Michael Shermer sits down with attorney and bestselling author Kent Heckenlively for a tense, thoughtful, and surprisingly cordial conversation about UFOs, government secrecy, and the idea of “catastrophic disclosure.”

Heckenlively argues that something real is being hidden. Not necessarily aliens, but information powerful enough to disrupt energy markets, military spending, and political authority. But beyond stories and secondhand testimony, where is the kind of evidence that would settle the question once and for all?

The episode takes up congressional hearings, whistleblowers, classified briefings, Cold War secrecy, optical illusions, advanced military technology, and why, after nearly 80 years, the UFO story continues to produce more questions than answers.

Kent Heckenlively is an attorney, science teacher, and New York Times bestselling author. His books have covered such topics as scientific fraud, bias at Google, Facebook, and CNN, promising medical therapies, as well as behind-the-scenes looks into the COVID-19 Task Force. His books have sold more than half a million copies. His new book is CATASTROPHIC DISCLOSURE: The Deep State, Aliens, and the Truth.

In this episode, Michael Shermer talks with filmmaker James Fox, whose work has helped push UFOs, now often called UAPs, out of the tabloid shadows and into congressional hearings, radar logs, and sworn testimony.

Fox has spent three decades interviewing fighter pilots, radar operators, intelligence officials, scientists, and firsthand witnesses. His conclusion is not that we know what these objects are, but that dismissing them no longer works. Around 90 to 95 percent of sightings collapse under scrutiny. The remaining cases do not.

The question is: What are we supposed to do with what’s left?

James Fox is a film director widely regarded as one of the leading voices in UFO filmmaking. He is known for documentaries such as The Phenomenon, The Program, and Moment of Contact, several of which are frequently cited among the best UFO documentaries ever made.

What if the deepest human drive isn’t happiness, survival, or even love, but the need to matter?

Philosopher and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins Michael Shermer to discuss The Mattering Instinct, her argument that the desire to feel significant lies at the core of human behavior. That drive helps explain our greatest achievements, from creativity and moral courage to scientific and artistic excellence. It also helps explain some of our darkest outcomes, including extremism, violence, and ideological fanaticism.

Goldstein examines why people will give up comfort, status, and sometimes even their own lives to feel that they matter. She questions why meaning cannot be captured by happiness metrics or self-help formulas, and why the same psychological force can produce saints, scientists, athletes, cult leaders, and terrorists. The conversation moves through free will, entropy, morality without God, fame, narcissism, and the crucial difference between ways of mattering that create order and those that leave damage behind.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, including 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. She holds a PhD in philosophy of science from Princeton University and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work has been supported by the MacArthur “Genius” grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, and the National Science Foundation. Her new book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.