Episode 3: Can You Trust the Pentagon About UFOs?
A media frenzy erupted when a Chinese spy balloon crossed the skies above the United States, but that was hardly the first UFO to violate American airspace. U.S. warplanes have shot down multiple UFOs this year and the government has reported over 150 more mysterious sightings in recent years that it can’t explain. Pilots and former Pentagon officials say it’s time for the U.S. government to study the issue seriously and tell the public what it knows. But the Pentagon’s bizarre history of stifling — and stoking — UFO panic makes it hard to know how out-there the truth will turn out to be.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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Peter Bergen: Have you ever seen a UFO?
Alex Dietrich: I have seen a U.F.O. My name is Alex Dietrich and I've seen a U.F.O. It was exciting in the moment. It was exciting, for a few days afterwards. And then I forgot about it.
Dietrich was flying an F-18 for the U.S. Navy when she saw the UFO. This was way before the current flurry of flying objects detected in and around U.S. airspace. It was 2004, and she was one of several pilots from the USS Nimitz who spotted a mysterious object flying off the coast of California during a training exercise.The UFO looked and flew and moved like no aircraft she'd ever seen.
Alex Dietrich: At the time I was, 25 years old, I certainly wasn't able to assess or interpret what was going on with the physics and the materials of what we saw that day.
Dietrich's encounter wasn’t made public until it was featured in a blockbuster New York Times story in 2017. It revealed that several other U.S. Navy pilots had had similar sightings — and several of them had captured these incidents with their imaging systems. The Times published those videos, along with the pilots’ shocked reactions.
ARCHIVAL Navy Pilots: Oh my gosh, dude. Wow. What is that man? Look at that fly.
The videos included a conversation between two pilots who can't seem to make any sense of what's showing up on their targeting cameras.
ARCHIVAL Navy Pilots: My gosh. They're all going against the wind, the wind's a hundred and twenty knots to the west. Look at that thing, dude.
The Times also revealed the existence of a small, little-known group within the U.S government that studied military UFO sightings like these. This revelation touched off lots of news coverage.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The remarkable admission by the Pentagon came as a result of reporting by the New York Times…
ARCHIVAL Anderson Cooper: The U.S. Navy has finally acknowledged that videos appearing to show UFOs flying through the air are real.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: They're unidentified, they’re flying, and they're objects.
This also touched off some fevered speculation about what the Pentagon knows or doesn't know about UFOs. The frenzy grew early this year when U.S. Air Force fighters shot down several strange objects in North American airspace. Those incidents came on the heels of U.S. intelligence officials dropping a report in January that documented 171 credible sightings of unidentified flying objects since 2004 — that they simply can't explain.
Is there a new technology out there that threatens national security? Is this evidence of aliens? And how might this affect you? Today, You'll follow me into rooms where people have answers to questions like these. Whether they're in the Pentagon…
Chris Mellon: What was incredible was the quality of the witnesses, the quality of the data.
In a laboratory …
Seth Shostak: We point the antennas at nearby star systems Looking for what's called a narrow band signal.
Or — in the case of Alex Dietrich — in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Her 2004 encounter with the UFO came to be known as “the Nimitz incident.” And it made her one of the most important — and reluctant — eyewitnesses in UFO history.
Alex Dietrich: I sort of ended up unwittingly in the center of this mania. I'm naturally introverted. I don't like the attention. I have 21,000 Twitter followers. It’s, it's absurd.
I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In The Room.
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
If you're like me — not a UFO buff and unaware until now who Alex Dietrich is — you should know something else about her. She's been pressed to tell the story of her sighting A LOT, like REALLY a lot. And at insanely inconvenient times.
Alex Dietrich: We were packing up our home, and getting ready to move across the country. I mean literally just cardboard boxes piled up in the living room. And I answered my phone and this producer from 60 Minutes just starts word-blasting me. ‘Do you wanna come on national TV and talk about UFOs?’ You know, I'm looking around at all these boxes and I say, ‘No. Not really.’ And anyway, like, what am I gonna wear? All of my clothes are packed up.
But a producer talked her onto the show. And so here she is on national TV…
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: Your mind tries to make sense of it. And when it disappeared, I mean, it was just,
…appearing alongside the lead pilot during the incident…Squadron Commander David Fravor.
ARCHIVAL David Fravor: There was four of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about five minutes.
In all kinds of interviews, they gave versions of the same story. It starts like this…
For several days, radar operators in the Nimitz carrier strike group, had been seeing flying objects on their screens …doing stuff aircraft just can't do. Stuff like... instantly changing direction... or dropping from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in just a couple of seconds. And then one day Dietrich was in the air — flying on Commander Fravor's wing – about to begin a training mission. When a call comes in over the radio.
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: We were interrupted, for a real-world intercept.
They got re-routed to go intercept… one of those objects. It was flying up the coast from Mexico. So the two jets raced over to the apparent intruder’s location. And on an otherwise calm day, the pilots saw a large disturbance down on the surface of the ocean.
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: We noticed something in the water, uh, that seemed to be disturbing the water or making it churn.
And so the jet circled this roiling patch of water, and then the lead pilot, Fravor, spotted something. It was about the size of a bus, and oblong. And it was zipping around weirdly above the waves.
ARCHIVAL David Fravor: I said, dude, do you, do you see that thing down there? And we saw this little, white Tic-Tac looking object, and it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area.
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: Do you ever drop your phone and it sort of bounces off the countertop and then bounces off something else and then it sort of like, no, no predictable movement. No predictable trajectory. It was just-
ARCHIVAL David Fravor: It was just like a ping pong ball.
Alex Dietrich kept circling. Commander Fravor flew down for a closer look. As he did, he says the object abruptly turned on its axis, spiraled upwards, mirroring his plane's movement… and then… disappeared. But what exactly did that thing look like? Dietrich has been asked to describe it. To the papers and the newswires and all over the Internet.
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: Oblong shaped object that was moving very fast.
And to PBS Newshour…
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: No apparent flight control surfaces. No apparent, visible, means of propulsion
And to CNN's Anderson Cooper…
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: It was white. It was, um, sort of a matte finish, uh, just like a Tic-Tac.
ARCHIVAL Anderson Cooper: I’m sure you’ve been asked a gazillion times but what do you think it was?
ARCHIVAL Interviewer 1: What are you thinking?
ARCHIVAL Interviewer 2: What do you think it is ?
That's the big question. Dietrich says she won't — or actually can't — tell you what the Tic-Tac was. She doesn't know whether it came from this planet or from somewhere else. And she's not budging on that.
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: This is a real pain in the ass. No offense to you, but…
This is from an interview Dietrich did back in 2021.
ARCHIVAL Mick West: No, I get it. I get it. Especially when you're going over the same thing and people are making little green men jokes and things.
A skeptical UFO researcher named Mick West was questioning her about the Tic-Tac for nearly an hour straight.
ARCHIVAL Mick West: The Navy wants to figure out what went on. Has anybody suggested ideas that sound at all plausible to you?
ARCHIVAL Alex Dietrich: I don't lie awake at nights thinking about it. I don't think we'll get closer to identifying what it was that day. It has haunted me ever since, in that folks like you have sought me out. But I don't go around trying to investigate it further myself or try to convince others that I saw something that day.
Peter Bergen: How sick are you of telling this story?
Alex Dietrich: I'm really sick of telling this story. My house is completely gutted because we had a whole house flood. I just got back from an appointment, as a follow up to my full bilateral mastectomy that I had earlier this year. I have three small children, I have a job. And so when I get these requests for interviews and media who want me to talk about UFOs, I just – to say it's distracting is an understatement.
Peter Bergen: Why do you agree to talk about this?
Alex Dietrich: I feel, as a military officer, as a servant of the citizens of the United States, that I have a duty and an obligation to respond if there are curious and concerned citizens. So as my life and health allow, I do grant some interviews.
Peter Bergen: You have three kids under the age of 10, right?
Alex Dietrich: I have three kids under the age of eight.
Peter Bergen: What do you say to them?
Alex Dietrich: I saw something strange. I saw something interesting and I told somebody about it. They've seen me on TV and they say, “Oh yeah, okay, that's weird. Sure.”
Peter Bergen: They don't question you about it.
Alex Dietrich: I mean, they're in the stage now where they're, dreaming out loud about, um, yesterday, they were playing Kraken, you know, and I had to be a sea monster and try to pull them off the couch into the ocean of the floor. And so, for them a U.F.O. is – it doesn't really blow their minds.
But as reports about Alex Dietrich's encounter with the UFOs started quietly and slowly spreading within the U.S. intelligence community… it definitely blew some people’s minds.
Chris Mellon: I read that report and I was floored because there was simply no earthly explanation for what was observed.
That's a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence named Christopher Mellon. He served in the Pentagon during the Clinton and Bush administrations. And to be clear, he's saying that he thinks the best explanation for the Nimitz incident is probably aliens. Mellon says he was advising U.S. Navy intelligence when he first heard about it.
Chris Mellon: That thing was not made by man. I mean, they've said that the squadron commander. He saw it in broad daylight at very close range. This thing has no wings, it has no exhaust, it has no air inlet.
Peter Bergen: You say you were floored. Were you floored because this is the first time you'd sort of seen or heard anything like this, or because it confirmed other reports, but just seemed to have more depth and detail?
Chris Mellon: These kinds of incidents have been going on for decades and on a significant scale. So it was not new in the sense of, people haven't reported things like that before. What was incredible was the number of witnesses, the quality of the witnesses, the quality of the data.
Mellon says he spent months trying to put information about several UFO sightings in front of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. But no one would hear him out.So he decided to take the story to the media, along with videos from the Nimitz encounter and two other similar incidents, which, surprisingly, weren’t classified.
Chris Mellon: Only after it became clear that nobody in the Defense Department was willing to touch this did I approach The New York Times. And I went and approached my former colleagues on Capitol Hill and provided them the information. So now we're finally getting some traction.
He may have found traction because you don’t necessarily need to believe in aliens to be troubled by unidentified objects flying around in U.S. airspace. They could be evidence of American rivals like Russia or China deploying exotic new technologies. Or maybe even not-so-exotic technologies, like that Chinese spy balloon and other floating craft that spawned so many headlines and jokes earlier this year.
ARCHIVAL Talk Show Host: We know nothing about where this balloon came from or what it can do, which is why it's so important to endlessly speculate about it.
ARCHIVAL Steven Colbert: Aliens are real and they're conquering our skies…
ARCHIVAL Seth Myers: The Pentagon this week described the unidentified object shot down over Canada on Saturday as a quote, small metallic balloon. So it was either a dire national security threat or a wasted 25 cents at a county fair.
Peter Bergen: Wherever you fall on, whether there are aliens visiting us or this is all just sort of people getting things wrong, the Chinese balloon story sort of shows that the United States needs to do a much better job of trying to understand what these unidentified flying objects are out there.
Chris Mellon: Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, I think most Americans assume that we've got the mightiest military in the world and our airspace is protected and nobody could possibly come here without us being aware of it. So it's kind of a wake up call.
And it seems that advocates for this idea have gotten Congress to listen. Lawmakers created a new Pentagon office in July 2022 that’s officially charged with gathering, studying, and figuring out what's behind UFO sightings made by U.S. military or intelligence personnel.
Peter Bergen: Christopher, this new office is the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The kind of name that only the Pentagon could come up with, but
Chris Mellon: Yeah. Well, they had some help from Congress. I want to believe it can work. I'm encouraging people that have information to come forward and meet with that office and share that information.
This is the office that helped analyze the hundreds of credible UFO sightings over the past two decades in that January report. The report offers explanations for some of what’s been seen. A handful of sightings were trash or birds. A couple of dozen were drones. Interestingly, more than 160 were balloons, or balloon-like objects.Still, that leaves 171 credible sightings that remain unexplained.
Chris Mellon: And undoubtedly some of this is likely to be drones from our adversaries and that kind of thing. But then there's this smaller category of events like the Nimitz incident where we're seeing things that are so radical, so far beyond our own technological capabilities, it's hard to come up with a theory that explains what we're observing without reference to some other civilization that has taken science and engineering to a far higher level than we have.
Some people who are still inside the Pentagon are way less enthusiastic about this alien explanation. Just before the January report dropped, unnamed Pentagon sources seriously downplayed any extra terrestrial connection in a story that ran in the New York Times. These sources also disparaged those UFO videos that Christopher Mellon helped release. They said that all the strange movements in the videos could be explained as misinterpretations or optical illusions or camera glitches.
The headline of the New York Times story summed it up, "Many Military UFO Reports are just Foreign Spying or Airborne Trash."This seemed like a pretty stark about-face from 2017, when the U.S. Navy videos leaked and the Pentagon’s official comments afterward conspicuously declined to rule out aliens. But this isn't the first time that the Pentagon has flip-flopped on UFOs.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I mean, from the very, very beginning, when the Pentagon first started looking into this stuff in the late forties after the initial wave of UFO sightings, you've always had senior people on both sides of this issue.
That's Gideon Lewis Kraus. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker who has chronicled the history of this mixed messaging coming out of the Pentagon. One of the key chapters in this story happened back in the fifties, when waves of UFO sightings were being reported all over the U.S. Then, in July of 1952, pilots and ground personnel at Andrews Air Force Base said they spotted insanely fast and nimble objects flying over Washington, DC.
ARCHIVAL 1950s Newscaster 1: Suddenly the Air Force takes off to intercept unexplained objects in the sky over Washington.
Multiple military witnesses said they'd spotted the objects on radar. And at least one pilot reported seeing them with the naked eye.
ARCHIVAL 1950s Newscaster 2: Lieutenant Patterson pilot of Red Dog One said he concentrated on one of the bright lights, but it outran him.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: This all kind of comes to a head when there's a sighting over the White House, and then there's this feeling of like, oh, well now we really have to deal with this if they're violating that kind of airspace. And there's this famous press conference where, a senior Pentagon figure comes out and says,
ARCHIVAL John Samford: I am here to discuss the so-called flying saucers.
The guy you're hearing was the officer in charge of U.S. Air Force Intelligence at the time, Major General John Samford. He's sitting behind a bunch of microphones giving a briefing that some have called the largest and longest the Air Force had held since World War II. And at first, General Samford dismissed the great bulk of UFO sightings as:
ARCHIVAL John Samford: Hoaxes, as erroneously identified friendly aircraft, as meteorological or electronic phenomena, or as light aberrations.
But then he threw reporters a bit of a curve ball:
ARCHIVAL John Samford: However, there have been a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things that we now are attempting to resolve.
And as you might imagine, the press was off to the races. Newspapers across the country carried headlines like "Saucers swarm over Capitol" and "Jets chase DC Sky Ghosts.” The same mania that landed our F-18 pilot Alex Dietrich on national TV... that was already hard at work 70 years ago. One air force investigator tried to quantify it. In 1952, he counted more than 16,000 newspaper stories nationwide about UFOs.And that's when the CIA got involved.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: So the CIA convenes this really famous panel in 1953 called the Robertson Panel.
The Robertson Panel was a group of scientists and military, and intelligence officials that studied evidence and testimony from more than 20 purported UFO sightings.The panel concluded that UFOs actually did pose a strategic threat to the United States, but not because of aliens.Remember, this was the height of the Cold War. And they worried that America's civil air defenses could end up being so overwhelmed by so many UFO reports that they might fail to see incoming Soviet bombers.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: And the goal of the Robertson Panel is pretty clearly from the beginning, to like, get rid of this stuff to put the lid on it and this is also where there's certainly some grain of truth in the conspiracy theorizing about this stuff because this really was a directive from the highest levels to say, it is not in our best interest to have this kind of, panic out there. We cannot give our adversaries the impression that there's stuff going on that we can't account for. It makes us look like morons. There was the explicit decision made that we are going to marshal all of our forces, including our connections to media, to debunk this.
Some evidence suggests that the Robertson Panel helped convince CBS News to do exactly this when Walter Cronkite put out a skeptical special on UFOs in 1966.
ARCHIVAL Walter Cronkite: So as we have seen, scientists think the evidence is mounting that life in some form exists elsewhere in the universe. But almost unanimously they find no evidence that anything out there has come here.
The government wasn't just working behind the scenes either. The same year that Cronkite's TV special came out, the U.S. Air Force undertook one of its most notorious public debunkings. It was a response to a mass UFO sighting in and around the town of Dexter, Michigan.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: This is arguably the most famous moment in the golden era of UFOs. Lots of people, I think more than a hundred people are seeing these weird football shaped lights…
ARCHIVAL Dexter Resident 1: I looked at it and I thought I was seeing things.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: … and it seems like it's going to become a problem. It seems like this is like rising to the level of a national story. And of course the government's worried about whatever hysteria might ensue. The local people seem very worked up about this.
ARCHIVAL Dexter Resident 2: Maybe there's a current, an electrical charge which is being, uh, radiated by one of these vehicles, which would electrocute you if you got within a certain area of it.
The U.S. Air Force set up a small office to investigate and essentially poo-poo UFO sightings. They called it Project Blue Book. And one of Blue Book's main investigators at the time was a guy named J. Allen Hynek. He was this cartoonishly scientific looking astronomer with thick rimmed glasses and a Colonel Sanders beard.
ARCHIVAL J. Allen Hynek: This is without question Venus and the moon. Any competent astronomer would confirm that.
He was a civilian, but he was the guy the Pentagon sent to investigate sightings all over the United States. And he's the guy they sent to Michigan.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: So Blue Book dispatches Hynek to show up there. And he says, this is probably just swamp gas.
You may be wondering what the hell “swamp gas” is. Certainly I was.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: You know, natural, um, decomposing organic material, catching spontaneously on, on fire. And this is immediately seen as such an insult to the local people that like, it's this guy coming in saying, you didn't, you guys didn't see what you thought you saw. This is this strange phenomenon that like you probably wouldn't really understand and it just sounds like a joke. And the local people are really affronted by this.
ARCHIVAL Reporter: Are you saying, doctor, that Michigan is now producing non-existent saucers?
ARCHIVAL J. Allen Hynek: Ha! Well,, that's one way of putting it, I suppose.
Peter Bergen: So sometimes these debunking efforts are seen in bad faith?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Absolutely.
Peter Bergen: So the whole swamp gas thing was an example of the government kind of gaslighting, as it were, the UFO community?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: That, that's a great, that's a great joke. It's come to mean the kind of like, standard dismissive take provided by authorities in the face of what people see as solid firsthand empirical reports.
Swamp gas became kind of a meme. It shows up in titles of UFO-related publications. There's even a book called "Swamp Gas, My Ass," which tries to debunk the debunkings of the Michigan sightings. And swamp gas even got a shout out in the sci-fi movie, "Men In Black."
ARCHIVAL Men in Black Speaker: All right, Beatrice. There was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and refracted the light from Venus.
But despite all the effort to turn UFOs into a joke, some American UFO watchers just couldn't be talked out of their beliefs. And they kept scanning the skies and reporting on objects that flew higher or faster, or just differently than regular aircraft. And this created a new problem for the Pentagon.
In some cases, UFO lovers were spotting stuff the government did not want them to see. The chief historian of the CIA at one point, estimated that as many as half of the reports investigated by Project Blue Book were actually sightings of highly classified spy planes — the Air Force's SR-71 Blackbird or the CIA's U-2.The Pentagon didn't need a bunch of credible witnesses running around describing top secret defense technology to the media. So coming down hard with a "nothing to see here" message was actually a national security strategy.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: There's a tension between wanting reliable reports from the public but at the same time other places in the government wanting some level of cover for masking what they were really up to.
This need for cover could help explain a new approach that some corners of the U.S. government seemed to adopt starting in the 1980s. That's when some UFO researchers reported cases of the government not just debunking sightings, but of Air Force counterintelligence agents actually encouraging the beliefs of diehard UFO lovers.
Mark Pilkington: It was to provide a distraction from what was really going on.
That's Mark Pilkington. He's a UK-based author of the book, Mirage Men. It's an exhaustive history of purported UFO sightings.It also chronicles the ways U.S. officials sometimes let UFO mania run wild with the express purpose of camouflaging classified American technology.
Mark Pilkington: It's just useful to keep the UFO story active.
He says U.S. Air Force agents made the story active by making stuff up — spreading rumors that the government was hiding the truth about aliens visiting earth. Pilkington believes the effort included meetings with close followers of UFOs, to seed conspiracy theories… And even distributing fake ‘Top Secret’ reports about military contact with aliens.
[MUSIC STING]
Peter Bergen: Even for the most paranoid of listeners, the idea that U.S. intelligence agents would make up this sci-fi story and disguise them as ‘Top Secret’ government documents and then hand them to UFO enthusiasts — it sounds pretty far-fetched. What convinced you that this kind of thing actually happened?
Mark Pilkington: The documents are out there. The paper trail for their creation exists. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer has told his side of the story now several times. There's very little doubt that this happened. I don't think we'll ever get this sort of, formal Air Force version of events. I think it would be considered just highly embarrassing for them at this point.
Pilkington and a few other researchers think the documents circulated at this time form the basis of a core story about crashed spaceships, recovered aliens, and a conspiracy to hide the truth that have inspired a lot of the fictional UFO stories that you've heard in popular culture ever since.
Mark Pilkington: That is the ur-myth of modern UFO lore. And of course, you'll recognize that as the plot to things like The X-Files and Men in Black, Independence Day….
There isn't any official confirmation that the U.S. government ran a disinformation campaign that accidentally inspired the X-Files. But folks like Pilkington do see a good argument for why active disinformation — or even just passively letting mania about UFOs run wild — makes a lot of sense. Crazy stories spread fast and they stick.
So even if UFO watchers were reporting on the movements of top secret real life aircraft, any information they might divulge would just get totally lost in all that noise about aliens. And so Pilkington thinks we should understand the Pentagon as having two distinct channels of communication when it comes to UFO's. One is for the public.
Mark Pilkington: You want to, on the one hand, reassure the people who don't believe in UFOs that UFOs are not a problem, that we're not being visited by hostile extraterrestrials. But on the other hand, you know that there's a certain core of believers in UFOs who are just not gonna be satisfied with anything you can tell them.
So then there's also a channel for UFO believers.
Mark Pilkington: The purpose for the Believer Channel, in this two-channel system, is to reassure them that you don't think that they're crazy, that you agree with them, that there's a mystery out there. I certainly don't believe there's a grand conspiracy to dupe people into believing in UFOs. I think just at occasional times, at occasional moments when it's useful, UFOs are pulled out of the toolbox, and become deployed as and when necessary.
So given all this history, what are you supposed to make of the mixed messages the Pentagon's been sending about UFOs more recently? To start with, you should probably separate two big questions. First, there's the worry that these recent sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects represent some kind of new secret American technology — or they might come from some rival state. That's a real concern for national security. But then there's this other question about whether there's actually some kind of alien intelligence at work here.
Now I'm not really a sci-fi guy. This, honestly, is just not a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about. So I called up somebody who's dedicated his whole professional life to searching for aliens.
Seth Shostak: My name is Seth Shostak. And I'm senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. SETI, is an acronym that stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, this is a little bit beyond just looking for life in space. We're looking for the kind of life that can hold up its side of the conversation.
Peter Bergen: Do you describe yourself as an alien hunter?
Seth Shostak: I have used the term alien hunter. If I'm at a party and people ask me what I do, I don't say I'm an alien hunter because they usually assume I should have a license or something like that.
Peter Bergen: What do you say?
Seth Shostak: I say, well, I'm involved with the SETI project, we're trying to find evidence for intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. And then they excuse themselves and go get some more hors d'oeuvres.
Peter Bergen: [PETER LAUGHS] Paint us a picture of the work that's done at SETI.
Seth Shostak: Mostly what we do is we look for radio signals coming from the sky. We point the antennas at nearby star systems within, say, a couple of hundred light years, looking for a, what's called a narrow band signal. It's a radio signal that's at one spot on the dial. So if you find a signal like that and then do a couple of other rather simple tests, you know that it wasn't made by nature. You can say, well, I don't know what they're saying, Bob. I don't know what they look like or anything like that, but there's somebody up there that's able to build a radio transmitter and that would be success, from our point of view.
SETI operates an array of 42 radio telescopes in California’s Cascade Mountains, about a 5 hour drive north of San Francisco. They look like a whole bunch of big radar dishes, pointed up at the sky. Seven days a week they scan 72 million radio channels simultaneously. They’ve been doing it for years, feeding the signals into computers that look for any signs suggesting someone out there sent a message.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: So you've been there for three decades. What's it like to go to work every day and, and just not find what you're looking for?
Seth Shostak: Well, that's become so routine that you don't even notice it anymore. Look, science is, it's, it's a slog. Mostly it's a slog. But the thing that makes it most interesting, at least for me, is that it's dealing with a big picture question, right?
Peter Bergen: And you think that we will in relatively short order, find intelligent life somewhere?
Seth Shostak: I actually gave a talk in Germany, not terribly long ago and the audience looked like it was getting a little bit bored, and I just said, ‘Look, I'll bet you all a cup of Starbucks we'll find E.T. within two dozen years.’ It seems likely to me simply because of the speed of technological advance that allows us to increase the speed of our reconnaissance.
And researchers like Shostak say the odds of intelligent life being out there are good because there are just so many places for it to live.
Seth Shostak: There are, in our own galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, about a trillion planets. And we can see hundreds of billions of other galaxies, each with a trillion planets. There are more planets than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth.
But he doesn't see any evidence that aliens have come to this planet.
Seth Shostak: Listen, if people wanna believe that the government is hiding the facts of alien visitation, fine with me. It's all okay. I, I'm not gonna try and dissuade them except to say that the actual science is interesting too. And unlike the whole business about UFOs, I think that the actual science is much more likely to pay off, to end up with a discovery.
And he doesn't think much of those “UFO” videos that came out in 2017 either.
Seth Shostak: I'm not sure that you need the government to tell you that the aliens are here. I think if they were here, you would know it. But not everybody agrees. If you really want to get into a fight, tell somebody that you don't believe that aliens are visiting Earth. You'll find that one in three Americans will take you to task.
Peter Bergen: For the hardcore conspiracy theorists, someone like you would seem to be part of the conspiracy, right?
Seth Shostak: That's absolutely true. I mean, I get blamed for it all the time. I tell you, I wear it as a badge of honor. If I were to go on late night radio and not get a lot of hate mail the next day, I would feel I was slipping in some sense.
When it comes to getting hate mail from UFO believers, there's another guy who may have Seth Shostak beat. That's because this other guy has made a name for himself debunking just about every high profile video of UFO sightings he finds.
Peter Bergen: Are you enemy number one for UFO lovers?
Mick West: I think UFO lovers might think I'm enemy number one, but I'm actually making their case better by removing things that are false.
That’s Mick West. In another life, West was a computer programmer who helped launch a video game series called “Tony Hawk Pro Skater.” The game and its sequels grossed nearly a billion dollars, allowing West to retire early.Since then he's become an author and something of a personality on YouTube.
ARCHIVAL Mick West: Welcome to Tales From the Rabbit Hole. I'm your host, Mick West.
Most of West's YouTube channel is just him conducting unfailingly polite debates with folks who have some pretty bonkers beliefs.
ARCHIVAL Mick West: My guest today is Mike. Mike is a member of the 9/11 Truth Community from New York.
He's built a reputation as a methodical debunker of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and more recently sightings of unidentified flying objects.
ARCHIVAL Mick West: Unidentified does not mean aliens or advanced technology or even an aircraft. It just means you can't identify it.
Mick West: When you're a computer programmer, your skill revolves in, not so much creating the software. A lot of it is actually figuring out what went wrong. You write it and then it doesn't work, and then you gotta figure out why it doesn't work. And I was very good at it and it lent itself very well to things such as investigating UFOs.
Peter Bergen: When you do your debunking videos, you deliver it in this sort of British rather soothing, you’re kind of very even in your tone. Is that a deliberate choice?
Mick West: You don't want to be saying things like, ‘There are some people who believe the earth is flat,’ because that immediately turns people off. You know, ‘What kind of an idiot will believe that aliens are visiting us?’ You don't want to be like that. You want to say, you know, some people think that aliens are visiting, they present this type of evidence, and I've had a look at that type of evidence, and here's what I think of it.
So Mick West took a hard look at some of the evidence that the New York Times put out in 2017 about UFOs. He has plenty to say about why he thinks none of those targeting camera videos of seemingly odd shapes amount to evidence of aliens. His explanations are pretty heavy on math. Many of them rely on the same kind of 3D to 2D computer modeling that he learned when he was programming games.
Mick West: We can tell that they're not moving fast. We can tell they're not defying gravity. We can tell that they're not doing any kind of weird trajectory. They're not like standing on their end, but we can't tell exactly what they are because all, all we are seeing are little blobs. So perhaps a drone, perhaps a plane. Possibly a bird or something like that, but probably just a balloon.
West has also taken issue with the story our F-18 pilot, Alex Dietrich, and her commander, David Fravor, have told about what they saw off the coast of California back in 2004.
Mick West: I think that, when they arrived at this location, they looked down and saw something in the water, possibly a U.S. submarine. Then they saw this white object moving around. It might have been a balloon that was released by a submarine, it's rising up through the air. And so you get this thing called a parallax illusion. And David Fravor goes down and he gets this illusion that it's mirroring his movement. And then when he flies towards it, because it's actually a lot closer than he thinks, it seems to him that it zips away. And he loses sight of it. And then the other pilot lost sight of it because she didn't have the reference of it being next to his plane.
Peter Bergen: You're familiar with the philosophical and scientific principle of Occam's Razor.
Mick West: Indeed. Yes. I try to use that all the time.
Peter Bergen: How would you define it?
Mick West: It's often described as being the simplest explanation is the best, but it's really the explanation that introduces the fewest new things and the fewest new significant things. Now with UFOs, we kind of have this odd situation where I'm suggesting this explanation of these events, which is quite complicated. All these things have to happen. People have to make certain mistakes. The equipment has to perhaps be slightly faulty in a certain way, and they have to be not aware that this type of optical thing could occur. So that sounds like it's really complicated and unlikely. But with Occam's Razor, when you posit something like aliens, you're actually introducing a whole lot of new entities. You're actually introducing an entire new alien civilization. So the amount of stuff you actually have to introduce to the alien side of the explanation is way more than just a few people making mistakes.
Peter Bergen: Former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Mick West: Yeah.
Peter Bergen: Is that where you are?
Mick West: No, ‘cause it is. It is evidence of absence. For example, if there was an elephant in my garage, there would be evidence of an elephant in my garage. I'm not asking people to believe me and take me for my word. I'm not saying I have a PhD in optics and therefore you should trust me. I'm just some guy, a video game programmer. And people can go in, they can do the math, and they can verify that for themselves. They can check their own garages to see if they have an elephant.
I probably should've mentioned this before, but if Mick West’s voice sounds familiar that's because you heard him earlier trying to convince the F-18 pilot, Alex Dietrich, to speculate about what her Tic-Tac was. They met each other on Twitter of all places.
Alex Dietrich: I was never big on social media. Mick West sort of bubbled up as this personality who was very adamant about certain things.
She said she won't rule out his theory about a balloon, but she doesn't find it convincing either.
Alex Dietrich: I don't know what we saw that day. And so I don't think that Mick West, who was not there, knows what we saw that day. You know, the fact that we had four air crew who had a visual tally on it, I don't think that we were talking about a balloon. But I don't know what it was.
The UFO encounter amounts to just a few moments, plucked from the textured and busy life of a now private citizen. Dietrich says the Tic-Tac doesn't even really rank among her favorite memories from her 13 years in the U.S. Navy.She's especially proud of the year she spent serving on the ground in Afghanistan as a civil engineer. And she says she probably got the most out of being a teacher to U.S. Navy cadets and officers.
Alex Dietrich: A lot of my more recent positive memories have been of my students succeeding, graduating, commissioning, heading out into the fleet, having their first solos in their aircraft. Guys who go off to SEAL training, living their dreams, and making a difference.
Still people keep seeking her out to talk about her UFO experience.... and their own.
Alex Dietrich: They want me to come to their conference or come on their show. Some of them are crazy, but then, a lot of them just seem like normal people. And they say, ‘You don't seem crazy. I don't think I'm crazy, but I had this experience. I saw this thing, and I am a deacon in my church, or I am established in my community. Or I do have a family that wouldn't believe me, or a job that I wouldn't wanna jeopardize. And so I'm sharing this with you.’ And I try to respond to everybody who reaches out. But I, say, ‘Oh, okay.’ Like, I don't know what to do with this. It's almost like they just need somebody to hold it with them and to feel like they're putting it into some sort of repository.
And if there’s a reason that Alex Dietrich talked to us, it was probably this: She says it's possible that UFO encounters like hers, raise new questions for science. She thinks they could also have national security implications.
Alex Dietrich: There was an unknown contact being picked up on radar. We don't know what it is, and it's close to our border. It's close to our citizens and it's close to our military operation.
And the former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense that we talked to — Christopher Mellon — he agrees.
Chris Mellon: From a national security standpoint, anomalies should be especially interesting. The intelligence community should be alert for any sign that our potential adversaries have achieved a technological breakthrough that might change the balance of power. That is one of the premier missions of the intelligence community.
And Alex Dietrich believes that even if the Tic-Tac wasn't new to science, or a threat to national security — it just wasn't supposed to be in that airspace at that time. And that issue — safety of flight — really matters, whether you're in the cockpit of an F-18 or flying coach to Cancún.
Alex Dietrich: That could be a collision hazard. There are highways in the sky mapped out just as there are on land. And we rely on everybody to adhere to those rules of the road, rules of the sky, in order to keep us all safe.
Whether the Pentagon's new UFO office lives up to this hope, or just turns out to be a new version of old Pentagon shenanigans, Dietrich says she's not likely to be keeping close tabs. She's done with UFO's. Mostly.
Alex Dietrich: Kinda how I find some levity in my day is, you know, if I get, if I'm at a coffee shop or something, I'll ask the barista, “Have you ever seen a UFO?” And it's really interesting to hear the responses. Even if they say no, a lot of people will say, I haven't but my roommate, or I know someone you know. And yeah, I feel like it should be a census question on the next census.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: Have you ever seen a UFO?
Mick West: Uh, I see UFOs all the time, but they are little white dots far off in the distance, and they're probably just birds or planes.
Peter Bergen: Have you ever seen a UFO yourself?
Seth Shostak: I have actually. I did see one. But when I got closer, I found out that it was just the Goodyear Blimp.
Peter Bergen: Have you ever seen a UFO?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: No, I have not seen a UFO.
Peter Bergen: Have you ever personally seen a UFO yourself?
Chris Mellon: I have not.
Peter Bergen: Is that disappointing?
Chris Mellon: Well, yeah.
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If you’re interested in digging into this topic further, we’d like to recommend a few books that helped us research this show. Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic and Respect, by Mick West. Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs, by Mark Pilkington. And UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, by Leslie Kean. All three books are available on Audible.
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In the Room with Peter Bergen is an Audible Original.
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