Unexplained aerial phenomena.
Is the government covering up what it knows?
Today, On Point: We dive into 75 years of UFO history and the beginnings of government mistrust.
Guest
Garrett Graff, journalist, historian and author covering politics, technology, and national security. Contributing editor at WIRED. Director at The Aspen Institute. Author of «UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There.»
Also Featured
Ryan Graves, executive director, Americans for Safe Aerospace. Former Lt. U.S. Navy and F/A-18F pilot.
Book Excerpt
Excerpt from «UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There» by Garrett Graff
The spies and analysts who work in earthly intelligence always try to draw distinctions between secrets and mysteries; their realm and strength, they say, is primarily in uncovering secrets—knowable facts purposefully concealed from public view. (The capabilities of the latest Chinese hypersonic weapon, for example, is a secret; how the Egyptians built the pyramids is a mystery.) Much of the story and history of the popular culture, media, and governmental focus on UFOs has been trying to understand where that critical line is between knowable secrets and unknown mysteries: How much of the UFO phenomena is attributable to secret human technology or visiting extraterrestrial activity versus simple physics, meteorology, and astronomy that we just don’t yet fundamentally understand?
UFOs surely continue to confound us, in part because we know so little about the world around us. As much as we now know about meteorology, astronomy, the heavens, and physics, it’s worth remembering how new (and still evolving) much of that knowledge truly is. Most of the core principles we have uncovered about physics, time, space, and astronomy have been discovered in just a human lifetime or two. In fact, before you even get to the mysteries of space, much of our understanding of our own planet is startlingly new.
Western scientists have only known about the existence of gorillas, our closest living relative, for about 150 years; before 1847, reports of their sightings were dismissed as stories of a mythical* This secret/mystery line was a key part of why the US government recently “rebranded” UFOs as UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena, understanding that while some portion of UFO sightings are surely secret advanced aerial craft from the US, China, Russia, or elsewhere, that surely much—and perhaps most or nearly all— of today’s UFO sightings simply reflect basic principles and phenomena of physics, meteorology, and astronomy that today are mysteries, creature akin to a yeti or a unicorn.
The first “dinosaur” was discovered and identified in 1824, and it’s effectively only been in my lifetime that we’ve come to recognize they were wiped out in an asteroid collision and that many dinosaurs were feathered. Giant squids existed as a myth for thousands of years, traceable to Aristotle and ancient Greece, until a French ship actually caught one in 1861, and it wasn’t until 2004 that biologists actually spotted one in its natural habitat. My high school geology teacher, Mr. McGraw, would remind us that the theory of plate tectonics—now widely understood as the way the entire Earth moves—wasn’t even proven when he himself was a student. We still know less about the bottom of the oceans than we do the surface of the moon. “There is a tendency in 20th century science to forget that there will be a 21st century science,” J. Allen Hynek, one of the world’s most influential astronomers and ufologists said, “and, indeed, a 30th century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different.”
This book intertwines two threads from across the last seventy-five years: the military’s on-again-off-again hunt for UFOs here on Earth, and the increasingly serious work conducted by scientists, astronomers, and eventually NASA to search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. These stories have been traditionally told separately, the UFO tale usually relegated to conspiratorial whodunits and self-published books by obscure small presses, while the more official “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” known as SETI, is the subject of more scholarly work and memoirs by well-respected scientists—but that artificial divide fails to recognize the parallel tracks these two stories have led since World War II, as advancing technology has allowed us to understand the heavens in ways that our ancestors never could have imagined.
Both threads are fundamentally stories of believing—the human desire, at a basic and almost cellular level, to hope even against the longest of odds—and they are different sides of the same coin, the line between the believability of one and the reality of the other deeply intertwined. “The common thread is a sincere desire to understand the universe, to find truth and meaning in a time when we are overwhelmed with astronomical data,” journalist Joel Achenbach writes. What follows is not an attempt to tell the full, exhaustive story of UFOs, alien contact, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence— there are some famous “sightings” that barely merit mention, and others that don’t get any mention at all, and many of the incidents, sightings, and reported encounters in this book have resulted in entire stand-alone books or even shelves of books themselves—nor does it purport to offer comprehensive solutions to every sighting. Instead, it is an effort to tell the story of how the US government, military, and leading scientists have approached these questions over our collective lifetime.
I’ve tried to narrow my focus to those incidents, sightings, and reported encounters that changed the arc of the broader history of UFOs in America and the world beyond during the latter half of the twentieth and the first two decades of the twenty-first centuries. It is a story populated by some of the biggest figures of modern American history, from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter, and some of most famous minds of the twentieth century, from Enrico Fermi to Carl Sagan, as well as all manner of strange and colorful characters who span the spectrum from serious scientists to outright grifters, from the nation’s leading nuclear scientists to the man who inspired talk radio conspiracist Alex Jones. It is a story, as one of the field’s most notorious practitioners, James Moseley, once described the field of ufology, of “genuinely mysterious events that always remain somehow just beyond solution while becoming impossibly tangled in a web of wacky human failings and yearnings.”
Part of the challenge in putting it all together is that the government absolutely is covering up the full extent of its interest and investigation into UFOs. Plenty of revelations, declassified documents, and public reports prove an active, ongoing cover-up over decades, and even today, the US government is surely hiding information from us about its knowledge, beliefs, and working theories about what exists in the skies above and beyond us. I know this not because I have any special visibility into what they’re hiding, but simply because the US government routinely hides information important and meaningless on all manner of subjects, regardless of whether there are legitimate national security concerns involved.
Every book I’ve ever written has run up against classified information and decades-old secrets still locked inside archives. Today, especially, the US government remains coy about the extent to which modern-day “UAPs,” an acronym that in recent years first referred to “un-identified aerial phenomena” and now refers to “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” are drones or unmanned vehicles launched by adversaries like Russia and China. What is unclear is whether the government is covering up meaningful information about UFOs or UAPs—the verdict is much more mixed about whether the government has intelligence that would forever alter our understanding of ourselves and our universe.
At the same time, as someone who has spent two decades researching and reporting on US intelligence, national security, and the military, one of my maxims is that government conspiracy theories generally presuppose a level of competence and planning that isn’t on display in the rest of the work that the US government does: sure, secrets can be held for a few years or a few decades, particularly if they’re focused on a small group, but the government just isn’t secretive, creative, or thoughtful enough to execute the grandest conspiracies we see lurking behind the darkest interpretation of events like Roswell, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, or 9 ⁄11.
The deeper I got into this particular subject, the more I came to realize that the government’s UFO cover-up has primarily been a cover-up motivated not by knowledge but of ignorance. It’s not that the government knows something it doesn’t want to tell us; it’s that the government is uncomfortable telling us it doesn’t know anything at all. It’s a bafflement that hints at a more exciting and intriguing truth: there is something out there, and none of us yet know what it is. As Philip Morrison, one of the inventors of the SETI field, said, “Either we’re alone in the universe or we’re not, and either possibility boggles the mind.”
For now, we are left with math, physics, astronomy, and a mystery. Carl Sagan dedicated his life to his hunt, wondering whether humans were alone, a hunt that popularized him even as it caused his peers to sneer at his scientific credentials. As he saw it, “In a very real sense this search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for a cosmic context for mankind, a search for who we are, where we have come from, and what possibilities there are for our future—in a universe vaster both in extent and duration than our forefathers ever dreamed of.” As it turns out, in the end, the story of the hunt for “them” is mostly actually a story about us.
Excerpted from UFO by Garrett M. Graff. Copyright © by Garrett M. Graff. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Avid Reader Press.
This program airs on November 14, 2023. Audio will be available after the broadcast.
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