Inside the U.F.O. Report

From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, after years of secretly investigating U.F.O.s, U.S. intelligence officials have released an unclassified report summarizing everything they found.

Kevin Roose spoke with our colleague, national security reporter Julian Barnes, about what we now know and whether this report settles anything.

It’s Wednesday, June 30.

Julian. Greetings, fellow earthling.

Greetings. Greetings from planet Earth.

So last week, we got this long-awaited government report about U.F.O.s. And we’re going to get into the report, because I have a lot of questions about it, but first I just want to kind of acknowledge how strange and exciting it is that I am here talking to you, a reporter who covers U.S. intelligence agencies, about unidentified flying objects.

Yeah. Things have come a long way. But one little correction, Kevin. We don’t call them U.F.O.s anymore. They’re now called U.A.P.s, which stands for unidentified aerial phenomena.

Very fancy.

Very fancy.

But I actually don’t quite understand why this report really exists. Why was this published, and why was it published last week?

Well, back in 2017, my colleagues at The New York Times published an article that revealed the existence of a secret government program collecting and analyzing information involving U.F.O. sightings.

Not only did the Times expose the existence of this shadowy program, but it also ultimately published three leaked videos of actual sightings by Navy pilots.

The first one was back from 2004. And it shows an object that’s white and oval, and it’s flying low over the ocean. It churns the water. It creates a disturbance.

The next set of videos come from this tour of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, which, in 2014 and 2015, was off the coast of Virginia and Florida. And there were a series of encounters between Navy pilots and a possible object.

We have two videos.

The first of these shows an object zooming over the ocean waves. And we hear the pilots talking about it.

They’re questioning what they’re seeing, and one says, wow, what is that, man? Look at it fly.

You hear the amazement in their voice. And there’s another video, too, with a strange object that’s flying against the wind.

The pilots keep saying it’s a drone, but you can kind of sense that they’re uncertain about it.

So these videos are out there in 2017 and 2019, and it caught the attention of the public, the Pentagon and the Congress. So in 2020, Congress demanded the government issue an unclassified report telling the world what it knew about these U.A.P.s.

And that’s the report that we got on Friday.

That’s right. That’s the report.

OK, so let’s crack this report open. It’s a PDF. It’s from the director of national intelligence. And it’s called “Preliminary Assessment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” I assume you have it in front of you. And I think the main thing I want to know, and the main thing I think a lot of people listening probably want to know, right off the bat is: Does the U.S. government know about the existence of aliens or alien life on Earth?

It’s not going to be that easy, Kevin. No, the government didn’t say there are aliens out there. As much as people might have wanted it, the report is not a deep dive into extraterrestrials. But what it does cover is a whole range of what might be out there. The report talks about 144 incidents, 144 unexplained phenomenon that the U.S. military recorded or saw, took pictures of. But there’s not a lot of detail about most of these things. They remain kind of murky.

And what makes these 144 things — incidents — interesting, versus just being blurry pictures or optical illusions?

Well, we get the sense from reading the report that most of these 144 aren’t that interesting. But there is a subset, a subset of 18 that are different. They exhibit unusual behavior. Some of them are accelerating fast, faster than anything the United States military has the technology for, or some of those 18 are moving without a visible source of propulsion. And it is these videos and observations that have the interest of the intelligence community.

So a small minority of these incidents, like 18 of them, aren’t just kind of unidentified things in the sky that some military pilot saw — they actually seem to be demonstrating behavior that defies the laws of physics?

Well, I don’t know if it defies the laws of physics, but it defies earthly technology as we understand it.

And has the government figured out a way to explain these 144 incidents?

They have explained one of them. 143 remain unexplained.

Wait a minute. So what you’re telling me is that the government investigated 144 U.A.P.s, things in the air, and of those 144, they only managed to come up with a definitive explanation for one?

That’s right.

And what was the explanation for that one?

It was a large deflating balloon.

Huh.

We have no idea what the explanation for these 143 incidents might be, but in this report, the government gave us five basic categories of possible explanations — sort of five ways to think about how these might be explained or understood. And even if it doesn’t resolve the 143, it gives us a way of thinking about it.

And that one that is explained, that large deflating balloon, the government places that one in their first category — the rather boring airborne clutter.

So we’re talking balloons, birds, just like anything random in the air that’s not actually all that exciting.

That’s right.

OK, so that’s one possible explanation. What else do we have?

Another one is natural phenomenon. I mean, there is a lot on this Earth that we haven’t explained or don’t fully understand, and could be things like ball lightning or meteorological effects that at first appear to a pilot or an infrared camera as something crazy, but are just something that we don’t see every day but are very much of this world.

Got it. So those two categories — airborne clutter and natural phenomena — kind of feel like the most sort of mundane explanations for what these phenomena might be. What’s the third category?

The third category is a U.S. secret project. And that’s probably the first of the interesting answers. Could this be a secret American drone that was observed by the Navy pilots?

Julian, I’m a little confused. Like, why would the U.S. government’s own military technology be a possible explanation here? Like, wouldn’t the government already know pretty definitively whether it was their own stuff up there or not?

You know, it’s kind of funny because the government is asking themselves the same question. I was talking to an official who told me about a senior general who was getting a briefing about the U.A.P. report, and turned to the briefer and said, don’t we know if these are our classified programs? And the briefer said, we don’t think they are.

Now, it seems absolutely crazy. I mean, shouldn’t the U.S. know whether it’s their classified black program or not? And I think the answer is they think it isn’t their programs, but they’re leaving the option open because maybe there’s stuff they don’t know. Maybe a U.S. contractor was testing something, and the government wasn’t fully aware of it. Maybe there’s still corners of classified programs they haven’t looked at yet. So they were pretty clear they don’t have any evidence that this is any secret U.S. programs, but they’re not ruling it out completely either.

Got it. OK. So let’s talk about the fourth category of possible explanation here in the report. What is that?

That is advanced technology developed by an adversarial power, in this case Russia or China. An example would be a stealthy drone or an advanced hypersonic aircraft, meaning something that can travel far beyond the speed of sound. The key element here is technology that the United States doesn’t have in its arsenal.

This seems like it would be a bad scenario, right? I mean, if one of our adversaries had developed technology not only that was more advanced than U.S. military technology, but that was so advanced that we didn’t even understand how it worked.

Yeah, that would be very bad on two fronts. One, it would mean our military scientists had fallen behind potential adversaries, and it would mean that American intelligence had missed these advances and did not understand what Russia and China were capable of fielding. But we should foot stamp that the report finds no evidence, there is no evidence that this is advanced Russia or Chinese technology.

You said there are five categories of possible explanation for these U.A.P.s. We’ve gone through four. So what’s the last one?

That is the catch-all category called “Other.”

Is that just code for aliens?

Well, yes and no.

We’ll be right back.

So Julian, let’s talk about this fifth category, this “other” category.

Yes. The “other” category is the catch-all category for the things the government can’t explain. And they hinted strongly that these Navy videos that we’ve been watching over and over again are in that category. But you know, they didn’t explain any further. They certainly didn’t mention aliens, but they didn’t also give us any other examples of what might fall into the other category. Other just means they can’t explain it.

So it seems like they’re steering clear of directly naming the one thing that a lot of people have a lot of questions about, which is extraterrestrial life on Earth, aliens. Is there a reason for that? Like, why do they seem to be going out of their way to avoid mentioning that theory?

They very much are going out of their way to not say the word aliens, or do anything to acknowledge that the phenomenon could be extraterrestrial. That’s a signal of how unlikely they think this explanation is.

But given that we know that there are a ton of people out there who have thought for decades that the government is engaged in this giant cover-up — Area 51, Roswell, you know the stories — given that they clearly understand that that theory is out there, why not address it more fully? Why not just be direct and say it’s not aliens, or it’s very, very unlikely to be aliens?

I think that’s a great question. It’s one I’ve asked. I’ve wondered why they’re not more direct about saying that. And I feel like by failing to categorize these things, by failing to state publicly that there’s no evidence of alien visitation, that they are, in fact, giving life to something that some people want to really stamp out.

I don’t know, I guess I’m just wondering, like, why they don’t want to take that seriously as a possibility. Is it just because they don’t want to feed into conspiracy theories, or is there some other reason?

I mean, I think the reason is the U.S. government doesn’t think that this is how we’re going to find signs of alien life. Serious scientists think the way we’re going to get to evidence of other forms of life in this universe is not through a fuzzy video taken on the surface of Earth. It’s not through a Navy targeting pod. It’s from a really powerful telescope. A more serious scientist thinks that is where we’re going to find proof that we are not alone in this universe, not from a flying saucer video.

And just humor me here. I know I’m going to sound a little bit like a conspiracy theorist here, but we know that the government has not always been totally forthcoming about what it knew about U.F.O.s or U.A.P.s. I mean, we didn’t even know that the government was looking into this stuff at all until our colleagues reported about it several years ago. So why should we believe what the intelligence community, what the government is saying now? What reason do we have to think that they’re telling us everything they know?

That’s a very important point.

There is a long history of the U.S. government allowing U.F.O. theories to develop in order to mask or hide what they’re up to, right? The Roswell crash was a U.S. military balloon designed to sort of spy on Soviet nuclear tests.

Remind me of what happened there.

So back in 1947, there was this high-tech balloon that the U.S. military developed and was testing near Roswell, New Mexico. It was designed to collect data on Soviet nuclear tests to get a better sense of how far the Soviet Union had advanced. It crashed. People took pictures in the local press. Newspaper photos were published. The military said it was a crashed balloon, but wasn’t really giving a full account of what happened. And as a result, we had decades and decades of conspiracy theories about an alien landing in Roswell, New Mexico.

I didn’t actually know that that’s where the Roswell conspiracy theories came from. It was a balloon designed to spy on Soviet military?

Yeah. And in the 1950s and the 1960s, a study by the U.S. government said almost 50 percent of U.F.O. sightings could be attributed to the C.I.A. testing the U2 spy plane. And then after that, the SR-71 Blackbird. That also created U.F.O. sightings. And the government lied about it and said it was natural phenomenon. It allowed the conspiracy theories to grow in the name of protecting these very important secret programs.

Right. So in other words, given what we know about previous eras of reported U.F.O. sightings — people taking photos of strange things in the sky that actually turned out to be military experiments that the government lied about or was not forthcoming about — maybe it’s rational for people to be a little skeptical of the government’s explanations for this latest round of U.A.P. sightings.

Yeah, it is rational. On the other hand, we have a government that has learned some lessons from that era, and we are in an era where the rise of conspiracy theories is considered a pretty important threat. And so I think it is also a case that we have the government doing its best not to lie and not to mislead. I mean, it’s impossible to tell, right, when the government is lying. And here, they don’t have the answers, but when you talk to officials, they’re not talking around it in the same way as when they are trying to not answer questions about America’s hypersonic technologies.

Right. They’re not saying, oh, you’re just seeing things, those are just blips in the sky or it’s ball lightning or it’s a sensor error. They’re actually admitting that there are some things that they don’t know and can’t explain.

That’s right.

Is this the first of many reports like this? Do you think there will be others?

They’ve said so explicitly. They’ve said that this is a preliminary report. They’ve laid out a 90-day plan to improve how they collect information, improve how they analyze this. So yeah, we’re going to get more U.F.O. reports.

U.A.P. reports?

Yeah, thank you for that correction. U.A.P..

I know this is a very speculative question, but do you think we’ll ever get to the bottom of what these U.A.P.s are? Will we ever know for certain what’s going on?

I think we can get a better answer than we have now. And I think what it’s going to require is bringing some scientific knowledge, some outside scientific knowledge into the process to work with the military officers, to work with the intelligence analysts and really look at how this information is being collected, what information they have and what the possibilities are. And we need to bring this into mainstream science, that there are — and let people understand that there are some important scientific questions here that need to be answered, and it’s worth people’s time to look into it.

Right, to sort of destigmatize not only reporting sightings of unidentifiable things in the air, but to destigmatize researching and studying what those things are.

That’s exactly right. And the truth could be very boring, or more boring than alien visitation.

Right. Could just be some balloons, some birds, some solar flares or whatever. Could be military technology that we don’t understand. Could be aliens, but we shouldn’t hold our breath.

I’m probably a little more Scully than Mulder, so don’t hold your breath.

OK. Julian, thank you so much.

Thank you.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, as the search for survivors at a collapsed Florida tower continued, a letter emerged from the president of the building’s condo association, warning residents three months ago that damage to the building had, quote, “gotten significantly worse.” The letter referred back to a 2018 inspection that had already identified major structural damage, and said that since then the damage had accelerated, and required costly repairs. The letter and 2018 inspection suggest that the building’s leaders and residents were aware of problems well before the collapse, which killed at least 11 people and has left about 150 people unaccounted for. And —

— the capital of the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which has been brutally occupied by the country’s military, has been retaken by Tigrayan fighters in a major turning point in the nearly eight-month-long conflict.

The Ethiopian government’s military offensive in Tigray has unleashed civil war, atrocities and famine. But over the past few days, the military withdrew from Tigray’s capital after losing ground to Tigrayan fighters. That development is a stinging setback for Ethiopia’s authoritarian leader, who predicted a quick and decisive takeover of the region.

Today’s episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson, Luke Vander Ploeg and Daniel Guillemette. It was edited by Liz O. Baylen and M.J. Davis Lin, engineered by Marion Lozano, includes original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop and Marion Lozano.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.