Oh hey, it's your old Dad Ward von Podcast whispering into a ham radio about UFOs today. Did you know that UFOlogy was the thing? Maybe you didn't. I did because it's been on my list for years, but here's how I envisioned this episode, okay? I thought I would be lurking in the back of a basement meeting, maybe looking for people with ponytails who hunt extra terrestrials, and then just adding a grip of a side, telling you to take their stories
with a very large chunk of salt. But that has not had this episode turned out. It is very oddly bizarrely mind-bendingly more legit. Because breaking news people last Friday, June 25th, the Pentagon released a long-awaited decades in the making-really report about UFOs, unidentified flying objects, more moderately rebranded as UAP, unidentified aerial phenomenon. So we have been waiting six months for this report to drop, and I just so happened to have a
my calendar and appointment to chat with twoologists about UFOs. One, a science writer and an editor for Wired, Astronomy, Popular Science, Interpast, and author of the 2018 book Making Contact, Jill Charter in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and her brand new 2021 release, they are already here, UFO culture, and why we see saucers. Now the otherologist, that's
right, there's two of them this episode. She got her PhD in history and the Sociology of Science in 2019 with a dissertation titled Reliable Witnesses Crackpot Science, the UFO and American Cold War Science. What? And it studied 30 years of UFO research in America. She's now the acting Associate Director for Undergraduate Studies in the History and
Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine at UPEN. You're going to meet them shortly, both of them, but first, a quick thank you to all the patrons who come in peace at patreon.com slash allergies and contribute a dollar or more a month to the making of the show and submit questions ahead of time for theologists. We got a lot for this one. Thank you for sending links to episodes to your friends and into the Twitterverse and making new oligites all
the time. And thank you to everyone rating the show and leaving reviews, which keeps us hovering at the top of the science charts. Also, I read all of your reviews because I care what you think. And this week's fresh ass review, let's do two. Two, one is from Thank You, Windowsill for the review that included the sentence, Insert Chiff of Eleanor from
the Good Place, saying, My Brain is Horney. And thanks to Black Plastic for writing in that the show is all encompassing intersectional and appropriate for all audiences as long as you don't mind swear words. I hope you don't because sometimes this shit's bananas,
you got to swear a little. Okay, you have a real word, a real study. And ever since 1947, one this private pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine round objects near Mount Renier up in the Pacific Northwest, our eyes have been scanning the skies for more flying
saucers. So in this episode, we're going to cover everything from Roswell to abduction, trends, alien parades, secret military missions, surprising conclusions, theologist's own wacky field experience, researching UFOs, energy vortexes, UFO statistics, global sightings, data, tic-tacs, space rocks, black triangles, fighter pilot sightings, Jimmy Carter, and of course, the just released Pentagon report on UAP, unexplained aerial phenomena with UFOologists, Sarah Skulls, and Dr. Kate Dorsch.
I know time is of the essence. What a day. What a day to talk to you both. I'm going to have you first, just really quick, if you could say your first and last names and your pronouns for me. Sure, I am Sarah Skulls and my pronouns are she-her-hers. And I am Kate Dorsch and my pronouns are she-her-hers. Awesome. What a day to gather you all. The long awaited report just came out what an hour ago, what time did it come out? It feels like a million
years ago, but it was probably a little over an hour ago. So that was Sarah, soft-spoken lids and a little higher register voice. Yeah, I would agree with that and have roughly an hour or so. And that was Kate with a mild and endearing Midwestern twang. Oh my gosh, what a time. I did not realize when we scheduled this that it might drop today. No idea. Yeah, you had good timing. The aliens must have been subliminally communicating with you perhaps.
I mean, my name auto-corrects to alien a lot. So there you go. First, before we address capital T, capital R, the report, I'd love to get a little bit of background on you both. I would say that you are UFologists. How did you end up studying UFOs or the people who study UFOs? So I'm actually a historian of science and technology. And in professional gatherings, I usually introduce myself as a historian of science who works on knowledge
making processes and expertise. But I came to the UFO question through first of research seminar project while I was still in grad school that really rapidly spun up into my dissertation. I am a demittedly a big nerd. So obviously, as a big sci-fi nerd, the UFO thing held some attraction. But also what drew me to it is that I'm really interested in sort of big picture ontological and epistemological questions. That is, what kind of stuff exists? And how do
we know things about the stuff that exists? And UFOs are these objects that in the 20th and I'm sure we'll talk about this more. But in the 20th and 21st centuries are both real and totally unreal. And they're sort of mythic and legendary and religious and sort of fantasy objects. But they're also really important artifacts deserving serious scientific study, at least for a certain period of time and apparently today.
So those bigger picture questions really drew her. And she says, if you're going to work on a dissertation for five or six or ten or fifty years, pick something you're really into. And how did Sarah gravitate toward floating objects? So I am a science journalist and I have written about astronomy and space exploration and military space technology for a number of years now. And I had never really thought very
much about UFOs. I thought a lot about the more traditional scientific side of aliens looking at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, study or astrobiology, you know, looking at that. Mysteries of other planets or the geology of other planets to learn about potential microbes there. But I had always kind of put UFOs just in this other category of things that were not for me, even though like Kate, I am also a big nerd.
Then in 2017, the New York Times published a big story about this Pentagon research program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which purportedly researched UFOs. And I thought, you know, that's interesting, like everybody else. And so I just kind of started going through that story trying to confirm or to fail to confirm everything that
was in it. And it was really in the process of that that I talked to, you know, historians and anthropologists and then also people inside uphology who had been studying this for decades. And I thought, you know, there's more here than I thought there was when I dismissed it. And a lot of the people I was talking to were interested in UFOs despite the fact
that they didn't really hold any beliefs about them. They were kind of agnostic about what UFOs were or were not, but they were interested in them from their human perspective in part and their historical perspective. And so I couldn't let it go. And I'm a writer. So when
you can't let something go, you write a book. And so I wrote, they're already here, UFO culture and why we see saucers, which is kind of an attempt to look at the different things that motivate people to be interested in UFOs and how that's influenced by the, you know, the politics and culture of the time through portraits of different people. And here we
are. It seems like people are really, really vocal and considered crackpots or it's incredibly confidential and it's this big secret field of study that maybe only like internal government people know about and are hiding from us. Yeah, I think that that is true. I think that there are a lot of high profile kind of celebrity speaker circuit euphologists. If we ever encounter aliens, they're not going to speak English or
French or German. We'll speak and we'll communicate via mathematics. Who would like to, you know, say a lot of things in public. And then there are people who say I have an NDA or if I
talked about that, I'd have to kill you. That was a bit literally, but I kind of got around that by focusing more on the people who are somewhere in the middle who are just regular people researching UFOs in their spare time or maybe who have had UFO experiences who, you know, the only thing stopping them from talking to me is, you know, maybe not liking the media or some
of the stigma around talking about about UFOs. So the way I got around that was just being very upfront about where I was coming from, you know, I would say I'm a science journalist, I'm coming at this from a skeptical perspective, but I really want to hear what you have to say and I promise to treat it respectfully even if I disagree with your interpretation of what it is.
Kate says that as a historian, she's less interested in abduction narratives and actual sightings than she's fascinated by the culture surrounding them because just the words UFO convention, those are enough to intrigue the most armchair social scientists. UFO festival in Roswell, July 2nd through 4th anyone, featuring an abduction parade, talks from the alien hunter, a former military police officer and a CIA operative considered the world's leading expert on alien abductions,
also a talk from the author of the book, UFOs and the murder of Marilyn Monroe. There's also a screening of the film Spaceballs. Anyway, Kate's research was like the New Mexico desert, fascinating and sometimes very dusty. I'm looking for sources, right? Do you have this pamphlet
from 1974 and someone almost always does and that's what I'm after? But I will say, thinking about these sort of different camps, I've studied the US Air Force investigations, the project sign, garage and blue book period, and have also gone through a lot of the papers
of professional scientists who study these things. And I do want to just say that I think that today it's sort of accurate to describe at least the two most visible groups as being this sort of like crackpot fringy group and then this sort of military, if I told you what I knew I would have
to kill you group, but there is a group in the middle and there's been a couple historical groups in the middle for my specific periodization that is professional scientists who had very prolific professional establishment science careers as atmospheric physicists, other kinds of physicists, astronomers, engineers, etc. who also had an interest in UFO phenomena. On the assumption that they represented some kind of trust, or in some cases extra-trust-reel technology.
And what have you found, both of you, about the timeline, and when people started thinking that they saw flying saucers or aliens, has this been going back from the 1700s or did it really start around the advent of sci-fi and after World War II? So people have been seeing things in the sky as long as we have written human records. What I think has changed over time and what we need to be careful of, at least the scholars who study this and as historians perhaps, is identifying
everything that's been seen over the centuries as UFOs. In my interpretation and my understanding, UFOs or flying saucers are a particularly post-World War II thing. They are driven by, if you'll excuse the pun, a sort of atomic anxiety, right? Concerns about an unknown enemy, about surveillance states, about nuclear threats, about the unrestrained progress of science and technology, and these powers
being in the hands of a sort of mysterious military. And that's not a milieu that you have and say the 18th or 17th or 6th century, if you will. So while people are seeing things, perhaps in the medieval age or in the Renaissance, they're describing things as being angels or acts of God or some sort of demon or monster. We interpret the things we see through our cultural lens, through the things we expect to see. And so I think UFOs in that way are very, very much a product
of the sort of post-war, Cold War era. So although not all glowing flying objects are identified, perhaps they offer, if nothing else, a blinking, pulsing reflection of our own anxieties. What does
Sarah think? I feel like a lot of times and something that UFO people who have been in UFO world for a long time point out is that what we see when we look up at the sky and see something unidentified is often just a slightly better, the next-next-generation version of something we already have, because it's something we can already imagine and interpret that way, which I think maybe aligns with what Kate is saying. I was nodding, which is like the podcast is an excellent
visual me, I know. So I was agreeing. And because I am here to ask all of our shameless questions, what are most UFOs? What are these unexplained flying things? Oh, let's Sarah take this one first. Great. I have all the answers to all the UFOs, so that's great. I mean, I think something important that gets lost, especially lately when we're talking about
UFOs is that they do have myriad explanations. A lot of times recently you will hear people saying like the phenomenon to refer to UFOs, but UFOs have always been a lot of different things. Looking at, you know, previous military studies or civilian studies through groups like the Mutual UFO network that analyze large volumes of UFO reports, they're anything ranging from, you know, just regular balloons, birthday balloons in the sky, weather balloons, surveillance platforms,
sometimes like Venus looking really weird. Which I never understood until I saw Venus when I was at a high altitude right on the horizon, and I couldn't tell if it was, if it was something that was moving and coming toward me, and it was shimmering and changing colors, and I was like, well, I get it. Glad I'm not flying a plane toward it right now. Did you know that before he became president of the United States of America, a young
governor of Georgia, Jimmy James Carter spotted a UFO, he described it thusly. There were about 20 of us standing outside of a little restaurant, and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown, he says. It got brighter and brighter, and then it eventually disappeared. It didn't have any solid substance to it. It was just very peculiar looking light. None of us could understand what it was. And, quote, and Carter said publicly, he never released
suspected aliens. Many folks speculate that he might have just seen a very bright Venus on the winter horizon. How does that work? Because Venus is closer to the sun than Earth. It looks like a jumps from either side of the sun, and it can appear to hover or dart around. So it's not Martian's outfit for a joyride. But just looking up and seeing another planet, which is pretty cool on its own. I mean, there's things like ball lightning or other atmospheric phenomena. Just jets, maybe like a
commercial plane flying straight towards you. Military aircraft can look very strange, especially the ones we don't know about yet. And, you know, now drones all over the place. So, and there are, there are more, but there has always been a small percentage that remain unidentified, whether that's, you know, due to something extraordinary that we don't understand or just lack of data to
actually figure out what's going on. Sarah has a dead on pretty much, and I would agree. I always try to frame this by saying in this part of this is, you know, I have a lot of respect for the UFO community. While I may not know what all UFOs are, I do believe that in most cases, people are seeing something that they can't explain. Right? So, yeah, in many cases, it's misidentified, what are called misidentified common objects, airplanes, birds, bugs, trash, caught in the wind, right? All
kinds of common things, but also aerial phenomenon. Interesting clouds, meteors, Venus is a great one or Jupiter, astronomical bodies you don't see all the time. One of the first questions I got when I started researching the subject was, oh, so I assume that UFO sightings went up after Sputnik was launched. And in truth, UFO reports went down around the launch of Sputnik because people were looking up at the sky, but they had been told what to look for. It's a rocket. A rocket. So they
were reporting having seen this satellite. So, I would be really curious, there is probably no way to get this information, but now that we're more acquainted with drones, for example, the way drones move and the way they look, what UFO experiences that share similarities between drones and what they saw, what those numbers have done, if there are less UFO reports that we could account for with drones. People report UFOs less when they are looking up expecting to see something.
And what about in different areas? You know, there are people who say parts of Utah, the Florida Panhandle or Marfa Texas, or even parts of Joshua Tree, like more people have sightings in those areas. Is that because they've gone there expecting to see something? That's a hard question to generalize about. And I don't have the latest, you know, sighting and geography statistics, but I think if you are someplace that is dark, then has a good view of the sky. It helps if
you're near a military installation. You, I think, are on average more likely to see something, just because you can see more of the sky and more of what's going on there. For my book reporting, I took a trip out to Area 51, or I mean, to the area outside of Area 51. They don't let me in there. But, you know, people go there expecting to see either some kind of alien test or a military test. And I think, you know, the people who go there expecting aliens and see something
weird, I have heard anecdotally see what they interpret as that. And, you know, I went there, saw some weird stuff. And I thought that was a cool military test, you know. And so I do think expectations play into it. What kind of weird stuff did you see? Very glad I asked. All right, buckle up. I saw, right when I was driving into the valley where it is this set of three or four, just orange orbs kind of just appear out of nowhere in the sky in this shape of a saucer and
float there and then disappear. And then I kept on seeing things like that as I was driving. And eventually I realized that it was military flares. So, so Jets doing exercises, chasing each other and then one will fire a fake missile and the other one will send off these flares to distract the flick the fake missile. And, you know, the flares when you see them, your mind connects them into a shape and sometimes the shape looks like a saucer.
And then there was this set set of many tiny white lights that would also just appear kind of taking over somewhere between like a half and a quarter of the sky in this kind of perfect matrix and then all move in unison and then disappear. So, I mean, it's weird. There's weird stuff out there. Raise your tiny gray arm if you have goosebumps. Sarah, can I ask, can I ask a question? Is that okay? Please do. Okay, bring it on. I just, I'm just curious. Like, I know how I feel about UFOs,
right? And the potentiality of seeing one. Was it, was it a weird, even knowing sort of in your like rational journalist writer brain, you know what you're there for, you know what you're looking for. And you know you probably have a rational explanation. Did it still grab you somewhere? Was it still like a weird experience? Was it unsettling in some way or did you just like
manage to embrace it? No, I think I tried to embrace the unsettling nature of it. I mean, the flares experience, I didn't get an explanation for till the next day and right now, you know, I still don't know what the what the white lights I saw were. And it's even though like I think those were, you know, regular military things, there was something very cool about seeing something new and strange and very outside of my experience that I was, you know, maybe one of a few dozen people
seeing. And it felt very special and like it was mine. And like I had, like I had kind of secret. I guess that I wasn't supposed to see. And I think that that is not dissimilar from the way people who might interpret UFOs differently would feel it was, it was, it was thrilling. I probably had some extra adrenaline. That's so cool. That is very cool. So looking at a map of UFO sightings, it's easy to see most are in the continental United States. And there are more and more of them
in areas like Roswell. And one exasperated news headline from May 2021 just reads, to happen again, people in Southwest US report strange lights in the sky, which is like, okay fine, but don't be a bitch about it. New source. Anyway, that story was regarding the recent launch of dozens of SpaceX starlink satellites that will ring around the Rosie themselves around our planet literally forever. And for more on that, you can see the space archaeology episode with Dr. Space
Junk Alice Gorman, a lot of shiny garbage up there folks. So first of all, we have a colleague, Greg Egegan, who has been looking at the sort of modern history of the flying saucer from an international perspective. He's got a book coming out later this year. It's a crazy and vicious project. And I am really psyched to read it. He and I have been in touch for years about this. So this is Penn State University history professor Greg Egegan, who has penned papers like
making UFOs make sense. UFOs, science and the history of their mutual misunderstanding, as well as a transatlantic bus flying saucers, extraterrestrials, and America in post-war Germany. And he's he's been one of the people who's been trying to unpack this from that international perspective, right? So he talks, for instance, about sightings over Germany in the Cold War period. The Germans assume that they're American and Russian, right? They're not, it's not like
their aliens or something. These are these are the Americans in the communist testing weapons over German airspace. Likewise, there's the Swedish ghost rockets, which are a historic case taking place in the late 1940s. And the Swedes assume that they're Russians, right? It's Russian missile testing. And that's what we can account these ghost rockets to these sort of transparent
technological artifacts that appear and disappear in the sky. Interestingly, historically, it's very rare that you see two sightings that are described in identical or near identical ways in different parts, even just in different parts of America, let alone in different parts of the world simultaneously or within a day or two of each other. What is much more common is that there is a sighting that has either one really credible witness or a number of witnesses that
gets a lot of attention in the press. It hits the newspapers for local, then it's in the New York Times and the LA Times and then maybe it gets picked up by the Guardian. And now there are a lot of copycat sightings taking place. So now people all over the world are seeing the same thing. I mean, as soon as you give something a name and kind of a category, like it's human nature to
fit what we see into that category, you know, the first arguably being flying saucer. And then you know, a couple of things that come to mind for me are people talk about, you know, seeing the black triangle. So these are black triangles that are described as shadowy, hovering, and noiseless, and this part really got me sometimes bigger than a football field. What? I guess no big deal. Not alarming. The black triangle spacecraft. And you know, once you see one, you read about it, you see
a bunch. And then I think most recently, you know, from the military sightings. An object in one of the videos is called a tick-tack. And so people have started talking about, you know, the tick-tack UFOs. Like as if it is a thing, a strict category. And so, yeah, I think it's just our nature to fit things into that. Which is so interesting because my assumption was that it would, in me, the tick-tack thing would get drawn to the sort of historic cigar UFO, the cigar
shaped thing. But they seem to be persisting as discreet objects, if you will. There's not a lot of overlap in this sort of lore happening between the tick-tack and then like the metallic cigar that seems very popular in the late 50s and early 60s. Well, that one was paid for by Big Sagar and this one is paid for by Big Tick-Tack. Okay. So these 2004, 2014 and 2015 and 2019 tick-tack sightings were recorded through the instrument panels of US Navy fighter jets aboard the USS Nimitz
and USS Bidor Roosevelt off the Southern California coast. And according to official reports, they are described as an elongated egg or a tick-tack shape that is solid, white, smooth, with no edges and uniformly colored with no wings. But it gets weirder. This footage was leaked by a UFO research group started by a guy from Blink 182. If you ask me, that's the weirdest fact in
this whole episode. But it does get you seer. So in late 2017, The New York Times published three videos and the world has just been waiting for a big report that came out one hour before we recorded this on Friday, June 25th. Okay, let's get to the report that was just released today. Again, I cannot believe that I'm talking to you both on this day. We've waited generations perhaps for this. Can you tell me what so far you've been able to glean from it?
But, Sarah, have you taken a look at it yet? I have. Yeah. Let's see. And it's nine pages from what I understand. Yes. It's nine pages and it looks like they looked into a 144 different reports and were only definitively able to explain one of them. One. Only one. Which was a deflating balloon. I believe in Kate. Please correct me with my
memory of this thing. I just read as wrong. And that the rest of them, they were not able to definitively identify, but they were able to fit them into five potential categories or imagine them fitting five potential categories of basically trash in the sky. I think like actual trash or drones atmospheric phenomena, US technology for and technology, and then what they call the other
catch all category. And of the 143 reports that they couldn't pin down, there were 18 different incidents and 21 reports that seemed to perhaps display some kind of advanced flight characteristics. But then they said, you know, that could be some kind of center malfunction or personal misperception and that they need to dig into it more. So to recap, because numbers 144 reports and they knew
what one was. It was balloon. The other 143 were just big ol shrugs that could have been garbage or drones, but about 20 seemed to fly really weird and really fast, making the experts say, what? I guess the biggest conclusion of the report for me and then I'll turn it over to Kate is that they they don't know. They think people are seeing real things. They catch them on sometimes multiple
sensor systems. They don't know what most of them are. They want to investigate further and they would like to have funding and systematized ways for people to report and then investigate what's going on. Got it. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good pretty great summary. So important to know that they're only looking at reports that have come from US government sources, which is a pretty self selective. This has always been the case. Like when we look at these government reports,
they have been very self selective. And for the early years, we're really just military and governmental personnel. They only expanded outwards sort of in the project blue book days. Okay, so these are investigated sightings seen and reported by government personnel, not like your cousin who lives in a yard and drinks his own pee, but project blue book. What was that? So between 1952 and 1969, the US Air Force investigated and analyzed over 12,000 incidents of UFOs. What we now call UAP,
unidentified aerial phenomenon. And they finally concluded no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security. They found there was no evidence submitted or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as unidentified, represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge. And that there's no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as unidentified
were extraterrestrial vehicles. Even back then, there were some believers like former Marine Corps, Naval Aviator Donald Kehoe, an author who was considered a leader in the field of UFOogy in the 50s and the 60s who disagreed with project blue books mild, eh, nothing to worry about findings. He wrote a book with a really kind of wishy washy vague title called Flying Saucers Are Real. Major Kehoe as author of the book Flying Saucers Are Real, what is your opinion of these new
sightings of unidentified objects? With all due respect to the Air Force, I believe that some of them will prove to be of interplanetary origin. During a three-year investigation, I found that many pilots have described objects of substance and high speed. One case, pilots reported their plane was buffeted by an object with past them at 500 miles an hour. Obviously, this was a solid object that I believe was from outer space.
But that was then and this is now. But so these are sources coming or reports coming from governmental sources. UAP sightings tend to decluster around US training and testing grounds, but we assess that this may result from a collection bias, which I think is interesting. As a result of focused attention, greater numbers of latest generation sensors,
unit expectations and guidance to report anomalies. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it is not surprising to me that these various government bodies, these Navy, and in many cases, the Air Force have test craft, right? They have these bases, they're doing all kinds of testing on various kinds of technology, manned and unmanned, and we should want them to report the things they see.
We should want them to tell us if they're experiencing anomalous performance in their own aircraft or in the aircraft of others or if they're having strange physiological reactions to things. But I do think that it's worth pointing out that the sightings tend to decluster around testing grounds and other sorts of places. But again, this is, you know, I've been people have been asking me for weeks what I expected as someone who has read a lot of governmental UFO
reports in my day. It pretty much, it's exhilarating to me and probably boring to everyone else, how cookie cutter it is. It's been 80 years and so much of the language is still so the same. And I love it. I am totally year for it. So I'm very excited. And honestly, she says in the last century, our warfare has been airborne. So it's not crackpot for the military to investigate
weird things in the sky. It's a matter of security for governments all over the world and not just a burning existential curiosity that melts our brains and fucks up our whole sense of reality. Do you think there's a reason why they released it now on Friday or on a Friday too? Like Friday just after the news cycle ends on the news dump, right? Like it's a Friday night news dump. But as far as this particular Friday, they had 180 days from the passing of the act that
mandated this report to do it. And today is the 180th day. So deadlines. It was an obligation that was put into the COVID relief bill that was called for. And yeah, I think that man, they really walked that right up to the wire, but that is historically what they've done. So again, nothing, nothing really shocking about the timing or that it's a Friday night at all to me really. Part of the COVID relief bill really indeed. It just slipped it right in there.
And former Senator, Democrat Harry Reid of Utah, was a big proponent of getting behind the science of UAPs. And one government investigative program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program ran from 2007 to 2012, but it was cut for funding. And five years later, the head of that program, Lewis Elizondo, publicly said that he personally
believes there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone. So this updated report just dropped on Friday, which delivers a big ol' we don't really know what the shit is, conclusion. It's pretty thrilling. Does the report make you excited for possibilities? I will not like hardcore history nerd out on you on this podcast. Please do.
Okay. Well, all I will say is that I'm really obsessed with reporting forums. I'm with like how over the last 80 years, the military has tried to collect data, like try to collect better data about these things because there's always the concern that they represent some kind of national security threat, right? So even if you have 10,000 cases and 9,999 of them are BS. There can be 100 people in the room and 99 don't believe in you.
If one of them is a nuclear missile, you have a problem, right? So we have to continue investigating them, but we have to get better data, always a search for better data. And so right away on page three, this report from today is like, oh, we need to come up with a better way of collecting data. And I'm like, yes, I love it. What struck me in the report is right, the Navy being like, we haven't had a formalized process before now for collecting this data. Where, you know,
the Air Force had one in 47, did it work? I mean, the Air Force sort of tapped out of this in the early 1970s and was like, we're never going to solve this problem. We can't square the circle, if you will. And so what I find sort of hilarious is that in a fun, historian way is that the Navy is going through a lot of the same challenges and issues and growing pains and struggles and hopeless battles that the Air Force went through in the 60s. I just want to tell them like, you
can't win. You're not going to win this one, right? Like, you will never, you will never write a state enough report to convince people that, you know, it's not aliens. So the Navy is learning the Air Force's lessons of oh, man, like, UFOs really hard. So frustrating. Like, what is it? But, but what about Sarah? Is she excited about this report? I mean, I agree with Kate. I think
that, you know, data is good. It's important, especially if you're coming at this from the perspective of national security or flight safety perspective to understand like, how common is this? And like, with this report, the instances they looked at were from 2004 to 2021, but they said that most of them were from the past couple of years once the Navy and then later the Air Force did create specific reporting systems for people. I think that getting an actual
handle on the scale of what people are seeing is important. And I'm going to draw an alien parallel, even though I am not endorsing the extraterrestrial have had this is for, for flying saucers.
But when, when a topic has a certain stigma associated with it that kind of inhibits research into it like with study, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, part of the way that became a respected discipline was doing things like systematic surveys of the sky to to like create statistics of how far away a civilization could we detect around what kind of star how many would we expect to see based on what we've surveyed now just kind of bringing it out of the realm of anecdote and
into the realm of something that you can analyze more categorically. So the first thing to do is to nix the stigma because where there is silence, there's a lack of data and where there's a lack of data. There are a lot of unknowns, a lot of hypotheses, a lot of fear, a lot of flimflam.
So ignoring UFOs, it's kind of like the abstinence only education of the cosmos. Now Kate says, one thing if I can be critical about even just the immediate reporting coming out right now around the report, right, that like, oh, the government is confirming that UFOs are real or whatever. Hey, I think they've always kind of been real. Like sometimes they have, they are real things in the sky that we don't know what they are. And so that means they're UFOs. Again, one takeaway, UFOs are
real. We don't know what a lot of airborne objects are. Doesn't mean they're blood drinking squid people, piloting hovercraft, but it's certainly UFOs. That's so rad, it makes me sweaty. I love a mystery. All of that aside, the military has an interest in investigating these things and in figuring out what they are and in figuring out if we as citizens or their pilots
are at risk or in harm's way, even if it's from the trash, right, airborne clutter. When you generate the stigma around these things, for example, in the reporting that's coming out right now, right, UFOs are real, that disinclines serious pilots from making reports in many cases. It may make them less likely to report having seen something or, you know, airline pilots, people who are up there looking at things. The Air Force grapples with this throughout their history of the
projects. Pilots are now telling us that they're not reporting, that they didn't see anything, and even if they did, they wouldn't tell us. That's a problem, even if it's just for national security or the health and safety of our pilots. I think that continues to be the case. I think that's a real struggle. One of the reasons why I like to encourage the people I'm talking to, especially journalists, to be careful about how you frame this thing. If it is a national security
issue, let's treat it seriously as one. See something, say something. Can I ask a few questions from listeners who wrote in? Definitely sure. Okay. They wrote, they wrote in great questions. Of course, we always like to take American money and shower a charity of the experts choosing.
In this week, it's going to be Denver Public Library Friends Foundation. When you invest in the library, they say you invest in critical support for free literacy programs, lifelong learning, workforce development, and equitable access to resources for the millions of adults, children, and youth of Denver. If you're looking for intelligent life, find it at a library.
So that was Sarah's choice. We did such a tight turnaround on this that I don't know case yet, but we will throw money at them and update the show notes with a link when we have it. So those donations were made possible by sponsors of the show. Thanks so much. You might hear about them now. Okay. Let's get some answers to your unidentified queries. Kelly Dodson wants to know, have we ever found a crashed UFO? Well, if we mean UFO as alien
spacecraft to my knowledge, no, we have not found one of those. But the classic example of something that went unidentified for a long time that did crash was the balloon that crashed outside of Roswell. And when was part of the secret project mogul, which was to detect Soviet nuclear tests, it was a balloon that flew high and then it crashed. And at first it was reported that that was a flying saucer, then that was taken back. There was confusion about what it was at the time.
Then the military said it was a weather balloon, and then only later did we get the true story. So I think there's stories like that. And probably people have seen things in the sky that they couldn't identify that then crashed. But in terms of alien spacecraft, if you find out, Kelly, please let me know. Same, same. I also don't know anything about alien spacecraft. Yeah, the Roswell case is great,
and so it had a great job telling it. Like, yes, a balloon crashed. The version I've heard had the sort of junior military personnel come out and tell people, right, like, oh, it's just a balloon, don't freak out. And then his higher ups freaked out because it was, you know, there was press interest and it was a highly classified project that was built, like it was built for spying on Russians, right? And so it was like, oh, no, no, no, it's not that. It's anything but that.
It's like a weather balloon or we don't know what it is. Maybe it's not a balloon at all. But yeah, we know almost, you know, we know for certain that it was a surveillance balloon. And if you're not up on this Roswell instant, quick overview is that in 1947, a rancher was rambling about his land in New Mexico and found a bunch of rubber in tin foil looking debris and gathered it up, took the sheriff and then major Jesse Marcel, a Roswell Army airfield
intelligence officer. I guess did the world of flim flam and we're still talking about it. So what became of him? Was he banished to a hut on the fringes of society? Well, he retired from the Air Force in the 50s and he went on to become a TV repairman. He's like, you know what? Screw this. I'm gonna go work on a TV and have a beer with lunch. But it's said that he maintained that what he saw was not of this earth. But the military made him recant his
statements to look like a real jag-off and take the fall. That's what he says. A lot of people think that something's still fishy. Oh, speaking of. Two patrons, a salmon like the fish and Malika want to know your thoughts on Umama. I always want to say Umama Mama, that it's not how it's pronounced, but Amua Mua. A pair of Harvard scientists say a massive fast-moving visitor to our solar system may have been a probe sent by an advanced alien civilization. Astronomers were excited to
discover the inner-stellar object last year. It was named Amua Mua. That's a why in for messenger or scout. Yeah, I am not fully up on all of the, you know, latest science of it. But my understanding is that the scientific consensus is that it's an interstellar rock and there is one very prominent scientist who would like us to at least consider the idea that it is an alien probe, but that most other scientists don't agree with him. And I do not have enough information to hold a fully
informed opinion, but maybe Kate does. I do not, unfortunately, but I fall in the same sort of position that Sarah does. A lot of folks, such as RJ Doige, as well as Becca and Olivia Alex, who asked, why are people so horny for aliens? Why is it everyone automatically goes for probing when talking about being abducted? What's the deal? You did mention a space probe. Is there something about just feeling like invaded, like space invaded? No, you're not putting those in my butt. Do you
find that a lot of folks do mention probing? Is it all psychosexual? I know. Everything is psychosexual, but I would say that at least in my anecdotal reporting, lots of alien things are linked to some kind of feeling of the fear of outsiders or fear of the unknown. And, you know, I would be afraid of probing. And so I think that there's a little bit of maybe fear of malicious things, fear of the outside things like that. And I'm going to stop before I get myself in any more trouble.
I will go out on a limb and then push a colleague of mine even further out onto that limb. In the interest of total transparency, as I said earlier in the beginning, I don't really work on the alien question. My interest in the extraterrestrial hypothesis is really sort of 50s, 60s, ETH type stuff. ETH side note is the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which is that UFO wasn't just a balloon, or Venus, or another country, case in the joint. Them things got aliens in them. That's the ETH.
Maybe the aliens want a party with our butts. We don't know. But I will say this colleague of mine, who I've already named up once, Greg Igigian. Once we were in a conference together and he was sort of also postulating that a lot of this alien abduction stuff seems to kick up at a time, or at least it really comes to the forefront in the late 1970s. It becomes a phenomenon that has taken much more seriously in the mid to late 1970s. Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, we can tie some other
things into this. Post-Vietnam PTSD, the rise of the social sciences in psychiatry, and second-wave feminism. Female taking back of the body, exploring our traumas through psychiatry, and so on, that these things might have something to do with the rise of the abduction narrative. I don't know if that ever went anywhere. I thought it was really compelling at the time, thinking sort of for history. I'm always obsessed with context, right? Historical context around
these phenomenon, phenomena, excuse me. But yeah, again, I don't have much insight into the sort of history of the probe. Moving away from probes and toward history, though. Patrons, Kathleen Sachs, Jade Pollard, first-time question-asker, Bridgie, Georgia Plotoral, Max Aubrey, Daniel Fuzer, Meg, Billy Bynum, and... And a few people row in Ridley and Anatomsen wanted to know a little bit about ancient art that has been uncovered, your thoughts on ancient aliens. Does that ever come
up in terms of pictorial representation of UFOs in art? How far back does that actually go? And how much are we just seeing what we want to see? I'll take place in first. I will sort of caveat this by saying I have... I have some strong personal opinions about ancient alien theory that I have been outspoken about on my Twitter more than once. So if you really want to come at me, like I've said some things on Twitter about it. I shall read you one of her ancient alien tweets. I went and
found it. She said, ancient aliens is scientific racism, masquerading is nonsense, entertainment, and people are always so sad when I'm like, you're not allowed to like ancient aliens. It's scientific racism, to which Dr. Lisa Monroe, a PhD historian, concurred and said, were kindred spirits. Ancient native people of the Americas built monumental structures and had science and writing, she wrote. That last part was in all caps, rightly so. I think a lot of it
is as seeing what we want to see. It comes down to this question of expectation, right? And... And yes, like, cherries of gods had had a lot to do with that. Stargate certainly didn't help. It's not that easy. This is a replica of the great pyramid of diesel. And I say that as like a Stargate fan, gently. There's been some sort of big pop culture stuff around this that has really driven some of this narrative. But I think a lot of it comes down to
seeing what we want to see, expecting to see something in ancient art. And then, you know, you say, okay, well, this one image of this, what looks to be an airship, an ancient, you know, South Asian or Indian art, it could be a UFO. Now I'm going to go back through all of the other art from the period, from all over the world and see if I can find similar things. If that's what
you're looking for, that's what you're going to find. And so I am, besides my sort of strong feelings about ancient aliens theory in and of itself, I think, for many people, it's just... You see what you want to see. Is it possible that this incredible dagger has some sort of an extraterrestrial connection? Jamie Pickle says a great question. Why is aerial footage always so grainy? When can those million dollar jets get a video upgrade? Great question. Yeah, I mean, UFOs
are always about military budgets, this report and otherwise. For sure. It would be great to have some clear footage and I have few doubts that among the 144 cases in this most recent report, there are probably better sensor data than we ourselves have seen. But also as the report says, I don't have it exactly in front of me, but it notes that these cameras and systems that catch other wavelengths like infrared or catch radio transmissions, they're not designed to pick up
an identified aerial phenomena. They're designed to help someone fly their plane and do so in combat. So you wouldn't ask a spatula to do a knife's job. Also, you shouldn't be talking to specialists period. That's at the point. Point is, these are plane flying tools. They are not UFO photo booths. And so they're not optimized for taking pictures of UFOs or UIP, just like
your cell phone camera is not. And you know, if you go outside and try to take a picture of the moon, which I keep doing despite knowing that it doesn't work very well, it just looks like a bad bright dot. And it makes me mad. And so I imagine if I saw UFO and tried to take a picture that the same thing would happen. And it's not totally dissimilar maybe from a jet word. It's just not what it's optimized to do. And I will say again, like it always kills me when I
have to be like a defensive military and defensive the military. They've tried. They have tried at various junctures to build sensors, cameras and otherwise devoted to capturing UAP. Like back then it was UFO phenomena, right? Like back then devoted to trying to capture these things when
pilots see them and like build them into the wings of planes. So that when a pilot saw something, he could just hit a button and it would take pictures with a bunch of different chemical filters and be able to account for various distances and temperatures and chemical makeups of whatever was out there. I mean they've tried this at multiple stages and it turns out that A, it's incredibly expensive for something that seems to have appears to have very little
payoff, right? Very hard to justify budgetarily. And then even when you do get budget approval to do it, turns out that it's very hard to attach a camera to a jet plane and then like get a good picture period. Let alone of something that is potentially engaged in some sort of high speed maneuver. It's been virtually impossible to pull off even with all of the resources ready at hand to the US military. Do you think that this report is a little bit of a, hey we could use a little more money
in these departments? I think I mean I can't say you know exactly what the motivation was but that is explicitly part of its conclusions is that you know this would benefit from from more funding that would support more data gathering and analysis programs. If the higher ups listen to that, that is what will result from it whether it's what was intended or not. That makes sense.
I always ask the last few questions of your favorite and your least favorite things about your job but instead I would love to ask if either one of you has like a favorite UFO story either in history or is there one that really drew you into a rabbit hole? Who should go first? You go first.
I'll tell the hit. I'll just tell like the love it like story really concisely. So the Lubbock Lights is actually a pretty famous sighting in sort of the history of UFO experience and what makes it really jump out to me is because some of the biggest questions that I have loved to engage with in the process of working on the history of these things is professional scientists and military grappling with the questions of like who's a credible witness? Who do we trust?
What counts as good evidence? And how much evidence do we need before we declare something unidentified? How do we know for certain that we don't know what something is? How can we rule out every known phenomenon in the world? So the Lubbock Lights they take place in the 1950s in Texas and the first sighting is made by four physical scientists who are tenured faculty at the local university.
They have like weekly or monthly stargazing parties and they're out back with their big telescopes drinking beer looking at the sky and they see these lights go overhead in formation and they're like wow that's really wild and they tell people about it and then they come back again like if unites later and they see these lights again flying in formation silently overhead these
these sort of small lights. At the same time some like on the other side of town a junior high kid with a camera takes pictures of these things right so now you have credible witnesses right trained physicists and astronomers making these sightings across multiple nights as they tell people more
and more people are seeing the Lubbock Lights we now have video there's some sort of sensor return like we're trying to get radar returns of these things people are tracking their paths right across various directions they always seem to be going I can't remember it's west east east west right
but these sightings are happening night after night after night and you're gathering more and more data so first fear forces say we need credible witnesses well you have credible witnesses right you have these scientists well now we need pictures okay well you have pictures well it has to happen
more than once well now it's happening nightly right and so all of this data sort of piling up and for a substantial period of time months into years the Lubbock Lights goes unsolved at the end of the day the air forces like we we don't know what this is like we can't rule anything out
and at some point down the road an ornithologist is looking through some other case files and comes across these Lubbock Lights and says oh I know what these are these are ducks are you dying I'm dead someone play the bagpipes and post a blurry picture of me from our last hangout because I am
deceased it was ducks this is a specific type of migratory duck that like migrates over this area and because now we have city lights right like Lubbock is in a small place what you're seeing is the lights the street lights reflecting off the silvered breasts of these ducks as they fly overhead
which is why they're silent which is why it's regular right which is why they're flying in that v-shape formation oh my god and what I think is so interesting about the story is is that like the air force keeps sending these bars right we need xy or z to be a credible exciting to be worthy
of investigation it needs this much evidence to go uns like to be an unidentified flying object and Lubbock continues to hit those bars and the air force is always sort of trying to ramp up and say well okay okay like we need more and they continue to get that and at one point they do
they say we don't know what this is we like we can't explain these sightings but eventually you get the right expert in front of them and solved I love it it's one of my favorite the pictures are so good it's like great there's tons of great data it's really it's a beautiful beautiful piece
of you all on the street oh my god what the duck is that oh no amazing you can fright themselves that's the best I'd never heard that story it's got a huge threat they're investigating us they're going to poop on us that's yeah I was gonna say hydro cars I looked at these photos and imagine a
black and white image on a very grainy dusty chalkboard and it has a v-shaped constellation of white dots kind of a blurry arrow of terror and then you go oh it's ducks and it becomes hilarious and Sarah what about you I think I'm gonna take a different and maybe controversial tech
and say that the the most interesting sightings to me are the ones that I feel like are the most kind of common kind for just the a regular person not flying a fighter jet and I think a lot about three three people sightings and their short show so I'll share all three but one is just a
like a 16 or 17 year old boy I met at a UFO conference who lived just just over the Colorado border in New Mexico who saw like a regular military aircraft that he said was followed by like a weird blue light just kind of accompanying it that then flew away and disappeared another woman who's
been researching and gathering other people's UFO sightings for years and years and got into it first when she saw kind of like a pink half moon light in the sky that appeared flew fast and then disappeared and then a person I met who worked at this place who works at this place called the
UFO watchtower in Colorado where I am and she said she was talking on the phone to her mom she saw a kind of light in the sky that maybe had that classic cigar shape and then it was flying along and as soon as she hung up the phone it disappeared and I think these all kind of illustrate
something that the historian Kate has mentioned a few times Greg a Keegan said to me early on in my reporting about UFOs is that what people find so personally compelling about them in their in their individual experiences and not there's something weird appears and does something weird
but that then after that it disappears and it's just gone it was yeah and so I think I think that that is the experience of most people maybe it's not what we find hovering above us thirsty to stop at our human juices but it's the earthlings we've met along the way do you both have like any
lifelong friends you've met through UFO conventions or or reporting or research any unexpected friendships come out of this in my personal life sure and that you meet people and you say work on UFOs and then they're your friend for life right but I think one of the things that I'm just
so I'm endlessly grateful for is the community of scholars right like when I first picked up this project I did get some side eye right people that were like oh you've got to be careful with this right like there's a reason that these files have been sitting in the archive for 50 years
but you should be careful and I sort of was like will screw it I think it's interesting so I'm going to do it and I just like the the people you meet from all over and all different walks of life with all different interests both like academically and otherwise I think has just been
such a gift like what a kick-ass community to get to be part of and I'm sort of forever grateful to the UFO as inconvenient as it can be at sometimes I'm really just glad to be to be part of this there do you have so many people saved in your phone with a UFO or alien emoji yeah but right
before the you know the A names in my phone are just a bunch of flying saucer emoji people no I mean I think one of the people I'm I met in my reporting who had the biggest impact on on me was a woman named Annie I Decor the one the one I mentioned who worked at this place called
the UFO watchtower which is a place where you can go camp and stand on this platform and look look for UFOs you know she had been for a while homeless just kind of trying to figure out what she was doing and had come to this place where the UFO watchtower was and gotten a job there
gotten a place to stay there and it had really just kind of changed her life a lot and the people she had met and the experiences they shared and the experiences she had you know it was just very meaningful for her and I think that that really illustrates the yeah the the kick ass community
aspects of the whole thing that just like if this is an interest that you have in common with people especially if you have a personal experience I think that it can really bring people together and uh yeah it was cool to see that happen for her the UFO watchtower side note sits at the end
of a remote road and there's a small domed shelter with a rooftop patio built kind of a scaffolding and then the rocky driveway is home to some alien figurines and a Yeti mannequin and a sculpture garden made by a collaboration of visitors who stack things like bent license plates and
marty grab beads and probably a handful of bent glow sticks and there's a printed plaque I looked at up and it says since the opening of the UFO watchtower in 2000 over 25 psychics have visited and told the same story there are two large vortexes located on the east side of the tower a vortex
is described as an opening to a parallel universe and is full of energy it continues we encourage visitors to leave something in the garden to get their energy there as well and quote it made me wonder how I would feel if I went there and what would I leave behind what if you had to pee
and you had knowingly peed into the center of the vortex there are more questions and answers but not for long and the last question I'll ask you both I'm sure you get this one alive do you consider yourself more of a molder or more of a skullie are you suggesting that the Philadelphia
experiment used alien technology or are we all somewhere in between I want to believe um I do but I think that I'm more of us I don't know I think I think if somewhere in the middle I would say I'm probably more of a skullie um but like I said I try really hard to be to remain agnostic I
believe that UFO witnesses have I think their experiences are real uh and I think that in overwhelming and an overwhelming number of cases they've seen something and I think they deserve our respect in our good faith but I probably more of a skullie if I'm being honest no this is why
people are different which is wonderful I think that I would say I am a skullie who indulges molder tendencies like I think sometimes especially not not just in UFOs but in any kind of you know reporting on investigating topics like there's there's something to be said for like indulging
some of your wilder thoughts and then calling upon the skullie to come to me let's take this back down so I uh I would say I'm molder and then I like rain it in um so uh Dr. Jacqueline Mr. Hyde I guess well what a day to get to talk to you both your phones must be blowing up I can't imagine how many
emails have absolutely pinged you while we've been chatting so thank you so much for accidentally confirming this appointment weeks ago and having it fall on the perfect day no I'm glad I worked out yeah thanks for having us yeah it's been super fun and like I said what
not spicious day so ask intelligent life forms crackpot questions because the truth is out there and we're all gonna die one day so you might as well ask but the TLDR from theologist experts we don't know what a lot of stuff is but that doesn't make it Martians do you know how long people
smart people doctor people thought that germs were made out of ghosts and that washing your hands before doing surgery was superstitious and witchcraft so when you think of science you think of all facts and answers but the truth that is out there is that we don't know shit we understand a literal
fraction of the universe dark matter dark energy which make up well over 90% of stuff in the universe a mystery to our blobs of brains so maybe ESP has an explanation maybe aliens exist maybe they like to hang out over Arizona who doesn't we don't know but for a long time we also thought that
lightning happened because god saw us jack off so there's a lot to learn but keep learning by following the links in the show notes to Sarah on Twitter at school Sarah Kate Dorsh is at hpskate you can buy Sarah's new book and I encourage you to so good it's called they are already here
UFO culture and why we see saucers that was just released a few weeks ago and many more links will be up at allieboard.com slash oligies slash ufology we are at oligies on instagram and twitter i'm an allie ward with one ill on both thank you to Aaron Talbert who I've known since we were
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transcriptionist who makes our transcripts Caleb patent bleeps my potty mouth and transcripts and bleeped episodes are available for free to anyone who needs them for any reason at the link in the show notes and stay tuned big news hot news i'm hiding this at the end for an oligies spin-off show
just for you littles or smallagites yep we have been working super hard behind the scenes to launch smallagies which will be bite-sized episodes of your favorite topics that are suitable for classrooms and kiddos and just a refresher for your brain all ages so those will be birthed into
the oligies feed in a few weeks thank you zik tomas Rodriguez of mind jam media for working so hard on those Susan hael makes the instagram quizzes noelle dole worth does the scheduling and the oligies merch posts the mayor of babe town and my soon to be not fiance impending husband jurt sleeper
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the end of the credits i divulge a secret and this week i'm gonna update you with some wedding stuff it's fun it's drama so we're getting hitched to lie tenth and to be safe i just bought a few thousand dollars worth of self tests for folks to make sure that we are a covid free gathering so
shove it up your nassoles loved ones it's gonna happen also i still don't have shoes but the rings and my dress or in the mail also we're not registered anywhere because we're very lucky to have everything we need we are not fancy people people's presence is a present so instead we started a
travel jar so if any guests are helping on giving something especially local folks they could just toss in a contribution that we could disperse to folks traveling because weddings are not cheap to get to so i don't know maybe wedding travel jars will become a thing we shall see just throwing the
idea out there any who's all thanks for listening may your contacts list be filled with emojis provide hack a dermatology homology ortho zoology litology nanosanology meteorology olipephyritology nephology seriology homologgy i woke up in a dirty metal dome and uh 40 little gray aliens watched me pee in a steel bowl