Why UFOs Freak Out the Government

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, host Brian Stelter is joined by author Garrett Graff for a deep dive into the world of unidentified anomalous phenomena and intelligent life elsewhere, the subject of Graff’s new book, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There. They discuss how we might discover another civilization and what Hollywood gets wrong, the government’s focus on greater transparency around UFO research, and where conspiracies stem from.

“This, at one level, is, yes, the story of aliens, the stories of extraterrestrials, of UFOs, intelligent life out there in the universe,” Graff says. “But mostly, this is actually a story about us. Mostly, this is a story about humans and US politics and geopolitics. And this very deep, fundamental question, in some ways the most fundamental question of human existence, which is: Where do we fit in the universe?”

Graff says that while he’s certain there’s intelligent life elsewhere, he’s less certain that we’ll ever have meaningful contact with such life. He says it’s something you come to understand once you comprehend the science of it all and grapple with how young our own solar system is compared to the age of the universe. “Hollywood loves the contact narratives, right? They love the alien invasions or the benevolent appearances of extraterrestrials. We’re probably never going to get a moment like that. When we learn of other civilizations, the thing that we’re probably going to see is the equivalent of an empty plastic bag blowing through our solar system from a civilization far, far away that we will never be able to contact and that may be millions or billions of years dead and gone.” According to Graff’s research, we’re much less likely to be visited by spaceships than we are to come across extraterrestrial trash.

Later in Graff’s book, he talks about the collapse of public trust and truth in government and institutions. “What you see in the late ’70s and ’80s is this rise of these much darker UFO conspiracy theories that the government is hiding something. In many ways, I think actually the deep state is born in UFO conspiracy theories,” Graff says. “I don’t think you end up where we are, in the sort of public debate over trust and truth and trust in the government and institutions and conspiracy theories, without the foundation of that sort of dark conspiratorial worldview laid by the UFO world in the ’80s and ’90s.”