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 yo