If you’re someone who likes to think about extraterrestrial life, the last few years probably felt exhilarating. Congressional hearings, declassified documents – for a while there, it seemed like we might finally hear the truth about UFOs and aliens. But we didn’t.

Still, as it turns out, the truth about UFOs is out there, and it does touch on government secrets and national security…however, it’s not what the believers have hoped for all these years.

I’m Gabrielle Sierra, and this is Why It Matters, today, the truth about UFOs, their role in national security, and the real global search for alien life.

Shane Harris: UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. It used to be called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Most people will know them as UFOs, Unidentified Flying Objects.

This is Shane Harris. He’s the intelligence correspondent for the Washington Post where he’s covered national security for over two decades.

HARRIS: But UAP is the new acronym that the government gives for unidentified objects, whether they be flying in the air, moving through the water, or sometimes moving between the air and the water.

People claim to have seen UAPs pretty often. Maybe you’ve seen one or you know someone who says they did. My own dad swears that he and his friend Julio saw one while hanging out in a field in Rhode Island during college, and to this day he hasn’t figured out what it could have been.

Gabrielle SIERRA: Okay. So if they aren’t aliens, what are they?

HARRIS: When the military and the intelligence agencies talk about UAP, they do not presume that they are extraterrestrial. They don’t presume that these are flying saucers from outer space coming to visit. Generally speaking, when we’re talking about UAPs, most people in the military are looking at these objects to determine whether or not they are foreign technology. Are they new drones being fielded by China? Is it some kind of Russian system that no one has seen before? Is it a weather balloon? Is it just trash flying through the air? They’re starting with the premise that these are actual objects, they are real and that they have not been identified.

For this reason, UAPs are not only handled by scientists at NASA, but by the Department of Defense. This is because UAPs pose potential national security threats. After all, UAPs are more likely to be from a foreign adversary than aliens.

HARRIS: UAPs are a military question and a military concern, because in many cases they have turned out to be foreign adversary aircraft, drones, surveillance platforms like balloons. These are devices that are gathering information on U.S. interests, ships, planes, possibly military installations. The military, theoretically I’m sure, might be concerned about an alien invasion, but it’s not what they’re asking when they look at UAPs, they want to know is this Russian? Is this from China? Is it one of ours? What is this thing? Is it hostile? Is it gathering information? Does it pose a threat? Only a handful of these UAP will end up being truly not categorized – just have a big question mark over them. And those are the ones that of course are the most interesting for people who wonder, well then what are they?

Disappointing as it is, UAPs have never turned out to be aliens coming down to visit us – as far as we know – nor are they investigated with aliens in mind. But the secrecy surrounding the government’s investigations has sparked intense interest from scientists and conspiracy theorists alike.

SIERRA: Why is the military so secretive about all of this? Can’t they just debunk everything?

HARRIS: You’re absolutely right that the minute you start hiding something and say, “Don’t look behind my curtain over here,” people are going to say, “Can I see what’s behind the curtain please, and why are you hiding it?” The big reason why is because intelligence agencies in the military are always reluctant to reveal what are called sources and methods. They don’t want anyone, particularly U.S. adversaries to know how it is that they collect the information they collect. They don’t want them to know about the technical tools they have in place, satellites, electronic surveillance equipment. They don’t want them to know about the kinds of sensors that they might be using to distinguish ‘what is this object?’ They keep all of that secret and they don’t want to give away to adversaries, more or less, where they’re looking and the kinds of questions that they’re asking. That’s one. Another is that just culturally, the military and the intelligence agencies over-classify tons and tons of stuff. Anybody in the intelligence community will tell you they classify things that don’t need to be classified. And so there is just a general pervasive culture of secrecy that surrounds this kind of work. And I think that the other too is that honestly, I think some officials are just reluctant to talk about it because they feel a little bit, I don’t want to say silly, but to go out and have an honest conversation in front of Congress about UFOs when you know kind of what everyone is thinking is a little bit of a daunting task. That doesn’t stop people from asking questions about, “Well, is the government hiding something that it knows more definitively from people about what these objects are?” One answer to that is probably yes. I would imagine the government has positively attributed some of these UAPs to China or to Russia and is not saying that, because they don’t want the Russians or the Chinese to know that we know or to know how we know, what we know. That does not mean that the government is hiding existence of aliens.

SIERRA: Well that said, I do think it’s very common for the search for UAPs / UFOs, to get conflated with the search for extraterrestrial life. So when did those two things even get mixed up?

HARRIS: I mean, you can almost argue that they’ve been mixed up for decades since the famous crash at Roswell, New Mexico back in the forties. The military has looked into strange sightings in the sky for many, many, many years. Project Blue Book is probably the most famous example of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKzI3uu_oTQ

History: 1952 was one of the biggest years of UFO sightings in U.S. history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W89jh2C2Ry8

Showtime: I am here to discuss the so-called flying saucer.

https://youtu.be/4-MbGYAv7Cg?si=TYG5hpko3ZnrljYk&t=42

U.S. National Archive: Washington International was picking up UFO returns. People were reporting sightings of strange lights in the sky.

Project Bluebook was a study created by the U.S. Air Force to investigate unidentified flying objects. It was created just as the ‘flying saucer’ era reached its peak in the early ‘50s. The Cold War was looming over the U.S during this time, anxiety was in the air, and leaders were highly concerned about national security.

However, after seventeen years of data collection and analysis, the project was shut down in 1969, following the release of the Condon Report, which concluded that the study of UAPs would not yield any major scientific breakthroughs, and that there was no real evidence that UAPs were connected to extraterrestrial life.

HARRIS: It’s been played out in popular culture like the X-Files and other movies where the government’s investigation is often seen as some kind of cover story for the existence of UFOs that the government has been hiding. I mean, Independence Day –

https://youtu.be/f2LD_bPdot8?si=TjIGbM0PUhCTisX8&t=75

Independence Day: No, you had the spaceship and you had the bodies. They were all locked up in a bunker, right? Area 51. You knew then! And you did nothing.

HARRIS: I mean famously another movie that kind of plays on this, But It’s important to note that the government was covering up the truth about unidentified flying objects. Almost certainly some of these UFOs that people saw in the ’40s and ’50s and during the Cold War were top-secret military experimental aircraft that the military was building and did not want the Soviet Union or anyone else to know about. So I think that, arguably, the investigation of UFOs by the government kind of feeds an idea that they are covering something up and distracts people maybe years ago from the real research that the government was doing into top-secret aircraft. But where you’ve seen in recent times the whole military and government examination of UAP start to get crossed in with the question about extraterrestrial life. I think this really begins back in around 2017 when the New York Times first reported on the existence of a secret Pentagon program that was looking into UFOs, that was essentially establishing an office to try to determine, well, what are these things? Now that was done in the context of trying to understand are they a military threat, are they a national security threat? And that is still kinda the posture the military takes with regards to UAPs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHnyMQ1ME34

ABC30 Action Network: A new report by the New York Times shows the Pentagon spent $22 million researching the possible existence of UFOs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1TCrs8GZDk

Fox News: We may not know if aliens exist but it turns out our government had a special team of UFO hunters that was trying to find out.

In 2017, The New York Times made a splash with their front-page exposé on a secret $22 million Pentagon project: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Hidden deep in the $600 billion Defense budget, the program was kept under wraps for a decade, investigating ‘aerial threats’ as a part of a national security protocol. Eyewitness encounters and video footage of UAPs captured by military personnel were all investigated by the Defense Department, even long after officials said the program had been shut down.

Many parts of this mysterious initiative remain classified, but the news shifted the tone around UAP research – which has predictably raised questions about whether or not the government has found evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth. And if the Times report wasn’t stimulating enough, 2023 had even more in store for UFO enthusiasts.

HARRIS: Last year we saw some pretty dramatic testimony from a intelligence officer who worked on a UAP task force who testified before Congress saying that he believed the government was hiding evidence of a crash retrieval program that had recovered alien technology and in some cases alien biology, corpses, we could think of it, proof of extraterrestrial life and that the government was hiding this.

You might remember this – because it was all over the internet. Intelligence officer David Grusch made headlines with a dramatic congressional testimony:

https://youtu.be/lcrCMLVk614?si=51_ppjMotBozmeu0&t=204

David Grusch/C-SPAN: I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional read-ons when I requested it.

https://youtu.be/nofeMMRGuyI?si=YTtpyuAymRuGkYXJ&t=49

WUSA9: Do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs?

David Grusch/WUSA9: Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over four years.

HARRIS: And it raises the question of, all right, is what we’re seeing here an actual government whistleblower with proof of extraterrestrials who has just revealed it to the public? Or is what we’re seeing an illustration of a big kind of urban legend that has existed within the intelligence community for decades? And I think I’m in the latter camp on this one right now, because until somebody comes forward with something in the way of really concrete evidence, I don’t know why we should believe, based on pure hearsay, that the government’s been hiding aliens for 80 years. Never mind the fact that that would be such an explosive piece of information, I find it nearly impossible to believe that it would’ve stayed secret for this long among the thousands of people who would’ve had to know about it. I mean, the public fascination and the imagination around UAPs and UFOs is huge, and I don’t think that you’re ever going to disaggregate that from serious UAP research, but maybe we shouldn’t try. I think what is better is that when people like journalists or U.S. officials are talking about this is to always distinguish ‘what are we talking about here? Are we saying this is evidence of extraterrestrial life or are we saying this is evidence of the Chinese drone?’ If adversary countries are developing technology that behaves in ways that we don’t understand that is capable of physical or aerodynamic properties that we don’t understand, that’s a really important thing for the military and the intelligence community to look at and to be asking, “Why don’t we understand how this works?” Both in terms of what the United States could learn from it, but also how it might defend against it if it in fact is a threat.

So that’s the defense department’s take on UAPs. But recently, science organizations have been more present in the conversation. After years of secrecy, major agencies like NASA are now wading into the UAP issue.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xhkNuJuWuXU

ABC7NY: NASA held its first public meeting on UFOs today, a year after launching a study into unexplained sightings. And in the meeting, the Department of Defense says they are tracking more than 800 reports of objects spotted in the skies that are in question.

https://youtu.be/5ODiMDCPbrg?si=dM_ALL3Bg16JSgGH&t=14

NBC News: NASA’s announcement coming on the heels of a new office set up at the Pentagon to investigate top secret encounters between pilots and unidentified aerial phenomena flying in restricted airspace.

In 2022, NASA launched an independent study team dedicated to researching UAPs. Mandated by the U.S. government to publish an annual report, NASA scientists examine potential UAP sightings throughout the United States each year.

In the most recent report from 2023, the team shared that they evaluated around 800 cases of UAP sightings, only a fraction of which were deemed truly anomalous, or unexplainable. NASA stated that the team found no evidence for the “extraterrestrial nature” of UAPs but that there is still a lack of comprehensive data to support any conclusions.

HARRIS: I think it’s a big step that NASA is getting into this investigation, because number one, they’re scientists, right? They follow the scientific method. They use data and rigorous analysis to try to answer questions. They don’t leap to conclusions. Their findings are not going to be classified. I think the fact that they can talk openly about this in a way that the military and the intelligence agencies don’t want to do is really beneficial and helpful. I think it also underscores the seriousness with which the government is taking investigation of UAPs, both as a potential national security threat, but, you know, also potentially as an investigation into new atmospheric phenomena. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that are happening on Earth that we don’t fully understand. We don’t understand everything about what happens in the environment. And I think that NASA getting into this is a signal that they think that there is some valid scientific inquiry here, which is very encouraging to people who want to know more about what these things are.

SIERRA: But you would agree that the truth is out there?

HARRIS: Oh, the truth is definitely out there. It’s always out there. It’s just around the corner. And I do think that, look, I am very much in the camp of, please, let’s continue to keep looking for evidence of life beyond earth. I think it’s a totally valid and fascinating and compelling, and I would argue even necessary topic to explore. But if anybody out there listening to this has a picture of the crashed spacecraft or can really show it to me, you know how to find me and I will listen to you. Believe me, I will listen. ‘Cause I want to believe.

All of this debunking is obviously a little bit disappointing for the millions of people who are eager to know more about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. But just because UAPs aren’t the right place to go looking for it doesn’t mean that the question of alien life is absurd. Quite the opposite actually. And while conspiracy theorists pour over grainy photos, scientists are hard at work all over the world seeking evidence that we aren’t alone in the universe. After a quick break, we’ll speak to two scientists from the European Space Agency to hear more about the real search for extraterrestrial life.

https://youtu.be/OfpSXI8_UpY?si=wKXguAy4BN9uMGgv&t=39

Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen. I think something is happening.

https://youtu.be/JCdnv3AP0eM?si=lMYzSFv3W-aLReRY&t=13

Since biblical times, man has witnessed and recorded strange manifestations in the sky.

https://youtu.be/eeWPnGsY-Xc?si=66LuXIXUAl_zR6vx&t=11

Come out where I can see you. What do you want? What are you doing?

https://youtu.be/QZS_W1tAkLs?si=SKHrgWZbj-eaf94a&t=58

He’s a man from outer space, and we’re taking him to a spaceship.

Well, can’t he just beam up?

This is reality today.

Kai-Uwe SCHROGL: Are we alone is certainly a question which is not only scientific, it’s also humanistic, it’s also political.

This is Kai-Uwe Schrogl. He’s the president of the International Institute of Space Law, a global association of space lawyers that aim to foster international cooperation on the governance and distribution of space-based resources. Pretty cool!

SCHROGL: And when you look at the big steps humanity made with Copernicus, with Darwin, with Sigmund Freud, this will be the next question. When we understand or will understand or possibly understand that we are not alone. This might change our complete mindset, it might change also how we cooperate with each other. And I think this will be a big, big jump in the way we look at ourselves.

Philippe AILLERIS: This is a very old question, which has fascinated humanity since the beginning of time.

And this is Philippe Ailleris. He’s a project controller at the European Space Agency’s Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands.

AILLERIS: So now I would say that because of the technological developments, new space observatories, new means of detection, we are progressing towards being able to answer the possibility of alien life in the universe and if we are alone or not.

All over the world there are scientists loosely organized under the acronym SETI which is the collective term for the ‘search for extraterrestrial intelligence.’ There’s actually even a SETI Institute, which houses around a hundred researchers dedicated to investigating the prevalence of life outside of Earth.

SIERRA: If it’s so important though, why isn’t alien-related research taken seriously? Is there always going to be a taboo around this topic?

SCHROGL: Many of the big scientific breakthroughs have also been breaking taboos. Copernicus certainly was also breaking a big taboo, since the Earth was not anymore in the center of the universe. And as I said, this is now the same quality and everybody is reluctant to break the big taboo. Even if we feel, and now much much better than let’s say fifty years ago, understand that there might be cases or there might be possibilities that there is non-human intelligent life outside our solar system. You cannot validate anything if you keep it secret. You have to bring it into a scientific process, into the process of providing it to the scientists who then shall judge with their methodologies whether it’s something real or can be discarded as an error or whatsoever. It is the basic assumption that when a scientist or any non-military or civilian person makes an observation, he or she shall present it to the public for further investigation and for a check by others, scientists in particular, who have the methodologies to do so. Only through that we can gain a better understanding and also an assurance of what is there and what has been observed actually.

SIERRA: What current missions are happening that involve the search for extraterrestrial life? Are there any happening right now?

AILLERIS: We have in Europe, we’ll have this future rover that will go on Mars. It’s called ExoMars. It will have a drill, it will drill two meters below the surface in order to find some trace of microbes, right? Because we know that on Mars many years ago, there was a lot of water. And because it doesn’t have an atmosphere, the radiation of the Sun would kill everything which is at the surface. So we have to dig a little bit deep to try to find a trace.

The European Rover project, which is one of many sent to mars in recent years, is just one of several underway worldwide that are seeking evidence of microbial life in the solar system.

So why would such a discovery matter? The answer is a little word called abiogenesis – the theory of how life begins from inorganic matter. Earth existed for billions of years as a lifeless ball of magma and iron without any life at all. But then, somehow, eventually, inert molecules of water, carbon dioxide, and other materials became self-replicating, ‘living’ matter. Nobody knows exactly how it happens, nor how rare the process is throughout the universe. Was Earth home to the only case of abiogenesis? Or does it happen every day somewhere in the cosmos?

If scientists discovered microbial life on Mars it would be a massive breakthrough, and could imply that microbial life is relatively common throughout the universe. This would leave scientists with fascinating questions, including the question of “How common it is for microbes to slowly evolve into thinking creatures, as scientists say they did here on Earth?”

SCHROGL: What would actually be spectacular and we have ideas but no concrete plans yet, is to have a sample return from an icy moon of Jupiter. This might take 20 or 30 years to be accomplished, but it is one of these fantastic and really exciting projects which our scientists have come up with. It will cost a lot of money. But we could do it. We have already been landing on a moon of Saturn with the Cassini-Huygens mission, a U.S.-European mission. We certainly will also be able to land on Jupiter. And imagine the excitement of having a sample, not only back from Mars, but even back from an icy moon of Jupiter, maybe with a little microbe in it. That would really change our view of the solar system.

AILLERIS: I think the James Webb Space Telescope, you will have another telescope, it’s called Habitable World Telescope, which will be really focusing on detecting exoplanets and really characterizing them in detail. So future observatories for me will be the most promising to find something in the universe, both in terms of biosignatures or technosignatures.

Okay so let’s backup here. Planets outside our solar system are known as exoplanets. And while there are probably billions of these exoplanets in our galaxy, they are not easy to spot from light years away. Starting in 1992, scientists have used tools like the James Webb telescope to identify roughly 5,000 exoplanets so far. And the technology is constantly improving.

Unfortunately, just as space agencies continue to conduct methodical – and long – expeditions far across the solar system and scan the skies for radio signals or transmissions from outer space, some here on Earth seem to be taking a less scientific approach, with potentially high costs to the credibility of those scientific missions. A day before the release of the NASA UAP Study Team’s final 2023 report, the government of Mexico heard testimony from UFO researchers who claimed to have discovered mummified alien bodies, which, of course, turned out to be a hoax.

SIERRA: What do you think about the cost – the cost of the sort of tidal wave of fake evidence that’s frequently circulated about UAPs or, you know, like the stunts we recently saw in Mexico’s Congress, how does that affect everything?

AILLERIS: I think it’s very counterproductive, extremely counterproductive and in fact the story of the Mexican mummies or whatever was just issued a few days after the NASA report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U8DmVcigSM

ABC7 News: These small mummified specimens were unveiled at Mexico’s first ever UFO hearing yesterday. Yeah, it looks like ET. You’re right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yajWXLv71vw

CBS Chicago News: It looks to me like something you got at the Spirit Halloween store. You know what, I’ll tell you right now, Spirit is rushing to produce this.

AILLERIS: And the fact that there was a NASA report was unprecedented. In ‘78, President Carter asked NASA to get involved in the study of UAP and they refused. And as you said at the beginning, many people don’t know anything about this field. They have this Hollywood cliché about it. So overall, the governments, they don’t see the need for special policy and the UN started the Outer Space Treaty 1967 but it hadn’t been updated yet because as we all know, there are much more pressing problems than this on our planet. So this is not a priority at all.

SIERRA: I am curious about the idea of global cooperation. Both in terms of countries collaborating on the search for alien life, but also the question of how the world might come together to respond to contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. We all know the movies, of course, where the aliens always end up talking to the American president.

SCHROGL: There are no binding protocols around scientists and non-governmental organizations, international non-governmental organizations and associations, professional associations, have been thinking about that. They have been developing a protocol in particular inside the International Academy for Astronautics, which also reached out to many other professional organizations in setting up already in the course of the 80s, but then updating it in 2010 for a protocol, how to handle first of all the information gathering, then the analysis, then the dissemination of any observations and then even leading to the question of who should be involved in preparing and deciding upon an answer. And that this is not only one individual, that it is not only one country is absolutely clear. It has to be an international, maybe even a global approach to such a way of responding. And the question certainly also is, “Should there be a kind of global, universal understanding and position on what you want to respond and how you want to respond? Shall that be organized in the United Nations system, which is the only forum for that matter? And shall there be a consensus on how and what we want to achieve with such a response?” This of course goes much further than what has been prepared as protocol so far and it certainly also changes with the political constellations, the global political constellations throughout the decades we have seen. I guess during the next decade, we will see a change in perception, not only public perception, but also the perception of decision makers, which will bring this topic forward, on the one hand, due to considerations of security – national security, international security, but also based on scientific investigations.

Governments around the world are slowly but surely getting involved in SETI research. China launched the world’s largest radio telescope called FAST, which aims to find the origins of interstellar communication signals through sending radio bursts to outer space. Other international radio telescopes utilized for SETI research include the LOFAR in Europe, the MWA in Australia, and the Lovell Telescope in the UK.

And this change of perception on the governmental level might make all the difference.

AILLERIS: The discovery of alien life has the potential to put people together. And we will know finally, we are not alone in this vast universe. So I think maybe we need this as well to find a place in the universe for humankind.

SCHROGL: I also think that it will happen eventually and it will be good. We should be positive about it. It will be the magnitude of the Copernican change, which also did not come with a lot of problems and questions and also fights, but in the end, enlightenment developed out of that. And maybe some new enlightenment could develop out of such a contact, out of the understanding that we need to have a completely different approach to what we have here on Earth and how we should treat it. And also the way we have to understand ourselves as only a part of something much larger.

For resources used in this episode and more information, visit CFR.org/whyitmatters and take a look at the show notes. If you ever have any questions or suggestions or just want to chat with us, email at [email protected] or you can hit us up on Twitter at @CFR_org.

Why It Matters is a production of the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions expressed on the show are solely that of the guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

This episode was produced by Asher Ross, Molly McAnany, Noah Berman and me, Gabrielle Sierra. Our sound designer is Markus Zakaria. Our interns for this episode were Rhea Basarkar and Kalsey Colotl. Robert McMahon is our Managing Editor, and Doug Halsey is our Chief Digital Officer. Extra help for this episode was provided by Mariel Ferragamo and Megan Fahrney. Our theme music is composed by Ceiri Torjussen.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your audio. For Why It Matters, this is Gabrielle Sierra signing off. See you soon

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This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Council on Foreign Relations can be found here.

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