What Should Smart People Think About UFOs?

What should everyday Americans think about aliens?

My first true political conviction was that they were real, they were here, and the government was covering it up. It was sci-fi, I confess, that did it. I obsessively watched The X-Files as a kid, and I became convinced that it was basically a documentary. Over time, of course, I steadily grew more skeptical, but as a teenager, I talked to a close family friend—a distinguished medical doctor—who believed in aliens. He claimed to have had patients who worked in the government and had told him about these beings. He said that they weren’t extraterrestrial, but inter-dimensional. They could defy our physics. They could even walk through walls.

Now I’m an adult, with a child and a house, which is full of books by the great authors on the subject of aliens: the French computer scientist Jacques Vallée, the journalist Leslie Kean, and the religion professor Diana Pasulka, just to name a few. My wife and I have even visited the sites of supposed abductions and UFO crashes. I’ve mostly treated alien visitations as a distinctly American kind of folklore. But there might be a lot more to it than that.

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Look, I know you sound like something of a nutcase when you talk about this stuff. This has long been treated as a topic for cranks, paranoiacs, and dimwits—the sort of people unable to distinguish the difference between sci-fi and actual science. But in the last decade, that has slowly started to change.

In 2017, The New York Times unveiled footage recorded in 2004 of some kind of oblong-shaped orb flying near a U.S. Navy exercise off the coast of San Diego. There’s no easy way to dismiss that 2004 footage, which is now popularly known as the “Tic Tac” incident. Since then, we’ve also had whistleblower after whistleblower show up before Congress with wild stories about American UFO retrieval programs and efforts to reverse-engineer crashed spacecraft. In 2023, retired Air Force officer David Grusch, a decorated Afghan war vet who also served in the intelligence community, testified to Congress of his knowledge of a supposed crash retrieval program. He even told reporters that Benito Mussolini’s Italy recovered a crashed UFO in the 1930s, which was then handed over to U.S. forces at the end of World War II via the Vatican.

More recently, there’s been another story flying around all this. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, the government might not have been suppressing our knowledge of UFOs. In fact, it might have been behind it. Perhaps UFOs, as we know them, were an invention to hide what the U.S. military was actually up to at places like Area 51, where bizarre-looking spy planes and stealth jets were tested.

And yet, and yet, when President Barack Obama was asked about aliens on a podcast earlier this year, he said: “They’re real.” He then clarified that statement, saying he was only speculating due to the high odds they exist, but President Donald Trump was quick to accuse him of releasing confidential information. Trump then said he was ordering the release of government files on the phenomenon. (He did not say when this release would occur.) The fact that current and retired presidents have been talking about this at all is a huge shift from where we were at the start of this century.

What do they know that we don’t? Why do clean-cut senators like South Dakota’s Mike Rounds seem so convinced that the government isn’t telling Congress the truth about this phenomenon? Why are bureaucrats with security clearances testifying under oath that the government has UFOs?

I want some answers. So I’ve interviewed a handful of experts, and for the next month, we’ll be publishing an interview a week. I’m not here to convince you of anything. This is not one of those History channel shows that runs with the most wild hypothesis. I’m here, as they say, just asking questions. I’ll probably get some stuff wrong. When I make mistakes, I want you to correct me. This is an important subject. And I want us to go on a journey of discovery together.

But enough of what I have to say. I want to introduce you to our guests. In this four-part series, we’re going to speak to journalist Michael Shellenberger, physicist Avi Loeb, oceanographer and retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Diana Pasulka.

And today, to begin our quest, we have Michael Shellenberger—who has studied this phenomenon for years. He has even testified to Congress about what he’s uncovered. Watch the whole video to see what he has to say.

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