44:46):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible.
It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for
iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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