June 16, 2020 • 32 mins
An interview with Sarah Scoles, author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, a first-person anthropolical look at the people who make up the UFO community.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. In late February, I
spoke with author Sarah Scoles. She is a freelance science
writer who is a contributing writer at Wired Science, a
contributing editor at Popular Science, and the author of two books,
(00:26):
Making Contact Jill Tarter and The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
and They Are Already Here UFO Culture and Why We
See Saucers. I talked to her just before the release
of They Are Already Here, an engaging, first person anthropological
look at the UFO community. I'm Toby Ball and this
(00:48):
is Strange Arrivals. My name is Sarah Schools. I'm a
science journalist, a contributor at Wired magazine, in Popular Science,
(01:12):
and I write about space. First of all, I love
the book Your interest. It seems to be not so
much with UFOs themselves, but with the people who are
interested in UFOs and the culture that surrounds UFOs. Can
you talk a little bit about your interests and how
that interest began. Sure, I had really never paid attention
to UFOs from most of my life until December sixteen,
(01:37):
and I read a story in the New York Times
that was about this Pentagon program that had been dedicated
to researching what they called unidentified aerial phenomena. And just
starting with that story, I tried to re report for
Wired magazine all the stuff that they had said about
this Pentagon program and just tried to prove it true
(01:59):
or false with my own reporting. And um, since I
was coming to UFOs totally fresh, I didn't actually have
any knowledge of my own and so I started to
try to seek out people who did have that and
who had been either you know, on the historical side
or on the personal side of UFOs for decades before
I came into it, and I didn't really know what
(02:20):
to expect. But I had a lot of ideas I
think about who was obsessed with UFOs and not not
all of those ideas were very flattering. Um. I think
I mostly thought it was just straight conspiracy theorists. But
what I actually found out when I started talking to
people was that, you know, there were lots of really smart,
dedicated researchers who had just found this cool mystery that
(02:45):
they were really interested in and that was really hard
to solve. And um, so that kind of got me
started wondering what it was about this particular mystery that
that was so compelling to them. And so then I
found so many answers that I had to write a
whole book because no one wants to publish an article
that long. So let's actually go back a second. You
(03:07):
you said that you your introduction to it was taking
a look at the program that that had been going
on in the Pentagon sort of under the radar, UH
for a number of years. Maybe you could talk a
little bit about I believe the guy who who ran
was his name was Luis Alisando, And it didn't seem
quite as straightforward from what you wrote as the story
(03:30):
that people might have heard. No, I don't think it
was a straightforward story at all. UM. So, the way
it was initially reported, the Pentagon was running this program
called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which UM involved
one contractor called Bigelow Aerospace researching sightings and reports of
(03:51):
UFOs and UM kind of doing research adjacent to that.
And it was this super secretive program, as they described it,
run by a man named Luis Alazando. And when the
story came out, the newspaper claimed released these two videos
that showed UFOs and they were official US government videos,
and this was kind of what led that that story
(04:12):
to really take off. UM and the program they said
ran from two thousand seven to two thousand twelve, but
that it kept going even after that, even further under
the radar, and you know, all of that is pretty
that's a pretty incredible set of claims. And as time
went on, from reporting I did, and also lots of
(04:33):
other people, the story wasn't quite as linear as that.
The Pentagon has said it didn't release those videos, they
were not authorized for release. It is said that this
man who was supposedly the director actually didn't work on
the program at all. It has said that this wasn't
a UFO program at all, and so it's kind of
(04:54):
just there are lots of statements that are in direct
contradiction to what was initially reported. But las Ando, I
think it's been on CNN and other places talking about
it as though it absolutely was a UFO program. Is
that right? Yeah? Yeah, Louis Alizondo talks a lot about
how it was a UFO program, and also he goes
(05:15):
even farther and says that the program investigated crafts that
UM he basically said they couldn't possibly have come from
this Earth because they couldn't link them to any particular country.
So i'mplaying not just like we were looking at UFOs
from Russia, from Russian military or something, but UFOs from
outer space is the implication. And he's gone off and
(05:38):
joined I don't know if this is the time to
talk about this. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. So
Luis Alizondo retired from the Pentagon Um and from this
program in October seen just before the news story came out,
and he joined up with a private company called to
the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which is based sically.
(06:01):
What they actually do is make books and movies and music,
but what they say they want to do is research
UFOs and then eventually reverse engineer some kind of really
great spacecraft. And Louis Alizondo said that he left the
Pentagon and joined up with these people because officials in
the military weren't taking the threat of UFOs very seriously,
(06:23):
and so he had to leave the government and go
to the private sector to get anyone to listen to him.
And meanwhile, the government says he never worked on the
program at all, So right, and to the Stars Academy.
That's Tom Delong's organization. Yeah. To the Stars Academy is
run by, um, the former frontman of Blink one two,
(06:43):
Tom DeLong. So he's and I want to get back
to Robert Bigelow in a second, but you you write
about both of them in the book and Tom DeLong.
It's an interesting character and it's funny because I feel
like people who aren't necessarily very interested in UFOs, one
of the things that people do know is that the
guy from Blink Win eighty two is into it. And
(07:05):
that's actually a response I've gotten to from people when
I've said, oh, I'm making this this podcast about UFOs,
were like, oh, what's Tom Long going to say? So, um,
so can you talk a little bit about him and
and sort of his interest in what he's been doing. Yeah. So,
Tom Delong's interest in UFOs seems to go way way
(07:25):
back to kind of the band's earlier days, and Um,
when I was working on the book, I tried to
go as far back as the Internet would let me
to read all these different magazine profiles of him in
Blink Win eighty two from years and years ago, and
pretty early on they start talking about how Tom DeLong
used to sit in the back of the tour bus
(07:45):
reading these huge books about UFOs and conspiracy theories and
things like that, and you know he um. He wrote
a song called Aliens Exist, which is basically about having
an alien visit your bed room and abduct you and
no one believe you. Um. And then later on he
(08:06):
started going more public with the idea that like he
was holding some kind of alien secret UFO secret and
he was going to bring it public. I don't remember
exactly what what year it was, but I remember before
I was interested in UFOs at all, I read some
profile of him that that said, you know, I'm collaborating
(08:27):
with high level intelligence officials and working with defense contractors,
and I'm going to bring the alien truth to you.
And I was like, Oh, that guy, that's that's interesting.
Wouldn't it be great if Tom DeLong brought us aliens? Um?
But then then a couple of years later he brought
us some um complicated version of them, I guess, but um,
(08:49):
so he he went off. He he started this company
called to the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, and
it's supposed to be some kind of UFO Disclosure Project
where they have access to data about UFOs and are
also going to collect it and kind of analyze it.
And he's brought you know, people from the actual Pentagon,
(09:09):
Louis Alizondo. There's another guy on their board called Chris Melon,
who was like a former high level intelligence officer. Like,
they've got they've got serious people, even though I don't
really understand why. The second I think person with a
lot of money, uh, in the last you know, decade
or so, Who's who's who's put a lot of money
(09:31):
into this was Robert Bigelow, who's another kind of interesting
character who bought the skin Walker Ranch, which has got
the coolest name of any place that I've ever heard.
Is completely intriguing just because of that. Can you talk
a little bit about him? Yeah, Robert Bigelow is a
very wealthy man who lives in Nevada, and he made
(09:53):
a bunch of money, um in real estate and running
a hotel chain, and then he went in, you is
that money to pursue his real interest, which wasn't budget
hotels but was um aliens. You know, he's gone on
sixty minutes, I believe, and told the whole world that
he believes there's an alien presence here on Earth. So once,
(10:16):
once he had amassed his fortune, he thought, you know,
I'm I'm going to do research into UFOs and other
paranormal kinds of things. So since the since the nineties,
he's given millions of dollars to UFO researchers, just kind
of funding researchers to do kind of small individual projects.
And then I guess the thing he's best known for
(10:37):
is reading an article in a newspaper called the Desirette
News about a family who owned this ranch in Utah,
and they said there were all these paranormal happenings. They're
like a giant wolf that wouldn't die when you shot it,
and animal mutilations and seeing UFOs and just all kinds
(10:58):
of spooky things. And he thought, you know, I would
like to buy that terrible spooky place and see if
I can research all this stuff that's going on on
the property. So he did. He bought it. He moved
some scientists in and founded a an institute called the
National Institute for Discovery Science, where he was going to
try to investigate these things on this place that was
(11:23):
called skin Walker Ranch um and see if he could
get to the bottom of the what they called the phenomena,
which is kind of the all encompassing term for all
these these weird paranormal things that they said was going on.
And so they bought cameras and sensors and hired scientists
and tried to catch paranormal activity as it was happening
(11:47):
in collect actual data on it um. But they never
actually really got any data that they could share. Um.
The you know, the sensors wouldn't work, the off that
was supposed to be happening, wouldn't show up when they
were looking, and they just kind of came away from
the whole experience with essentially what they started with, which
(12:08):
was a bunch of stories. A theme I think in
your book and we've already started talking about it is
this relationship between people who are interested in UFOs and
at least one faction of that group who really wants
to try and prove scientifically, um that they exist there,
(12:30):
you know, that they're actually terrestrial um. And then there's
sort of this weird dynamic or relationship between them and
then the scientific establishment, which shows very little interest in it.
And you know, you get the sense that that that
(12:51):
the UFO people um feels though the scientific establishment is
almost working against them. Yeah, I think that mainstream science
doesn't really want a whole lot to do with uphology,
and that's very understandable because there really is no or
very little hard data to go on. Almost everything is
(13:13):
an eyewitness report and without you know, columns of numbers
and sensor data that you can take home and then analyze.
So there's really no systematic plan of investigation in the
way that scientists would normally want to have, And so
it's it's pretty legitimate that the UFOs and UFO research
(13:34):
in their current form aren't part of mainstream science. But
I do think then uthologists are both kind of angry
that they're not a part of it and that they're
not taken seriously. But at the same time they say
traditional science actually isn't adequate to do research on what
we are dealing with because they're too narrow minded and
(13:55):
they don't take human testimony seriously or they don't have
the right tools. So then they kind of reject mainstream science.
But then also anytime a scientist actually does show interests
or like if somebody has a PhD and they're speaking
at a conference, you can tell that you folowgists actually
(14:16):
really revere science and what to emulate it. Even at
the same time they're like, you don't understand me, So
I don't know. It's complicated both directions. I think strange
arrivals will return in a moment. Another tense relationship is
(14:45):
between the UFOL community and UH the US government in
the U S Military, And you make a you make
the point a couple of times in your book about
how there's a lot of suspicion within UFO community towards
the government, but that the government has, you know, in
many ways earned it over the years. Yeah, the government
(15:07):
hasn't really been honest or straightforward in most of its
dealings with UFOs or the UFO community UM, starting from
the very beginning. It's early Projects UM, in particular Project
Blue Book, which was their longest UFO investigation program that
went until nineteen sixty nine. Like a lot of the
(15:30):
point of it was not actually to figure out what
UFOs were and to solve UFO cases, but it was
too UM Essentially, this is what people say, UM cross
things off is known so that no one would have
to worry about them, like to to find to find
explanations for things, even if those explanations didn't quite fit,
(15:52):
so that people wouldn't panic that there was this kind
of unknown thing in the sky. UM. So there's that. UM.
You know, you have the canonical crashing roswell where something
crashed on a rancher's land UM in New Mexico. And
at first the official government press release said this was
(16:14):
a flying saucer, we got it, don't worry, um, And
then they said, just you know, just kidding, that was
a weather balloon. UM. And then decades later in the
nineties they said, just kidding, it was actually a nuclear
test detector experiment. There was also a CIA sponsored panel
(16:34):
called the Robertson Panel UM, and in their scientists and
military personnel were specifically looking at the effects that UFOs
and your UFO reports might have on people and chaos
and panic, and they essentially said, if we get too
many UFO reports, it might clog our intelligence channels and
(16:57):
it might cause you know, hysteria in the streets. So
what we need to do is essentially make propaganda to
tell people not to worry about UFOs. And so just
throughout history for decades and decades, you have these instances
of the government trying to manipulate public opinion and interpretation
of UFOs, but then also saying like we have no
(17:20):
interest in them and neither should you, And it just
it just leaves people feeling like they can't trust the
government on the topic, I think, and they're not wrong.
Another theme that seems a comp in uh in the
book is these people who kind of look at UFOs
ah rather than you know, sort of approaching it scientifically,
(17:43):
but serves you to have a more spiritual or religious
take on them, or or way of sort of conceiving
of them. And I was wondering if I could bring
up a few of those people and maybe have you
talk about them a look, because I thought it was
super interesting. And one of those one of those people
is Steven Greer, who was talking about close encounters of
(18:07):
the Fifth kind. Yeah, Stephen Greer has kind of a
whole empire around him. He has made a name for
himself with the specific kind of contact with aliens called
close encounters of the Fifth kind Um, which is essentially
(18:27):
a kind of contact with aliens and UFOs that you,
as a human being on earth, try to initiate, like
you kind of send your intention and receptive nous too,
that experience out into the universe somehow, and then the
phenomenon is supposed to sense that and and appear to you.
(18:49):
And so he leads these retreats where he tries to
teach people to do this and it involves UM a
lot of meditation and um, yeah, projecting your intentions. And
a lot of people don't like it. A lot of
people think of it UM as kind of snake oil,
(19:10):
but a lot of people, um it really resonates with
I think because it is a kind of spiritual experience,
and it also is something that you can participate in,
Like you're not just a passive observer of these supposed
UFOs and or aliens. You are connecting your brain with
them somehow, And I think that appeals to people. It's
(19:32):
sort of seemed to me a little bit like the
Secret but for extraterrestrials it's sort of you know, envisioned
it and it and it might happen, or it's more
likely to happen. Definitely. It's like your UFO vision board. Yeah, exactly.
Another person that you talked to who sort of falls
into that spiritual realm is UM a guy named Garrett
(19:56):
for sure. Yeah. Garrett for sure was actually a kind
of famous radio astronomer who did really conventional, you know,
physics and astronomy work using radio telescopes and then UM
at some point when the search for Extraterrestrial intelligence UM,
which is a kind of more conventional look for broadcasts
(20:19):
from alien civilizations, when that kind of research was getting started.
At first he did a little bit of it himself,
using radio telescopes to look for these messages from aliens.
And then as time went by and he started to
hear more of the talk from his fellow astronomers, he
started to doubt UM their methods a little more, and
(20:41):
he thought that there was basically no chance that they
were going to find aliens. And so he made kind
of a joke conference talk where he said, instead of
giving these people a billion dollars to make a telescope,
what if you gave me some money and I just
sat on top of a mountain and thought about aliens
and that he said, it had basically the same chance
of success as what they were doing, and it would
(21:04):
cost essentially no money. But but then he started I
don't know exactly why he went down this path, but
then he started to kind of take that idea seriously.
He he read a book by a scientist named John
Lily who was doing some work on trying to communicate
with dolphins, and he read about sensory deprivation tanks where
(21:27):
you could go in a place that's totally dark and
totally quiet and you're floating. Um. And this guy, John Lily,
had thought that he had communicated with some kind of
being outside of himself, and so Garrett, for sure, I
thought that he would try the same thing. Um. And
so he spent a bunch of time going in these
(21:48):
sensory deprivation tanks, and what he heard seemed to him
like the voices of aliens, like his joke experiment was
actually working um. And then to eventually he came to
the conclusion that what he was hearing was his own
unconscious mind and like the collective unconscious mind of of humanity,
which sounds out there in a different way from from UFOs.
(22:11):
But that was kind of his his research journey, which
is a little like a like a seventies New Age
spiritual type of journey. So he kind of came to
this sort of young Gian view of what he was
experiencing was that it was, and you mentioned it in
the book Experiencing the Collective Unconscious in some way that's
more manifest than you would get otherwise. Yeah, he kind
(22:35):
of thought, he, yeah, he could like tap into the
you know, the the ideas and archetypes of the collective
unconscious when he was totally removed from all other sensations,
and that the way that that manifested itself was this
alien inside of his brain essentially. Huh. You mentioned that
(22:55):
that he had worked with set to begin with, and
I thought it was really interesting the way, and I
can't I can't remember if you characterize it or he
characterized the sort of attitude that a lot of the
people involved in SETI now have towards the possible benefits
of making contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Yeah. He came up
(23:18):
with the term the salvation school of SET, which was
that when SETI scientists were trying to justify all this
money they wanted to spend looking for aliens that might
not be there, they would say, this is worth our
time because this is a really big question. Are we
alone in the universe. It's an almost religious question, but
we can investigate it scientifically, and because if we are successful,
(23:42):
then that will mean peace on Earth because everyone will
be united as Earthlings because we're all so much more
like each other than we are like the alien who
we can't identify. And they also say that if if
we make contact with an alien civilization, it will be
much much older than us, and so it would be
(24:03):
more technologically advanced, and so it would have gone through
some kind of what they call it technological adolescence, which
is basically where we are right now, where like at
any given time we might blow ourselves up with nuclear bombs,
or have so much climate change we don't survive, or
things like that. And they say, the aliens who have
(24:26):
survived that can teach us that it's possible to survive
that and maybe how. And Garrett Verscher kind of looked
at all of that and saw it as very religious,
where instead of having a god that's going to, you know,
tell you the right way to live your life and
save you from all your troubles, it's this great alien
society and that that's really kind of a Cold War
(24:48):
type of type of logic, it feels like to me.
And also there's actually like we don't actually know how
anyone would react if we found aliens that might have
no effect on the world. Maybe there will be piece.
Maybe we'd all run out in the streets rioting. Nobody
can actually know that for sure. In my opinion, I
just thought it was it was really interesting because it's
(25:09):
it does and you mentioned the Cold War. It it
does kind of hearken back to, you know, the contact
ease of the nineteen fifties that we talked a little
bit about in the podcast at the very beginning with
George Adamski who said he was visited by this beautiful
person from Venus, who said, we're keeping eye on you
(25:32):
were really advanced, and we want you to be spiritually
better and more peaceful, and we're worried that you're gonna
destroy each other and all this, and it was clear
that he was making up this whole story, but it
was the same idea that these sort of advanced extra
rationals are have these lessons to teach us about how
to live together and live peacefully and be respectful of
(25:55):
the planet and all that stuff. And to um had
that kind of your today, Well, I thought was it
was pretty interesting. Definitely, Yeah. I mean it's not very
different from Jesus getting born and saying like be nice
to each other. You spend a lot of time in
the book and in real life sort of going to
visit these places where UFO people gather. So you go
(26:20):
to Roswell, you go to a Buffon conference, you go
it's close to Area fifty one, is you can get
you go to the was it the Alien watch Tower?
And I was wondering, do you have any thoughts about
the fact that these sort of institutions exist and people
come to them, and what sort of that cultural significance is. Yeah,
(26:43):
I think the sites like that are almost if if
we're continuing the spiritual train of thought, there are a
little like pilgrimage points where they're like important points in
this particular subculture that people can come visit and um
maybe how a meaningful experience while they're there, and then
most importantly interact with other people who kind of understand
(27:05):
where they're coming from, which I think was the biggest
common factor between move On meetings, the UFO Watchtower and
UM Roswell. I guess um, I didn't really see very
many people at Area fifty one, But if you if
you go to a place that is known for UFOs
or aliens, um you know that the other people around
(27:28):
you kind of have that same interest at some level,
whether they're serious like you, or if they just have
a casual interest, like they're probably not going to just
make fun of you or tell you you're crazy, and
so I kind of feel like people go there and
like pay homage to this interest, have a little fun,
and then also can maybe speak more freely with each
(27:48):
other than they can in real life. At least that
was what I noticed when I was there. Well, it's great.
Do you have any last thoughts or things you wanted
to convey that you learned that you thought were particularly
that we haven't talked about. Let's see. I think so.
There's a thing a historian named Greg Gigan who's at
Penn State told me when I was very first getting
(28:11):
into the subject, which was that when UFO belief in
the general population gets like stronger, people more interested than
they used to be, it's usually when other stuff isn't
going well, which we could argue it's not in the
world right now, like things are pretty precarious. There might
be a global pandemic, people are afraid of nuclear war,
(28:32):
and so when all that is going on, if you
have this other like powerful thing to turn to and
be interested in. A it's distracting and you can kind
of project your fears onto it, or if you're going
the other direction, you can think, like the study people
like maybe that's something that will save me. And it's
just interesting to kind of have looked in the past
(28:53):
and seeing that wave go up and down, and then
to see it kind of rise up again just in
the past few years. I hope you enjoyed this week's interview.
Next week, on a second bonus episode of Strange Arrivals,
I talked with Stephanie Kelly Romano, an associate professor of Rhetoric,
(29:17):
Film and Screen Studies at Bates College. She has gathered
narratives from over three people who believe they were abducted
by aliens, and has written on how these stories helped
make sense of issues of race, control, rights, and identity.
In terms of an example, for raise, I think that
just the fact that experiencers talk about a multiplicity of
(29:41):
types of aliens and that the aliens have different characteristics. So,
for example, the little gray aliens that are so popular
in pop culture are oftentimes those beings that are worker beings.
They don't necessarily have personality they're not particularly developed, are
advanced in a lot of ways. Technologically, certainly they are,
(30:03):
but they're very focused on conducting experiments or doing that
kind of thing, whereas people also talk about Nordic aliens,
and Nordic aliens have a tendency to be more human looking,
and they are characteristically Caucasian and blonde, and those aliens
are the ones that are compassionate. Those aliens are the
(30:26):
ones that are kind. There have been a bunch of
different studies or a couple articles anyway, that talk about
gray aliens as being kind of the combination of black
and white, right, and so this ambiguous racialized mixture, But
also the fact that the advanced aliens of Caucasian I mean,
(30:46):
coupled with ancient alien theories, which are inherently racist in
some ways, race is clearly underneath it all. The fact
that any non westernized, non colonized society couldn't have made
whatever it is, the Pyramids and Nascal lines, whatever, and
they needed to have help from extraterrestrials, but westernized Caucasian
(31:10):
societies didn't is a little questionable. Strange Arrivals is a
production of I Heart Radio and grim and mild from
Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby
Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with
(31:30):
executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty
Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickike. Barney Hill was portrayed
by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the Milms Special Collections
and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan,
w y A M in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and
(31:52):
David O'Leary, the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic
series Project blue Book. Learn more about a show over
at Grimm and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. In late February, I
spoke with author Sarah Scoles. She is a freelance science
writer who is a contributing writer at Wired Science, a
contributing editor at Popular Science, and the author of two books,
(00:26):
Making Contact Jill Tarter and The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
and They Are Already Here UFO Culture and Why We
See Saucers. I talked to her just before the release
of They Are Already Here, an engaging, first person anthropological
look at the UFO community. I'm Toby Ball and this
(00:48):
is Strange Arrivals. My name is Sarah Schools. I'm a
science journalist, a contributor at Wired magazine, in Popular Science,
(01:12):
and I write about space. First of all, I love
the book Your interest. It seems to be not so
much with UFOs themselves, but with the people who are
interested in UFOs and the culture that surrounds UFOs. Can
you talk a little bit about your interests and how
that interest began. Sure, I had really never paid attention
to UFOs from most of my life until December sixteen,
(01:37):
and I read a story in the New York Times
that was about this Pentagon program that had been dedicated
to researching what they called unidentified aerial phenomena. And just
starting with that story, I tried to re report for
Wired magazine all the stuff that they had said about
this Pentagon program and just tried to prove it true
(01:59):
or false with my own reporting. And um, since I
was coming to UFOs totally fresh, I didn't actually have
any knowledge of my own and so I started to
try to seek out people who did have that and
who had been either you know, on the historical side
or on the personal side of UFOs for decades before
I came into it, and I didn't really know what
(02:20):
to expect. But I had a lot of ideas I
think about who was obsessed with UFOs and not not
all of those ideas were very flattering. Um. I think
I mostly thought it was just straight conspiracy theorists. But
what I actually found out when I started talking to
people was that, you know, there were lots of really smart,
dedicated researchers who had just found this cool mystery that
(02:45):
they were really interested in and that was really hard
to solve. And um, so that kind of got me
started wondering what it was about this particular mystery that
that was so compelling to them. And so then I
found so many answers that I had to write a
whole book because no one wants to publish an article
that long. So let's actually go back a second. You
(03:07):
you said that you your introduction to it was taking
a look at the program that that had been going
on in the Pentagon sort of under the radar, UH
for a number of years. Maybe you could talk a
little bit about I believe the guy who who ran
was his name was Luis Alisando, And it didn't seem
quite as straightforward from what you wrote as the story
(03:30):
that people might have heard. No, I don't think it
was a straightforward story at all. UM. So, the way
it was initially reported, the Pentagon was running this program
called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which UM involved
one contractor called Bigelow Aerospace researching sightings and reports of
(03:51):
UFOs and UM kind of doing research adjacent to that.
And it was this super secretive program, as they described it,
run by a man named Luis Alazando. And when the
story came out, the newspaper claimed released these two videos
that showed UFOs and they were official US government videos,
and this was kind of what led that that story
(04:12):
to really take off. UM and the program they said
ran from two thousand seven to two thousand twelve, but
that it kept going even after that, even further under
the radar, and you know, all of that is pretty
that's a pretty incredible set of claims. And as time
went on, from reporting I did, and also lots of
(04:33):
other people, the story wasn't quite as linear as that.
The Pentagon has said it didn't release those videos, they
were not authorized for release. It is said that this
man who was supposedly the director actually didn't work on
the program at all. It has said that this wasn't
a UFO program at all, and so it's kind of
(04:54):
just there are lots of statements that are in direct
contradiction to what was initially reported. But las Ando, I
think it's been on CNN and other places talking about
it as though it absolutely was a UFO program. Is
that right? Yeah? Yeah, Louis Alizondo talks a lot about
how it was a UFO program, and also he goes
(05:15):
even farther and says that the program investigated crafts that
UM he basically said they couldn't possibly have come from
this Earth because they couldn't link them to any particular country.
So i'mplaying not just like we were looking at UFOs
from Russia, from Russian military or something, but UFOs from
outer space is the implication. And he's gone off and
(05:38):
joined I don't know if this is the time to
talk about this. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. So
Luis Alizondo retired from the Pentagon Um and from this
program in October seen just before the news story came out,
and he joined up with a private company called to
the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which is based sically.
(06:01):
What they actually do is make books and movies and music,
but what they say they want to do is research
UFOs and then eventually reverse engineer some kind of really
great spacecraft. And Louis Alizondo said that he left the
Pentagon and joined up with these people because officials in
the military weren't taking the threat of UFOs very seriously,
(06:23):
and so he had to leave the government and go
to the private sector to get anyone to listen to him.
And meanwhile, the government says he never worked on the
program at all, So right, and to the Stars Academy.
That's Tom Delong's organization. Yeah. To the Stars Academy is
run by, um, the former frontman of Blink one two,
(06:43):
Tom DeLong. So he's and I want to get back
to Robert Bigelow in a second, but you you write
about both of them in the book and Tom DeLong.
It's an interesting character and it's funny because I feel
like people who aren't necessarily very interested in UFOs, one
of the things that people do know is that the
guy from Blink Win eighty two is into it. And
(07:05):
that's actually a response I've gotten to from people when
I've said, oh, I'm making this this podcast about UFOs,
were like, oh, what's Tom Long going to say? So, um,
so can you talk a little bit about him and
and sort of his interest in what he's been doing. Yeah. So,
Tom Delong's interest in UFOs seems to go way way
(07:25):
back to kind of the band's earlier days, and Um,
when I was working on the book, I tried to
go as far back as the Internet would let me
to read all these different magazine profiles of him in
Blink Win eighty two from years and years ago, and
pretty early on they start talking about how Tom DeLong
used to sit in the back of the tour bus
(07:45):
reading these huge books about UFOs and conspiracy theories and
things like that, and you know he um. He wrote
a song called Aliens Exist, which is basically about having
an alien visit your bed room and abduct you and
no one believe you. Um. And then later on he
(08:06):
started going more public with the idea that like he
was holding some kind of alien secret UFO secret and
he was going to bring it public. I don't remember
exactly what what year it was, but I remember before
I was interested in UFOs at all, I read some
profile of him that that said, you know, I'm collaborating
(08:27):
with high level intelligence officials and working with defense contractors,
and I'm going to bring the alien truth to you.
And I was like, Oh, that guy, that's that's interesting.
Wouldn't it be great if Tom DeLong brought us aliens? Um?
But then then a couple of years later he brought
us some um complicated version of them, I guess, but um,
(08:49):
so he he went off. He he started this company
called to the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, and
it's supposed to be some kind of UFO Disclosure Project
where they have access to data about UFOs and are
also going to collect it and kind of analyze it.
And he's brought you know, people from the actual Pentagon,
(09:09):
Louis Alizondo. There's another guy on their board called Chris Melon,
who was like a former high level intelligence officer. Like,
they've got they've got serious people, even though I don't
really understand why. The second I think person with a
lot of money, uh, in the last you know, decade
or so, Who's who's who's put a lot of money
(09:31):
into this was Robert Bigelow, who's another kind of interesting
character who bought the skin Walker Ranch, which has got
the coolest name of any place that I've ever heard.
Is completely intriguing just because of that. Can you talk
a little bit about him? Yeah, Robert Bigelow is a
very wealthy man who lives in Nevada, and he made
(09:53):
a bunch of money, um in real estate and running
a hotel chain, and then he went in, you is
that money to pursue his real interest, which wasn't budget
hotels but was um aliens. You know, he's gone on
sixty minutes, I believe, and told the whole world that
he believes there's an alien presence here on Earth. So once,
(10:16):
once he had amassed his fortune, he thought, you know,
I'm I'm going to do research into UFOs and other
paranormal kinds of things. So since the since the nineties,
he's given millions of dollars to UFO researchers, just kind
of funding researchers to do kind of small individual projects.
And then I guess the thing he's best known for
(10:37):
is reading an article in a newspaper called the Desirette
News about a family who owned this ranch in Utah,
and they said there were all these paranormal happenings. They're
like a giant wolf that wouldn't die when you shot it,
and animal mutilations and seeing UFOs and just all kinds
(10:58):
of spooky things. And he thought, you know, I would
like to buy that terrible spooky place and see if
I can research all this stuff that's going on on
the property. So he did. He bought it. He moved
some scientists in and founded a an institute called the
National Institute for Discovery Science, where he was going to
try to investigate these things on this place that was
(11:23):
called skin Walker Ranch um and see if he could
get to the bottom of the what they called the phenomena,
which is kind of the all encompassing term for all
these these weird paranormal things that they said was going on.
And so they bought cameras and sensors and hired scientists
and tried to catch paranormal activity as it was happening
(11:47):
in collect actual data on it um. But they never
actually really got any data that they could share. Um.
The you know, the sensors wouldn't work, the off that
was supposed to be happening, wouldn't show up when they
were looking, and they just kind of came away from
the whole experience with essentially what they started with, which
(12:08):
was a bunch of stories. A theme I think in
your book and we've already started talking about it is
this relationship between people who are interested in UFOs and
at least one faction of that group who really wants
to try and prove scientifically, um that they exist there,
(12:30):
you know, that they're actually terrestrial um. And then there's
sort of this weird dynamic or relationship between them and
then the scientific establishment, which shows very little interest in it.
And you know, you get the sense that that that
(12:51):
the UFO people um feels though the scientific establishment is
almost working against them. Yeah, I think that mainstream science
doesn't really want a whole lot to do with uphology,
and that's very understandable because there really is no or
very little hard data to go on. Almost everything is
(13:13):
an eyewitness report and without you know, columns of numbers
and sensor data that you can take home and then analyze.
So there's really no systematic plan of investigation in the
way that scientists would normally want to have, And so
it's it's pretty legitimate that the UFOs and UFO research
(13:34):
in their current form aren't part of mainstream science. But
I do think then uthologists are both kind of angry
that they're not a part of it and that they're
not taken seriously. But at the same time they say
traditional science actually isn't adequate to do research on what
we are dealing with because they're too narrow minded and
(13:55):
they don't take human testimony seriously or they don't have
the right tools. So then they kind of reject mainstream science.
But then also anytime a scientist actually does show interests
or like if somebody has a PhD and they're speaking
at a conference, you can tell that you folowgists actually
(14:16):
really revere science and what to emulate it. Even at
the same time they're like, you don't understand me, So
I don't know. It's complicated both directions. I think strange
arrivals will return in a moment. Another tense relationship is
(14:45):
between the UFOL community and UH the US government in
the U S Military, And you make a you make
the point a couple of times in your book about
how there's a lot of suspicion within UFO community towards
the government, but that the government has, you know, in
many ways earned it over the years. Yeah, the government
(15:07):
hasn't really been honest or straightforward in most of its
dealings with UFOs or the UFO community UM, starting from
the very beginning. It's early Projects UM, in particular Project
Blue Book, which was their longest UFO investigation program that
went until nineteen sixty nine. Like a lot of the
(15:30):
point of it was not actually to figure out what
UFOs were and to solve UFO cases, but it was
too UM Essentially, this is what people say, UM cross
things off is known so that no one would have
to worry about them, like to to find to find
explanations for things, even if those explanations didn't quite fit,
(15:52):
so that people wouldn't panic that there was this kind
of unknown thing in the sky. UM. So there's that. UM.
You know, you have the canonical crashing roswell where something
crashed on a rancher's land UM in New Mexico. And
at first the official government press release said this was
(16:14):
a flying saucer, we got it, don't worry, um, And
then they said, just you know, just kidding, that was
a weather balloon. UM. And then decades later in the
nineties they said, just kidding, it was actually a nuclear
test detector experiment. There was also a CIA sponsored panel
(16:34):
called the Robertson Panel UM, and in their scientists and
military personnel were specifically looking at the effects that UFOs
and your UFO reports might have on people and chaos
and panic, and they essentially said, if we get too
many UFO reports, it might clog our intelligence channels and
(16:57):
it might cause you know, hysteria in the streets. So
what we need to do is essentially make propaganda to
tell people not to worry about UFOs. And so just
throughout history for decades and decades, you have these instances
of the government trying to manipulate public opinion and interpretation
of UFOs, but then also saying like we have no
(17:20):
interest in them and neither should you, And it just
it just leaves people feeling like they can't trust the
government on the topic, I think, and they're not wrong.
Another theme that seems a comp in uh in the
book is these people who kind of look at UFOs
ah rather than you know, sort of approaching it scientifically,
(17:43):
but serves you to have a more spiritual or religious
take on them, or or way of sort of conceiving
of them. And I was wondering if I could bring
up a few of those people and maybe have you
talk about them a look, because I thought it was
super interesting. And one of those one of those people
is Steven Greer, who was talking about close encounters of
(18:07):
the Fifth kind. Yeah, Stephen Greer has kind of a
whole empire around him. He has made a name for
himself with the specific kind of contact with aliens called
close encounters of the Fifth kind Um, which is essentially
(18:27):
a kind of contact with aliens and UFOs that you,
as a human being on earth, try to initiate, like
you kind of send your intention and receptive nous too,
that experience out into the universe somehow, and then the
phenomenon is supposed to sense that and and appear to you.
(18:49):
And so he leads these retreats where he tries to
teach people to do this and it involves UM a
lot of meditation and um, yeah, projecting your intentions. And
a lot of people don't like it. A lot of
people think of it UM as kind of snake oil,
(19:10):
but a lot of people, um it really resonates with
I think because it is a kind of spiritual experience,
and it also is something that you can participate in,
Like you're not just a passive observer of these supposed
UFOs and or aliens. You are connecting your brain with
them somehow, And I think that appeals to people. It's
(19:32):
sort of seemed to me a little bit like the
Secret but for extraterrestrials it's sort of you know, envisioned
it and it and it might happen, or it's more
likely to happen. Definitely. It's like your UFO vision board. Yeah, exactly.
Another person that you talked to who sort of falls
into that spiritual realm is UM a guy named Garrett
(19:56):
for sure. Yeah. Garrett for sure was actually a kind
of famous radio astronomer who did really conventional, you know,
physics and astronomy work using radio telescopes and then UM
at some point when the search for Extraterrestrial intelligence UM,
which is a kind of more conventional look for broadcasts
(20:19):
from alien civilizations, when that kind of research was getting started.
At first he did a little bit of it himself,
using radio telescopes to look for these messages from aliens.
And then as time went by and he started to
hear more of the talk from his fellow astronomers, he
started to doubt UM their methods a little more, and
(20:41):
he thought that there was basically no chance that they
were going to find aliens. And so he made kind
of a joke conference talk where he said, instead of
giving these people a billion dollars to make a telescope,
what if you gave me some money and I just
sat on top of a mountain and thought about aliens
and that he said, it had basically the same chance
of success as what they were doing, and it would
(21:04):
cost essentially no money. But but then he started I
don't know exactly why he went down this path, but
then he started to kind of take that idea seriously.
He he read a book by a scientist named John
Lily who was doing some work on trying to communicate
with dolphins, and he read about sensory deprivation tanks where
(21:27):
you could go in a place that's totally dark and
totally quiet and you're floating. Um. And this guy, John Lily,
had thought that he had communicated with some kind of
being outside of himself, and so Garrett, for sure, I
thought that he would try the same thing. Um. And
so he spent a bunch of time going in these
(21:48):
sensory deprivation tanks, and what he heard seemed to him
like the voices of aliens, like his joke experiment was
actually working um. And then to eventually he came to
the conclusion that what he was hearing was his own
unconscious mind and like the collective unconscious mind of of humanity,
which sounds out there in a different way from from UFOs.
(22:11):
But that was kind of his his research journey, which
is a little like a like a seventies New Age
spiritual type of journey. So he kind of came to
this sort of young Gian view of what he was
experiencing was that it was, and you mentioned it in
the book Experiencing the Collective Unconscious in some way that's
more manifest than you would get otherwise. Yeah, he kind
(22:35):
of thought, he, yeah, he could like tap into the
you know, the the ideas and archetypes of the collective
unconscious when he was totally removed from all other sensations,
and that the way that that manifested itself was this
alien inside of his brain essentially. Huh. You mentioned that
(22:55):
that he had worked with set to begin with, and
I thought it was really interesting the way, and I
can't I can't remember if you characterize it or he
characterized the sort of attitude that a lot of the
people involved in SETI now have towards the possible benefits
of making contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Yeah. He came up
(23:18):
with the term the salvation school of SET, which was
that when SETI scientists were trying to justify all this
money they wanted to spend looking for aliens that might
not be there, they would say, this is worth our
time because this is a really big question. Are we
alone in the universe. It's an almost religious question, but
we can investigate it scientifically, and because if we are successful,
(23:42):
then that will mean peace on Earth because everyone will
be united as Earthlings because we're all so much more
like each other than we are like the alien who
we can't identify. And they also say that if if
we make contact with an alien civilization, it will be
much much older than us, and so it would be
(24:03):
more technologically advanced, and so it would have gone through
some kind of what they call it technological adolescence, which
is basically where we are right now, where like at
any given time we might blow ourselves up with nuclear bombs,
or have so much climate change we don't survive, or
things like that. And they say, the aliens who have
(24:26):
survived that can teach us that it's possible to survive
that and maybe how. And Garrett Verscher kind of looked
at all of that and saw it as very religious,
where instead of having a god that's going to, you know,
tell you the right way to live your life and
save you from all your troubles, it's this great alien
society and that that's really kind of a Cold War
(24:48):
type of type of logic, it feels like to me.
And also there's actually like we don't actually know how
anyone would react if we found aliens that might have
no effect on the world. Maybe there will be piece.
Maybe we'd all run out in the streets rioting. Nobody
can actually know that for sure. In my opinion, I
just thought it was it was really interesting because it's
(25:09):
it does and you mentioned the Cold War. It it
does kind of hearken back to, you know, the contact
ease of the nineteen fifties that we talked a little
bit about in the podcast at the very beginning with
George Adamski who said he was visited by this beautiful
person from Venus, who said, we're keeping eye on you
(25:32):
were really advanced, and we want you to be spiritually
better and more peaceful, and we're worried that you're gonna
destroy each other and all this, and it was clear
that he was making up this whole story, but it
was the same idea that these sort of advanced extra
rationals are have these lessons to teach us about how
to live together and live peacefully and be respectful of
(25:55):
the planet and all that stuff. And to um had
that kind of your today, Well, I thought was it
was pretty interesting. Definitely, Yeah. I mean it's not very
different from Jesus getting born and saying like be nice
to each other. You spend a lot of time in
the book and in real life sort of going to
visit these places where UFO people gather. So you go
(26:20):
to Roswell, you go to a Buffon conference, you go
it's close to Area fifty one, is you can get
you go to the was it the Alien watch Tower?
And I was wondering, do you have any thoughts about
the fact that these sort of institutions exist and people
come to them, and what sort of that cultural significance is. Yeah,
(26:43):
I think the sites like that are almost if if
we're continuing the spiritual train of thought, there are a
little like pilgrimage points where they're like important points in
this particular subculture that people can come visit and um
maybe how a meaningful experience while they're there, and then
most importantly interact with other people who kind of understand
(27:05):
where they're coming from, which I think was the biggest
common factor between move On meetings, the UFO Watchtower and
UM Roswell. I guess um, I didn't really see very
many people at Area fifty one, But if you if
you go to a place that is known for UFOs
or aliens, um you know that the other people around
(27:28):
you kind of have that same interest at some level,
whether they're serious like you, or if they just have
a casual interest, like they're probably not going to just
make fun of you or tell you you're crazy, and
so I kind of feel like people go there and
like pay homage to this interest, have a little fun,
and then also can maybe speak more freely with each
(27:48):
other than they can in real life. At least that
was what I noticed when I was there. Well, it's great.
Do you have any last thoughts or things you wanted
to convey that you learned that you thought were particularly
that we haven't talked about. Let's see. I think so.
There's a thing a historian named Greg Gigan who's at
Penn State told me when I was very first getting
(28:11):
into the subject, which was that when UFO belief in
the general population gets like stronger, people more interested than
they used to be, it's usually when other stuff isn't
going well, which we could argue it's not in the
world right now, like things are pretty precarious. There might
be a global pandemic, people are afraid of nuclear war,
(28:32):
and so when all that is going on, if you
have this other like powerful thing to turn to and
be interested in. A it's distracting and you can kind
of project your fears onto it, or if you're going
the other direction, you can think, like the study people
like maybe that's something that will save me. And it's
just interesting to kind of have looked in the past
(28:53):
and seeing that wave go up and down, and then
to see it kind of rise up again just in
the past few years. I hope you enjoyed this week's interview.
Next week, on a second bonus episode of Strange Arrivals,
I talked with Stephanie Kelly Romano, an associate professor of Rhetoric,
(29:17):
Film and Screen Studies at Bates College. She has gathered
narratives from over three people who believe they were abducted
by aliens, and has written on how these stories helped
make sense of issues of race, control, rights, and identity.
In terms of an example, for raise, I think that
just the fact that experiencers talk about a multiplicity of
(29:41):
types of aliens and that the aliens have different characteristics. So,
for example, the little gray aliens that are so popular
in pop culture are oftentimes those beings that are worker beings.
They don't necessarily have personality they're not particularly developed, are
advanced in a lot of ways. Technologically, certainly they are,
(30:03):
but they're very focused on conducting experiments or doing that
kind of thing, whereas people also talk about Nordic aliens,
and Nordic aliens have a tendency to be more human looking,
and they are characteristically Caucasian and blonde, and those aliens
are the ones that are compassionate. Those aliens are the
(30:26):
ones that are kind. There have been a bunch of
different studies or a couple articles anyway, that talk about
gray aliens as being kind of the combination of black
and white, right, and so this ambiguous racialized mixture, But
also the fact that the advanced aliens of Caucasian I mean,
(30:46):
coupled with ancient alien theories, which are inherently racist in
some ways, race is clearly underneath it all. The fact
that any non westernized, non colonized society couldn't have made
whatever it is, the Pyramids and Nascal lines, whatever, and
they needed to have help from extraterrestrials, but westernized Caucasian
(31:10):
societies didn't is a little questionable. Strange Arrivals is a
production of I Heart Radio and grim and mild from
Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby
Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with
(31:30):
executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty
Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickike. Barney Hill was portrayed
by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the Milms Special Collections
and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan,
w y A M in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and
(31:52):
David O'Leary, the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic
series Project blue Book. Learn more about a show over
at Grimm and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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