--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just about 23 years ago, a band called Blink-182 put out a song about aliens existing. It was called Aliens Exist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hey mom, there's something in the back room. Hope it's not the creatures from above. You used to read me stories as if my dreams were boring. We all know conspiracies are dumb.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But years later, something totally unpredictable happened. The Milhouse-sounding dude singing that song, Tom DeLonge, he would sort of become an authority on unidentified flying objects.
--:-- Tom DeLonge: [not spoken, but mentioned as a reference]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tom DeLonge's research on UFOs was cited in the New York Times, and the Times' coverage led to UFOs being taken way more seriously than they had been in recent memory.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we are revisiting our episode on that renaissance. on today's Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, Sean Rameswaram for I'm here with Gideon Lewis-Krauss from The New Yorker, who says UFOs are having a renaissance.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So yes, I think we can confidently say we're in the midst of a UFO renaissance. The question is, who knows how long this will last?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, there have been times where this kind of thing has flared up in the past and then dissipated fairly quickly. But for now, yeah, absolutely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the show today, we're going to try and understand how this sort of conspiratorial mainstay came to be taken seriously in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, Congress just had its first UFO hearing in half a century this May.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're going to start with the best of the best UFO sightings. I mean, by far the best known case at this point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the cases that motivated a lot of this renewed interest was the so-called Nimitz encounter.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: It was November 2004, and the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was training about 100 miles southwest of San Diego.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: For a week, the advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, had detected what operators called multiple anomalous aerial vehicles over the horizon, descending 80,000 feet in less than a second.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these were showing up for about a week, and then finally after about a week, they said, well, we might as well have this checked out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they vectored two F-18As to go see what was going on, to intercept one of these.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So these two planes with four pilots, most notably this commander David Fravor, who's shown up in 60 minutes on a bunch of this stuff, and most recently now his wingwoman, Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, who had never spoken in public before.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: These four pilots give the same story, that they showed up and there was kind of a roiling shoal beneath the water about the size of a 737 as if there had been some subsurface disturbance.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And we saw this little white tic-tac looking object and it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you ever drop your phone and it sort of bounces off the countertop and then bounces off something else and it's sort of like no predictable movement, no predictable trajectory.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was just like a ping pong ball.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Then Commander Fravor descended, the Tic Tac registered his presence, swerved, kind of mirrored his feints for a few minutes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So it's mimicking your moves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it was aware we were there.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And then this Tic Tac just darted off at some ultrasonic velocity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I think that over beers we've sort of said, hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything, because it sounds so crazy when I say it.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Subsequently, a fifth pilot went out with an infrared pod and recorded this video known as FLIR-1.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know who's building it, who's got the technology, who's got the brains, but there's something out there that was better than our airplane.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Okay, so this Nimitz encounter features some pretty credible seeming pilots who we just heard on 60 Minutes talking about seeing some UFOs darting around, descending at 80,000 feet a second.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's pretty persuasive stuff, but I'm guessing there's a reason to be skeptical here?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So there are reasons to be skeptical of each component in isolation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So some of the skeptics, most notably this guy Mick West.
--:-- Mick West: Today, the Navy officially released three videos of UFOs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's a retired video game designer, and he's made a living out of debunking a lot of these videos.
--:-- Mick West: The internet immediately took this as meaning that aliens are real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the videos are not actually new.
--:-- Mick West: He's pointed out that, like, actually, this really could have just been an error on the part of the pilot who didn't flip the zoom, and that really... This object doesn't actually move on screen, except when the camera moves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it resembles an out-of-focus, low-resolution, backlit plane.
--:-- Mick West: I don't know what the pilots saw, but this video does not show anything really interesting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, in Mick West's version of this, well, there had been this radar upgrade and maybe the radar wasn't calibrated very well.
--:-- Mick West: And so all of a sudden the radar was picking up clouds or it was picking up birds
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then well what did these pilots see A target balloon
--:-- Mick West: And then what did the subsequent pilot film Well the subsequent pilot filmed a commercial plane
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These videos don't show evidence of any kind of advanced technology
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So unfortunately, the real explanations, while fun to investigate, are probably pretty boring.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That all seems perfectly persuasive when you watch Mick West videos, but he can only determine that by essentially writing off the rest of the evidence.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Well, that actually sounds a lot less persuasive. That just sounds like this perfect storm of alternate theories.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, that's one of the things that the UFO people often say in reply, is that, like, in a weird way, Occam's razor would be, oh, it's much likelier that there was some kind of actual UFO, whether it was extraterrestrial or whether it was developed by some adversary, than, like, this string of crazy coincidences that have to be put together to mount this alternative explanation.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So, you know, at a certain level, there's just this argument over, like, the basic attitude toward the data, where one side says, this is a whole bunch of randomness assembled to mean something.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the other side says, well, like, if you're going to say that that's a plausible explanation, why won't you even grant that there's like the plausible explanation that this in fact was one thing that was seen and we don't know what it was?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: I mean, if we are to take these pilots seriously and to trust their accounts, what are we accepting exactly?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are we accepting that they saw something real that we can't explain? or are we saying aliens exist?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Well, so, you know, certainly even the pilots themselves will be the first people to say, like, the far likelier explanation is that this is either our own classified technology or the classified technology of an adversary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Clearly, that's going to be the explanation you reach for before you reach for extraterrestrial explanation.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Now, there are problems with those explanations, though, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if we are to believe what has been the flight characteristics attributed to these things.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: It seems hugely unlikely that they would be a foreign adversary's technology because we would know about some of those interim steps, that there's no way that you make that kind of overnight leap and there's no trace of the interim steps there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if you pursue that even further, this Nimitz encounter was in 2004.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So you think that this was developed 20 years ago, that, you know, they had functional prototypes 20 years ago, and then they've never used them?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because it seems like if you have that, you would probably want to use it to demonstrate, like, your complete technological dominance.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Right. Like when the United States dropped the atomic bomb or something like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Exactly.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: I think it's pretty rare to find a time lag where you've developed some super secret technology and then you don't use it for 20 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what you're saying is, if you accept that these pilots saw what they think they saw, what you are accepting is that there is extraterrestrial life that has visited our planet?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: The problem is that, like, all of these arguments are arguments by process of elimination.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Process of elimination is just not a great style of argumentation.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: It's not airtight. It's subject to all kinds of bad initial assumptions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But yeah, I mean, lots of people follow that logical path you've just laid out, and that's the conclusion they come to.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: But you can't help but acknowledge the fact that, like, if we are talking about this right now in terms of this UFO renaissance and the idea that there's extraterrestrial life, this isn't humanity at its best, you know?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What would it mean if humanity all of a sudden had to acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrial life?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: I mean, in a particular time where it seems like we truly cannot agree on anything.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, okay. So the first thing that I'll point out is that the UFO issue has rare bipartisan appeal in America.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: This has not somehow broken down along predictable culture war lines.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is something that, you know, everybody likes to talk about UFOs.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And maybe UFOs are going to be the thing that, like, allow us to heal the divisions in our country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, I mean, on a more serious level, Ezra Klein wrote a very nice column that was kind of a follow-up to my piece, talking about exactly that question, as like, what would this look like?
--:-- Ezra Klein: Sorry, who's that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ezra Klein.
--:-- Ezra Klein: But seriously, imagine tomorrow you have an alien craft. It crashes down in Oregon.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: There are no life forms in it. It's, I guess, a drone, basically.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's undeniably extraterrestrial in origin.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So we have the knowledge that we're not alone, that we're maybe being watched, and we have no way to make contact, how does that change human culture and society?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I talked to this guy, Avi Loeb, who is the Harvard astrophysicist who had determined that this object that passed through our solar system a couple of years ago might have been the detritus of some alien civilization, might have been a light sail or something.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And in his book, he says, look, what would the consequences be if we believed that this could have been an artifact of an alien civilization?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he has a very sunny, optimistic view, which is that this would immediately weld us together as a species.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: We would let go of our petty tribal divisions and jealousies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It would represent a global kind of Sputnik moment where all of a sudden we would be motivated to stop arguing about stupid bullshit and come together.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And once we had seen a demonstration that this kind of thing was possible, then we would pour all of our resources into becoming ourselves a cosmic civilization.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this could just as easily go the other way, right?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: The superpowers could potentially just turn on each other, like in the Amy Adams alien movie Arrival.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Problem is, not everyone shares our policy of being open with the aliens.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Have you met General Shang?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The call sign for him is Big Domino.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Whatever Shang does, at least four other nations will follow him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right, which was vastly, vastly inferior to the novella it was based on.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Tonight China becomes the first world power to declare war against the aliens
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There this political scientist named Alexander Wendt at Ohio State who been writing about this for a long time
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: He has this academic journal article from 2008 called Sovereignty in the UFO
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And his argument is that the reason for the UFO taboo is because the existence of extraterrestrials would just fundamentally undermine our anthropocentric ideas of what sovereignty even is.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And that, like, the whole geopolitical order would go to hell because people would think, like, why am I paying attention to my government when there are aliens out there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it could go either way.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Seems like it could go either way, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gideon Lewis Krauss from The New Yorker returns in a minute, and we're finally going to get to that UFO renaissance and how exactly it happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Getting you alluded to the fact that you know UFOs are having a renaissance right now but obviously that implies that this isn't the first time this isn't this unprecedented moment of attention on the possibility of aliens and and unidentified flying objects in our atmosphere.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Well, I mean, that's really why I did this story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the first week of looking into this, I discovered that there was like this whole forgotten history that I certainly knew nothing about, about America's longstanding relationship with UFOs.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: I initially imagined that this story was about how a completely fringe topic that nobody had ever taken seriously had all of a sudden become a creditable topic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Turns out that actually it was kind of a reversion to the historical mean.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: From 1947 to 1970, this was something people talked about all the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was on the cover of not just Life magazine and Look magazine, but Saturday Evening Post.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And there's a copy of the New York Times magazine that had a flying saucer on the cover and a really sober treatment of it inside.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Between the 1970s and essentially the aughts, this is mostly relegated to this fringy conspiracy place, fueled in part, let's say, from a few Will Smith movies?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Welcome to Earth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, yes, except for the fact that there's also all kinds of evidence to show that behind the scenes, the government was still interested.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: I write about this famous four-page memo written by a DIA source in Tehran in 1976 after the Shah's generals had sent somebody up in an F4 Phantom to intercept glowing diamond-shaped lights northeast of Tehran near the Soviet border.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this came back to Washington in this communique with a cover letter saying that this was an outstanding example of the phenomenon.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So clearly, even though publicly they weren't taking this seriously. Privately, there were plenty of people taking this seriously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How long is it before the U.S. government prominently starts taking this seriously, perhaps in a public way again?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Well, public way, not until they're forced to in 2017.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Privately, what happens is in 2007, Harry Reid, along with the late senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye fund this secret black money project, $22 million, going to an outside contractor to look into UFOs.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Harry Reid, like a formerly very powerful person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, absolutely. He was a Senate Majority Leader.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Where does his interest in UFOs come from? Is it just because like Area 51's in his backyard or something?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I mean, he's from Nevada and like this stuff is in the water out there.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Over the years, Reed visited Area 51 several times, but whatever he saw out there, he's never commented.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had been interested in this stuff for a long time, I mean, since at least the 90s.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: He hasn't been shy about that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In my opinion, this is something that we should be studying.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: It's a worldwide phenomenon, not just here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He himself said like there were many times over the years when my staff members said like stop associating yourself with this UFO stuff because it going to make you look like a lunatic
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And he said no I want to be associated with this stuff
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Harry Reid, ahead of his time.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And a decade later, it doesn't seem so embarrassing to be associated with this stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does that happen?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: The primary reason is that it appears in The New York Times, which just legitimizes the whole thing overnight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, military footage of flying objects that can't be explained.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: A decade of hidden funding in the government budget.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A Times investigation discovers a secret program inside the Pentagon to investigate the threat of UFOs.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: The next reason is that they have these two videos.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course, like the videos capture public imagination.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And they have the testimony of these very credible seeming pilots.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, there was nothing in the time story that like was particularly outlandish.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: I mean, in fact, the time story was criticized by a lot of UFO types who said, like who were really disappointed by it because they said, well, on the one hand, it's great that we're talking about UFOs again in public.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the other hand, this whole story is framed not as the phenomenon is real, but it was the Pentagon was studying UFOs and has been continuing to study UFOs.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So it was framed as a story about a DOD program and a story about government resources rather than framed as like UFOs are real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what does that story do to the Pentagon's study of UFOs?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So the thing that I found was that even if the people who wrote that New York Times story thought that they were exposing a really formidable, serious UFO program.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What they were actually doing was functionally creating one.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Which is to say that the program they exposed was, you know, essentially one guy with a very small cohort of people that had all been interested in UFOs for a really long time who had faced tremendous headwinds at the Pentagon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that basically what happened was the people who were interested in pursuing the issue realized that they weren't going to get anywhere internally and that the way to make the Pentagon care about this issue was to make Congress care about this issue.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And the way to make Congress care about this issue was to make people care about the issue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they knew that if they went public in a big enough way, there would be, you know, growing public awareness of and interest in the issue.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And that would lead to Congress people taking the issue seriously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that once it was taken seriously in the legislative branch that they would push the DOD to take it seriously, which is exactly what happened.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: So even if the Times kind of purported to reveal this really important program, basically, from what I understood from my reporting, is that the program didn't get serious until basically 2018 when Congress mandated it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gideon, after spending months researching and reporting on UFOs, where do you land?
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Do you believe?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, where I land is that like, whatever is going on seems to be like considerably weirder than people give it credit for being that.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Something weird is going on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, maybe at least some of these incidents are reducible to drones or drone swarms that are like, you know, low rent technologies being used for surveillance.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: But, you know, there's a lot of stuff that just can't be all that easily explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's hard to dismiss.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: Did your investigation and your reporting bring you to a deeper understanding of why it is we so desperately want to believe, whether we're Democrats or Republicans or Americans or Russian or Indian or Cote d'Ivoirean, why is it that we want to believe that there's something else out there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, to me, that's a really, that's an easy question to answer.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: And in fact, I think it's like a somewhat harder question to ask the opposite, which is that why are people not inclined to believe it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, especially if you believe that there are extraterrestrial civilizations that are capable of intergalactic travel, it radically expands the horizon of what would be possible.
--:-- Gideon Lewis-Krauss: In a time that can feel like such a dismal grind, it can feel like all of a sudden the universe is radically open-ended again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Gideon Lewis Krauss staff writer at the New Yorker his big piece on UFOs is a must for everyone who wants to believe it's called How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously in true New Yorker fashion it's like 18 pages long
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him it's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had some music today from Blue Dot Sessions some cooperation from the New Yorker Radio Hour and a cameo from Ezra Klein
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Also, I miss you all, and I love you, and I miss you.
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