INTERVIEW 1: Sarah Scoles

See Saucers. I talked to her just before the release of They Are Already Here, an engaging, first person anthropological look at the UFO community. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals. My name is Sarah Schools. I'm a science journalist, a contributor at Wired magazine, in Popular Science, and I write about space. First of all, I love the book Your interest. It seems to be not so much with UFOs themselves, but with the people who are

interested in UFOs and the culture that surrounds UFOs. Can you talk a little bit about your interests and how that interest began. Sure, I had really never paid attention to UFOs from most of my life until December sixteen, and I read a story in the New York Times that was about this Pentagon program that had been dedicated

to researching what they called unidentified aerial phenomena. And just starting with that story, I tried to re report for Wired magazine all the stuff that they had said about this Pentagon program and just tried to prove it true

or false with my own reporting. And um, since I was coming to UFOs totally fresh, I didn't actually have any knowledge of my own and so I started to try to seek out people who did have that and who had been either you know, on the historical side or on the personal side of UFOs for decades before I came into it, and I didn't really know what to expect. But I had a lot of ideas I think about who was obsessed with UFOs and not not all of those ideas were very flattering. Um. I think

I mostly thought it was just straight conspiracy theorists. But what I actually found out when I started talking to people was that, you know, there were lots of really smart, dedicated researchers who had just found this cool mystery that they were really interested in and that was really hard to solve. And um, so that kind of got me started wondering what it was about this particular mystery that

that was so compelling to them. And so then I found so many answers that I had to write a whole book because no one wants to publish an article that long. So let's actually go back a second. You you said that you your introduction to it was taking a look at the program that that had been going on in the Pentagon sort of under the radar, UH

for a number of years. Maybe you could talk a little bit about I believe the guy who who ran was his name was Luis Alisando, And it didn't seem quite as straightforward from what you wrote as the story that people might have heard. No, I don't think it

was a straightforward story at all. UM. So, the way it was initially reported, the Pentagon was running this program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which UM involved one contractor called Bigelow Aerospace researching sightings and reports of UFOs and UM kind of doing research adjacent to that. And it was this super secretive program, as they described it,

run by a man named Luis Alazando. And when the story came out, the newspaper claimed released these two videos that showed UFOs and they were official US government videos, and this was kind of what led that that story to really take off. UM and the program they said ran from two thousand seven to two thousand twelve, but that it kept going even after that, even further under the radar, and you know, all of that is pretty

that's a pretty incredible set of claims. And as time went on, from reporting I did, and also lots of other people, the story wasn't quite as linear as that. The Pentagon has said it didn't release those videos, they were not authorized for release. It is said that this man who was supposedly the director actually didn't work on the program at all. It has said that this wasn't a UFO program at all, and so it's kind of just there are lots of statements that are in direct

contradiction to what was initially reported. But las Ando, I think it's been on CNN and other places talking about it as though it absolutely was a UFO program. Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, Louis Alizondo talks a lot about how it was a UFO program, and also he goes even farther and says that the program investigated crafts that UM he basically said they couldn't possibly have come from this Earth because they couldn't link them to any particular country.

So i'mplaying not just like we were looking at UFOs from Russia, from Russian military or something, but UFOs from outer space is the implication. And he's gone off and joined I don't know if this is the time to talk about this. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. So Luis Alizondo retired from the Pentagon Um and from this program in October seen just before the news story came out, and he joined up with a private company called to the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which is based sically.

What they actually do is make books and movies and music, but what they say they want to do is research UFOs and then eventually reverse engineer some kind of really great spacecraft. And Louis Alizondo said that he left the Pentagon and joined up with these people because officials in the military weren't taking the threat of UFOs very seriously, and so he had to leave the government and go to the private sector to get anyone to listen to him.

And meanwhile, the government says he never worked on the program at all, So right, and to the Stars Academy. That's Tom Delong's organization. Yeah. To the Stars Academy is run by, um, the former frontman of Blink one two, Tom DeLong. So he's and I want to get back to Robert Bigelow in a second, but you you write about both of them in the book and Tom DeLong.

It's an interesting character and it's funny because I feel like people who aren't necessarily very interested in UFOs, one of the things that people do know is that the guy from Blink Win eighty two is into it. And that's actually a response I've gotten to from people when I've said, oh, I'm making this this podcast about UFOs, were like, oh, what's Tom Long going to say? So, um, so can you talk a little bit about him and

and sort of his interest in what he's been doing. Yeah. So, Tom Delong's interest in UFOs seems to go way way back to kind of the band's earlier days, and Um, when I was working on the book, I tried to go as far back as the Internet would let me to read all these different magazine profiles of him in Blink Win eighty two from years and years ago, and pretty early on they start talking about how Tom DeLong used to sit in the back of the tour bus

reading these huge books about UFOs and conspiracy theories and things like that, and you know he um. He wrote a song called Aliens Exist, which is basically about having an alien visit your bed room and abduct you and no one believe you. Um. And then later on he started going more public with the idea that like he was holding some kind of alien secret UFO secret and

he was going to bring it public. I don't remember exactly what what year it was, but I remember before I was interested in UFOs at all, I read some profile of him that that said, you know, I'm collaborating with high level intelligence officials and working with defense contractors, and I'm going to bring the alien truth to you. And I was like, Oh, that guy, that's that's interesting. Wouldn't it be great if Tom DeLong brought us aliens? Um?

But then then a couple of years later he brought us some um complicated version of them, I guess, but um, so he he went off. He he started this company called to the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, and it's supposed to be some kind of UFO Disclosure Project where they have access to data about UFOs and are also going to collect it and kind of analyze it. And he's brought you know, people from the actual Pentagon, Louis Alizondo. There's another guy on their board called Chris Melon,

who was like a former high level intelligence officer. Like, they've got they've got serious people, even though I don't really understand why. The second I think person with a lot of money, uh, in the last you know, decade or so, Who's who's who's put a lot of money into this was Robert Bigelow, who's another kind of interesting character who bought the skin Walker Ranch, which has got the coolest name of any place that I've ever heard.

Is completely intriguing just because of that. Can you talk a little bit about him? Yeah, Robert Bigelow is a very wealthy man who lives in Nevada, and he made a bunch of money, um in real estate and running a hotel chain, and then he went in, you is that money to pursue his real interest, which wasn't budget hotels but was um aliens. You know, he's gone on sixty minutes, I believe, and told the whole world that

he believes there's an alien presence here on Earth. So once, once he had amassed his fortune, he thought, you know, I'm I'm going to do research into UFOs and other paranormal kinds of things. So since the since the nineties, he's given millions of dollars to UFO researchers, just kind of funding researchers to do kind of small individual projects.

And then I guess the thing he's best known for is reading an article in a newspaper called the Desirette News about a family who owned this ranch in Utah, and they said there were all these paranormal happenings. They're like a giant wolf that wouldn't die when you shot it, and animal mutilations and seeing UFOs and just all kinds of spooky things. And he thought, you know, I would like to buy that terrible spooky place and see if I can research all this stuff that's going on on

the property. So he did. He bought it. He moved some scientists in and founded a an institute called the National Institute for Discovery Science, where he was going to try to investigate these things on this place that was called skin Walker Ranch um and see if he could get to the bottom of the what they called the phenomena, which is kind of the all encompassing term for all these these weird paranormal things that they said was going on.

And so they bought cameras and sensors and hired scientists and tried to catch paranormal activity as it was happening in collect actual data on it um. But they never actually really got any data that they could share. Um. The you know, the sensors wouldn't work, the off that was supposed to be happening, wouldn't show up when they were looking, and they just kind of came away from the whole experience with essentially what they started with, which

was a bunch of stories. A theme I think in your book and we've already started talking about it is this relationship between people who are interested in UFOs and at least one faction of that group who really wants to try and prove scientifically, um that they exist there, you know, that they're actually terrestrial um. And then there's sort of this weird dynamic or relationship between them and then the scientific establishment, which shows very little interest in it.

And you know, you get the sense that that that the UFO people um feels though the scientific establishment is almost working against them. Yeah, I think that mainstream science doesn't really want a whole lot to do with uphology, and that's very understandable because there really is no or very little hard data to go on. Almost everything is an eyewitness report and without you know, columns of numbers and sensor data that you can take home and then analyze.

So there's really no systematic plan of investigation in the way that scientists would normally want to have, And so it's it's pretty legitimate that the UFOs and UFO research in their current form aren't part of mainstream science. But I do think then uthologists are both kind of angry that they're not a part of it and that they're

not taken seriously. But at the same time they say traditional science actually isn't adequate to do research on what we are dealing with because they're too narrow minded and they don't take human testimony seriously or they don't have the right tools. So then they kind of reject mainstream science. But then also anytime a scientist actually does show interests or like if somebody has a PhD and they're speaking at a conference, you can tell that you folowgists actually

really revere science and what to emulate it. Even at the same time they're like, you don't understand me, So I don't know. It's complicated both directions. I think strange arrivals will return in a moment. Another tense relationship is between the UFOL community and UH the US government in the U S Military, And you make a you make the point a couple of times in your book about how there's a lot of suspicion within UFO community towards the government, but that the government has, you know, in

many ways earned it over the years. Yeah, the government hasn't really been honest or straightforward in most of its dealings with UFOs or the UFO community UM, starting from the very beginning. It's early Projects UM, in particular Project Blue Book, which was their longest UFO investigation program that

went until nineteen sixty nine. Like a lot of the point of it was not actually to figure out what UFOs were and to solve UFO cases, but it was too UM Essentially, this is what people say, UM cross things off is known so that no one would have to worry about them, like to to find to find explanations for things, even if those explanations didn't quite fit, so that people wouldn't panic that there was this kind

of unknown thing in the sky. UM. So there's that. UM. You know, you have the canonical crashing roswell where something crashed on a rancher's land UM in New Mexico. And at first the official government press release said this was a flying saucer, we got it, don't worry, um, And then they said, just you know, just kidding, that was a weather balloon. UM. And then decades later in the nineties they said, just kidding, it was actually a nuclear

test detector experiment. There was also a CIA sponsored panel called the Robertson Panel UM, and in their scientists and military personnel were specifically looking at the effects that UFOs and your UFO reports might have on people and chaos and panic, and they essentially said, if we get too many UFO reports, it might clog our intelligence channels and it might cause you know, hysteria in the streets. So what we need to do is essentially make propaganda to

tell people not to worry about UFOs. And so just throughout history for decades and decades, you have these instances of the government trying to manipulate public opinion and interpretation of UFOs, but then also saying like we have no interest in them and neither should you, And it just it just leaves people feeling like they can't trust the government on the topic, I think, and they're not wrong.

Another theme that seems a comp in uh in the book is these people who kind of look at UFOs ah rather than you know, sort of approaching it scientifically, but serves you to have a more spiritual or religious take on them, or or way of sort of conceiving of them. And I was wondering if I could bring up a few of those people and maybe have you talk about them a look, because I thought it was

super interesting. And one of those one of those people is Steven Greer, who was talking about close encounters of the Fifth kind. Yeah, Stephen Greer has kind of a

whole empire around him. He has made a name for himself with the specific kind of contact with aliens called close encounters of the Fifth kind Um, which is essentially a kind of contact with aliens and UFOs that you, as a human being on earth, try to initiate, like you kind of send your intention and receptive nous too, that experience out into the universe somehow, and then the phenomenon is supposed to sense that and and appear to you.

And so he leads these retreats where he tries to teach people to do this and it involves UM a lot of meditation and um, yeah, projecting your intentions. And a lot of people don't like it. A lot of people think of it UM as kind of snake oil, but a lot of people, um it really resonates with I think because it is a kind of spiritual experience, and it also is something that you can participate in, Like you're not just a passive observer of these supposed

UFOs and or aliens. You are connecting your brain with them somehow, And I think that appeals to people. It's sort of seemed to me a little bit like the Secret but for extraterrestrials it's sort of you know, envisioned it and it and it might happen, or it's more likely to happen. Definitely. It's like your UFO vision board. Yeah, exactly. Another person that you talked to who sort of falls into that spiritual realm is UM a guy named Garrett

for sure. Yeah. Garrett for sure was actually a kind of famous radio astronomer who did really conventional, you know, physics and astronomy work using radio telescopes and then UM at some point when the search for Extraterrestrial intelligence UM, which is a kind of more conventional look for broadcasts from alien civilizations, when that kind of research was getting started. At first he did a little bit of it himself, using radio telescopes to look for these messages from aliens.

And then as time went by and he started to hear more of the talk from his fellow astronomers, he started to doubt UM their methods a little more, and he thought that there was basically no chance that they

were going to find aliens. And so he made kind of a joke conference talk where he said, instead of giving these people a billion dollars to make a telescope, what if you gave me some money and I just sat on top of a mountain and thought about aliens and that he said, it had basically the same chance of success as what they were doing, and it would

cost essentially no money. But but then he started I don't know exactly why he went down this path, but then he started to kind of take that idea seriously. He he read a book by a scientist named John Lily who was doing some work on trying to communicate with dolphins, and he read about sensory deprivation tanks where you could go in a place that's totally dark and

totally quiet and you're floating. Um. And this guy, John Lily, had thought that he had communicated with some kind of being outside of himself, and so Garrett, for sure, I thought that he would try the same thing. Um. And so he spent a bunch of time going in these sensory deprivation tanks, and what he heard seemed to him like the voices of aliens, like his joke experiment was

actually working um. And then to eventually he came to the conclusion that what he was hearing was his own unconscious mind and like the collective unconscious mind of of humanity, which sounds out there in a different way from from UFOs. But that was kind of his his research journey, which is a little like a like a seventies New Age

spiritual type of journey. So he kind of came to this sort of young Gian view of what he was experiencing was that it was, and you mentioned it in the book Experiencing the Collective Unconscious in some way that's more manifest than you would get otherwise. Yeah, he kind of thought, he, yeah, he could like tap into the you know, the the ideas and archetypes of the collective unconscious when he was totally removed from all other sensations, and that the way that that manifested itself was this

alien inside of his brain essentially. Huh. You mentioned that that he had worked with set to begin with, and I thought it was really interesting the way, and I can't I can't remember if you characterize it or he characterized the sort of attitude that a lot of the people involved in SETI now have towards the possible benefits

of making contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Yeah. He came up with the term the salvation school of SET, which was that when SETI scientists were trying to justify all this money they wanted to spend looking for aliens that might not be there, they would say, this is worth our time because this is a really big question. Are we

alone in the universe. It's an almost religious question, but we can investigate it scientifically, and because if we are successful, then that will mean peace on Earth because everyone will be united as Earthlings because we're all so much more like each other than we are like the alien who

we can't identify. And they also say that if if we make contact with an alien civilization, it will be much much older than us, and so it would be more technologically advanced, and so it would have gone through some kind of what they call it technological adolescence, which is basically where we are right now, where like at any given time we might blow ourselves up with nuclear bombs, or have so much climate change we don't survive, or

things like that. And they say, the aliens who have survived that can teach us that it's possible to survive that and maybe how. And Garrett Verscher kind of looked at all of that and saw it as very religious, where instead of having a god that's going to, you know, tell you the right way to live your life and save you from all your troubles, it's this great alien society and that that's really kind of a Cold War type of type of logic, it feels like to me.

And also there's actually like we don't actually know how anyone would react if we found aliens that might have no effect on the world. Maybe there will be piece. Maybe we'd all run out in the streets rioting. Nobody can actually know that for sure. In my opinion, I just thought it was it was really interesting because it's

it does and you mentioned the Cold War. It it does kind of hearken back to, you know, the contact ease of the nineteen fifties that we talked a little bit about in the podcast at the very beginning with George Adamski who said he was visited by this beautiful person from Venus, who said, we're keeping eye on you were really advanced, and we want you to be spiritually better and more peaceful, and we're worried that you're gonna destroy each other and all this, and it was clear

that he was making up this whole story, but it was the same idea that these sort of advanced extra rationals are have these lessons to teach us about how to live together and live peacefully and be respectful of the planet and all that stuff. And to um had that kind of your today, Well, I thought was it was pretty interesting. Definitely, Yeah. I mean it's not very different from Jesus getting born and saying like be nice

to each other. You spend a lot of time in the book and in real life sort of going to visit these places where UFO people gather. So you go to Roswell, you go to a Buffon conference, you go it's close to Area fifty one, is you can get you go to the was it the Alien watch Tower? And I was wondering, do you have any thoughts about the fact that these sort of institutions exist and people

come to them, and what sort of that cultural significance is. Yeah, I think the sites like that are almost if if we're continuing the spiritual train of thought, there are a little like pilgrimage points where they're like important points in this particular subculture that people can come visit and um maybe how a meaningful experience while they're there, and then most importantly interact with other people who kind of understand where they're coming from, which I think was the biggest

common factor between move On meetings, the UFO Watchtower and

UM Roswell. I guess um, I didn't really see very many people at Area fifty one, But if you if you go to a place that is known for UFOs or aliens, um you know that the other people around you kind of have that same interest at some level, whether they're serious like you, or if they just have a casual interest, like they're probably not going to just make fun of you or tell you you're crazy, and so I kind of feel like people go there and like pay homage to this interest, have a little fun,

and then also can maybe speak more freely with each other than they can in real life. At least that was what I noticed when I was there. Well, it's great. Do you have any last thoughts or things you wanted to convey that you learned that you thought were particularly that we haven't talked about. Let's see. I think so.

There's a thing a historian named Greg Gigan who's at Penn State told me when I was very first getting into the subject, which was that when UFO belief in the general population gets like stronger, people more interested than they used to be, it's usually when other stuff isn't going well, which we could argue it's not in the

world right now, like things are pretty precarious. There might be a global pandemic, people are afraid of nuclear war, and so when all that is going on, if you have this other like powerful thing to turn to and be interested in. A it's distracting and you can kind of project your fears onto it, or if you're going the other direction, you can think, like the study people

like maybe that's something that will save me. And it's just interesting to kind of have looked in the past and seeing that wave go up and down, and then to see it kind of rise up again just in the past few years. I hope you enjoyed this week's interview. Next week, on a second bonus episode of Strange Arrivals, I talked with Stephanie Kelly Romano, an associate professor of Rhetoric,

Film and Screen Studies at Bates College. She has gathered narratives from over three people who believe they were abducted by aliens, and has written on how these stories helped make sense of issues of race, control, rights, and identity. In terms of an example, for raise, I think that just the fact that experiencers talk about a multiplicity of

types of aliens and that the aliens have different characteristics. So, for example, the little gray aliens that are so popular in pop culture are oftentimes those beings that are worker beings. They don't necessarily have personality they're not particularly developed, are

advanced in a lot of ways. Technologically, certainly they are, but they're very focused on conducting experiments or doing that kind of thing, whereas people also talk about Nordic aliens, and Nordic aliens have a tendency to be more human looking, and they are characteristically Caucasian and blonde, and those aliens are the ones that are compassionate. Those aliens are the

ones that are kind. There have been a bunch of different studies or a couple articles anyway, that talk about gray aliens as being kind of the combination of black and white, right, and so this ambiguous racialized mixture, But also the fact that the advanced aliens of Caucasian I mean, coupled with ancient alien theories, which are inherently racist in

some ways, race is clearly underneath it all. The fact that any non westernized, non colonized society couldn't have made whatever it is, the Pyramids and Nascal lines, whatever, and they needed to have help from extraterrestrials, but westernized Caucasian societies didn't is a little questionable. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with

executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickike. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the Milms Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y A M in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project blue Book. Learn more about a show over

at Grimm and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.