Pale Blue Dot

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Hey, Hey Animation.

Do you mind if I toss this mic on you?

Could you just stay your name?

I'm Travis Walton. Today is January twenty ninth.

How long has it been?

Now?

Forty five years? Forty five years and three months. But some things don't change, you know, Some things about it haven't gotten any easier at all. I wish that this had never happened. It's not been a good thing for my life, for my family in some ways, they don't even see the real me, you know.

This morning I woke up, had breakfast and some coffee, showered, then went to my office. I had a few zoom calls, a quick lunch, did some scrolling on TikTok and Instagram, sent a few emails and some more emails the.

First yawn of the day.

Left my office, went to my local neighborhood bar. I love a good Jim Martini, a phone call, another email, another email, time to eat dinner and go to sleep.

Okay, I think you get it.

We all have a version of this, a routine, a pattern, our habits, whatever it is.

We all have shit.

To do, more than enough to worry about, jobs, relationships, politics, religion, COVID, whatever, the next version of COVID is an endless amount of things to keep our minds busy. Life can feel like a hamster wheel doing the things we know until we get too tired and fall asleep.

That sounded depressing.

My point is it's almost by default that we as humans remain focused on what's right in front of us, and for the most part we have to. But if you ever just stop, stop and step outside and just look at the sky, sometimes all the things in our daily lives suddenly feel incredibly small, and maybe that's a good thing.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark, the pale blue dot.

This is the voice of the late Carl Sagan, renowned astronomer and an astrophysicist, famously describe the Earth as a pale blue dot. He put our tiny existence into perspective, artfully explaining not only our responsibility to each other, but also to our planet.

Consider again that dot.

That's here, that's home, that's us.

Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only on.

We've ever known.

My name is Payne Lindsay, and for the last five years or so, I've spent my career making true crime podcasts and investigating cold cases. Ever since I was a kid, gazing up at the stars with something I love to do, wondering what else could be out there, or if there was anything at all. Well, scientifically speaking, the likelihood of intelligent life existing somewhere else in the universe at this point is almost certain. Space is literally so big that

So doing the math.

That brings us to a whopping one septilian number of planets in the universe. That's a one with twenty four zeros after it. What are the odds? We're just so damn lucky one inceptilian, I guess. But even if science supports the idea of extraterrestrial life, we here on Earth have an incredibly hard time grappling with it. Hoaxes, pseudoscience, attention seeking people. It's all clearly muddy the waters. And I get it.

Little green men are fun.

They look cool on a T shirt or a mug from a gift shop, But what's the real deal here? Very quietly, over the last two years, the conversation surrounding UFOs has started to slowly shift. Navy pilots have come forward.

With evidence, my god.

Aircraft maneuvering in ways that defy our current understanding of the laws of physics.

Congress is meeting about it, NASA has joined the SARCH.

If there's ever been a time to look at the subject a little more seriously, it's probably right now.

UFOs on radar harassing a US Navy warship off the California coast.

This Navy video showing the pilot's reaction to the strange aerial encounter. What pilots described as aircraft that flew in a manner that defied physics.

It's rotating, by god, the whole I have a look on the NFA.

The UAPs or unexplained aerial phenomena, that's what the military calls them, physical evidence of off world vehicles not made on this.

Earth, no wings, rotors or detectable exhausts, Unable to track where they came from or where they disappeared.

Tool on it.

Oh my god, I hope that's a plane.

Oh gee, please be applying, How please we can hire you?

Ready for this cha?

And sure there's no wide eyed alien saying take me to your leader here, But there is a record number of strange sightings in the sky throughout the entire world that no country on Earth has been able to rationally explain. Yet this question are we alone? Has been an everlasting

But the ultimate challenge.

In this way of thinking still remains, we all have shit to do, and even if we found all the answers going to change my life today or the responsibilities I have tomorrow. But maybe it's a big enough question worth leaving the monotony of my daily routine and just attempt to answer. I'm stepping off the hamster wheel because I know it'll be right there waiting for me if I ever decide to come back.

All you have to do is listen. Welcome to high strange.

Do you believe in UFOs? Applying the correct definition to the word UFO, that question doesn't make any sense.

What they're really saying.

When they ask do you believe in UFOs? Is do you believe that we're being visited by extraterrestrials? They're not saying do you believe that there are objects in the sky. We can't explain two very different things. If you said to somebody I study UFOs, they laugh. I try to even avoid the word UFO. I study data about objects in the sky that we can't explain.

This is Leslie Kane.

She studied UFOs for over two decades now, written multiple articles for The New York Times and made their best seller list as an author.

I did not get into UFOs by any kind of intentional design. What happened was I was working at a public radio station in Berkeley, California, in the nineties. This colleague from France sent me this report about UFOs that changed everything for me.

The report that made it to her desk was titled UFOs and Defense, a scientific study into whether there were any dangers or national security threats related to UFOs?

Are there any dangers? Are they a national security issue because these things are up in the skies? It was a ninety page study written by admirals, generals, a chief of police, police scientists, authoritative people who weren't going to be making up stories. They interviewed all these pilots, and they looked at data from around the world, and they drew the conclusion that the best hypothesis to explain the cases they studied, the most valid, logical, rational explanation for

Say that these were all qualified experts from extremely varied backgrounds. Scientists, pilots, technical directors, police chiefs, admirals, air force generals, the kinds of people you'd probably listen to as a journalist.

To me, it was like, oh my god, this is huge, the biggest story there is completely blew my mind. Even if there's this small chance that we are being visited by something from another world, isn't that like a massive story. It was to me. I tried to pitch a story to a lot of editors, pitch the story to them, and I learned nobody wants to hear about this topic. The papers were afraid of taking the risk that they would be laughed at. UFOs were completely stigmatized, considered to be a joke.

Basically, the stigmatization around UFOs has been an enormous obstacle.

This is Brian Bender, senior correspondent for Politico who covers national security.

No one wants to be the UFO guy.

I too do not want to be the UFO guy.

And trust me, I mean it when I say that I feel like the conspiracy rabbit hole surrounding this topic is a dark, slippery slope. It starts with just wanting to know what this thing is. Then the next thing you know, you're analyzing Egyptian pyramids searching for clues from aliens.

It's not a career builder.

It's not a career builder, it's you know, it's a tenfoil hot wearing Do I want to be considered that person? As a journalist in Washington covering national security for the first twenty years of my career, UFOs never came up at all. I mean, he just wasn't a topic that people talked about. It didn't mean that there weren't people out in the world talking about it, It just was never a topic that as a reporter covering the Pentagon

Roll their eyes and I'm not going to be taken very seriously.

Summer of twenty seventeen, I got a call from a source of mind. He said, hey, you know, I think I might have a good story if you're interested. There's this guy. He's in the Pentagon. He's a career intelligence officer and he's been working on UFOs. First of all, I was like the UFOs, the Pentagon studying UFOs.

Like in modern day. So it was intriguing to me.

But at the same time, I was like, you know, I don't know that that's a politico story. There's this guy, he's about to leave the government and he's leaving quite frustrated, but he's ready to go public with this.

So I met him. I also did some betting of him. Is he who he says he is? And what is his background and who?

Was very clear to me in the beginning that he was very credible, and started digging a little further, peeling back the onion layer. And it turned out the program that he was working on in the Pentagon, that was researching UFO sightings was actually initiated by Senator Harry Reid from Nevada got some of his fellow senators to put twenty two million dollars into the budget, a senior politician who wants the Pentagon to study UFOs, and made it happen.

If the government was using taxpayer dollars to fund a secret UFO research program, who was just the hook he needed to publish a story. Simultaneously, unbeknownst to each other, Leslie Kane was chipping away at the same story.

Because of the years of reporting I'd done on this, I got to know some of the sort of key inside players. One of them invited me in October of twenty seventeen to a meeting with a man named Luis Elizondo.

Lou Elisondo that anonymous source from the Pentagon who claimed to have run the UFO research program was a man named Lou Elizondo, and he didn't just have an interesting story to tell, he had evidence to support it.

Lou Alexondo was preparing to come out of the government in trying to pitch this story to mainstream media.

I went to this meeting with Luis Alessando and three of there are people I knew. At that meeting, I was shown these incredible documents, and then I was also shown these three videos.

Oh going, I can for whin the wind for hunting, pointing out for the west.

Oh, I think.

It's rotating, so I rot the thing.

Oh my god, there's a whole fleet. I have a look on the FA.

Actual videos in the possession of the Navy of UFOs. My mind was blown. All the journalism I'd done nothing came close to this. The implications of this were huge. The government was taken this seriously. The government had invested resources into studying UFOs, which meant they're real. I brought it to the editors at the New York Times, showed them everything. There is something real that's unexplained.

They were going to the New York Times. I think they talked to the Washington Post. I went to my editors and when can we run it? There was some eye rolling a little bit in the newsroom.

There are real physical objects in the sky that demonstrate extraordinary technology beyond the capability of what we have.

What is that How do they do that? How are they flying that way? No sense from any.

Of the radar.

If there's an engine, it's not giving off any heat going from the service of the ocean to seventy thousand feet in a couple seconds, which would make any aircraft we know blow up.

We really want this.

Story out, but we're not even sure the mainstream media will bite.

We had decided we were going to go with it.

We ran the first story the same day that the New York Times did.

In twenty seventeen, both Politico and The New York Times ran stories about UFOs witnessed by military pilots, aircraft captured on radar and video maneuvering in ways that farce topass our current technology. When the story's published, the Pentagon responded confirming they were real.

Now, after a series of unusual encounters by Navy jets, like this one in twenty seventeen showing an F eighteen super Hornet encountering an unidentified object, the Navy has decided it needs to codify how its sailors and pilots record such unexplained events in case these flying objects are in fact some kind of advanced aircraft.

The US Navy and.

Pentagon are trying to destigmatize reporting what they call unexplained aerial phenomena.

For the first time in American history, there was physical video evidence of an unidentified flying object captured by the military that the government itself acknowledged to be real, not just real, but that they don't know what they are. Alongside these Navy videos, Brian and Lesley's stories unearthed the top secret Pentagon program that have been studying these things for years, depending on office.

That was created in two thousand and seven was called the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program.

The acronym was a tip very innocuous sounding name.

Obviously, there's no UFOs in that name at all, and I think that was on purpose.

It was sort of hiding in plain sight.

Recent report by The New York Times unveiled the existence of a real life X Files Department.

Secret UFO program has just been revealed millions of dollars to look into UFO sidings.

It's a five year secret government program to investigate mysterious flying objects.

It was set up to basically look at UFOs as.

We think of them, so you know them whatever you will.

Flying saucers in interviewing pilots or other military personnel that were reporting these sightings.

Thirty four studies they commissioned.

They hired smart people at different universities, scientists to.

Do basically theoretical studies.

So, in other words, if the craft is doing this, it's exhibiting these properties, how might that work?

What kind of propulsion system might you need to be able to do that?

Interviewing some of the witnesses, participants, chronicling what happened and when it happened. That was the primary role of the ATIP office. ATIPS spent a lot of time on a particular case involving the USS Nimts aircraft Carrier.

The USS Nimets aircraft Carrier and its support ships carrying the most sophisticated sensor systems in the world, had several interactions with AAVs that is anomalous aerial vehicles.

So imagine it's like a normal day if there is such a thing for the USS Nimics aircraft carrier sailing off the southern California coast. F eighteens fighter planes take off from the deck doing drills, doing their normal practice runs, flown by some experienced pilots who were not just right out of flight scold lieutenant commanders had been in for a decade or more.

They're reporting that they're seeing with their.

Own eyes, also picking up on the faighteens camera, these tic TAC shaped vehicles, many of them flying at enormously high speeds, speeds that they can't even really begin to keep up with them if they wanted to.

It was so advanced it rendered US capabilities ineffective. It showed velocities far greater than anything known to exist.

Numerous vehicles basically stalked the aircraft carrier days, and by stock I mean pilots are flying off the aircraft carrier doing their drills, and these tictacs are just flying circles around them.

They could turn itself invisible both to radar and the human eye, undetectable and unchallenged.

And at one point the faighteen pilots are supposed to rendezvous some sixty miles away, is part of their daily exercise, and they find out that the tic TACs they just saw, they're already there. The tic TACs went from where they were sixty miles in a couple seconds to the predetermined rendezvous point. So the question was well, how do they

That became one.

Of the main cases that the aid TIP program went back and tried to unpack and tried.

To explain is there any way we could understand how those things could be doing that?

And maybe if we did, we could maybe get a little further down the road of explaining where they're coming from and who owns them.

Is somebody in them?

If that's a bad guy who had that technology, we're in big trouble.

They're twaying with us.

The first hand accounts from military personnel aboard the USS nenets were compelling, and if all their claims were true, then the implications were massive. But there was still one huge problem.

Nobody cares, nobody's listening. There's this sort of human nature. If we can't really come up with good answers It's like, I don't want to go there. There's no easy answers. I don't know what to tell you.

They were captivating news stories, but that's it. The only question that really mattered was still unanswered. What the hell are these things?

Not everybody is on fire about wanting to know more about UFOs? Are we alone in the universe? What does this mean? Why are they here? It's something that most people don't have the time and energy to think about. It's absolutely understandable to me. People are making living, raising their kids. They don't have the luxury of the time to contemplate these kinds of things. This is a paradigm shifting thing.

That gets to the point of the stigma changing.

Just for the last couple of years, there is more willingness to come forward. But that's not because the Pentagon decided that one day be more transparent. It's because members of Congress who control the budget are demanding it.

They're saying, enough is enough.

Tell us what you know, and if you don't know anything, go out there and start studying it.

There's so much scar.

Tissue, so much conspiracy theory, so much bs, so difficult that stigma. We're so conditioned to think of the flying saucer in terms of like the Hollywood image aliens that came from some faraway place and oh, maybe they were here before we were. And it's a very sort of almost linear way to look at it.

A lot of people when they think of UFOs, they think of raw the whole notion of aliens as opposed to just there being a phenomenon that we can't explain that really comes from Roswell. Initially, people associate UFOs with Roswell Wildwell.

New Mexico headline in July eighth, nineteen forty seven, the Army Air Force has announced that a flying disc has been found and is now in the production of the Army. Late this afternoon, a bulletin from New Mexico's ejected that the widely publicized mestally of the flying pulters may soon be called.

When it comes to UFO mythology in American history, there's arguably one case that stands out, riddled with speculation and conspiracy theories, now known infamously as the Roswell Incident.

It goes like this.

On July eighth, nineteen forty seven, something crashed in the desert of Roswell, New Mexico. It soon became a national news story. What exactly crush there has been the topic of intense debate now for over half a century.

I'm here to discuss so called flying Saucers' interest in this problem has been due to our feeling of an obligation to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability, anything in the air that may have the possibility of threat or menace to the United States.

Rozel has had such a grip on the culture, permeated the culture in a way that has probably helped the taboo stay alive. I think it's so fascinating to people because it involved a crash and beings.

July nineteen forty seven, Roswell's Army air Base the press release announcing that the remains of a flying saucer had been found.

On the day of the crash, the Roswell Army Airfield issued a pre release stating they had recovered a quote flying disc The.

US military quickly withdrew that statement, saying the crash spacecraft was in fact the remains.

Of a weather bloom.

The conflicting reports made by the government fuel public suspicion. But it's what happened in the years following that cemented the Roswell Incident in UFO lore, a local resident named Glenn Dennis came forward with a bizarre and much more unnerving narrative.

In July of.

Nineteen forty seven, he was a mortician and received a puzzling phone call from the Air Force. They wanted child science confidence delivered to the air base.

How long would it take you to get more? And I said, how many do you need? He said, that's not important. How long would it take you to get more?

Glenn Dennis claimed that the crashed object was some form of advanced aircraft and that three bodies were recovered from the scene, bodies unlike anything he'd seen before.

They definitely weren't demans. Doctors were explaining this that they couldn't be from our planet. They had to be an alien. It had to be something, yes, but not in our planet.

The eyewitness accounts of alien bodies and a cover up by the US government has given birth to the most powerful UFO story in American history, known simply as the Roswell Incident.

Most of the cases we have on record are things in the sky, right, It's much easier to stigmatize the idea of a crash saucer in bodies than it is to stigmatize something that a pilot sees in the sky and picks up on radar. It's added to sort of conspiracy element, this sort of sci fi element to it, where UFOs are sort of synonymous with the idea of bodies and aliens. The impact that that's had sort of

As the years went on, more and more witnesses came forward. I got my hands on some of the declassified sworn affidavits, one from a man named George Roberts, the manager of a local Roswell radio station at the time, states the following I made an attempt to go out to the crash site and see it for myself, but I was turned back by a military person who said it was

You that if you release it, it's.

Very possible your station's license will be in jeopardy, so we suggest you don't do it a little weird. Another affidavit from a woman named Sappho Henderson, refers to comments made by her husband, a high ranking Air Force pilot station in Roswell at the time. Her statement reads, in nineteen eighty, my husband picked up a newspaper at a grocery store. The article described a crash of a UFO side of Roswell, with the bodies of aliens discovered beside

No matter how you look at this Roswell event, it's weird. I'm not going to say that I know, but it's completely conceivable to me that it was something as the terrestrial would crash there.

I don't know what happened at Roswell, and I think anybody who says they do one hundred percent no doesn't know either or they're dead. I think something happened here. There was clearly a government reaction.

There's no way in hell this thing that fell was made by humans.

So the myschis on out in Roswell, that creepy Maxim and Major Marcel, what could you tell us road?

But you know, there's a professor a Vi Lobe at Harvard who's now run something called the Galileo Project Institution at Harvard. It has real money now to study UFOs. But Avi Lob at Harvard says that we almost have to throw out everything else that came before. So difficult, especially all these years later, to separate what's fact what's fiction.

When you talk about Roswell.

And you talk about all of these cases in history, I think what it doesn't account for is the magnitude of the lack of institutional knowledge within the government. There's enough mystery around it, enough things that don't add up to tell me that whatever the answer is number one, it's probably not one answer. There could be multiple answers, multiple truths. It's probably something that we're not even thinking about. Maybe we're kind of scratching at it a little bit.

When I was a kid growing up, I can vividly remember seeing tabloid magazines about UFO encounters and alien abductions at the grocery store checkout line. They looked eerie, covered in weird, grainy photos of flying saucers and alien autopsies. My mom never let me get them rightfully, so they were too scary for an eight year old, and she probably knew they were all full of shit. This concept

Thousands of previously classified documents regarding UFOs have now been released to the public.

The shocking details from this fifteen hundred page report.

Some of the stories include alien abductions, electrical paralysis, and even sexual encounters.

From abductions that perceived time loss, the report says humans have been injured from exposure.

I'm a person who has spent most of his podcasting career investigating unsolved murders and disappearances, dealing with facts, physical evidence.

There's no room for fringe science.

But while working on this show, I found one case in particular that's so strange Trying to rationally explain it feels next to impossible. In nineteen seventy five, seven men encountered something unexplainable in the mountains of Snowflake, Arizona. I've managed to get my hands on a ton of archival tape.

There were seven men out there about three days ago. They were all coming back here after dark. Saw this bright, bright light to look to all seven of them like a saucer or some identified object. Before they actually stopped their truck, Travis jumped out of the car and ran up underneath of this thing. If you can imagine. They all witnessed a blue bluish light that projected from the bottom of this craft, whatever it was, and at that time it hit him. He cruppled and fell. They were terrified,

Now, what was that man's name again? Who's missing?

The man's name missing is Travis rot.

The wa lp N.

And a tend search for Travis Walton proceeded for three days, dogs and helicopters. They were unable to find him or any signs of where he was. After they told their astounding story to the police, they came under suspicion of murder.

Travis was missing for five days as people searched the.

Woods for him.

There is no doubt Travis Walton believes he is telling the truth about what he experienced.

On November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven men who are part of a logging crew deep in the mountains of Arizona claimed to have encountered a flying saucer. One man by the name of Travis Walton ran towards it to get a closer look and was struck by some sort of beam emitted from the craft, and then he was gone. He was literally a missing person for five days. For

Him give me a little test check.

One two three, yeah, nine two eight two.

Out of the blue, an old truck pulled into the driveway. I peeked through the blinds and it was him. I was about to open the door and greet him, but I paused and stopped myself. He was sitting in the driveway with his car off, just staring out the window. He seemed anxious or like he was contemplating something. Ten full minutes passed and he was still sitting there same position. Is he having second thoughts? Is he prepping his story?

That was still very skeptical of all this.

I sat on the couch, stewing in my own thoughts, and then, hey.

How long has it been here? Forty five years? Twenty five years and three months. Some things don't change, you know. Some things about it haven't gotten any easier at all. I wish that this had never happened. It's not been a good thing for my life, for my family. In some ways, they don't even see the real me, you know. The area we were working on was a logging contract. Our job was to come in after the loggers and

There.

It's a double caped truck. There was room for all seven of the crew in one vehicle, four in the back, three in the front. We were headed home. Everybody's tired, so there was various conversations going on in the truck, two here or two there like that. As we were jouncing along this little logging trail, I could see a glow through the trees up the head. Closer we got, the more I was thinking that maybe this glow I

Heard of it.

We got to a point where we were past the thickest part of the growth and we could see the source of this light. Boom there it was. It was unmistakable.

For the space.

You white, that's your name of a habitat.

And when.

Didn't riched it?

You know smoking gine need a wee player, didn't take a lean with a lean it you've been on the g there's a bean back.

I've been going gene because of cool reck. Now she was over see the pending up.

I'm talking your depend in a Ben Stupert show, Steve bud top Ton avert riding men. You well, you can kind of being down to saying the park peal we spend at dot com and nine help those boom Nata guys, we a Nati devil.

High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for free every Thursday, But if you'd like to binge the whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now. Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange, and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email

Our cover art is by Polygon.

This episode features the song space Cadet by metro Booman featuring Gunna, written by Wesley tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler, Wayne Alan Ritter and Jack Queis Webster performed by metro Booman featuring Gunna courtesy of Republic Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises for metro Booman in three hundred Entertainment

Thanks for listening.

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