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Gideon Lewis-Kraus, staff writer for The New Yorker, talks about the history of the American government’s interest in unidentified flying objects and how the 2017 disclosure of a secret Pentagon program spurred a renewed interest among lawmakers in studying the phenomena.
Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, not the X-Files, just in case you're confused, but the hit TV show, the X-Files, was based on the premise that the US government quietly investigated paranormal and extraterrestrial activity, and that it kept that information secret from the general population. Now, while there's no actual evidence of pod people or alien life just yet, recent reporting revealed that in fact, the United States government does have a secret unit to investigate reports of UFOs or UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena and it's been doing so for 10 years and now UFO advocates and politicians have worked to pass legislation to require the Pentagon to release their findings.
That report is expected next month. This is serious enough that it has made it to the pages of the New Yorker. With me now is Gideon Lewis Kraus, staff writer for the New Yorker. His latest piece for the magazine is called How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously. Hi, Gideon, welcome to WNYC.
Gideon Lewis Kraus: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.
Brian: I talked about the X-Files, but this is not hacky stuff, right?
Gideon Lewis Kraus: No, certainly not. That's why I took the assignment, was, it seemed like there was a way to look at it seriously, and without just making fun of the whole phenomenon.
Brian: From your reporting, there's a history of the government benefiting and chiming in on jokes about little green men, right?
Gideon Lewis Kraus: The government has always had a conflicted stance about this. From the very beginning, just after World War II, there were people in the government who thought that this was something that needed to be taken seriously, either for cold war national security reasons or because they believe that these were genuinely visitors from some extraterrestrial civilization and that's always been true. There have been times that it's gone in and out of fashion, but there have always been people in the government, whether they're just hobbyists or people with a real commitment to some policy implication here, who have taken this seriously.
Brian: Let's do a little of that history and then we'll talk about the upcoming report. 1947 is considered the year the UFO story really started in this country. In that year, there were close to a thousand sightings. What was going on in 1947 that that broke out?
Gideon Lewis Kraus: Well, the first big sighting, the inauguration of the modern UFO era was in June of 1947, when a private aviator named Kenneth Arnold saw nine undulating, boomerang shaped objects near Mount Rainier and that a newspaper headline at the time conjured this image of flying saucers, which became a contagious meme that year and then all of a sudden the air force was just flooded with reports. By September of that year, a high ranking officer in the Air Force decided that the government had to do something about it.
They initiated a classified study to look into it, in part, just because they were concerned that there was at least a chance that the Soviets had made some unimaginable technological breakthrough that had to be addressed and dealt with.
Brian: Then there was Project Blue Book, perhaps the most well-known government attempt to investigate and track sightings and reports of UFOs that ran from 1952 all the way to 1969. At the end of that, there were around 700 sightings that the government declared unexplained, but let's fast forward to 2017, just four years ago, when one of the subjects of your story, Leslie Kean or Kane reported a bombshell story in the New York times. What did she find?
Gideon Lewis Kraus: Leslie Kean had been reporting about UFOs in as sober a manner as possible, in a way she calls militantly agnostic, which means she doesn't speculate about what they are. She just wants people to pay attention to the fact that there's a consistent remnant of maybe 5% of these sightings that can't be explained. She had developed a lot of sources over those 20 years and in the fall of 2017, she met with a group of people who told her that from about 2007, in an official capacity, until about 2012 and then in unofficial, unfunded capacity after that, a small group of people at the Pentagon had been taking UFO seriously and have been trying to figure out what the government's attitude should be toward unexplained sightings in our airspace.
Brian: How did Leslie Kean's reporting lead to this Pentagon report that we're expecting to receive next month?
Gideon Lewis Kraus: At the time, it seemed as though the New York Times had revealed this very formidable program. In the year since, there've been a lot of questions about this program, and it seems like it was a pretty small effort on the part of a few people who were personally interested, who didn't have a whole lot of buy-in from their superiors. They had tried to brief the secretary of defense and they had been denied and so out of frustration, they took a couple of videos that had never been classified, but they had cleared for public release and got them to the Times.
Then after that Times story came out through some combination of widespread public fascination with these videos and with the reports of these highly credible seeming pilots that have been involved in various incidents, it was used to leverage interests on Capitol Hill, which then forced the Pentagon to take seriously something that they had long been reluctant to take seriously.
Brian: Go ahead. Do you want to finish [unintelligible 00:05:32]
Gideon Lewis Kraus: Then by last summer, they announced that there was this UAP task force and that this year, 180 days from the passage of the COVID act at the end of December, that they were recommended, not actually mandated, but recommended to produce some public report bringing together disparate data from various agencies to try to get some purchase on what was or was not doing on.
Brian: Now that you're on this beat for the New Yorker, do you have any leaks, do you have any sense of what's going to be in this Pentagon report?
Gideon Lewis Kraus: No leak. What various people told me is that we should keep our expectations calibrated, that it's highly unlikely that this report is going to reveal that the government has in fact been in touch with some vast galactic Federation for 70 years and that there might be more information about sightings. Certainly, many, many senior officials have said that the government certainly has more videos and more data.
One thing that they're going to be trying to do is just to pull together the kinds of data from instruments that are looking for other things. We already of course have NORAD, which is monitoring the airspace for incoming missiles and the idea is to try to look back at some of that data and see if they can fish out registered traces of things that it wasn't actually looking for, but that might be helpful to know about.
Brian: Last question, Gideon, now that you've reported this article, do you believe any more or any less that beings from outer space have ever come to check us out?
Gideon Lewis Kraus: That's the question that everybody wants to ask me. I actually feel, I think, less clarity than when I went into this. When I went into this, I thought, "Oh, this is a really interesting cultural phenomenon that's gone in and out of favor and it's a story about something that was okay to talk about, and then it wasn't okay to talk about and then it was okay to talk about again and all the reasons for that."
After all of this, there's definitely something weird going on. I think that's the closest I can come to any kind of personal conclusion. There are a lot of reports that are very hard to explain. Of course, it's more than possible that these are just drones or drone swarms, or some other kind of new technology, not necessarily a super advanced technology, but it's certainly a fun topic to think and speculate about. Anything that gives it the barest-- that clears the barest threshold of plausibility, licenses people to enjoy the speculation.
Brian: Soon the skies will be full of Amazon drones delivering packages and nobody from outer space will even want to come close. Gideon Lewis Kraus, staff writer for the New Yorker. His latest piece for the magazine is called How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously. Thanks a lot, Gideon. We appreciate it.
Gideon Lewis Kraus: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
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