Transcripts For CSPAN3 Garrett 20240704

A absolute and true friend to the National Archives and Records Administration as well to the Gerald R Ford foundation. How a friend is Garrett Graff well just to put it in a kind of small perspective garrett is such a friend that when garrett writes out his check every year to the irs, garrett loves believe that every single comes to the National Archives for our usage. Im not sure. Im not sure that is true garrett in fact, it probably goes like the tailhook of an f 35, but my friend, its the thought that counts ladies and gentlemen, Garrett Graff. Its. Yeah. Joel just stole what is normally my opening joke when i speak at a president ial library or museum, which is im just a huge fan of. The president ial libraries and museums across the country and ive been lucky. I think ive done research now at all. But three of them and its theyre just a wonderful Network Across the country resource for history. So im very appreciative of the work that archivists do across the country. So thank you so much for so you started by writing a book about Robert Mueller and the fbi getting a kind of sweet gig on cnn. A lot of a national exposure. You moved from that to writing my personal favorite, raven. The the story of the u. S. Governments plan to itself while. The rest of us died and you followed that with the in my opinion one of the best oral histories editorial ever written and the only plane in the sky. The story of 911 and then not on that success. Hugh moved and wrote one of 2023 pulitzer prize. His history of the history of watergate and last couple of years ago, you were here to talk about your watergate book and fully remember this. You and i were having a private dinner across the river. And i every every youve been here, i usually ask you so, garrett, whats next in your response was . Im writing a book on ufos. And i know my response. What . So, garrett y ufos, as you say. Im a very weird person have written this book because i am not a i was not raised watching xfiles or star trek. Im not a sci aficionado. I come this book, as you just outlined, as someone who has covered National Security for the last 20 years and what i noticed in watching dean in the last couple of years was the convoy procession around changed and that there was a series of blockbuster reporting by the New York Times and politico, where i used to work in the fall of 2017. That outline of two threads of a changing perspective on ufos. One was a series of about a secret pentagon ufo Study Program that had been funded by then Senate Majority leader harry reid and had been run by a las vegas businessman and space entrepreneur named robert bigelow. And at same time, there were a series of videos that came out that the pentagon released from navy pilots, Navy Aviators who had encounters with objects in the sky that they could not explain. And there were a series of three videos that came out the the aviators the pilots sort of testified about these encounters said was, you know, technology. They did not understand that they did not believe that the us could counter and things that moved at speeds angles that to them defied as we understood it and that was interesting but there was a moment for. In december 2020 that took this a you know something i was sort of vaguely attention to to something where i was like, okay, i should sit down and, dive into this for a book project, which was john brennan, who had just wrapped up the better part of a decade at that point as the cia director and the white House Homeland Security gave an interview, a dc journalist named, tyler cowan, where he, in essence in, incredibly tortured syntax. Theres stuff out there we dont what it is it us and it may ripper isnt a phenomenon that some might say might constitute a new form of life. And thats an incredibly statement for someone like john brennan to make. I had covered john brennan. Ive interviewed brennan. Hes about as serious a National Security establishment person as as you can get and i figured there cant be that many things that puzzle old john brennan like when he woke up in the morning and was cia director and white house homeland advisor. If he had a question, we have a 60 billion a year intelligence apparatus that went out and tried to answer his questions. And, you know, there are spies and analysts and operators and satellite Surveillance Networks and signals intelligence intercepts, systems all dedicated to answering whatever random questions john brennan wakes up in the morning with. And so if he is leaving office at the end of eight years as white House Homeland Security advisor and and cia director and he says, man, this ufos stuff is really puzzling. That to me felt like something that was worthy of diving into deeper. So this book tries to pull together. Our two threads that journalists in historians normally treat differently. One, thats the militarys hunt for ufos here on earth. And then the evolving science and the around are under of the size and scale and scope the universe and what astronomers call the search for extraterrestrial intelligence study and that journalist and normally try to treat these as like two totally separate unreal rated topics. You know you have the wacky ufo people here who are all crazy and then you have this serious astronomers doing serious work, studying the universe. But to me very much the same. In part because you see the same figures sort of moving back and forth between two worlds and arguing with one another, but then also at an incredibly level, the question of are aliens visiting us here on earth has a lot to do with the question of whether aliens exist at all anymore. So before i answer, ask or answer, i ask my next i want to do a quick audience poll because it leads into question number two. So here here is the poll. How many of you believe that ufos exist . But they not of alien nature. Raise your hand. Im not of alien region. Not okay. How many you believe that ufos exist and they are of aliens nature. Please raise your hand. Okay. All right. And heres the last. How many of you did not raise your hands because you are concerned about being stigmatized . One way or the other . All right thats not very fair, a very fair raising of your head. So, garrett, in your book, you write quite a bit about the Scientific Community early in the ufo experience right after the war and after World War Two and scientists are like common human psychology. Theyre saying one thing in public, but theyre saying else entirely in private. Can you expand on, please . Yeah. So the modern flying saucer begins in the summer of 1947, and it was in idaho businessmen named Kenneth Arnold in june 1947, who is flying his private plane up in the pacific northwest, the cascades and. He sees out his window, nine saucers shaped object moving at tremendous speed. He lands. Tell some friends about it on the ground. It gets picked up by the media. The media sensationalizes and it kicks off the summer of the flying saucer. Flying saucers are entirely new to american culture. That point and over the course of that summer, there are sightings across 34 states up into north america. You know, a sighting almost every day in the country there. You know, this like front page newspaper, four stories, day after day after day that summer two weeks into this phenomenon, theres a in roswell, new mexico. So that becomes part of the of this saucer. And in that early moment theres no one who thinks that these are aliens and what the government is deeply concerned about is that this is is secret soviet spacecraft being built by kidnaped rocket scientists. Because what is the United States doing in the summer of 1947, this is the dawn of the cold war. This is actually the summer when the war in some ways of peaks in its early years that you have the passage of the security act of 1947, almost the same day as the roswell crash, that this is the act that creates the cia, the joint chiefs of staff, creates the defense department, creates the air force as an independent military branch, creates the National Security council, you know, the whole government is sort of reshaping itself for the the war. And we we would use a word, different word than kidnaped. We would tell you that we had presented some unique Employment Opportunities to former nazi rocket scientists in places like lasalle, moz and the white sands proving grounds and were them build you know, the next generation of v2 rockets to help launch the space race and the you know, the force as a independent service its first crisis is these saucers and it needs to figure out what things are and are a threat to National Security and they are just as baffled as anyone else. In the summer of 47 and and eventually figure out its not secret soviet and in a very weird way the us and the us air force then loses interest in whatever the flying saucers actually are once they determine not the National Security threat they are most concerned about, and instead have hollywood come along. And in the late forties and early fifties, the sort of alien invasion movies that now are so familiar with that begin to link for the first time. The idea, you know, flying aliens, know, visiting earth invasion, etc. Etc. And it creates this fascinating feedback loop that then plays out decade by decade for the next 80 years where have the public sightings drive . National security panics by the government that then inspire hollywood to sort of new threats and new pop culture use of aliens that then inspires public sightings of ufos, that inspires more National Security panics and sort of ad infinitum and this is a point where i actually come in to answer your question, the what you see is sort of science begin to have this really difficult dance where. This is just in the real dawn of serious astronomy know government supported radio astronomy, you know, exploration, the heavens in a much more system way than weve ever seen before. Again, much of it driven by World War Two technologies like radar and that scientists. You know are trying to sort of downplay possibilities of aliens visiting earth. The one hand, while beginning to get really excited about the possible of life elsewhere and. Sort of the middle third of this book ends up being this. Sort of intellectual feud over decades. Aids between j. Alan hynek, who is the astronomer who, leads the government investigation of ufos and, and carl sagan, who is, of course, sort of famous, most famous astronomer of the 20th century and is simultaneously the lead voice for ceti, for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence out there, while also being the arch skeptic, aliens are actually visiting us here on earth. So this is a president ial president ial library museum. So i think its only appropriate that we ask about the president s and ufos. So you write in your book quite some detail with regard to kind of the dispirit of quite a few american president s and this the ufo issue gerald ford, jimmy, ronald reagan, bill clinton. Can you expound and talk a bit about each of those president s and what they did or did not do for the ufo . Yeah. So the the thing that will sort of most surprise is most of you who think that you know something about gerald ford in this room is that gerald ford in congress was the leading advocate for studying ufos that actually in the summer of 1966 he was congressman here he was the minority in the house and in the summer of 66, there is, a very famous series of ufo sightings at college here, michigan. And it goes on a period of about a week. Theres one sort of very famous sighting at hillsdale, this glowing orb out in the forest behind one of the dorm thats witnessed dozens and scores of students in College Administrators and police officers. Then a series of other ufo sightings across Central Michigan at far ends, a couple of other locations. Jalen hynek, astronomer, is dispatched by the air force up to investigate it and and he spends a couple of days going around the army and Police Across michigan trying to understand whats happening and he eventually a press conference at the Detroit Press and its the largest press event ever at the Detroit Press club where. He diagnoses the ufo sightings and dismisses them as swamp and it becomes one of the most sort of infamoUs Government dismissals of ufo sightings in history and if you if you dont know your biology gas is a real thing it has to do with like methane melting the winter and then being released through the ice as the spring thaw happens and gerald ford, the local is incredulous that the government would so quickly dismiss his obviously correct constituents who saw ufos and so he pushes the first ever congressional hearings on ufos in the summer of 1966. That end being the first congressional hearings and only hearings until the congressional hearings. Two summers ago, when Congress Sort of picked back up this this issue. As i said in my opening answer, as we sort of began to see serious people in talking seriously about gerald ford runs of in 76 against jimmy who is has best documented ufo of any american president. He when he was governor of georgia saw a ufo what he thought was a ufo outside of an elks club one night while he was speaking as governor. And it until about a decade ago to out what he actually saw which he saw a military missile test over the horizon that released a barium cloud that of lit up the sky in this very peculiar way. And jimmy in exactly the way you would expect jimmy carter be dutifully filled out the paperwork to report a ufo sighting and, sent it in when he was governor and it become sort of part of his president ial campaign because everyone at that point hopes that jimmy carter will win and then open up the governments secret files, which he then does not do. Yeah. So lets lets talk about your alma mater, harvard, there are a couple of interesting in your book as well as the great story relating to carl sagan and his career track nearly being ruin earned by his initial interest. Ufos as well. Another famed harvard psychologist dr. Mach, you asked whether when asked at the time whether harvard was embarrassed by professor, a harvard spokesman stated that all of its faculty had strange interests and quote, they are all weird and one way or another can you talk about not harvard but this with sagan and dr. Mach yeah so john mach becomes one of the most fascinating of ufology in the 1990s as he pioneered is really the Scientific Study of people who report abductions. And i spent a couple of chapters of the book looking at the phenomena of alien abduction once and what what mark really to understand and there are a couple of people in this world who sort of study this actually a very Famous Artist named budd hopkins, whos a writer in his own way, who gets interested in this, a couple of others. And and john mack calls them experi answers because he does not want to. Prejudge one way or another what actually happened to these people and that alien abductions really. Come to the fore. This in the late 1960s and then really peak in the 1980s, early nineties and the the psychiatrist to study them really believed that something happens to these people and that they report report all of the signs trauma that would be consistent with people who have undergone actual trauma. You know, they up psychiatrically sort of very similar to abuse victims, you know, war veterans, you know, sort of other people who have variations of what we now call ptsd. And that they are have no interestingly, no share sort of psychopathy before reporting in experi ence and no shared psychopathy after. So is not a situation where you see, you know, people who are schizophrenic, who then report alien or people who report alien abductions then go on to be a diagnosed as bipolar, that theyre are sort of this very wide spectrum of experience. Heres and that as far as sort of Mental Health and psychiatrists can Say Something to them and we dont know what it is that leads me into my next question, and this is a question i guarantee that this question has never been asked at the Gerald R Ford president ial museum and i can guarantee it. It never again. So garrett, chapter 41 sex with aliens. Expound, expound, please, sir, im so this is sort of see it to two very different populations of people who report encounters or experience with aliens and and theres this wave of people in the 1950s is that are called contact these and and they are people who come forward to sort of say like i have i have this encounter with an alien some of them say that they, you know, been taken rides with spaceships and, you know, gotten to see tours of the universe and that they have been given messages to share with humanity. And its a message about, you know, peace and we should get along and, not have nuclear war. Its a very specific 1950 is sort of psychological moment. And a lot of them report sort, you know, basically the of like the alien stops every thursday and we have tea together and and they for the most part go on to attempt to like monetize this experience. You know, they theres a lot of grifting in this of, you know, setting up some, you know facilities and things that most people would consider cults and things like that. And the contact these are general really sort of written off as as kooks and and dismissed. One of them sort of very famously. His wife ends up divorcing him and sites the alien being that he says continues to visit him as the sort of aggrieved extra party in their divorce and its the only known in Divorce Court that an has ever been cited in legal papers as the sort of of other party in a divorce proceeding. And then you have this other population of of the experiencias and that they buy in large are people who have solo encounters and. Then just go with their lives. And its a much more interesting to me phenomenon because most them have no reason to report the in counter that they have. And actually a lot of reason that you would not want to report the encounters that these people have. And some of them are abduction stories. But then you also have theres theres one sort of, particularly to me, credible witness that i talk about in the book. Whos, a policeman in socorro, new mexico, in 1964. His name, Lonnie Zamora, and and hes a small town cop chasing a speeder in the desert on the road out into the desert. He knows who the speeder is, you know, a good small town cop, so he knows, like the kid that he normally a lot of trouble with. He hears an explosion off in the desert and sees what thinks is a overturned white car off in desert. So he abandons his pursuit. He knows he can show up at that kids house leader and, get him, and he sort of turns this pontiac cruiser and is like bumping up and down through the gullies towards this overturned car. There two figures standing outside of it. And as he gets closer, they get into the craft he describes a sort of football shaped he gets closer and the craft takes off and something happens to Lonnie Zamora that desert there is a new mexico state trooper who shows up on the scene within a couple of minutes sees Lonnie Zamora sort shaken and upset by whatever this encounter is that he has had theres some circumstantial evidence that the military and fbi respond to the scene and find marks in the desert where the a craft sat or appeared to have sat, where Lonnie Zamora said that was. And that he is considered to be by the government investigators of one of the most credible witnesses that we have, in part because he has reason to make up this story and then just goes on with the rest of his life and never has another you know, encounter or experience to report. You know, theres a very simple explanation for what Lonnie Morris saw, which is this is 1964. Its adjacent to the white sands proving grounds. Its the heart of the apollo program. Maybe he stumbled across the air force, a lunar lander in the desert that he just wasnt supposed to see. But, you know, were 50, 60 years later and there has never emerged evidence of any craft that the Us Government has created that behave as anything like the capable cities of what he says that he saw in the desert that day great. Thank you very much. I think it would be remiss if did not talk about one of the most famous cases in ufo history and. That is the issue surrounding the roswell. Can you talk a little about the roswell situation in 47 and then the roswell situation and much later . Yeah, so was well is almost instantly it occurs as i said, about two weeks after the age of the flying saucer begins. Its part of this series of events you see across the country in the summer of 47, this rancher comes in to the city of roswell and reports i found of a crash on my ranch the air force sends two officers out to investigate it, bring the wreckage back to the Roswell Army Air force base and. The commander of the roswell base looks at it and says he this is a really great moment and goes, you know, wait, the government has finally found of these flying saucers thats in the newspaper every day. And he tells, his Public Affairs officer to put out a press release saying the government recovered a flying saucer, which they do, and they pack up the wreckage and they put on a plane, cargo plane, to the eighth air force headquarters in in fort worth, texas where someone else at it and says, idiots, this is a weather balloon. And and in about three and a half hours, the military puts a second statement saying, you know, our apologies. Its not a flying saucer its a weather balloon. And the roswell story comes and goes in about 3 hours and is basically for 30 years and really reemerges all in the wake of watergate in the late 1970s. And, you know, one of the things that really surprised me in working on this book was, is joel said, my previous was a history of watergate. And this book, in some ways ends being a weird sequel to a book on watergate because the second half of the book ends up being a lot about the rise of ufo conspiracy theories and collapse of faith and trust and truth in government institutions. And so the ufo conspiracies become, really the first government can spirits these to rise in wake of watergate the committee the Pike Committee vietnam, the pentagon papers in the seventies and eighties. And really establish the concept that we would now wreckage as the deep state in the american spectrum and and american politics sort of this idea that there is shadowy perm and government cabal you know secretly working at the heart of the Us Government at crosspurposes. Its leadership figureheads and the american public. And that you see this story grow and become darker and more conspiratorial and sort of more poisoned. Its over the course of the 1980s and it morphs into this idea that the government has recovered, you know, multiple space craft, multiple aliens, you know dead aliens, living aliens, that we have peace treaties with alien civilizations. Theres, you know, one set of these conspiracies that we actually had a big that the Us Special Forces have a big shootout with a alien base in the us southwest that leads to dozens deaths of us troops and that this really becomes i think the beating heart of the Conspiracy Movement that we now, you know poisoning a lot of our politics. So the ufo conspiracy issue, the ufo sightings this is not only an american phenomenon as write in your book and quite quite excellent detail. This is a global phenomenon you talk about the soviet Union Investigation ins. You talk about france and belgium and the uk. Can you talk a little bit about some of the experiences that the Global Community has had with issue . Yeah. And and was also. You know, the question that everyone asks when, i sort of Start Talking about working on this book is, are ufos real . And the answer is like, of course, like all a ufo actually is is an unidentified flying object. And there are lots of those. The question that people mean when they are ufos real is are we alone . And that becomes in many ways the the, you know, intellectual and sort of philosophical beating heart of this book and this question of are we alone is in many ways probably one of the two or three most profound and basic questions of existence. You know, it is up there with. What happens to us after death, you know, is there a god, you know, these are the the questions that you can amass in basically humans for as long humanity has existed and. One of the things that you see as you said, joel, is that, you know, this is not just an american phenomenon, but many cultures around the planet sort of have meaningful ufo and that, you know, there are government studies in the soviet union. France has a has a big one. The costa rican has actually taken the clearest photo of a ufo anyone has ever seen. It was an. And this becomes sort of that you see really take all over the world. But this question whats also interesting as you get into this is the question of are we alone turns out to be a very modern and also a very and christian one because many eastern traditions have sort of always assumed that there are other and intelligent life and sort of a multitude worlds out there. And in fact, actually harry reid in the modern incarnation and one of the reasons he funds the modern pentagon ufo studies is hes mormon and in the faith tradition, you believe actively in possibility of other worlds and other beings and. One of the things that you really see change in last 25 years, which i talk about in the book, because to me this is one of the like the greatest revolution in Human Understanding we have seen is the math is on the side of the aliens is that we, as late as the 1990s did not understand there was a single planet outside of our own solar system and that we now understand that effectively every star in the universe has planets and that a huge number of them not necessarily a large percentage but a huge number just because of how huge and vast. The universe is fall into what scientists call the goldilocks zone, which is planets that are not too hot, not too cold. Support water could support an atmosphere or could support life. As we as we would recognize. And that in numbers. The current estimate is that there. Are 1 sextillion habitable planets across the universe which. 1,000,000,000 trillion in have habitable planets. So you can believe that life is rare you can believe that intel giant life is rare. But is it really a one in sextillion and . Then you get into sort of these very interest setting and sort of related questions, which is life be common in, intelligent life could be common and it could still be too far away for us to know right now or we could be functionally alone right now, that sort of part, the mind bending math of the universe we now understand it, is we are an incredibly young civilization in england, incredibly young solar system, in a very old universe that solar system is about billion, four and a half billion years old in a 14 billion year old universe. And the way that James Webb Space Telescope has our understanding of stars and for Star Formation and planetary formation is that the James Webb Space Telescope has found now stars that began to form. 300 million years of the start of the universe. So youre with this possibility that there could be billion year civilizations that have risen and fallen civilizations so much more advanced that we would not be able to even recognize them that have come and gone before our solar system ever began to gather out of dust and. It leads to this really weird of thought experiment, which that we totally misunderstood and First Contact that hollywood and pop culture has given us sort of the three scenarios for what our first sci sign of an intelligent alien civilization would be and they are sort of all unarmed us and clear theres the independ since day flying over the white house me to your leader im for friendship or to harvest your organs for energy. Theres the jodie foster contact radio message from outer and theres the e. T. Sort of string did lone traveler situation and whats most likely to happen is something we will probably first see in intelligence civilization in a much more ambiguous and puzzling way. And we are most likely to first see a piece space trash, but were going to have some, you know, telescope photo. So where we see something that we recognize is not ours, but we dont know whose it is and that its a harvard astronomy chair. Avi loeb talks about it as being basically equivalent of an empty plastic bag blowing through cosmic backyard that were going look up and were going to say, thats not from our walmart. Whos walmart . Do you think thats, from . And were not going to know whether its civilization thats close by. Were not going to know whether its around. Were not going to know whether its friendly or not friendly. But that or idea that aliens are actually going to cross interstellar space and come visit actually is probably wrong, that we are probably not of any interest to any intelligence civilization that could master interstellar communication or travel and that this idea that sort of anyone bother stopping in on earth is probably wrong and that see scientists like carl sagan who again arch proponent of the for extraterrestrial intelligence out there and also arch skeptic the ufos visiting us his argument was never aliens dont earth its that would treat earth the way we treat a rest area on the jersey turnpike that its a place you stop on the way from one interesting stop to and that statistically aliens probably visit earth. 100000 to 200000 years just based on how you would sort of expect patterns of interstellar travel to unfold. And so its not that aliens dont visit earth was carl sagans argument. Its the thing that you saw out your window last tuesday night is unlikely to the one night of these 200,000 years that an alien happened to stop by on their to something far more interesting than us. So i asked one more question and were going to turn it over to the audience guys. Garrett this book is quite lot of things. Its part cold war history, part science, part of an examination of conspiracies that you had. But what is the one thing that throughout all of your research in doing this great book was part of that kind of wow factor. But what really wowed you in all of your research . So i think to me it was this idea, as i said, that the math is on the side of the aliens, which is just a sort of tremendous revolutionary idea in and that understanding how much of this is really a spiritual question as much it is a scientific one or National Security one, and and, you know, to to sort of cut to the the the. You know, one of the things that you really begin to understand as you get into this is that in some ways aliens could be the least interesting answer to what ufos actually are. And that what i you know so the government now calls these uaps unidentified phenomenon. The the irony of course is actually that they started off as flying saucers the government, the military came up with and popularized term ufos to destigmatize the conversation around flying saucers. Fast forward. A couple of decades now the government has come up with unidentified anomalous phenomena on to destigmatize the conversation around ufos, but also to capture. Two shifts in the perspective. The way that the government looks at this one is not all of these are objects some chunk of them are phenomena and not all of them are flying. Theyre actually one of the big things that the government is now focused on as part of its renewed interest in ufos and uap is is usos unidentified submerged objects or an unidentified swimming objects. And one of the things that the government has actually discovered that we actually because the pentagon has talked about it is in its study of uap in the modern in last couple of years it discovered a heretofore unknown known trans medium chinese drone which is to say a chinese drone that comes out of the water and transitions to flight, which is a technology that the us did not realize china had until it began to get this modern uap study. So when you look at what uaps probably are i think its four categories. It is advanced adversary being tested against us which are chinese drones, russian drones, you know, whatever tony stark is building some mountain lab that we we know about. Some chunk of it is highly scientific term called weird stuff. And thats the theres just a bunch of weird stuff floating up there in the sky that we dont really Pay Attention to on a daily basis and this is what we ended up with with chinese spy balloon last year which is if you turn the northward sort of slightly differently, you pick up a bunch of balloon guns and junk and we panic a country. And we sent up the worlds most advanced fighter jet to shoot it all down with, a quarter Million Dollar missiles and this is real. We shot down. One of the things we shot down was a hobbyist balloon from, the Northern Illinois balloon meteorology. That just we didnt know was up there and. Then you get into sort of two other categories that i think are the real interesting stuff, which is meteorological, atmospheric and astronomical science and phenomenon that we dont understand yet. But i think one of the great lessons of science of the last couple of year, the last few decades, is that we should be really humble about our understanding the world and the world is probably much weirder than we think it is. And we, i think, have a bias that we understand a lot more of the world than we actually do. And then when you begin to go back, you realize how just how much of our knowledge is really new. You know, George Washington lived and died not knowing dinosaurs existed until. 47. The gorilla by western science was considered a mythical creature akin to the yeti or the unicorn before it was ever actually spotted by western science and you go to the 1950s, we did not. Plate tectonics. You know the basics. How are are our own earth moves . We still know . You know, as everyone says, know less about the bottom of the ocean than we do the surface, the moon. And you want to know something fascinating about how we know about the moon . We not even looked on moon to know whether there are other lunar landers elsewhere on, the moon that are not ours. Like weve never even done a composite of study of the moons surface at a resolution in detail enough to know whether are other lunar landers from civilizations on our own. This not me saying i think that there are other lunar landers on the moon. This is me saying this is how nascent our study of a lot of these phenomenon actually are. And then you get to the last which is the truly weird stuff, which is physics that we dont understand and the idea of you real revolutions in physics that people theorize right now but that we dont yet understand mean this could be really mind bending stuff you know inter travel parallel universe is time travel from the past or future things that would to us be even weirder than visiting, but that we dont get necessary really understand at a theoretical level. And you say like no we get physics like we know there are no parallel dimensions, theres no time travel. The worlds oldest woman died last year. She was a french nun. She was 118 years old. Everything thing that humanity knows about relativity and quantum physics was discovered in her lifetime. Imagine what we will learn about physics, the next human lifespan. Imagine we could learn in 500 years, thousand years, 10,000 years. Theres a italian astrophysicist, carlo rovelli, who has a new book out, im not a physicist, so im about butcher. A very complex theory that he has, but its his proposal for the idea of white, not black holes, but white holes. Weve never seen. But he theorizes they exist and its his explanation for what happens at the bottom of black hole, which at the bottom of a black hole, he theorizes the. Black hole bounces and effectively and time reverses and everything that ever entered into the black hole is then expelled. And he says, of course weve, never seen this, but when came to his first senior level astrophysics appointment in the 2000, his department pulled him aside and said you dont really believe in black holes, do you . Because 2000 weve never seen one and we now understand the universe is populated wildly them and yet theres of still so much that we dont understand about this world around us the answers of which could be, again, far weirder than mere aliens. Gerard, thank you so much. Questions from the audience, please have about 15 minutes anyway down here. I think weve got a mike around. Like looking around. I was just wondering what you thought the Travis Walton incident, if you know about that. Yeah, all the different studies of each person that was there and confirmed. Yeah. This is the incident. The fire in the sky, the movie was originally based on on. It. You know its a its a its a weird incident, you know, theres reasons to doubt some of what unfolded there. Its certainly one of the the. Its certainly sort of one of the biggest savings or encounters that we see in the last, you know, 25, 30, 40 years. And and i think was a really big part of that flywheel that i was talking about of how pop culture incidents sort of inspire more sightings that inspire more pop culture and that but, you know, i dont part of the challenge with a lot this is its going to be really hard to go back and untangle any of the encounters that have reported over the years because we just dont have the data that one would want be able to sort of trace what actually happened in encounters and. So obviously the harvard astronomy that i mentioned earlier, the thing that hes trying to do right now is he just last fall opened the first up he observed. Three to try to document the like of you know what an ordinary looks like to try to establish like baselines, Data Collection that you would want to begin to try to investigate, sort further encounters like, like that one whenever they happen in future. And well have a better understanding of sort of like whats weird and whats not weird. Like, yeah, but the navy pilots. Yeah. And, and everything was well documented and yeah. So the navy pilots are the, you know, to me fall into this Lonnie Zamora category of, you know, super, highly credible witnesses. You know, theres a lot reasons if you are a navy aviator, a navy pilot, that you, in fact, dont want to be the person who comes back, the Aircraft Carrier and you wouldnt believe the ufo. I just ran across and that, you know, they they have what are sort of considered best types of encounters because you have a credible witness backed up with external, you know, video radar or, you know, instrument readings and they are you know, they have been a big part of restarting this conversation since 2017, when and there work is those those encounters. Take place or theyve sort of been turned over to this new Pentagon Office called arrow that is really to make sense of what the government can sitters uap sightings. You know part of the challenge theres a what are considered public ufo sightings are generally not that interesting you know the vast majority of public ufo sightings are easily explained. You know the planet venus is actually a really large percentage of public ufo sightings because its just such a bright star in a weird place in the sky, only to come from it. Well, whos one seventeens . So then you know what the public considers ufo are often actually also secret Us Government test projects a big chunk of what we now understand were ufo sightings in the 1950s were the u2 spy plane being tested and developed by . The cia and the air force . And you know that the years since has been the you s. R. 71, the a12 oxcart, the stealth fighter, the stealth bomber. You know, the stealth b 21 bomber just had its test flight in november last fall. So these programs are still out there. But the question me is, what are the sightings that the u. S. Government thinks are ufo sightings and what are the ones that they cant explain and . That number over time is, somewhere between as high as 20 and generally considered closer to about 5 that the government cant explain an arrow in, its work with the navy pilots and other encounters it finds about 2 of ufo sightings. It can not explain with you know known known known phenomena on known test flights known you know other manmade technology. And to me of course like whatever is interesting the answer to the mystery of ufos a new ap is in 2 of sightings that the government itself cant explain. I was wondering what your access is to find out things like it was a video online or on cable of these figures that were supposedly photographed at roswell. They look like aliens. Do you get to look into that . Do you do you have access to anything like that . Yeah. So i think. I actually roswell one of the least interesting ufo sightings and i find it unhinged. Interesting for the following reason which a lot of people dont put together, which is the most famous conversation in in ufo ology is something the fermi paradox, which is a enrico fermi the physicist, a is having lunch with his colleagues at Los Alamos National lab in the summer of 1950. With it, Edward Teller theres a third scientist with them. If you know your oppenheimer movie from last, these are all the people who were involved names that are familiar, and theyre talking about a new yorker. So thats how were able to date this conversation to the summer of 1950 that has there had been a series of stories about, alien or sorry, about garbage cans missing from new york city streets and the cartoon is about alien getting off a, flying saucer carrying their souvenirs from visiting earth. These new york city trash cans and theyre talking lunch and enrico fermi says. If life is so common, where are they at . And it its, you know now known as the fermi paradox, which is if life is as common as we think it is, why dont we see more of it . Why dont we . Why know . Why do we have no sign of it and thing that people miss about . Roswell is that in the summer of 1947. If the Us Government had recovered an alien spacecraft or alien body alive or dead, it wouldnt gone. As a lot of people think to Wrightpatterson Air Force in dayton, ohio, which where the air force intelligence is located. And theres sort of this long standing conspiracy that theres a hangar at wrightpatterson. The alien spacecraft are kept it it would have gone to the asylum national lab, which was right up the road from roswell and which was where the government had already all of the smartest physicists in the United States to address the biggest questions of physics. If wed encountered an alien spacecraft the summer of 47, even if that had been kept incredibly secret by. If there were ten people in the united who knew about that craft and had been asked to provide advice about it, theres no enrico fermi was not one of those ten that if anyone in america that we had recovered or spacecraft in the summer of 47 fermi in teller would have been among that group and they were at the base where the Us Government would have almost absolutely put that. So if in the summer, 1950, three years later, enrico fermi is sitting there saying, well, we havent seen any evidence of any aliens yet, have we . To me thats the most convincing evidence that nothing interesting happened in roswell in 47. One more question. Finds kind a dual question. The first one is im going to ask you back. You ask us about do you believe in aliens . And if you do, do you think theyre more regional or more out there . And then the other one is, what are your thoughts from before you wrote the book, what you thought about aliens and ufos two after you wrote . Yeah so im i think that and and basically all my views on this have been shaped by this book came into this book with very little, you know, knowledge or understanding of this of this subject, which is, you know, the fun of researching and writing a book. I think the intel agent civilizations exist across the universe. Im pretty dubious that they are close enough, that we will know. And to me, the oh, theres this sort of amazing hope and optimism that underlies the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that i think is really important to sort of capture and live in our daily lives, which that these scientists who work on this subject, you know, are embarking on studies that probably of them will ever live to see to fruition, you know, that these. Are 10,000 year, 100,000 year million year projects that they Getting Started in, trying to understand where fit into the scope and scale of the universe and when the group the sort of founding scientists are setting came together at the National Radio astronomy. Observatory in green bank, west virginia. In the first meeting they came up with whats called the drake equation, which is sort of the most famous equation in in setting. And frank, this guy, frank drake, comes up with it and its an equation that lays out the variables for how how common life and intelligent life would probably be across the universe and you know, its how many planets are habitable, what percentage of planet that are habitable does life evolve . You know what, what on what percentage planets that are habitable do it doesnt intelligent life evolve out of life and on and on through this equation the most important is called el and el is the length of time in intelligence civilization lasts lasts and everything in ceti hinges is on el and if el is a few 10,000 years, 100,000 years, we are functionally alone. You know the life could happen all the time. Intelligent life could happen all the time. And time. It appears its going to be functionally alone in the universe because civilizations just last long enough to overlap with one another. If el. A million years or billion years our universe will teeming with intelligent life to me from the human experience. Now where were sitting in 2024, theres a lot of reasons to be pretty wary that el is very long and that you know, which is like half of a joke and like half not a joke which is, you know, youre looking around today. Theres a lot of reasons to think like were not here 10,000 years from now. I hope that we are. And i think sort of one of the reasons that humanity should take really like living through these next couple of decades and figuring out the really questions that we have to figure out to keep this planet live it live livable and habitable over the next couple of decades. Centuries is we have a lot invested in to make el as big possible and that you know we are right now just a total blip on the cosmic radar and and theres a lot of Pretty Amazing stuff that humanity figure out if we give ourselves the chance for another thousand years, another hundred thousand years, another million years, you know, the average lifespan for a species on earth is about million years. And and, you know, were in the tens of thousands for our species right now. You know, like imagine what, 5 million years of humanity could achieve and what that could mean for what el could look like across the rest the universe. Well, before gleaves closes the show, ladies and gentlemen, Garrett Graff Garrett Graff. Hello, new york. Hello, upper west side. Hello our bookish friends on cspan. Thanks for coming out tonight,