007 - Journalist Garrett Graff on What the Government Is and Isn't Covering Up - The Anomalous Review

Episode Transcript
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(00:24):
Welcome to the Anomalous Review,the official podcast of the
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, or SCU.
I'm Michael Glausson. I'm a philosopher of science and
technology, a contributing member of SCU, and the host of
the show. At SCU, we work together to push
for the serious technical study of anomalous phenomena, and as
part of that mission, this show hosts in depth conversations

(00:48):
with professionals who are applying their expertise to the
study of phenomena that are wellevidenced but not yet well
understood. We're glad to have you listen
along, and if you enjoy these conversations, please take a
minute to like and subscribe. It really will help us keep this
project going. One of the biggest challenges
when studying this subject is sorting fact from fiction,
rigorous theorizing from wild speculation, reliable

(01:10):
information from obfuscation, sometimes intentional
obfuscation. As if reality wasn't complex
enough, in a recent conversationI had outside this show with the
philosopher Stephen Brown, he made a fascinating point.
He said when it comes to some subjects, there is no option not
to be a conspiracy theorist. Let me tell you what he meant by

(01:31):
that, and why I think it's so interesting.
For instance, when studying the Roswell event, there are really
only two possible theories of the case.
Either A. A balloon carrying a high
altitude instrument used by the Army's Project Mogul for
detecting Soviet nuclear tests crashed in the desert, and then
a small group of government officials conspired to cover up

(01:51):
the truth by convincing the world that it was just a weather
balloon. That conspiracy then came to
light, and everybody has the story now.
Or B, something otherworldly crashed in the desert, and a
small group of government officials conspired to cover up
the truth by convincing the world that it was a weather
balloon. And then when that story was

(02:12):
deemed implausible, another later group of government
officials conspired to convince the world that it was an
instrument from Project Mogul that crashed.
So either we believe that there was a conspiracy pulled off by
the government to cover up the Project Mogul crash by
convincing the public that it was a weather balloon, or we
believed that there was a meta conspiracy pulled off by the
government to cover up a UFO crash by convincing us it was a

(02:35):
Project Mogul crash. Either way, our theory of the
case is in some sense a conspiracy theory.
I think this is a brilliant observation.
How then, do we go about excavating the facts and
reconstructing the truth when they've been buried, sometimes
intentionally, beneath layers ofmisinformation, obfuscation,
fabrication, and conjecture? What sources do you trust to

(02:57):
guide you between competing narratives?
How much faith do you put in your intuitions when they have
in some ways already been shapedby the narratives that you're
now trying to evaluate? It's a problem.
My guest today, Garrett Graff, isn't new to subjects plagued by
muddied facts and wild speculation, though.
In fact, he's one of the small handful of respected journalists
who seems to continually gravitate towards subjects that

(03:19):
are fraught with the gnarly uncertainties that might make
others shrink. His book on 9/11 debuted at the
top of the New York Times bestseller list, his book on
Watergate was a finalist for thePulitzer Prize, he's taught
journalism at Georgetown University, and he's currently a
columnist for The Washington Post.
Today we're discussing the challenges he faced when
researching and writing his 2023book UFO, The inside story of

(03:44):
the US government search for alien life here and out there.
I like this book very much. It puts forward an interesting
thesis that isn't articulated asclearly anywhere else.
And although there are points where I want to challenge the
trustee places in or the conclusions he draws about
certain claims or source materials, I think it's
important that everybody who's interested in the subject

(04:04):
understands the arguments that he makes.
That central argument is that the history of the UFO subject
is the history of a conspiracy by the government to cover
something up. But it might not be knowledge
that it's covering up. It might be ignorance.
Here now is my conversation withGarrett Graff.

(04:27):
Welcome to the ANOMALOUS REVIEW.My guest today is Garrett Graff.
Garrett, welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, absolutely. So you've written a lot of
books, a lot of very interestingbooks.
And one of the things that I tried to do when I was doing
background research on you is figure out like what's the
thread among all of them and howa UFO book fits into it.

(04:47):
So you've written on JFK, Watergate, 9/11, cyber
terrorism, UF OS, and then your most recent book is on D-Day.
How does the UFO subject fit into all of that?
So you're right, it it at a first glance seems anomalous a a
word that comes up a lot in our conversation.

(05:08):
But I come at the UFO story as anational security story.
And to me, what, you know, I am not a lifelong ufologist.
I am not someone who, you know, has been fascinated with the
subject for decades. I'm not someone who grew up

(05:31):
devouring, you know, science fiction and Star Trek or, you
know, whatever your your sort offavorite UFO adjacent popular
culture things are. Pretty much it.
Yeah. But, you know, what got me
interested in this story was thesense that the interest in the

(05:58):
story was changing in national security circles.
And that the people that I was spending time around in
Washington, in the intelligence community, in the military
community, in the law enforcement community, you know,
on Capitol Hill, in in government, we're talking about
this subject differently. And you know, you began to see

(06:26):
post 2017 for reasons. It's sort of anyone who is
listening to this podcast would know.
And Ralph Blumenthal article. Yeah.
And the follow up reporting thatthey did and the Politico did
and you know, the congressional interest and you know, mandates
in the NDAA to, you know, spur UAP work at the, you know,

(06:52):
Director of National Intelligence, etcetera,
etcetera. You began to hear serious people
talking seriously about this subject in a way that felt new
and distinct to me. And I I talk about it in the
book that there was sort of thisone specific moment that

(07:14):
crystallized my interest in thisas a book topic, which was.
In December 2020, John Brennan gave an interview to ADC
journalist named Tyler Cowen, and he was asked about UFOs.
You know, John Brennan, of course, in in 2020 had was a,

(07:38):
you know, career intelligence officer, had spent the better
part of a decade at that point atop the US intelligence
community as White House Homeland Security advisor and
CIA director. And he was asked about UFOs, and
he gave this answer, which I will quote because of precisely

(07:59):
how torturous the syntax of it is.
Some of the phenomenon we're going to be seeing continues to
be unexplained and might in factbe some type of phenomenon that
is the result of something that we don't yet understand, that
could involve some type of activity that some might say

(08:20):
constitutes a different form of life.
And that struck me as just a really, really weird thing for
someone like John Brennan to say.
You know, John Brennan's a very serious guy.
I have covered him. I have interviewed him.

(08:44):
I knew a lot of people who had worked with him.
I'd actually traveled with John Brennan at one point when he was
CIA director, when I was workingon an article for Wired magazine
about the director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper.
And, you know, for Brennan to walk out of the jobs that he had

(09:08):
had and to say in effect, like, I'm really puzzled by this UFO
thing felt like a real importantsignal to me.
And I the, you know, in my book talks, I talk about, you know,
there just aren't that many puzzles in your life.

(09:29):
If you are CIA director, you know, if you have spent eight
years atop the CIA and the WhiteHouse Homeland Security Advisor
role, you know, you wake up any morning and you say, you know, I
want to know what kind of pants Michael wore last Tuesday. the

(09:54):
US has an $80 billion a year intelligence apparatus that goes
out and answers that question. And we have satellites, and we
have sensors, and we have signals intelligence intercept
networks. And we have covert operators.
And we have, you know, agents, You know what you would sort of
commonly call spies. There are intelligence officers.

(10:16):
They're intelligence analysts. There are 17 different
intelligence agencies with different specialties that sort
of play different roles, you know, to go out and answer those
puzzles. And so for the CIA director to
walk out of that job and say basically like, bam, this UFO

(10:37):
thing's real weird, isn't it? Sort of just felt like it was
worth diving into. And, and so I got interested in
it in the context of that national security conversation.
And I got interested in the particular slice that I bit off
because, you know, that slice, the US government's involvement

(11:02):
in the hunt for UFOs and alien life actually is very consistent
with the type of work that I have done in terms of writing
histories of the Cold War and Watergate and the presidency and
911 and, you know, nuclear weapons.
And so, you know, I think the story that I tried to, you know,

(11:27):
part of what is complicated about the UFO story and we, we
can get into this later, is they're just a lot of different
parts of it and a lot of different facets.
And, and, and in some ways, I think one of the things that I
come away from my work and research on, on this is thinking

(11:50):
that probably our conversation about UFOs as we have it at this
sort of popular level in our society and culture entangles a
bunch of things that are probably actually unrelated to
one another. And, you know, that sort of the
question of UFOs here is probably unrelated to the

(12:14):
questions about alien life out across the rest of the universe,
and potentially unrelated to thequestions of, you know, what we
would commonly call alien abductions or, or experiences.
And that, you know, those might be 3 entirely separate
phenomenon or objects or experiences that we sort of all

(12:39):
lumped together as, as UFOs, youknow, or, or aliens or flying
saucers in, in a way that's not actually reflective of what the
final answers will end up being.That's, I love that John Brennan
quote as an entry point into thesubject because John Brennan
first knows how to put a sentence together.

(13:00):
I mean, he's an incompetent speaker, but to hear somebody, I
shared that intuition with you, but to hear somebody in in his
position just garble out and answer with like.
So I want to graph that statement in some way and show
like how many parentheticals andlike hedging phrases there are
in it. But it it's, yeah, a little bit

(13:20):
disconcerting that somebody in his position is so mystified by
this. But it seems so.
So I see how you as a national security writer heard that and
thought fascinating. I need to jump on that.
But I see this other kind of thread through your work where
it seems like you like topics that have that attract kind of

(13:45):
conspiratorial thinking and weird outside, you know, groups
that have their own sort of weird agendas and views.
But you tend to take this approach to those topics that
says you don't just defend kind of the official story is I think
that's kind of a concept I work a lot in my head with this.

(14:06):
There's like an official story. You don't just defend that, but
you definitely don't say, well, the conspiracy theorists, you're
right. You tend to kind of approach
these subjects and say there really is something fascinating
here, It's just not what the conspiracy people think is so
fascinating about it. And then you write that and you
sort of reframe it. So you're really good at at

(14:27):
applying a new sort of insightful framework to these
topics. And that means that for the
topic of UAP, you must have heard these people in the
national security sector talkingkind of a new way or giving new
credence to it, but thought thatthere's something more than just
the pure national security framework that needs to be
applied to this subject. And what that if it's not, I

(14:49):
mean, you definitely don't come down to the side that like it
was just aliens, you know, But So what?
What was like the inkling? I know you maybe you don't have
a firm conclusion, but what in your head said there?
There's probably something more than just Chinese balloons and
and conspiracy theories to this.Yeah, that's a really insightful
observation and really insightful question that

(15:11):
actually I no one has ever put together in exactly that way.
And I really appreciate it because it gets at the core of
what I see as a writer as one ofthe like things that I most try
to do for readers. Or actually in any of the the

(15:35):
reporting and historical work that I do, which is, you know,
in a city like Washington, I think we are way over rotated on
covering politics and way under invested in covering government.

(15:56):
And that like the whole world would be better if we took 1000
reporters off of the, you know, White House and Capitol Hill
beat and instead better covered all of the little agencies and
jobs and, you know, cabinet departments that where where the

(16:20):
actual sort of like money and work takes place in Washington.
And it was, it was something that I was always attracted to
as a magazine writer, which is, you know, in 2014, 2015, I wrote

(16:50):
a couple of really big magazine articles about the corruption
within the Border Patrol. And, you know, the Border Patrol
is this massive agency. You know, it is the largest
federal law enforcement agency in the country.
You know, it is larger than the NYPD.

(17:13):
It is, you know, larger than theUS Coast Guard.
It is. And, you know, there are like
three people in the country who cover it full time as reporters.
And, you know, that's true sort of across all of DHS.

(17:37):
Also, you know, DHS is, you know, this quarter million
employee organization with, you know, operational components
that, you know, include the TSA and the Coast Guard and the
Secret Service and the Border Patrol and Immigrations and
Customs Enforcement. And like, there just aren't that

(17:59):
many people who cover that in a dedicated way.
And in fact, most, most reporters in Washington who
cover Homeland Security sort of get it lumped together with the
Department of Justice, which is its own massive agency, massive
cabinet department. And so for me, what I've always

(18:21):
been interested in is diving into the like nuts and bolts of
government and understanding howbureaucracies work and the, you
know, incentive structures that get us to the point of, you
know, country that we have today.

(18:44):
You know, like most of the most of the corruption of the Border
Patrol stems from this incredibly small issue that they
are basically in U.S. governmentjob description parlance, the
Border Patrol are police officers and not detectives, and

(19:11):
they they are agents as opposed to special agents in government
parlance. Which meant that the Border
Patrol did not have the authority for most of its
existence in in post 911 to investigate its own corruption
and malfeasance and had to rely on other agencies like the FBI

(19:35):
or ICE or the Inspector general's office to investigate
its own internal corruption. It was like running the world
the nation's largest police force with no internal affairs
unit and. That designation?
Just because of that little designation and and like that

(19:55):
enabled it to become the most corrupt and violent law
enforcement agency in, you know,in the country, honestly.
And so for me. Diving into a story like UF OS
in the US government's involvement or, you know, my

(20:16):
earlier book, Raven Rock, which is the sort of story of the US
government's Cold War doomsday plan, sort of all of the weird
things that would happen during and after a nuclear attack.
It is this chance to try to basically like tell taxpayers

(20:37):
what they're getting for their money.
And and as you said, you know, Iam, I write a lot on sort of
conspiracy adjacent topics, but I'm not actually myself a
conspiracist, in part because the, the joke that I always
have, which is, you know, mostlypejorative is my problem with

(21:03):
government conspiracy theories is that they presuppose a level
of competence, foresight and planning that is just not on
display in the rest of the work that the government does.
And so, you know, like, let's look at the, you know, the UFO
conspiracy where, you know, it's, it's not that I don't

(21:29):
believe that the government would cover up alien crashes and
alien bodies. It's that I don't think the
government could keep that secret for any meaningful length
of time. And, you know, sure, maybe if an
alien craft crashed, you know, this week, they would be able to

(21:51):
keep it secret for a couple of hours, a couple of days, you
know, maybe a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two.
But like, the government's just actually not that good at
keeping really big secrets. And, and when you sort of look
at the way that the government keeps secrets, you know, it can

(22:13):
keep small secrets for a long period of time or big secrets
for a short period of time. You know, let's look at, let's
look at my most recent book, D-Day in 1944.

(22:34):
The biggest secret in the Alliedwar effort was the timing and
the location of the D-Day invasion.
That was a secret they had to keep for six months, basically
from January 44 through, you know, June 6th, 1944.

(22:58):
It was the only two secrets that, you know, Operation
Overlord really cared about. There are at least a half dozen
examples in those six months of that secret being compromised
entirely, entirely accidentally.There's a Colonel who gets

(23:22):
sorry, a general who gets drunk at a cocktail party and starts
talking about it. And Eisenhower, you know, ends
up busting him back to being a Colonel and, you know, basically
departing him back to the UnitedStates.
There's a set of overlord war plans that one planner

(23:42):
accidentally mails back to his mom in Chicago because, you
know, he had on his desk, you know, one envelope that was
going to his mom and one that was going into interoffice mail.
And, you know, put the war plansin the wrong envelope and you
know, it went back to his mom in.
Chicago all the time. You know it is.

(24:03):
You know, there's a officer who leaves his briefcase of war
plans on a double Decker bus in London by accident.
When he sort of does that thing that we have all done on public
transit where he sort of like suddenly realizes at the last
minute that the bus is at his stop.

(24:24):
And he jumps up and runs off thebus and realizes that he's left
his briefcase full of war plans on the bus as the bus is, you
know, pulling away from him. So, you know, these secrets get
compromised in lots of weird little dumb, yes, that are

(24:46):
again, like in the best of circumstances with the best of
intentions, you know, and that'sleaving aside the possibility
of, you know, anyone like EdwardSnowdening, you know, the UFO
conspiracy, you know, And let megive you sort of two other

(25:07):
examples of this. You know, I think people just
really underestimate how much paperwork hiding alien
spacecraft would entail in the US government.
David Grush, you know, familiar to anyone listening to this

(25:31):
podcast in in some of his interviews in the last year has
talked about that he believes that there are 5000 people in
the US government, you know, read into or with knowledge of
the UAPUFO alien cover up. Do you have any idea how much

(25:55):
paperwork 5000 people in the US government generate in the
course of a year? You know, budget briefings,
personnel memos, performance evaluations, you know,
requisition contracts for supplies.
You know, even before you get tothe PowerPoint, that's like,

(26:17):
here's The Cave where we've hidden the, you know, where
we've hidden this week's alien craft.
And just like the idea that there are, you know, 5000 people
in government and we have, you know, never had one of them
accidentally, you know, attach one of those PowerPoints to a
roommate's e-mail or, you know, accidentally left one of those

(26:42):
on the printer in, you know, thebreak room, you know, sort of
etcetera, etcetera. It just like boggles my mind
because again, when you, when you approach these stories as
like government bureaucracy stories, they just look really
different. And, you know, you, you hold up

(27:05):
sort of the idea that we've had this 80 year conspiracy of
crashes at, you know, at Roswellthat we've kept secret with the
reality of like the discord leaks last year where, you know,
the most important tactical secret in the US government

(27:26):
right now is our understanding of Ukraine's ability to fight.
That is the most important day-to-day secret that the US
government is keeping because, you know, it's knowledge that
Russia is desperate for, its knowledge that it expose would
expose to our allies our own penetration of Ukraine's

(27:52):
intelligence and military services.
You know, who inside the Ukrainian government is
cooperating with our intelligence agencies, you know,
against Ukraine's own interests.Like this is the type of stuff
that, like, people would, you know, be sent to jail or
executed if it comes out. And, and it turns out we were

(28:20):
not able to keep PowerPoints about Ukraine's ability to fight
that were being given to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at
the highest level of the government.
From being read and accessed andprinted out by a junior
Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who was photographing

(28:44):
those documents and posting themto a video game Discord server
for a year before the US government and intelligence and
law enforcement caught on. And like, again, the like, I
just can't square sort of like that level of bureaucratic
incompetence with the idea that the government has some massive

(29:10):
UFO cover up that it has been carrying on for 80 years.
That's, that's a remarkable sortof lay of the, of how you see
the landscape of bureaucracy andhow it functions and how it
functions, especially with regard to secrets.
But there are certain points that sort of confuse me because

(29:30):
I'm not sure if the example you give works one in One Direction
or the other. So for instance, with the
International Guardsman who had leaked a bunch of secrets on
Discord for a year, we couldn't prevent him from doing that.
But it also took a year for anybody to realize that it had
happened, right? So on the one hand, it's it's

(29:51):
like, OK, the the secrets get out, but they don't get out in
the effective sort of way that where everybody immediately
knows the secret either. So it seems like the US
government is at least competentenough to keep certain secrets
if it wants to. Like nobody seems to really know
what the, the design or functionality of the helicopter

(30:14):
that was used to, you know, ferry people to kill Osama bin
Laden. We have a stealth helicopter has
been like a decade. There's some speculations about
like that it was a kit that was used to modify an Apache or
something, but nobody really knows.
Nobody's been able to figure outfor a long time they could keep
that. Do you think it's that certain
types of secrets are more prone to be leaked or, or sort of

(30:38):
harder to contain and, and others aren't, for instance,
secrets that you might be able to just hand over to private
industry, right? I mean, maybe the US government
is really bad at keeping it secret.
So maybe Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman isn't so bad at
it or, or do you think that that's not really one way or the
other? Yeah, I think that the, again,

(31:03):
the US government is absolutely capable of keeping secrets.
What it what it struggles to do is keep secrets for a long
period of time that involve a sort of larger community and.

(31:32):
5000 people that Grush talks about.
Well, yes, 5000 people working on it now.
So you know, So what does that mean over 80 years is that, you
know, 30,040 thousand, 50,000 people who have gone through
that program over, you know, 80 years.

(32:01):
That just feels like too many tome to have not had more concrete
details of the program leak out that, you know what?
And some of this gets also at part of what I think is so

(32:25):
fascinating about the government's, you know, quote,
UN quote, involvement with UFOs,which is it is very clear that
there are a consistent set of programs that the, you know,
going back at least to the 1980sand and possibly before that.

(32:49):
People who are involved in thesecircles in the military and
intelligence community, who are knowledgeable, who have security
clearances that look to them as sort of second hand observers,
like they are programs involvingUFOs and aliens.

(33:14):
And, and that to me, you know, there was this Arrow report that
came out at the beginning of theyear that that basically said,
you know, we've looked at all ofthe pro, you know, we have
located all of the programs thatDavid Grush and other
whistleblowers have pointed us to as being, you know, the UFO

(33:42):
cover up. I'm, I'm being somewhat
hyperballistic and pejorative inthis.
But you know, and we have determined that all of those
programs exist and are not aboutUFOs.
And I think that there was sort of this like big ho hum reaction

(34:06):
to that report where you had sort of all of the total belief
true believers say, you know, this is more of the government
covering up the cover up. And all of the people who were
inclined to be total skeptics say, see, you know, this was all
a bunch of Hoo ha and nonsense. And to me, there was actually an

(34:30):
incredibly fascinating answer buried in that error report that
I don't think people paid sufficient attention to, which
is, OK, So what are these secretprograms that the government has
confirmed exist that look like to the people who work down the

(34:51):
hall from them that they are about UFOs but we now know
aren't. And, and you can sort of think
about what those categories of things could be.
And they could be like, just as fascinating and explosive as
aliens, even if the answer isn'taliens.
I mean, So what is this is, you know, are there propulsion

(35:15):
systems that the US government has figured out that, you know,
have not been made public yet? Is there engineering advances
that are adversaries like Russiaand China have made that we are
trying to reverse engineer that we have not been able to figure

(35:38):
out yet? You know, sort of technological
breakthroughs that, you know, Russia and China have achieved
that we have not, you know, are there, you know, investigations
into or scientific research into, you know, states of matter

(36:00):
that you know, are at the cutting edge of classified
science right now that the government has sort of figured
out or is in the process of trying to figure out that we
have not actually ever made public?
You know, to me, Part 1 of the things that I sort of say is

(36:21):
like, I think if you part of thechallenge of this world is it is
only ever I the only two people whoever engage in the debate are
total true believers or total skeptics.

(36:43):
And sort of both of them show upat this conversation with a sort
of all-encompassing worldview where every everything either
sort of reinforces or underscores the way that they
come at this as a believer or a skeptic.

(37:03):
So there's no real conversation,it's just every piece of data
fits perfectly. Right.
And to me, I think if you approach this subject with a
completely open mind, you have to admit that there's something
here that we don't understand and that the answer to what that

(37:30):
is could be a wide range of different things, You know,
from, you know, parallel dimensions to time travel to,
you know, aliens to whoever could be anything, right, to,

(37:55):
you know, you know, physics thatwe don't yet understand.
And that in some ways, like to me, what I say about this is
that aliens in some ways represent the least interesting
answer to what Uaps could unravel as in the decades ahead.

(38:21):
And that that's where you know, you get into if you comment the
Arrow Report as the true believer or the total skeptic,
like you're going to find you'regoing to read the Arrow Report
as as what it is and how it fitsinto those two world views.
If you come at it lots of. Things that we're just all kind

(38:41):
of drawing 1 circle around and saying it all, you know?
It's if, if you come at it as someone who like just is really
open about the possibility of what this could be like that
error report is, you know, has potential, you know, hints at
potential, you know, that could be like real revolutions.

(39:05):
So I, I, I totally agree, especially when you say that
aliens would be the least interesting of all of the, the
answers, at least the, the sort of Independence Day aliens.
If that's the case, I'm just really disappointed.
But you, so you, you want to kind of craft this middle road
where you think that there is something interesting there.

(39:27):
It's not just hoaxes, It's not just maybe visual, you know,
misapprehensions or something, but it's probably not the like
Independence Day kind of Roswellcover up thing.
But it seems like in some placesyou do just kind of hold up the
official story given by some government office and say this

(39:50):
is just kind of how this is. This is what it really is.
And I think a lot of readers of your book might just find it at
certain points to be kind of an apology for the OR apologetic
for those use for. For instance, I wanted to give
you the the chance to talk us through how you as a journalist.
Look at those official accounts or the sort of plausible, you

(40:11):
know, Arrow or government officeaccounts and assess their
credibility or not. So, for instance, in several of
your articles and in the book, you bring up the, the UFO flap
of the like 1950s and 60s and you point out that the CIA has
explained that over 50% of UAP sightings through the 60s were

(40:34):
due to the U2 spy plane. I, I find that explanation
difficult to, to swallow. I don't know what the proper
explanation is. I'm not convinced that there's
aliens flying around and sort ofbetter spaceships than ours.
But I also find this explanationpretty implausible.

(40:56):
I don't want to give the reasonsupfront, but I want to hear you
say how you, when you look at that claim, how you assess it
and say, OK, I'm going to go with this.
When you know that the CIA and other government offices are
prone to lie or cover up or sortof misdirect with their
statements. Yeah.
And I, it's a totally fair question and I think that I come

(41:17):
at it as you know, the vast majority of UFO sightings and
UAP sightings are quotidian and boring.
You know, we all know like a sizable, significant percentage

(41:38):
of UFO sightings are the planet Venus.
You know, you know, today, you know, go on Twitter on any given
day and you know, Starlink satellites appear to account
for, you know, a sizable percentage of, you know, modern

(41:59):
UFO sightings, UAP sightings. You know, I just in terms of
nomenclature, you know, I think that the embrace of UAP,
unidentified anomalous phenomenon is incredibly
important in the development of this story.
You know, for colloquial conversation purposes, I use

(42:20):
them pretty interchangeably between UFOs and, and, and Uaps.
But, you know, for reasons that we can talk about or you may
have already covered on, on the podcast, you know, I, I actually
think the sort of governmental embrace of UAP is actually a
really important step forward inbeing open minded about what
these things could be. So, so from there though, I

(42:46):
think you pretty quickly shrink your pool of UFOUAP sightings
that are worth paying attention to, to an incredibly small
number. And, you know, I, I don't know
whether that number is in the, you know, dozens scores,

(43:09):
hundreds, you know, over these last 80 years.
But like the cases that are really interesting and puzzling
to me are pretty small in number.
And they are cases like in the 1960s, Lonnie Zamora in Socorro,

(43:32):
NM, You know, small town police officer in New Mexico chasing a
speeder on his way out of town. Here's what he thinks is an
explosion off in the desert, Sees what he thinks is an
overturned car off in the desert, abandons his chase.

(43:57):
And, you know, sort of starts bumping up and down on the road
or on the desert over to this thing.
It gets closer or he gets closer.
He can see I'm, I'm, you know, telling the short version of of
this story. It's it's more detailed and and

(44:18):
there's more documentation of it.
Probably know the know the case.Similar, but yeah.
Yeah, see sort of two figures outside of it.
White football shaped object figures disappear inside of it
and the thing takes off into thesky.
Now, something happened to Lonnie Zamora in the desert that

(44:42):
day. There's a New Mexico State
trooper that shows up a few minutes later, sort of arrives
on scene, sees him visibly traumatized by this experience.
The FBI investigates, the military investigates Project
Blue Book shows up with, you know, Jay Allen Hynek, and, you

(45:05):
know, there's some circumstantial physical evidence
of something being there in the desert, like.
Prince on the ground or something, right?
Yeah. And you know, Lonnie Zamora to
me is like this unique type of witness that we have that stands

(45:29):
a part in sort of the annals of ufology to me.
Who are these like credible witnesses who have sort of no
apparent reason to have made-up the story that they have
made-up? And actually to the opposite,
have a great deal of professional or personal

(45:53):
pressure to not be the weirdo who reports a UFO sighting, who
have sort of the one weird experience and then go back and
read the, you know, lead the rest of their lives in
obscurity. You know, like you know the rest
of his. Life, I think he.
Just yeah, he just, you know, next day, Lonnie Zamora wakes up

(46:13):
and is, you know, a cop in smalltown New Mexico.
You know, he never tries to monetize this.
He never tries to, you know, make it, you know, sell a memoir
out of it or make a movie out ofit.
And he's not one of these people, of which there are lots
in the annals of ufology, who sort of become, again,

(46:35):
pejoratively, the witnesses who are like.
And then the aliens came by every Thursday afternoon for tea
for the next, you know, 20 yearsof my life.
And, you know, something happened to Lonnie.
We can't explain it. And it continues to puzzle us,

(46:58):
you know, 60-70 years later. Now, again, there are some super
obvious answers that this could be, you know, this was he was
adjacent to the White Sands Proving Grounds.
It's the height of the the spacerace.
You know, maybe he stumbled across, you know, the military
testing some Apollo moon Lander in the desert.

(47:25):
But, you know, we've had 70 years go by and there's no
evidence that has ever emerged from the government archives
that the US ever built a craft anything like the thing that he
says that he saw. Fast forward, you know, to
today. I would put the the Navy

(47:45):
aviators of the last 20 years, you know, the, the the Tic Tac,
the gimbal, the go fast Navy fighter pilots in that same
category, which is, you know, highly credible witnesses who
have no obvious reason to come forward with the sighting and

(48:08):
encounter that they had. And in fact, quite the opposite,
have a lot of professional pressure leaning against them
coming forward. You know, no one wants to be the
Navy fighter pilot who lands back on the carrier and is like,
you would not believe the dogfight I just had with a
flying saucer. Like that's a, that's a quick

(48:30):
ticket to like being a washed out, you know, has been back on
shore somewhere. They're backed up by, you know,
some level of, you know, instrument, instrument evidence,

(48:53):
you know, video radar, you know,Fleer sensors, sort of etcetera,
etcetera. And like I put them in this sort
of same really credible category, which is, again, I
don't think that there are necessarily like hundreds of
people like that over the last 80 years.

(49:14):
But there are enough of them that I come away from this
saying, you know, we should be more interested in this when we
are. That's other than we are.
Because I, I get the sense from working in SCU that there are
thousands of such cases. And maybe the difference between
our perspectives is simply this factual question over how many

(49:38):
there there are. I mean, I, I wish Robert Powell
or Rich Hoffman were here because they, they're much
better with the numbers and, andstatistics than than I am.
But at what point would your mind change?
Like how many cases would you need in order to?
I don't know, I have a sort of shift in your thinking about.

(49:59):
What? What would the shift?
Even be I mean, if there were, if there were thousands of more
of those cases, it wouldn't be evidence that they were aliens
or anything. Right.
And, and I don't think the, the distinction that I'm trying to
draw is, is not, is not in termsof quantity like this is this
is, you know, if, if you say that you think that there are

(50:22):
thousands who meet that, sure, for the sake of, you know, just
conversation, maybe thousands. But I, I think to me there's a
distinction that, you know, takewhatever the number is, you
know, 99% of all UFO sightings Ithink are easily explainable and

(50:46):
not that interesting. Oh, yeah, sure.
And, you know, nobody over here disagrees with that.
Like all. Yeah, we all agree.
Yeah. When we've all been subject to
it, we've all looked up and like, what the hell is that?
Oh, there's four of them there in a line.
It's a Starling satellite. But for a minute you're like,
I'm. I don't.
And so I think that that's wherethe, the thing that I the the
sort of distinction that I draw it is, is more in the there are

(51:12):
enough Lonnie Zamoras and Navy aviators across this history
that it makes me think there's something more here than nothing
and that we shouldn't rule out, you know, that there's nothing

(51:35):
interesting here. And in.
And in fact, I think one of the things I come away from and then
I sort of say in my book talks about this is the thing that
frustrates me in this story as ataxpayer is I want the
government to be more interestedin this subject than it appears

(51:57):
to be. That.
Like if if there are Navy pilotscoming back to the carrier
saying I just encountered something that I can't explain,
like I want the Navy to care more about that than the Navy

(52:17):
appears to care about that. And then I think the sort of
part of my, and this, this by the way, going back to a little
bit of my aside earlier is why Ithink the embrace of the
unidentified anomalous phenomenon UAP rubric is so
important to this conversation because it opens up the world of

(52:41):
possibility of what UFOs could be.
And I think creates a permissionstructure for, you know,
government entities and militarypersonnel and intelligence
community personnel to be interested in this subject

(53:02):
seriously without feeling that they are going to risk their
careers or security clearances. Absolutely.
So I I feel similarly, but it seems to me that a lot of the
official statements that that governments and and government
agencies make on the subject only have the effect of shutting
down that possibility. And that's what frustrates me.

(53:22):
Not that it's shutting down any particular thesis about what
these things are, but that it seems to just collapse it and
say there's nothing really there.
So maybe you can you can tell mehow how you react to to this
imagined character, which is sort of me, but not entirely.
So like when the CIA says that 50% of UAP sightings to the 60s
were due to the U2 spy plane, myimmediate that's, that's the

(53:46):
official story and it seems to just shut down any contemplation
about an interesting phenomenon that's there.
But my immediate response is that it just seems flatly
implausible that the U2 was so easily detectable by civilian
witnesses in America that it caused the continent spanning
UAP flat for like 15 years, but it went totally undetected by

(54:09):
the Russians for the entire time.
I mean if you look at where the YouTube was supposed to fly, it
can't possibly account for 50% of the UAP sightings in America
over that time. What about all the UAP sightings
before 1955 when the when the U2didn't even fly?
How does that account for those when the U2 stopped flying?
Why don't UAP sightings drop with the altitude that it flies?

(54:31):
That doesn't make any sense. You can't say I'm just a spy
plane for God's sake. You're not supposed to be able
to see it. Yet somehow America just went
through a craze because of this thing.
That seems like so flatly implausible to me that it
doesn't seem even like a seriousanswer.
You, however, seem to to take itfairly seriously.
What, how? How did that calculation or or
assessment work out for you? Yeah, I think there are a couple

(54:55):
of different things at work there that are worth untangling.
1 is and I don't remember it offthe top of my head here.
I think that the the the CIA assessment was, you know, of
some subset of, you know, however you want to define it,

(55:17):
like officially reported. Officially reported sightings or
credible sightings reported to Project Blue Book or or or or
sort of some subset, I don't think.
I don't think. One of their categories was air
traffic controllers, but anotherwas civilians who were calling

(55:38):
into like Air Force bases and things.
Yeah. So I don't, I, I don't think, I,
I would not interpret that as 50% of the people who saw a, who
think that they saw a UFO duringthose 15 years saw AU 2.
That's not the way that I would interpret that.

(56:02):
The second thing I think, and, and again, when we talk about
this story, so much of this story to me is a bureaucracy
story. And it's a story about, you
know, bureaucracy, incentives is, you know, I think, I think

(56:23):
at a really basic level, John Brennan is telling the truth.
I agree, yeah. And what I mean by that is the
US government that the cover up of the cover up within the US
government is more about covering up what it doesn't

(56:46):
know, ignorance then what it does.
And, and I think part of the challenge is from the outside,
those look pretty similar, whichis, you know, the, IT looks like

(57:09):
the, you know, Condon committee,you know, shutting down any
debate, you know, it looks like,you know, decades of the Air
Force, you know, telling you notto worry about UF OS.
I think that's because we have the assumption that the that the

(57:29):
government covers up things because it knows exactly what
it's hiding, that its incentivesare about, like keeping
something specific from you rather than keeping a sort of
vacuum of the cigarettes. But that's damaging, too.
If the government let's everybody know that it doesn't
understand something, that's a piece of intelligence for our
adversaries. It's useful.

(57:51):
Yes. And I think that that's, and it
also has to do with so there's this bureaucratic incentive that
the UFO story gets caught up in,which is like no one in the
government, in the intelligence community, in the Pentagon is
going to advance their career bybeing the person who says, man,

(58:14):
we have no idea what this is like.
You don't want to be the brieferin the CIA saying to the CIA
director, you would not believe the weird shit that we're seeing
out there that we just have absolutely no idea what it is.
And you don't want to be the CIAdirector sitting in the

(58:39):
situation room telling the president, Mr. President, you
would not believe the weird things flying around in our
airspace that we can't identify like the like those.
That's just not the bureaucraticincentive structure.
And at the same time, the question of what the government

(59:01):
does know about UFOs and Uaps and what it records and what it
detects runs up against probablythe one of the most sensitive
other subjects that the government hates talking about,
which is its own sensor capabilities.
And, you know, the government gets really squirrely talking

(59:29):
about, you know, what it detects, where it detects, what
you know, when it detects. What resolution it can take
pictures of and what frequencies?
Yeah, yeah. And there's sort of good reason
for that is like, that is like, you know, the inner sanctum of
inner sanctums of, you know, how, you know, how all of our

(59:52):
various sensor networks and satellites operate and the
government has a lot of those systems.
And, and, and we, you know, we got sort of a little reminder of
that last summer with that Titanic submersible where if you
remember, like, you know, the whole world goes on this, you

(01:00:12):
know, emotional journey for fivedays about, you know, are these
people alive? What's happened to them?
Where did it go down? They find the wreckage.
Everyone's dead. And the government says a couple
of days later, there's a story in the Wall Street Journal that

(01:00:36):
the Navy's, you know, submarine defense.
Acoustic sensor. Acoustic sensor system detected
the implosion of the submersiblein real time and you know that
the government knew from, you know, 1/8 of a millisecond

(01:00:59):
liter, you know that everyone was dead and that the thing had
imploded. But the government sort of
doesn't like talking about the ability of its acoustic anti
submarine network in the North Atlantic.
And you know, sort of tried to cover that up for a week or so.

(01:01:22):
And and you know, those systems exist all around.
And and, you know, I think one of the things that is hard to
hard for us to again disentanglefrom the outside is, you know,

(01:01:46):
the government is going to sort of instinctually cover up what
it is able to detect, which looks to the outsider like, you
know what The thing is. But it would also cover up in
the same way if it didn't know what the thing was.
And that's intentional, right? Because they don't.

(01:02:07):
It should be indistinguishable from out the outside.
Whether you're covering up knowledge or ignorance that way,
you can't tell from the style ofcover up which one is being
covered up. So it's a sort of, it does come
back to sort of like bite itselfbecause then the public assumes
that you're covering up because you know, and you don't have any

(01:02:28):
way of signaling to them to know.
We're actually covering up this because we don't know what it
is. But then if they did, you
wouldn't know if they were telling you the truth or not
because you're caught in this bizarre sort of world of of
those intelligence and messaging.
And that again, is why I think that John Brennan quote is so
interesting and important, whichis if you take that quote at

(01:02:51):
face value, it actually tells usan enormous amount that there's
like something that the government has detected that it
has put some amount of resourcesinto trying to solve that it has
not yet solved. And is super uncomfortable

(01:03:11):
talking about how little it actually understands what The
thing is or what the phenomenon is.
You know, maybe it's not a thing, maybe it's a phenomenon.
But like that, you know, I thinkin in some ways you look at
things like these, you know, theerror report or the Brennan

(01:03:32):
quote and people to, you know, try to find the hidden meaning
in. It or something?
Yeah. You know, when actually, like if
you just take it at face value, it is actually sort of just as
illuminating and explosive and, and and open to possibility as,

(01:03:54):
as the thing would be if you'd actually bothered to decode it
accurately. Yeah.
Absolutely so. So we know then that the
government is prone via its own incentive structure, rationally
prone to obfuscate and cover up and hide and misdirect all sorts
of things under certain circumstances when it has to do
with sensitive intelligence matters or when it has to do

(01:04:16):
with anything that if you knew it, you could then infer maybe
something about their sensitive intelligence capabilities or, or
intelligence that they had. So then it puts me in a weird
position when I'm trying to readgovernment statements and know
how to interpret them. Am I interpreting it at face

(01:04:37):
value or should I interpret it in some different way?
For instance, like when the the Arrow reporter came out, it said
that I'm trying to find the the exact wording, but it says that
we found no, nothing that that is evidence of extraterrestrial

(01:04:59):
intelligence. That seems to me like at face
value, I understand exactly whatit means and I don't want to
seem like a conspiracy, a conspiracist to sort of decoding
everything. But it does seem strange to me
that that sort of statement getsmade a lot.
We we have nothing that is evidence of extraterrestrial
intelligence, but that I know for a fact that among the

(01:05:22):
scientists who work on this, there is no agreed upon standard
for what constitutes evidence ofextraterrestrial intelligence.
So I know that there's no conceivable circumstance right
now that they could say anythingelse.
If they found a spaceship with hieroglyphs on it, I don't think
that they could say we've concluded that this is an

(01:05:43):
extraterrestrial intelligence because they don't have those
agreed upon standard. So how do I interpret that or
like how do I interpret give another example, the Roswell
case. I have no, I have no clue what
happened to Roswell. But I know that the project
Mogul explanation, which I thinkthat you tend to accept that a

(01:06:04):
balloon that was a balloon system that was used to
essentially listen for a nucleartest explosions around the
earth, that that thing crashed near near Roswell that were the
Air Force Base green. Like I guess that seems semi
plausible, but there's other things that don't seem very

(01:06:25):
plausible about it. Like why?
I mean, there was no more sensitive military base on the
face of the planet at that time.I mean, the, the most important
secret in America was whether that one flight crew had nuclear
bombs or had nuclear capabilities was was right
there. What are the chances that they
were just testing, you know, balloon systems near that that

(01:06:49):
could fail, that they're in their in their test fail phase?
That seems unlikely. But it all seems it also seems
very likely that if something strange did happen, we would get
the exact story that we did. And I think you can probably
agree with that. Like if there were an an
extraterrestrial ship or whatever that crashed at Roswell
and we didn't have a clue what it was, probably the United

(01:07:11):
States government would have come up with a successive set of
most plausible explanations using whatever information it
could tell us at the time of initially it was just the
weather balloon and then later when Project Mogul, these gets
declassified, it becomes ProjectMogul and so on and so forth.
So we would be in the exact sameposition as we are now.

(01:07:33):
So do you think that would you have written the exact same book
if if Roswell had been an alien crash, wouldn't you be in the
exact same position that you arenow?
Wouldn't you've gotten the same explanation from the government
and wouldn't you have taken it as I'm a facial plausible and
and written the same book or how?
No. So to me, there's actually one

(01:07:56):
very convincing piece of evidence that absolutely nothing
interesting happened in Roswell in July 1947 and it has
absolutely nothing to do with Roswell, which is the Fermi
paradox. This is the probably the most
famous conversation in extraterrestrial conversation

(01:08:20):
and ufology and you know, etcetera, etcetera.
And, you know, it is Enrico Fermi's question, you know,
basically where are they? You know, if, if, if, if life is
as common as we think it is in the universe, you know, why

(01:08:40):
don't we see a lot more of it? That conversation happens at Los
Alamos National Lab in the summer of 1950.
And we know that because what kicked off that conversation
between Fermi and Edward Teller and another physicist is a

(01:09:04):
cartoon in The New Yorker that ran that spring.
So we can date, we can date the follow up conversation to when
the cartoon ran. And the thing that I think
people miss is there is this, you know, sort of assumption or

(01:09:27):
theory or accepted fact in the Roswell conspiracies that the
crashed bodies and spacecraft were flown across the country to
Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the wake of that July crash.

(01:09:50):
Again, think like a government bureaucracy.
That spacecraft, if it had happened, if that had included
recovered technology or bodies, no one would have bothered to
fly it all the way across the country to Wright Patterson Air
Force Base. It would have been driven right

(01:10:13):
up the road to Los Alamos National Lab in Los Alamos.
In 1947, the US had already gathered all of the world's
leading physicists and engineersin an isolated, highly secret,

(01:10:33):
highly controlled environment where they were trying to answer
the biggest, most important questions about physics.
Why would you fly this crashed spacecraft and dead bodies to a

(01:10:59):
government office building in Ohio filled with sort of mid
ranking company and field grade intelligence officers?
You would have taken that question.
You would have taken that recovered technology, that
recovered craft to the biggest and best minds that the US could

(01:11:23):
deploy against it. They would have just driven the
thing up the road on a truck to Los Alamos.
And that that's the thing that that seals it for you like.
Well, So what seals it for me isif there were 10 people in the

(01:11:44):
entire U.S. government who had been asked to consult on a
crashed alien spacecraft in 1947, I don't see how there's
any way that Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller are not at least

(01:12:06):
one of those 10. Sure.
And so if in the summer of 1950,the two of them are sitting
around saying, man, it's just soweird that we've never seen any
evidence of any aliens. And we have that conversation so
precisely dated because of the context.

(01:12:30):
And that conversation is so famous because of the people who
were around it, who were sittingthere and remember it and that
they were talking amongst themselves.
Like this wasn't like Enrico Fermi goes out and give some
public address that's covered onABC News.

(01:12:52):
And it, you know, could be part of the elaborate cover up, you
know, the, the, the idea or whatever.
Yeah. The idea is, you know, this is
the two of them talking in the inner sanctum of the inner
sanctum of all of the US government's secrets.
And the two of them are sort of saying we've seen no evidence of

(01:13:12):
aliens. Like, sure, like maybe that's
part of some disinformation campaign, you know, But like, I
doubt it. And again, I just sort of take
that conversation at face value.And to me, like the idea that

(01:13:36):
there's we're three years into some massive cover up of alien
technology and crashed alien bodies and that Enrico Fermi and
Edward Teller have never been asked to like look at the thing
and try to figure out the physics of the propulsion
system, just like doesn't hold water to me.

(01:13:59):
I my ability to I mean, I, I think that argument makes a lot
of sense. My ability to imagine what the
bureaucracy of like 1947 U.S. government would do is I have
very little confidence in my ability to do that.
But I get the the prima facie reasoning of it.

(01:14:21):
And it seems like the, the Fermiparadox to you is like a, well,
let me let me say this. I think some people will hear
your answer to the question is evasive and say, well, let's not
even go into the details of likethe whatever happened at
Roswell, but details there are we don't are, are contestable

(01:14:43):
anyway, because this, this larger consideration seems to
just solve the answer to me. I don't think that's evasive
because I think what you're doing is a kind of reasoning
that we call Bayesian reasoning,where you're like, you have a
set of presuppositions about theworld that kind of undergird
your thinking. And one of those presuppositions
is that the Fermi paradox, the fact that like we haven't

(01:15:04):
encountered anybody is a pretty good indication of the state of
things or the state of what we know.
That if there were lots and lotsof alien beings out there and
civilizations, we'd probably have figured it out by now.
That that does seem right to you, that, that the fact that
they're not apparent is a is a good indication that they're not
here or they haven't been visited here.

(01:15:26):
They don't know where we're hereor something.
Yes, but I also think there's almost nothing that we can
extrapolate about whether they exist based on whether we found
them in the last 80 years. Like, I think to me, this is
where we just like totally misunderstand our place in the

(01:15:47):
universe, which is, you know, I,I think every piece of evidence
that we have of advancing science in the last 30 years
shows that the math is on the side of the aliens and that I'm
sorry. Existing you mean?

(01:16:08):
Existing that that actually lifeis probably quite common across
the universe. Intelligent life is, you know,
some subset of life, but probably equally, you know,
equally teeming across the universe.

(01:16:29):
But that, you know, when, when Italk about this, you know, we'll
leap right from the, the Fermi paradox to the next most famous
piece of extraterrestrial science and the Drake equation,
you know, which is Frank Drake'ssort of back of the envelope

(01:16:52):
calculation of, you know, the likelihood of life around the
the rest of the universe. And, you know, it's, it's a
pretty, it was a brilliant pieceof work.
But it's a pretty straightforward equation that
like of what, you know, of what percentage of stars have
planets, what percentage of those planets are habitable?

(01:17:15):
What percentage of habitable planets develop life, What
percentage of places where life develops, you know, develop into
an intelligent life. And then you get to what is
actually the only variable that actually turns out to matter at
all, which is L, which is the length of time an intelligent

(01:17:42):
civilization lasts. And L turns out to be the whole
ball game when we talk about theuniverse, which is if L is
10,000 years, you know, even a million, couple million years,

(01:18:03):
you know, there could be all sorts of intelligent life that
comes and goes and we might be still effectively functionally
alone right now. If L is, you know, hundreds of
millions or a billion years, yeah, there's probably actually
a lot of life out there right now that, you know, maybe we

(01:18:26):
will find, maybe we won't. But the to me, the the question
of, you know, where is everybodysort of wrongly presupposes this
like human centric view that like we are a particularly

(01:18:51):
advanced civilization A&B anyonewould care that we exist, that,
you know, we just haven't been around that long.
We haven't been looking for for all that long.
We haven't been looking in particularly sophisticated ways.

(01:19:16):
So what if we say the question isn't about us finding them, but
the question is would we have been found by now?
I mean, the Earth has been habitable for like 3.5 billion
years and we've had an atmosphere that's giving off the
right sort of frequencies, reflecting the right sort of
light frequencies that could be detected.

(01:19:37):
The Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.
That means for effectively 3.5 billion years, we've been
visible to anybody in the Galaxywho has the technology to look
around clearly enough to see that we're here.
So it seems almost certain to methat there's lots of life in the
Galaxy. I mean, whatever L is, there's

(01:19:57):
enough that even the outliers make the Galaxy a pretty
populated place, especially if they're landing on different
planets and populating them. So it seems like there's lots of
life out there and almost certainly they know we're here.
They probably known we're here since before we even existed.
They knew we would be here because they're, and it's
conducive for the for life. But then maybe we've been

(01:20:18):
speculating about how that wouldlook.
I mean, you, you talk sometimes about first contact and you say,
well, we, we imagine first contact is either like the ET
version, the, the, the contact Carl Sagan version.
They're like the Independence Day version, but it's probably
going to be space trash, right? That's, that's the most likely
thing. That to me seems like maybe

(01:20:38):
we're making another bad assumption that, that they, that
whatever the, the ETS are not human intelligences are that
they would be something like us.They'd be making trash and trash
would be kind of floating aroundand we'd be able to tell what
trash was trash and what trash was just space debris or
whatever. But it seems to me that there's
points of, of technological development at which you won't

(01:21:01):
even have bodies or you, you might be able to ingrain your
intelligence into like fundamental particles or
something and just be present all, everywhere the same time or
something. I know that's wildly
speculative, but it's not, doesn't seem totally out of the
realm of possibility. And you think that the world, I
mean, you've said a few times that you think the world is a
weirder place than we give it credit for and that we're not

(01:21:23):
considering all the good possibilities that might be good
explanations for these phenomena.
So like what, what is that spaceof, of possibilities?
I didn't mean to cut you off from the Drake thing, but like
I'm sure you can find a way to furrow it back in and and cover
all this. Yeah, Yes, there's a lot that

(01:21:48):
was sort of packed into that, that question.
So let me sort of, and it's a really good one and it's a
really smart one. So let me try to disentangle a
couple of different threads of it. 1 is, you know, Carl Sagan
was the, you know, biggest 20th century skeptic of, you know,

(01:22:13):
UFOs here equal aliens while also being, you know, the
biggest proponent of the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence everywhere. They're probably just having
picnics here, right? That was his.
Yeah, and his argument was neverthat aliens don't visit Earth.
His his argument was statistically you would only

(01:22:37):
expect aliens to swing by every 100,000 or 200,000 years that
they would that, that, you know,we look at Earth as the
destination, whereas aliens probably treat it more as a rest
stop on the Jersey Turnpike. You know, you're, you're
somewhere that you sort of stop over on your way from somewhere

(01:22:59):
interesting to somewhere else. And, and, and so his argument
was, was, you know, never that people, you know, beings and
aliens don't visit. It's that the thing that you saw
out your window last Tuesday is unlikely to be the one time in
this 200,000 years that aliens stopped by to check on you.

(01:23:26):
And, and I think that there's, you know, what's useful in that
example to me is the way that I think we need to adjust our
mindset to sort of galactic scale and that, you know, we

(01:23:46):
just haven't been around for that long.
We haven't been looking real hard.
You know, aliens could have swung by the planet, you know,
20,000 BC, you know, which galactically would be the

(01:24:06):
equivalent of, you know, this morning and, you know, found
nothing interesting here other than, you know, some, you know,
large megafauna and, you know, some elephants in Africa.

(01:24:29):
And, you know, checked off theirchecklist of, you know, let's
check back here in another 180,000 years.
And that that would have been a totally reasonable decision for
them to have made at that moment.
And I also think, you know, partof what really scares me is if

(01:25:01):
you take us as a totally normal example of what intelligent life
is when it evolves. And again, the, the, you know,
the, there's sort of this whole theory in, you know, ufology
and, and SETI of sort of, you know, Earth, you would expect to

(01:25:23):
be mediocre that like we are, you know, not the most advanced
planet nor the least advanced planet, but you know, we are
probably exactly average. Again, I'm sort of
oversimplifying hugely complex scientific debates here, but
like, assume we're average. There's a lot of reasons to look

(01:25:46):
around. You know, here we are in
September 2024 and think that the human L is not that big that
like we're we may not get another 100 years or another
thousand years of sort of advancing human civilization and

(01:26:07):
science. Like there.
There's a lot of reasons to likelook around on our planet, you
know, as someone who's written other books on nuclear war, to
think that like, you know, we may not get another 10 years.
You know, the climate may not give us, you know, 50 and you
know, or you know, one of the one of the other challenges in

(01:26:30):
this is you have to be a civilization that not only
continues but is interested in exploring the rest of the the
universe, which not to get sort of too dystopian or political in
the final minutes of our our conversation here.
Go for it. But, you know, there's a lot of

(01:26:51):
reasons to sort of think that, like, maybe misinformation and
AI and video games pollutes our culture in the next, you know,
20-30 years such that like, we just won't last.
As a civilization that is interested in studying outer

(01:27:12):
space, there are a lot of reasons to think that, you know,
Elon Musk aside, you know, we are losing the political
appetite to explore the rest of our universe and that like,

(01:27:33):
maybe we'll survive as a, you know, civilization for another
1000 years. But, you know, we'll just play
video games on our, you know, Google, Oculus or Facebook
Oculus or whatever those things are and like, never bother to
look to the heavens for inspiration and exploration

(01:27:53):
again. And like, that's the end of L.
That would be the worst, saddestpossible outcome.
I hope that you're wrong. I think that the one maybe
glimmer of hope to me is that itseems like once you hit the
ability to like fairly easily destroy your entire planet,

(01:28:18):
you're also on the cusp of beingable to get off of it.
The technologies have a sort of like convergence there, yes.
So maybe that's maybe that extends out that there's enough
if we are average, maybe there'senough planets where the story
is that they did annihilate, butthere was just a small enough

(01:28:42):
skin of their teeth that they could get off and and start
over. But I hope that that doesn't
restart the cycle. Garrett, this has been a
fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for for giving
us your time. Where can people find out more
about your work? I know that you've got a a new
book on D-Day that came out thisyear.
Tell us a little bit about that or anything else you want to

(01:29:03):
plug before. You.
Yeah. So I'm at garrettcraft.com
online Vermont GMG. I live in Vermont, so all of my
social media handles are VermontGMG, my initials, you know,
Instagram, Twitter, wherever youlike to go, Threads and you

(01:29:25):
know, my book is on UFOs or or D-Day or or 911, you know are
available wherever you'd like toget your books.
We will plug those in the in thelink description and thanks for
joining us. My pleasure.
Thanks for the great conversation and the amazing
questions. You're welcome.

(01:29:46):
The Anomalous Review is a project of the Scientific
Coalition for UAP Studies. It's hosted and produced by me,
Michael Blossom, and edited by Kelly Michelle.
Our theme song is written and performed by Tama Chrisanti.
Communication and PR work is by Preston Dykes.
Our advisory team includes Jennifer Roach, Robert Powell,
Richard Hoffman, Joshua Pearson,and Larry Hancock.

(01:30:07):
To find out more about SU, checkout Explorer scu.org.

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007 - Journalist Garrett Graff on What the Government Is and Isn't Covering Up

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}007 - Journalist Garrett Graff on What the Government Is and Isn't Covering Up