Well just to put it in a kind of small p garrett is such a friend th 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 isgoes like the tailhook of an f 35, but thought that counts ladies and gentlemen, Garrett Graff. Its. Yeah. T stole what is normally my opening joke when i speak at a 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 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. E story of the u. S. Governments plan to itself while. The rest of us died and you followedhat with the in my opinion one of the best oral histories editorial ever written and the only plane in t the story of 911 and then not on that success. Hugh moved and wrote one o2023 pulitzer prize. His history of the 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 you been here, i usually ask you so, garrett, whats next in your was . Im writing a book on ufos. And i know my response. What . So garrett yfos, as you say. Im a very weird written this book because i am not a i was not raised watching xfiles or star trek. Im not a scicionado. I come this book, as you just outlined covered National Security for the and what i noticed indean 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 threadsng perspective on ufos. One was a series of about a secret pentagon ufo Study Program that had been funded by then Senate Majority leader harryd had been run by a las vegas businessman and space entrepreneur named robert 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 taviators the pilots sort of testifsaid was, you knowthey did not believe that the us could counter and things that moved atangles that to them def it and that was interesting but there was a momentin december 2020 that took this a you know something i was sort of vaguely attention to to somethinwhere 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, wherence 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 that puzzle old john morning and was cia director and white house homeland advisor. If he had a question, we have a 60 billion a year intelligence pa went out and tried to answer his questions. And, you know, and analysts and operatorsance networks and signals intelligence intercepts systems all dedicated to ansring whaver random questions john brennan wakes up in the morning with. An 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 book tries to pull our two threads that journalists in historians normally treat differently. One, thas hunt for ufos here on the evolving science and the aro under of the size and scale and 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 thet 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 ques of whether aliens exist at all anymore. So before i answer, ask or answer, i ask my i want to do a quick audience poll because it leads into question number two. So poll. How many of you believe that ufos exist . But they not of alien nature. Raise your hand. Im noton. 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 becre you a 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 early in the ufo experience right after the war and after World War Two and scientists are like common human psychology. Theyre in public, but theyre saying entirely in private. Can you expand the modern flying saucer begins in the 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 windo object moving at tremendous speed. Lands. Tell some friends about it on the ground. It gets picked up by the media. The media sensationalizes and it kicks off the sum flying saucer. Flying saucers are entirely to american culture. That the course of that summer, there are sightings across 34 states up into north ame sighting almost every day in the country there. You know this like front page newspaper, four stories, day after day after day that summer tw 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 the government is deeply concerned about is that this is is secret soviet spacecraft being built by kidnaped rocket scientists. E in the summer of 1947, this is theawn summer when the war in some ways of peaks in its early years that yo 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, y k whole government is sort of reshaping itself for the the war. And we we would use a different word than kidnaped. We would tell you thate had presented some unique Employment Opportunities to former nazi rocket scientists in places like lasalle, moz and the white sands grounds and were them build you know, the next generation of v2 rockets to help launch the space race and thyou know the force as a independent service its first crisis ist needs to figure out what things are and security and they arbaffled as anyone else. In the summereventually 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 about and instead have hollywood come along. And in the late forties and early fifties the sort of alien invasion movies 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 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 that inspires more National Security panics and sort of adum 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 seriousported radio astronomy, you know,a much more system way than weve ever seen before. 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 the possible of life and. Sort of the middle third of this book e being this. Sort of intellectual feud over decades. Aids between j. Alan hynek, who is astronomer who, leads the government investigation of ufos sagan, who is, of co famous, most famous astronomer of the 20 century and is simultaneously the lead ceti, for the search for extraterrestrial while also being the arch us here on earth. 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 f in this room is that gerald ford in congress was the leading advocate for studying ufos that actually inhe summer of 1966 he here he was the and in the summer of 66, there is, a very famous series of ufo sightings here, michigan. On a period of week. Theres one sort of very famous this glowing orb out inz forest behind one of the dorm thats witnessed dozens and scores of students in college adnistrators and police officers. Then a series of othersightings across central far ends, a couple of other locations. Hynek, astronomer, is investigate it and and he spends a couple of days going around the army andice across michigan trying to understand whatspening and he eventually a press conference at the Detroit Press and its the largest press event ever at where. He dismisses them as swamp a f ufo sightings in and if you if biology gas is a real thing it has to do w melting the winter and then being r thawand gerald ford, the loc is incredulous that thed 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 being t9zhe first congressional hearings and only hearings 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 peoplesly about gerald ford runs jimmy who is has best documented ufo of any american president. He when he was governor of georgia saw a thought was a ufo outside of an elks club one ght 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 sighting and, sent it governor and it become sort of partcampaign because everyone at that pointopes that jimmy carter will win and then open up secret files, which he then does not do. Yeah. So lets letsyour alma mater harvard, there are a couple of interesting in your book as well as 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 whetherai harvard was embarrassed by professor, a harvard 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 mache most fascinating of in the 1990s as he pioneered is really the scientifictudy 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 actually a very Famous Artist named bu 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 and that alien abductions 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 peoplehat they report signs trauma that would be consistent with people who have undergone actual trauma. You know they psychiatrically sort of very similar to abuseictims, you know, war sort of other people who have variations ofptsd. And that they are have no interestingly, no share sort of psychopathy befoexperi ence and no shareso is not a situation where you see, you know, people are schizophrenic,hoalien 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 into my next question, and this is a this question has never been asked at the Gerald R Ford president ial museum and i can guarantee it. It never garrett, chapter 41 sex aliens. Expound, expound, please sir im so this is sort of see it to two very different populations of people who report encounters or aliens wave of people in t 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 thed that they have been givene with humanity. And its a message about, you 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, ome, you know facilities and things that most people w consider cults and things like and the contact these are general 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 theire only known an has ever been cited in legal papers as the sort of of other proceeding. And then you have this other population of of the experiencias buy in large are people who have solo encounters just go with their lives. And its a much more interesting to met phenomenon because most them have no reason to report the in counter that theytually a lot of reason that you would not want to report the encounters that these people have. And some ofstories. But then you also havetheres one sort of, particularly to me credible about in the book. Whos, a policeman in socorro, new his name, Lonnie Zamoras 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 he knows, like the kid that he normally a lot of trouble with. He hears an explosion off in the desert and what thinks is a overturned white car o in desert. So he abandons his pursuit. He that kids house leader and, get him, and he sort of turns this pontiacer and is like bumping up and down through the gullies towardsturned car. There two figures standing as he gets closer they get craft he describes a sort of football shaped hecloser and the craft takes off and something happens to lonnie desert there is a new mexico state trooper who shows up on the scene within a couple ofutes 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 find marks in the desert where craft sat or appeared to have sat, where Lonnie Zamora said that was. And that he is considered to be by the govert investigators of one of the most credible witnesses that we have, in part because he has reason to make up thishen 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. Nds proving grounds. Its the heart of themaybe he stumbled across the air lander in the desert that he just wasnt supposed to see. But, you know, 50, 60 years later and there has never emerged evidence of any craft that the Us Governmentas 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 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 events you see across the coun summer of 47, this rancher city of roswell and found of a crash 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 wait, the government has finally newspaper every day. And he tells, his