Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Martin Willis your host, and
this is a pre recorded show. I may be in the chat room,
but this is a pre recorded show because I am going to be on the
road while this is airing, and I'm not sure if I'm going to be
able to have access to good internet or any of that, so I decided
to pre record with our great guest today, Garrett Graff. He's a distinguished
journalist and internationally best selling historian and he spent nearly two decades covering politics,
technology, national security and all that. He has a a book that's out
and it's a very interesting books. In the name of the book is UFO,
The Inside Story of the US Government Search for Alien Life Here and out
There. And thank you all for supporting the show and check out our website
PODCASTUFO dot com. And I'm bringing in our guests right now. Hello,
Garrett, Welcome, Thanks so much for having me, Thank you for being
here. And you this I have to say right off the bat, what
what sparked your interest enough to write, you know, do a deep dive
and and write this book. Yeah. I am not someone who has spent
a lifetime on the subject I was not someone raised on the X Files or
Star Trek, or someone who devours sci fi novels in my spare time.
I'm not a lifelong ufologist. I'm someone who covers national security. I've covered
national security in Washington for twenty years. My previous books are about things like
nuclear weapons in the Cold War, the War on Terrorism, the cybersecurity.
My book preceding this one was about Watergate and Richard Nixon's presidency. And what
got me interested in this subject was I began to see and feel this change
in the way that people in and around national security circles in Washington were talking
about UFOs and what the government now calls UAPs. That there was, as
your viewers and listeners know, this series of reporting by Politico and The New
York Times in twenty seventeen about more extensive Pentagon efforts studying UFOs than anyone had
understood existed until then. There was this follow up reporting about Navy pilots Navy
aviators who had seen and had encounters with craft that they felt defied, you
know, physics as they understood it, that moved in ways that they could
not understand and that they believed was technology. That the US couldn't match,
and you began to see these conversations in and around Washington change and shift,
And for me, there was one very specific moment that got me interested in
this sort of going from like a background noise story to something I was interested
in writing a book about, which was In December twenty twenty, John Brennan
gave an interview to a DC journalist named Tyler Callen. Now John Brennan,
of course, was in twenty twenty, had just wrapped up the better part
of a decade as CIA Director and White House Homeland Security Advisor, and he
was a career, lifelong intelligence officer. I've covered him, I've interviewed him.
He's a really serious, thoughtful guy who has spent you know, most
of the twenty first century at the upper ranks of the US intelligence community.
And he said in this December twenty twenty interview this incredibly weird answer to a
question about UFOs, where he said, you know, yes, there are
things out there that puzzle us. We don't know what they are. And
then, in very tortured syntax, he said something along the lines of and
some might say this phenomenon could constitute what some might recognize as a new form
of life. And that incredibly odd statement for someone like John Brennan to make,
and particularly in my view, because there can't be that many things that
puzzle John Brennan. Like if he woke up in the morning wanting the answer
to a question, there's a massive, sixty billion dollars a year intelligence apparatus
that goes out and tries to find it for him. And so if he
was leaving office saying, yeah, this whole UFO thing really puzzles me,
that felt like something that was worth diving into more as a book subject.
And so this book tries to tell to related and intertwined threads going back eighty
years or so to the dawn of the flying saucer age in the nineteen forties,
both the military and the government's work on UFOs and understanding UFOs here,
as well as the evolving science and astronomy about the size and scope of the
universe. You know what they call the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, right right,
So I bet as you're doing the research for this book, you're probably
shaking your head. You probably learned so much that you had no idea.
I mean, that's what happened with me. You know, I had I
had what I consider an unexplained UFO citing back in two thousand and seven,
really didn't pay that much attention to the topic at all. But after I
had that, I started looking into the topic and then thinking, wow,
you know, these aren't all tinfoil hatters. These are some serious people talking
about some serious things, you know, And we call it, you know,
the modern UFO era of nineteen forty seven forward. But there's been things,
you know, unexplained things, of course, you know, the further
back you have, the further back you go, the less state you have,
of course, and you know, but there's been mysterious things, you
know, reported for you know, centuries. So it's really fascinating when you
look into it real deeply like that. But so I'm just asking you,
what, what was the most kind of thing that you can think of right
now that kind of stood out that you didn't you never knew before when you
started looking into this. So to me, I think the thing that most
wowed me in my research was coming to understand just how much our understanding of
the size, scale and scope of the universe has changed in recent decades.
You know, as late as the nineteen nineties, we didn't understand that there
was a single planet outside of our own Solar system, and we now believe
effectively every star has planets, and that a large number, not necessarily a
large percentage, but a large total number of those planets across the universe are
going to fall into what'side just called that Goldilock zone, the not too hot,
not too cold, capable of supporting water, capable of supporting an atmosphere,
and would be habitable to life as we understand it and would recognize it,
and that across the universe. Now we now believe that there are one
sex tillion habitable planets, and that's a billion trillion habitable planets, and so
to me, you know, yeah, it's an incredible number. And you
know, you can believe the chance of life is rare. You can believe
the chance of intelligent life is even more rare. But like, it's hard
to think that we are a one in sextillion chance across the universe. And
particularly again as we come to understand the way that the universe has evolved,
you know, the James Web Space Telescope is transforming the way that we think
about and understand the beginnings of the universe, and that you know, we're
actually a really young solar system and a very old universe. You know,
we're about four and a half billion years old in a fourteen billion year old
universe. And the James Webspace Telescope has discovered galaxies and stars that we're forming
within three hundred billion years of the creation of the universe. And so you're
left with these like incredible thought experiments about you know, we could have seen
multiple billion years civilizations rise and fall. You know, civilizations that across the
universe filled with intelligent life, you know, so advanced is to be unrecognizable
to us and have those civilizations rise and fall before our solar system even begins
to gather out of dust, and so to me, you know, I
start this book with this argument that I think is increasingly undeniable, that the
math is on the side of the aliens, that our universe probably both teams
with life and teams with intelligent life, whether any of that life is close
enough that we will ever notice it or have meaningful contact with it, or
whether our human civilization will last long enough to explore the universe at the scale
that we need to in order to find it. Those to me are much
more open questions. And I think, you know, actually quite the opposite.
There's some very strong evidence that, you know, we could be functionally
alone in the universe at this particular moment, even if across history there there
is a lot of life and a lot of intelligent life. Interesting and you
know, I've thought, I've heard other people talk about, you know,
societies lining up, and I've mentioned this a number of times. An astrophysicist
visiting NASA, a scientist that was on this show, said that his basically,
he and his fellows having conversations that if any society goes through the technological
bottleneck without blowing themselves up, then they're you know, most likely we'll be
traveling the stars, you know. And I thought that was quite, you
know, quite an interesting quote. And I you know, one of the
one of the things about the possibilities, and you just mentioned that a mass
number that no one could possibly conceive of the possibilities. Another astrophysicist I had
recently on the show said that they, you know, statistically, they're thinking
about in our galaxy alone, about forty billion Earth like planets, which is
it's all fascinating to me. Now, I know a lot of most time
I hear the argument when I speak with people like you, and also you
know many scientists, is the outrageous distances. And a good way to get
a good scale on that is to say, if the sun was in Washington,
d C. And the size of a grapefruit, the Earth would be
the size of a ball and a ballpoint pen, and the nearest star would
be in San Francisco. That's about That's that's putting it to scale, and
it's really it's really hard to imagine, you know, the vast distances.
But the one thing I've always thinking of it, and I'm not saying that
what we're being visited by by is aliens. I don't know, you know,
I don't have the answer to that, and I always kind of run
away from people that do have the answer. I think they do, I
should say, uh, But I've always thought maybe there's something about space time
that they know that we don't know, something about physics that is figured out
when you think about you just talked about the possibilities of you know, an
intelligence growing over millions of years or beyond us. You know, the type
of thing, So who knows what can be figured out. I know you
can't defy physics, really, but but who knows if something can be discovered
within physics that could that could actually solve the travel situation. So I don't
you know, I mean, these are just thoughts, you know, I
just wonder what you think about all that. Absolutely, yeah, And I
think answering that requires unpacking a couple of different things. One is, I
think one of the challenges that a lot of people have in discussing this topic
is people try to come at the topic of UFOs and extraterrestrials broadly as either
a full skeptic or a full believer, and that you know, when you
read books about this subject, they are generally either dedicated towards proving that aliens
exist and starting with the premise that, of course, aliens exist, or
starting with the premise that, you know, UFOs are not real and aliens
are not real, and aliens do not exist, and that they're sort of
written by full skeptics. And you know, there's a long intellectual tradition of
these, you know, going back to Donald Menzel at Harvard in the in
the forties and fifties. You know, I tried to land somewhere in between,
because I think that the most likely case requires holding some views that may
seem contradictory at once at the same time. So what I mean by that
is, you know, I think that I settle somewhere where extraterrestrials exist.
We're probably too far away from them to have meaningful contact with them, but
those represent a real phenomenon. UAPs represent a real phenomenon, and that the
answers to what UFOs and UAPs could be could still blow our minds and transform
our understanding of the universe and our place in it, even if it ends
up being a terrestrial explanation and not an extraterrestrial explanation, you know, to
your point on physics, Physics to me is a huge part of this that
I think the answer to UFOs and UAPs almost certainly is most simply that the
world and the universe is a much weirder place than we currently understand it to
be, And then I think we should be humble about just how weird the
world and the universe probably actually is. That a big chunk of UFOs and
UAPs are most likely astronomical, meteorological, and atmospheric phenomenon that we don't yet
understand. You know, there's just been some interesting research in the last couple
of weeks about the possibility that the Foo fighters in World War Two, those
sort of balls of light that seem to track fighter planes at night through the
skies of Europe probably represent plasma that plasma balls that we did not really understand
or recognize at the time. Then you get into the physics category, which
is, you know, I think that our biggest fault in this is probably
assuming that we actually have any understanding of what physics actually does right now in
our lifetime. That the again, we need to approach our understanding of physics
with a great deal of humility, that this science that we consider ourselves so
knowledgeable about really is, for the most part, only a few decades and
a century old. Last January, the world's oldest human died. She was
a French nun. She was one hundred and eighteen years old, and Harvard
Astronomy Chair Avi Lobe points out that everything that we know about relativity and quantum
physics we learned in her lifetime, So imagine how much more we have to
learn about physics in one more human lifetime. Imagine what we might learn in
five hundred years, or a thousand years, or ten thousand years or a
million years. You know, last summer, for the first time, we
spotted in space the gravitational waves that move through space and bend space time.
We had theorized that they existed, but had never actually spotted one in real
life until last summer. The Italian astrophysicist Carlo Rivelli, he has a new
book out arguing for the existence of what he calls white holes, which is
basically his theory for what happens at the end of a black hole. And
he says, you know, look, we've never seen a white hole,
but our knowledge of black hole is recent enough that when he started his major
academic appointment in the year two thousand, his department chair came to him and
said, you know, Carlo, you don't really believe in black holes,
do you, Because in two thousand we had never actually seen a black hole
before, and now we understand that the universe is widely populated with them.
So you know, you get into these questions about how intelligent beings, intelligent
civilizations, other civilizations could move throughout our space, and you know, I
don't think we have the foggiest idea about the technologies or wrinkles in physics that
might allow for some of these things to happen. And by the way,
the answers could be really really, really weird. You know, this could
be parallel universe's, interdimensional travel, time travel from the past or future.
Things again that would blow our minds. Yeah, it would change forever the
way that we look at the world and the universe and still not be aliens.
And that, to me is like part of the challenge in uncovering all
of this is just really admitting up front just how humble we probably should be
about our understanding of the world. Right, I agree with all that.
I'm going to share this because this just was sent to me today. I
thought it was really interesting. And this is a FedEx pilots say film to
UFO that followed their cargo plane for over a half an hour, and it's
very similar to the Foo Fighters. That's when you mentioned that, I'm going
to bring up the video here, and it shows up they did did video.
Whoops. Okay, let's try that again, and it looks like something
plasma. Now that the odd thing. I don't know if you can hear
the audio of this. But are you hearing the audio of this? Okay,
so yeah, it's good because of some of the language. But anyway,
it's showing this, it's showing this thing. They're they're filming the FedEx
pilots are filming this and not understanding what it is. But this thing followed
them, you know, the strange thing. And you know, and I
agree, you know, it's hard to know. I think we know very
very little. You know. There's this great quote by Newton that basically says,
what we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.
And you know, I really think that's true. We have no clue
of this. And so the FOO fighters and this, you know, they
seem to be have some type of intelligence following something like they used to They
used to follow along the wings of you know, purportedly alongside the wings of
the craft. I spoke to an American Airlines pilot. He was dead heading
on a flight, you know, to get to another location, sitting right
beside me. And this was right when the New York Times article came out
in December of twenty seventeen, and I was flying like for Christmas, and
I said to him, Hey, did you catch that article about UFOs and
you know, he was a pilot and American Eyelines pilot and he said no,
but I know they exist. And I said, well, tell me
what you know what happened and he said, a green orb was for over
three hundred miles. He was in an F sixteen when he was in the
Air Force and his Weisel weapons operator in the back was sleeping, which I
heard they never do. He said he was relocating a plane and so he
let him sleep and it lit up the whole cockpit in green and followed him
for like three hundred miles. And he said he was never going to report
that. He just was, you know, the stigma of the whole thing.
So I asked him, I said, would you mind being on my
show anonymous and talking about and said no way. He said, I'm not
going to and I'm not going to give anything out there that could challenge his,
you know, career. So it's kind of sad that has a stigma
because you know, you're have done enough research in it that it is some
type of real phenomenon that is happening. People are really seeing things. It's
not like, I mean, I know I'd have to say, I would
have to have been drugged or something to have seen what I've seen and not
be above me. You know what I saw back in two thousand and seven,
which I just that just kept me going on this whole topic because it
was it was actually a disc shaped thing. It had a blue glow,
and it moved and stopped and then moved again, and it made no absolutely
no sound at all. And that was the most airy part for me,
because I just thought, you know, this hou is this thing doing that
and you don't hear anything. But I mean, there is an explanation for
whatever we see, no matter what it is when people see ghosts, So
whatever it is, there's always an explanation. But like you're saying, we
may not understand what that explanation is. Yeah, let me give you two
examples about, you know, just how new our search to understand all of
this actually is. You know, we have not even begun to do the
low hanging list of all low hanging fruit of trying to search the the universe
for you know, messages or proof of extraterrestrial civilizations. You know that you'll
you'll hear critics of the SETI program, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. You
know, talk about well, we've been listening for you know, fifty sixty
years and you know, haven't heard anything. You know, blah blah blah
blah blah. And you know we're looking at like tiny fractions of the sky.
And you again, concrete examples about that we have not even searched the
Moon at a level of detail yet sufficient two recognize if there are other lunar
landers on the Moon that uh, you know, this is not me saying
I believe that there are other lunar landers on the Moon. This is me
saying our search is so new that the one place we have left a lander,
we haven't even bothered to check whether anyone else left a land or there.
And you know that it's only been in the last couple of years we've
had comprehensive photography of the Moon at a level of detail great enough to search,
and we have never actually applied the you know, computing power and artificial
intelligence at this point yet to do that study. Second example, you know
you talked about, you know, the possibility, uh, you know,
the challenge of covering space, uh is the vast distances that you know you're
looking at, you know, any any civilization that conquers interstellar travel would probably
need to figure out how to do it at a fraction of the speed of
light. Not the speed of light, not a large fraction of the speed
of light, but you know, some small fraction of the speed of light,
which is, you know, far faster than anything we have yet designed
to go. We don't have on Earth right now the technology to recognize something
moving through our own solar system at a fraction of the speed of light.
So, you know, one of the weird answers you're left with in the
you know, among these thought experiments about interstellar travel and extraterrestrial visitors is our
solar system could be currently being traversed by alien craft daily, weekly, monthly,
once a decade, once a century, you know, once a millennia,
and we wouldn't have any technology right now that could recognize those craft as
they come through our solar system. And you know, you think about and
you and I were talking a little bit about this before the show starts.
One of the biggest fallacies I think in the world of ufology is that anyone
would care that we're here in the first place. That you know, we
have this sense that aliens would bother covering the vast distances of interstellar space to
come and check on us, whether that's for friendship purposes or to invade us
and conquer us and use our organs for food or energy. That you know,
Hollywood has sort of given us these three different first contact scenarios. They
are all unambiguous and definitive. You know, you have the Independence Day flying
saucer over the White House, take me to your leader, alien visit.
You have the Jody Foster contact radio message to Earth from outer space. And
then you have you know, the ET version, which is the stranded loan
traveler coming by Earth. And the truth of the matter is probably no one
knows we are here, and even if they did know, they wouldn't necessarily
care. That this idea of first contact visiting Earth in a clear and unambiguous
way is probably too human centric. That the first sign of an intelligent universe,
intelligent civilization that we are likely to see is effectively a piece of space
trash traversing our Solar system. That you know, an old defunct space probe,
a wreckage of a spacecraft, you know, wreckage, or a piece
of some alien space base. You know, just sort of floating through our
solar system, the equivalent again as Abby Lobe talks about it, of an
empty plastic bag blowing through our cosmic backyard. That will you know, look
up one day with our telescopes and see something and say, well, that's
not from our Walmart, Like who's Walmart? Do you think that's that's visiting
from? And you know, you look at some like Carl Sagan, who
in the twentieth century was simultaneously the biggest proponent of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
and also the biggest skeptic that aliens were visiting Earth as UFOs. And his
argument was never that aliens don't visit Earth. His argument was that statistically you
would only expect an alien civilization to pass by every one hundred thousand or two
hundred thousand years, that they would be more likely to treat Earth as the
equivalent of a rest area on the Jersey Turnpike, sort of somewhere where you're
stopping off on your way from one interesting place to another. And that Sagan's
argument was not aliens don't visit Earth as UFOs. It's it's that it's statistically
unlikely that the thing that you happened to see last Tuesday out your window.
Is the one time in the last one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years
that an alien happened to be stopping by? Well, yeah, if you
take that argument at face value, I mean, it's an opinion that's really
based, not truly on anything that we really know or don't know in my
opinion, but here is. And I know that you know, we're looking
for techno signatures with the web. And another thing something that you said about
whether they'd care or not. We don't know whether they would care or not.
I agree with you, but they could also care too to explore,
so they could care to take a look. And I have to tell you
this. I've told this a number of times on this show because it was
long before I really had much of an interest. Is back in the ninth
teen nineties, I had a gentleman I remember his name, Tom Bowden.
He was an insurance adjuster. I've been not adjuster. He was an insurance
broker and he sold me basically life insurance, and we went over the plans
and stuff, and he sat with me in my house. He was older
than myself and eventually in the conversation. We got to talking about other things,
and you know, he said, he talked about being in Vietnam and
I said, wow, what was that like? And he said, well,
it was pretty unusual because of what I did. And I said,
well, what did you do? And he said, I worked for a
special section of the Air Force and we were trying to understand what the UFOs
were that were showing up during napalming and you know, situations like that.
So I go really, and he said, yeah, something was going on
and it was our job to try to figure it out, you know,
what it was. And we never really could get too far. And so
he was on his way out the door that that night after we got done
talking, and so I said, hey, by the way, what what
what does it? Did the government tell you what they thought they were?
And he looks at me and he said that we're a petri dish, and
uh, you probably I had never heard it before, and since that that
whole thought. But I mean, that's just an interesting thing to throw out
there, you know, that would imply that, you know, we were
It sounds like that were something seated and we're being observed, you know,
according to his you know, his thought and what the government was claiming that
they could be. Now, I'm just putting that out there and not saying
that. I've tried to look this person up very deeply, and I found
someone out in the Midwest with the same name, insurance broker, but it
was not him. I mean trying to get him back on, you know,
to talk to him these days when I'm doing the show, just to
can you elaborate more on that. You know, what you were talking about.
It's interesting. I have nothing to back it up, but it's interesting,
yeah, and I think you know, to me, there's again,
I think part of untangling this subject and trying to understand it is recognizing that
there are credible witnesses who point to something without necessarily having to prejudice what that
something actually is, and that you know, to me, there is a
series of credible and reliable witnesses across decades, you know, across many of
these sightings, who all point to something or some things, multiple possibilities existing,
as you know UAPs an unidentified anomalist phenomenon, and that you know,
you look at these navy aviators in recent years, you look at, you
know, someone one of the cases I talked about in the book is nineteen
sixty four Socorro, New Mexico. A local policeman there named Milani Zamora who
is chasing a speeder on his way out of town and see here's an explosion
off in the desert and sees what he thinks is an overturned car. He
turns his car, his cruiser off the road, begins to sort of bump
up and down through the gullies over to this overturned car. As he gets
closer, he describes it as a football shaped craft with two figures outside that
get inside, and then the craft takes off. Now there's a new Mexico
state trooper who shows up a couple of minutes afterward, sees Lonnie Zamora shaken
up by whatever it is that he has encountered. He is. The FBI
and the military respond and find some circumstantial evidence that something was physically located where
Lennie Zamora says this craft was out in the desert. You know, something
happened to Lonnie Zamora in the desert that day in nineteen sixty four. And
he's a pretty credible witness. You know, he's not someone who had any
reason to make it up. As you said, in some of the people
that you've talked to, there's actually a lot of reason to not be the
person who comes forward and talks about a UFO encounter. And so to me,
you know, you look at someone like Lannie Zamora, you look at
someone like these naval aviators, and it points to me that there's something worth
investigating here that is uh deserving of our intention, deserving of greater intention and
focus from the government. And it really strikes me that this is something that
you know, we should be paying more attention to than we are. And
again, the chances are that we could find some really amazing world changing answers
wrapped up in here, even if the answer is an aliens No. I
agree, And there's been talk lately of you know that the inter dimensional part
has always been part of since I've been you know, doing the show for
twelve years, it's always been part of the possibilities. You're hearing that more
and more, and you know, some of the cases that I've looked into,
it would kind of work, you know, from what people are reporting.
But I mean that's just another, like you say, mind bending situation
to try to figure out what that would look like and what that would be
like. You know, for instance, when supposedly if there was craft here
or whatever, if they're interdimensional, how could they stay in this dimension or
get back? Is it a power thing? You know, something done through
power? I mean, all these things that we just don't understand. And
if that other dimension has to be physically here or can it come from elsewhere?
I mean, it's all, you know, great stuff to think about.
But again, you know, we don't I don't know. Uh So,
I guess I'll ask you this question. Do you think our US government
has more answers than we know about? But just something that if they release
it, it may show of them with some type of weakness in a way
that maybe they can't really explain it all. So why even try to explain
any of it? I mean, just puts your thoughts on that. Yeah,
So, I think, to me, again, there's a couple of
different things to unpack in that question. The first is the government is absolutely
covering up the extent of its knowledge about UFOs, probably not for the reasons
that people think. You know. For one thing, there is a cloak
of secrecy that overlays a lot of this that is some chunk of what the
public things are UFOI are the government's own secret test projects. You know,
historically we've seen things like the U two, the SR seventy one, the
A twelve ox Cart, the F one seventeen UH Nighthawk, the B two
bomber, you know, b what the public thinks are UFOs, but they
are the government's own secret test projects. Those projects are very much still in
existence. You know, just last fall we saw the military UH testing for
the first time the the B twenty one stealth bomber, new generation stealth bomber.
You know, there are other stealth drones and planes and things that we
are surely not aware of. There's another cloak of secrecy, which is some
chunk of what the public again considers UFO sightings are advanced adversary technology being tested
against us. You know, this is Chinese drones, Russian drones, Iranian
drones, and that you almost certainly see a large number of public UFO sightings
being explained by you know, the government's knowledge of these classified adversary technologies being
tested, and the government gets really squarely talking about what it's understanding of other
things in our airspace is because it doesn't like talking about its sensors. It
doesn't like saying what its sensors detect, what its radar detects, what it
notices, what it doesn't notice. And so almost certainly the government knows a
fair deal about things like that that the just don't talk to, you know,
that they can't talk about without giving away sensor technology. Then you get
to that question. Then you get to the question that that you're started asking,
which is is the government covering up meaningful knowledge of contact with aliens or
extraterrestrials or non human intelligences? You know, are there crashed spacecraft, are
there uh or covered alien bodies or what you know? The the buzzword now
is you know, non human biologic and that uh you know. I think
there's a lot of reasons to be dubious that the government is covering up meaningful
knowledge about contact uh or or or recovery programs of extraterrestrial knowledge extraterrestrial civilizations,
in part because you know this, it is hard to imagine a bigger secret
that the government could be keeping and not have any meaningful whispers of it escape.
I think actually you're on the right track with where you were heading in
your question, which is to me the most likely answer, and certainly what
we see documented again and again in the declassified records such as they have exist
and have been shared and made public over the last eighty years, is that
the US government is mostly covering up its ignorance of what UAPs and UFOs actually
are. That much of the evidence that we have for what the government was
covering up at any one given moment is that the government was just as puzzled
about what UFOs and UAPs are as we are, right And I understand without
even having to ask you the question that David Grush, you know, came
out with the six extraordinary claim back in June this last year. I was
actually at the Washington d C Hearing when he was in the in the room
at the time when that all happened. And I understand that your reply to
that, before I even ask, would be that you know this is a
secondhand witness. However, I don't know if you followed that the I don't
know what his the director I guess of a ro oh of Sean Kirkpatrick basically
said you know in his letter as he was leading his op ed or whatever
you want to call it that basically saying that you know, he he'd only
heard from secondhand witnesses, and I that is that is not true because I
know personally, you know, a firsthand witness that actually went and testified for
four hours, uh with the encounter the that he had. But what I'm
getting at is, uh, how would you feel if there was actually a
testimony of a firsthand witness that claimed that he actually had uh, that they
actually worked on technology, you know with Let's just say, do you think
that would change everything? And things would really be looked into deeply? You
know as far as uh, if these things are compartmentalized, I know you
probably have a feeling that none of that may uh may or may not exist.
But I'm just saying, do you think that would change things if actually
firsthand witness you know, came forward and you know, went through the whistleblower
whatever the legal the legal channels to do it right. So I think part
of uh, part of part of the challenge of David Gresh's testimony is almost
everything that he says is likely true, maybe even probably true, and it
still doesn't just make that one last little leap that the public makes because the
public doesn't sort of quite understand the nomenclature and the way that the government sort
of speaks and operates. And what I mean by that is, you know,
David Grush really began last spring with this claim. I'm oversimplifying a little
bit, but basically the core of his original claim was the US government has
a UFO crash retrieval program that has recovered unknown technology that the government believes is
extraterrestrial. I think that almost every aspect of that is almost certainly true,
except for the last little intellectual leap that people make when they hear that.
And what I mean by that is, the US government does have a UFO
crash retrieval program. It has had one for almost one hundred years. It
dates back to World War One. What was originally called the Foreign Technology Division
of the Army Air Corps, and it is a unit that goes around and
recovers crashed UFOs unidentified flying objects. Is how in the World War Two we
recover German measure Schmidt fighters and Japanese Zeros and Dornier bombers. In the Cold
War, this was the unit that was responsible for picking up Soviet megs from
friendly countries or non aligned countries or you know, battlefields of the Korean War.
UFO is just an unidentified flying object. It doesn't have to be an
extraterrestrial spacecraft. So yes, we have a UFO crash retrieval program. I
would bet also that that UFO crash retrieval program has recovered technology that it doesn't
know what it is. You know, that would seem to me to be
table stakes really for a UFO crash retrieval program is that we're recovering things that
we don't know what they are, either because we're you know, it is
advanced adversary technology we haven't seen before, or or it's you know, pieces
of wreckage that you know, we can't make sense of what that piece of
wreckage actually is. I would very much believe, and I think it's you
know, almost probable that the government has a warehouse somewhere that's like all of
the weird stuff the government has recovered that we don't know what it is yet.
So like the second part of David Grush's statement is probably also true.
I will even believe that there's someone on that team who says, who's looked
at it and says, I believe that this doesn't look like anything humans have
made. You know, I think that this is extraterrestrial. We sort of
all have that coworker whose opinions are, you know, one standard deviation outside
of the rest of the team. Yet, when David Grush says, you
know, the US government has recovered unknown technology that it believes is extraterrestrial,
what I think the public heres is that the US government has concluded that it
is extraterrestrial. You know that there was a formal briefing in the situation room
by the Director of National Intelligence to the President of the United States with PowerPoint
slides where she says, you know, uh, it is with a high
degree of confidence and the assessment of seventeen intelligence agencies that we've recovered alien technology.
I don't think that that's happened. I don't think that's happened, probably
for a whole bunch of different reasons, you know, they're not the least
of which is like, that'd be a pretty incredible secret for the government to
have, you know, officially concluded in the process that the government goes through
to reach an official conclusion. So, you know, I think that part
of the challenge of listening to David Grush is that David Grush could be almost
entirely telling the truth as he understands it. You know that there are people
in the intelligence community who have told him these things, you know, people
who have told him that they work on these programs that he is talking about.
And yet it doesn't necessarily, in my mind, add up to the
you know, two plus two plus two equals eight scenario of you know,
the government has a secret hangar under Area fifty one packed with alien bodies.
Okay, I'm going to say goodbye to kg R A Radio right now.
We'll be back next week with David Scott from Spaced Out Radio and thank you.
I want to continue on just a little bit because there's a couple of
things I wanted to So we're going to go over time a little to hear
a couple of things I want to ask. So, what do you think
about when it comes to his claim of the pilots of a few of these
things? You know, again exactly as you predicted that that feels to me
like secondhand knowledge that we haven't yet seen evidence to back it up. I
think that there's a lot of reasons to doubt that the government is capable of
keeping a secret of that size and scale, and you know a lot of
evidence. You know, as someone who has covered national security for twenty years,
has written a lot about the US government's doomsday programs and nine to eleven
and Watergate and a lot of places where there's a lot of government conspiracy programs
or conspiracy theories. You know, My challenge with government conspiracy theories ends being
that they presuppose a level of competence, planning, and forethought that is not
on display in the rest of the work that the government does. You know,
could the government keep knowledge of an alien recovery secret for a short period
of time, probably, Could it keep the knowledge of an alien recovery for
a long period of time, maybe with like a very very very small group
of people. But that's not how David Grush talks about this. He talks
about it as a ninety year cover up stretching back to fascist Italy and World
War Two that he says, in modern terms, has about five thousand people
working on it. So, you know, extrapolate that out across the you
know, eighty ninety years of a cover up, you know, maybe fifty
thousand people, maybe seventy five thousand people have worked on it over the years
or would have been cleared into it in one form or another. That just
doesn't seem possible for me in the context of the scale of the cover up
that he's alleging. Based on what we know about how the government is able
to keep secrets. Yeah, I mean there's there's a lot of people have
talked in theories about that. How you know of just you know, to
come compartmentalize things to the point where everyone knows pieces but not the whole,
you know, that type of thing, to keep this, you know,
to hide this the secrets. I love your Freudian slip. Was it a
government conspiracy programs? You said by accident and then changed it to theories that
was that was pretty funny. But now I know you did some work on
the nukes, and so you must have looked into the situation at Maelstrom in
other places where is supposedly there was interference when it comes to UFOs, not
just that there's been a number, I forget how many cases in total,
but where there was you know, basically the UFO and then something happened with
the the weapons systems or something like that. I just wondered if that's something
you actually looked into. You know, I've looked into it in the context
of looking into a lot of these other things. You know, Untangling and
getting an understanding of past historical UFO sightings is incredibly hard, simply because it's
you know, we don't have the data and records that we would want of
most of these incidents, and trying to figure out what some of these things
are, you know, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years later,
it is really challenging. And you know, the truth of the matter is
most of these things will probably be forever unsolved at this point, right.
I can't I can't disagree with that at all. I want to thank you
so much and for your book will be linked down in the show notes and
in the text below, the YouTube and Facebook, et cetera. The name
of the book is UFO, The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for
Alien Life here and out there. You've been a great guest. Thank you
so much for all your insights. Thanks much a pleasure chatting with you.
Is there just one more thing? Is there any further research you're going to
do in this or you're just going to move on to other topics at this
point. You know, I will continue to cover this, you know,
more as a magazine writer, which is my my other life going forward,
you know, because I think that there is something here and I, along
with a lot of other people, will be curious to figure out what it
is. Excellent, all right, and I don't know if we ever will
in our lifetime, but you never know, all right, Thanks so much,
Take care all right everyone, So we'll be back next week. We'll
be live, and we'll have Dave Scott from spaced Out Radio. Thank you,
and remember to keep your eyes to the sky.