¶ The X-Files and Government UFO Disclosures
This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and like the X-Files said, the truth is out there, but is it really in the hands of the federal government?
I think disclosure is great, but it's gotta produce something. It can't just be this endl endless circle.
Stick around.
What did you steal?
Secrets.
There's a new Steven Spielberg UFO movie out. It's called Disclosure Day. The human race cannot accept what we know. We need to stop it anyway. This is the guy who made E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So while he didn't invent the genre, Spielberg's films have really shaped the images so many of us have in our minds when we think about extraterrestrial life.
And here's the thing, this movie is being released at a time where very real conversations are happening around extraterrestrial life. What, if anything, is out there, and what does the US government know about it?
As promised by the president, the Pentagon has started releasing what it calls never-before-seen UFO files, more than 160 in the first batch, some dating back to the 1940s.
Last month, the Trump administration started releasing declassified files around sightings of UAPs. Some say unidentified anomalous phenomena, some say unidentified aerial phenomena, but either way, that's what we're calling UFOs these days.
A lot of these sightings can be chalked up to weather balloons or meteoroids or optical illusions, but that burst of transparency came not long after former President Barack Obama told the YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen something that lit up the internet back in February.
Are aliens real?
Uh they're real b but I haven't seen'em and and and uh they're not being kept in uh what is it? Area fifty fifty one.
Obama later clarified those comments a bit, saying, quote, I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. But all of this is doing nothing to quiet down conspiracy theories, that there's some grand cover-up at play, that people in power know the truth, but that they're keeping it from us.
What does it say about our society that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that? And if they were to see proof of intelligent life, would they actually accept it?
¶ Pentagon's UAP Document Releases Examined
Adam Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and the author of The Little Book of Aliens. So Adam, there have been three of these document dumps from the Pentagon thus far, the latest one coming just this week. Can you just walk me through what exactly was in them?
You know, there was a lot of uh hype about this, that this was disclosure, you know, finally we were gonna get documents that tell us something About what the government knows about UFOs and whether or not these UFOs connect to, you know, us being visited by aliens. And of course, as an astrobiologist who studies life in the universe, I'm super excited about anything which might tell us.
about that question. And unfortunately, these documents were a potpourri of, you know, things we've seen the entire history of UFOs. Crackling with video.
Videos and photos showing cryptic images of what appear to be very peculiar flying craft. The release by the Pentagon has UFO and UAP watchers buzzing.
There were documents going all the way back to the fifties basically.
And
You know, it was government interviews, you know, it was people from the government interviewing people who had claimed to have seen UFOs.
Among them, a bit of unusual audio between the capsule and ground control during the 1965 Gemini 7 mission.
This is Houston. Say again, Seven. We have a book here at three o'clock high. You have any more information, uh estimate distance or size?
There were lots of videos with no background or not much background. You know, from the military where you see some kind of blob. Sometimes it was hard
Yeah, but it's really grainy, so you're like, What am I looking at here?
Exactly.
In 2022, there are reports of a military sensor tracking a UAP moving from north to south, and in another report, flying from west to east. In twenty twenty-four, a teardrop-shaped craft and an uneven ball of white light and a diamond-shaped vessel traveling nearly five hundred miles an hour. reported by military observers.
In general, it's exactly the it's the whole history of UFOs, fuzzy blob videos and um, you know, an unverifiable testimony, personal testimony, which is the worst form of evidence, sadly. Um, and so, you know, given the explosive testimony we heard in Congress about government having, you know, alien bodies, this was pretty disappointing.
You mentioned that testimony'cause I am wondering if the federal government has approach this more rigorously or in a different way in recent years than they have in the past.
Well, th you know, the modern era of UFO U UAPs, right? In twenty seventeen, the New York Times did that story which said, Look, there is this Pentagon program to study UFOs, which were rebranded as unidentified aerial phenomena.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
And there were those three Navy videos from Navy fighters that were released.
Well the first.
And since then the government has we we see a lot more activity from the government and you see these congressional testimonies and the good thing about it has been that there's been a willingness For people to step forward and say, I saw something. Like having those Navy pilots being willing to say, I I saw something I didn't understand is great.
But also there has been just a wash of testimony that is so explosive without any substantiation, without anything to verify. Everybody says, I know a guy who knows a guy who saw the spaceship. But nobody's ever actually seen the spaceship themselves or can give us any kind of real
Data, actual data, pictures, numbers from experiment, you know, uh the tests that were done. Um and so in that way it feels it's beginning and especially with these new data dumps, it's beginning to feel like an ongoing circular conversation.
¶ Demanding Concrete Evidence for UAPs
Well, you wrote a piece in The Atlantic last month called Just Show Us the Spaceships already. I don't even know if I have a question. I just like hard agree. Like, show us something.
Well that's exactly what it is.
Mr Gresh, finally, do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs?
Uh absolutely based on interviewing uh over forty witnesses over four years.
And where?
I know the exact locations and and those locations were provided to the inspector general
that there are these secret government programs that are routinely Capturing down spaceships and that there are, you know, uh what do they call it? Um non human biologics, which is not even a term in science I've ever heard us. Got invented, it feels like, uh in the congressional testimony.
Have you seen any of the bodies?
That's something I've I've not uh witnessed myself.
Okay.
As a uh astrobiologist who cares deeply about this question, it's the most important question humans can ask. Are we alone? Is there life elsewhere? Um I found though that testimony both explosive and then was quite sort of uh, you know, angered that there was no actual evidence for a claim like this being made public. So, you know, um I think disclosure is great.
But it's gotta produce something. It can't just be this endl endless circle. I mean, at some point, you either show us the spaceship, show us the alien bodies, or show us.
The test.
That were done. Because clearly we've all seen the movie, right? There's an alien uh body that's wheeled into a laboratory, and then the scientists do lots of tests on them. Where are the data from those tests? Something that a scientist like me could say, like, oh, they found extra oxygen in the blood or there was more calcium than I would have expected in a biological sample. Something you could actually get your teeth into. Where's that?
Data.
And so, you know, I think the pr the danger here is it's gonna be an endless circular conversation and we're never gonna get actually any kind of real data, which means to me that the data isn't there.
¶ Astrobiology's Expanding Horizons and Exoplanet Discoveries
I was gonna say, do you believe there is extraterrestrial life out there? I think
Uh you know, the universe is vast. Um, I think it would be remarkable if there wasn't life on other planets. But there is a huge difference that people need to understand between saying, yeah, there's good chance that there's life in the universe and saying it's here. Right? Uh pretend you know.
uh hiding but not hiding very well, right? There's this big distinction between those two. And somehow they always get this is what happened actually I think which drove the whole c mo the conversation we're having. Because when Obama made that statement, which sort of triggered all this. He was saying he thinks life is out there, as opposed to UFOs are aliens and they're visiting us. Those are two very different claims.
Right.
I mean, a recent CBS UGUV poll found that sixty-three percent of Americans believe that there is intelligent life on other planets. That's up from fifty percent. Back in 2010. It's not like we've seen any evidence in that time, though. So why are more people believing in this?
Well, the sci it's because I think the science is really changing quite a bit. Astrobiology has gone through these incredible revolutions in the past. um 10, 20, 30 years. When I was a graduate student, we didn't know whether there were any planets orbiting any other stars, right? It could have been that our solar system with Earth and Venus and Mars were freaks, that they're just, you know, planets were hard to make.
Instead, we now know that every star you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. So, you know, every star you see in the sky has Planets, rocky planets where you could stand on them, right? Where there's perhaps, you know, snow falling in mountain valleys. Um, so that has expanded our understanding of the possibilities of life. More recently now using the James Webb space telescope we've acquired the capacity to
into the atmospheres of those planets to be able to tell whether there's a biosphere there or whether there's even a technosphere. I mean the that's what I want people to understand is the science of astrobiology is exploding and I think within Ten, twenty, or thirty years,'cause you know, science takes time.
We will have real data that speaks to this question. And I don't know what that data will say. It may tell us that life is rare. It may tell us that life is common. But we're gonna actually have data.
Alright, gotta take a break. When we come back, why we start to look to the stars when things get tough down here on Earth? Stick around.
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I'm Audie Cornish.
I'm Ari Shapiro and it's engagement party. It's engagement. And we get to talk about what we're obsessed with, what we're engaged with, what we need to process with a friend. I went to see Obsession last night because I had to know what the buzz was about. I was the oldest person in the theater by about 20 years, but it was packed on a Monday at 5.30 p.m. Amazing crazy is going on here.
Well, not so crazy. I mean, I feel like I've been doing the story about the waves of horror in cinema for the last couple of years. And I think the reason why I wanted to talk about it with you is because I was trying to figure out, well, what's different between this?
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That were like, people are doing movies on their own. It's called Fumblecore. You know, and we would like to talk about how people Why why film stuff? Follow engagement party.
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¶ Why Humanity Seeks Life in Space
Why do we all want to know so badly the answer to this question? Isn't there enough going on on Earth right now?
I think exact it's exactly that. Isn't there enough going on on earth on l with life right now? We recognize that life is strange, right? Life is unlike any other physical
Just putting it mildly.
Yeah, right. You know, life innovates. Life is the only system that innovates, that creates via evolution, et cetera. And so and we as an example of life, as an example of self conscious life that has this amazing thing called a society that we Seem to screw up all the time. Um, we are deeply interested about whether or not are are we an accident in the entire universe with its ten billion trillion, that's the actual number, ten billion trillion trillion.
Planets where life could have formed. Are we the only time it's happened? Is life common? Is life, you know, are we part of actually a community of cosmic life? including other intelligent civilizations which maybe we could learn something from. Like if we even knew that there was a civilization that lasted more than two or three hundred years, right? A technological civilization.
That would be a huge thing, right? Just we didn't we wouldn't even have to meet them if we just knew that they had been around on their planet, say, for ten thousand years. It would show us at least that that's possible, which would be a huge comfort.
I mean, is there any kind of pattern we can see throughout history? Like when times get really tough for us humans, when things are polarized, when there's just bad news all around us, do people start looking to the stars more and start wondering about these questions?
Um, I think there certainly is when things are when there's a lot of upheaval, people tend to ask bigger questions. They tend to ask about the nature of their own lives, the setting of life and society. But I really think what's happening here is unique because in the entire history of humanity, right, in the entire 300,000 years that we have been a species. We have never had these capacities. Like literally I am getting data now. I can see data from the atmosphere of a planet that is
300 light years away. And three people have to understand one light year, the fastest thing we've ever invented would take a hundred thousand years to cross. uh one light year. I'm being able to see whether or not there's carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere of these planets that are 300 light years away. This something really unique is going on here.
¶ Conspiracy Theories Versus Scientific Fact
That same poll that I mentioned earlier found that eight in ten Americans believe that the US government knows more than it is telling about this subject. And like you can see that same kind of sentiment with the Jeffrey Epstein files. the JFK assassination, this is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but for someone like you who deals with the facts, the hard truth, how do you contend with that conspiratorial mindset?
It is so common right now. You know, I do a lot of work with climate change. I've been watching for years as this, you know. flood of science denial um has overwhelmed us. You know, first sci you know, the denial of the of climate change, and then we got to the vaccines, and then, you know, everything else. And it's not like, look, the government, you know, governments
Definitely hide things, right? That's the nature of government. So transparency is great. We should demand that the government is transparent with us. Um when it comes to UFOs, there's been this long history. People need to really understand the history. Going back to uh 1947. And there's always been these claims.
Uh there was a book in the nineteen fifty six where a guy, uh uh ex-Air Force officer said, Oh, there was this report and that said, you know, UFOs were and it was interesting, interplanetary, right? Nobody was thinking interstellar then. It shows the mindset. Um and of course nobody ever found that report, right? So and so I just think there's a way in which
UFOs have always been part of that government conspiracy thing. And now that we are so impossibly overwhelmed by science denial, it becomes very difficult to separate uh the wheat from the chase. Um and that's why I have a feeling what may happen with this, if we don't actually get real disclosure or there is, you know, there's nothing there in the disclosure, this will just become exactly like the JFK files.
No matter what gets released, you know, the conspiracy people want to argue with each other and everybody else just moves on.
But that's what I wanna ask because say we do get to a point where either the government has something to share with us that is real, verifiable, or science comes up with some big new discovery and they try to announce it to the world. Are there gonna be a big chunk of people who don't believe it for whatever reason? You know
If there's actual I don't think that would happen because if you know, this is the great thing about science is like You can only you can only pretend for so long, you know? And if the government were really to release something that then laboratories around the world could start working on, I think the uh the questions would be resolved.
Certainly when it comes to my own field in astrobiology, if we were to find a planet that we thought was showing signs, what we call biosignatures or techno signatures, it's not like that would be the end. That would be the beginning. Then we'd build bigger telescopes and we'd study it again and we'd do, you know, different we'd ask different kinds of questions. So once you start getting real data, the whole purpose of science.
uh is to not fool ourselves. And once you start getting real data, now it's like not one thing, now it becomes a hundred things and a thousand things, ten thousand pieces of evidence that all interrelate. You're learning things, you're using that learning. to uh push new uh understanding. So I don't worry about that.
¶ The Undeniable Power of Scientific Data
But I mean, you just said there's all kinds of science denialism out there right now. And there's also, you know, deep fakes and AI online where people are questioning the veracity of what they're seeing right in front of their eyes. So how would something so monumental not run the risk of being flatly rejected by folks who might be more prone to conspiratorial thinking who want to think that there's some big secret out there still.
Listen, I mean one thing my experience on Twitter, um uh with, you know, the UFO bros as I like to call them, is nothing's gonna change their mind. Like there's nothing you're gonna you I'll never expect those people to change their mind. They have a pre established bias.
And nothing will get in, right? Um, but that's not most people. And say like, you know, with science denial, say climate denial, the climate change is happening, at some point you just can't deny it anymore, right? A small group of people have.
do
Yeah, no, but once I that's because right with climate change right now, we're not even in the teaser trailer for climate change. A hundred years from now, climate change will not be deniable. Right? I'm sure that I'm sure there might be some people will but you know, that's when really I think, you know, you're gonna see demand for action. So once things get to a certain point, you will always have a group of people who want to deny, have their own things. But I think for the general
Public.
The majority of people will sort of come along for the ride with the science because it's exciting.
always hear from climate scientists that like that the point that you're describing where it will be completely irrefutable is like disaster, complete calamity around us everywhere. What if that's the case for extraterrestrial life?
Let's say d tomorrow w my group, the my collaborators, we find strong evidence for say city lights on another planet. The light we're seeing is artificial, you know, it's clearly artificial. You can't explain it. And we announced that, right? And then some people are like, that's crazy. It's not crazy. You know, so you see the usual sort of thing happening. But then we start focusing on this planet. And now we find like oh my god, there's also cloud
Yeah.
Fluorocarbons in that atmosphere. And so now we build a bigger telescope. And now we are able to like zoom in a little bit more and we see we're able to resolve enough to see, like, wow, there's There's places on the planet where there's extra heat being generated, like, you know, in sort of industrial zones. You know, and so sure, there will always be some group of people who are like gonna deny the whole thing. But as we build larger and larger data sets,
The evidence becomes convincing enough that I think the more data and the more science we do and the more, you know, one piece of science leads to another piece of science, I think you'll start building a pretty convincing case that most people will enjoy following.
Well, that's a very rational um way of thinking about it and um I guess we can only hope that uh the public would kind of sign up for that. Uh Adam, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
It's been a real pleasure, thank you.
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I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life Podcast. We're talking to Dr. Alexander Moskop. He's author of the book called The End of Migraines, and he's the founder and director of the New York Headache Center. He's gonna tell us why headache what's really happening in your head and what you can do about it. This is the first thing you sort of recommend then in terms of lifestyle?
So sleep deprivation is number one and people are busy not getting enough sleep.
That's probably part of the reason headaches have gone up. Just because we're getting less and less sleep.
Diet is a very important factor as well. Lowering your carbs can definitely help. Three out of four migrant sufferers suffer from reactive hypoglycemia, which means you eat something sweet or carbs, sugar goes up and then plumps.
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