Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Garrett Graff:

We could have missed billion-year civilizations. I mean, things that have come and gone and would be far longer and more technologically advanced than anything that we could possibly imagine.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Garrett Graff. He’s a journalist and historian who has written about Robert Mueller’s FBI, America’s nuclear war contingency plans, cyber warfare Watergate, and September 11th. His latest book dives into another intense element of American history, our national obsession with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The book is called, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here and Out There. We talk about what alien contact might look like, the viral nature of conspiracy theories and the recent national resurgence in UFO interest. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from John Sipher who asks, “How will the story surrounding Fani Willis impact the Georgia case? Can it go on without her and the special prosecutor? So John, you’re obviously talking about a wave of controversy surrounding reports that have emerged out of the case in Georgia that suggests that Fani Willis has had some kind of relationship undisclosed, of a romantic nature with someone who she appointed to be a special prosecutor in the case, Nathan Wade. Those allegations come from one of the defendants in the Georgia election case, Michael Roman. He has made a motion based on those allegations that not only must Fani Willis and the special prosecutor Nathan Wade be conflicted out of the case, and be removed from the case, but also that the indictment against him should be dismissed. Since he’s made those allegations and filed that motion, one of the other defendants, the most famous defendant, Donald Trump, has joined in the motion.

Now, your question about how the stories around this may impact the Georgia case, well, as an initial matter, putting aside the legal question, it gives a lot of grist and ammunition to critics of the prosecution and to supporters of Donald Trump. I don’t know all the details, Fani Willis has not said much about it other than defending the qualifications and the ability and the expertise of Nathan Wade, who she says is quite qualified and necessary to the ongoing prosecution of the former president and his co-defendants. But one might argue that in a very, very high stakes case, almost certainly the most important and high stakes case of a DA’s career, you want to be above reproach and not give grist or ammunition to your critics. Another impact is that the allegations have spawned a special committee in the Georgia State Senate that is intending to investigate this alleged misconduct and these allegations about an improper relationship and about the use of state money in connection with vacations that allegedly Fani Willis and Nathan Wade may have taken with each other.

So all this will play out certainly in the press, in the Senate Chamber and in the courtroom. My prediction, although I’m often loathe to make predictions, my prediction is that at some point, Nathan Wade, the appointed special prosecutor will step down. I think it’s a distraction, I think it raises a lot of questions, and whether it’s fair or not, I think he’s probably going to go. On the other hand, I don’t think Fani Willis will go. I think she will insist on remaining and will be permitted to remain in charge of the prosecution that she oversaw in the investigative stage, in the grand jury phase, and now as it goes to trial. As to your final question, can the case go on without her And the special prosecutor? Even though I think Fani Willis will not go anywhere, any case brought by a district attorney’s office or a US Attorney’s Office does not require the lead person to be on the case, whether it’s a US Attorney or a District Attorney.

If for some reason Fani Willis is removed from overseeing the trial or is held to be conflicted in some way, and or the special prosecutor meets the same fate, there are seasoned professionals in that office there can continue preparing for trial, conducting the trial and handling any appeals. In any given prosecutor’s office from time to time, the lead person in the office, the DA or the US attorney may be conflicted off a case, maybe they handled some part of it in private practice, maybe the person is connected to them in some way, either as a business associate or there’s a friendship there. But it’s not unusual for there to be recusals at the top of an office. That doesn’t mean the case stops, that doesn’t mean the other prosecutors in the office can’t carry on.

This question comes in an email from Valerie who writes, “There’s been a lot of comment on whether any of the Trump criminal prosecutions will be tried prior to the election. What about the period between a Trump victory on election day and inauguration day? Is there any reason why a trial could not take place during this period? And if such a trial results in a guilty verdict, what impact would that have? Would he become president despite the verdict?” Well, Valerie, thanks for your question. It’s a good question. It’s a good series of questions. I shudder at the hypotheticals that are embedded in your question, including the fact of a Trump victory. But there’s nothing that I know of in the law or the constitution that prevents Donald Trump from being tried at any point before the election or in that transition period between an election and inauguration day, whether Trump loses or wins the election.

And on the one hand, by the way, it might be perceived as a pretty good time to have a trial because there’s no election looming in the future. It can’t have an impact on the election. It’s a sort of, I guess, arguably quiet period during which a trial could take place. On the other hand, you might imagine how it will look to postpone a trial until that period and have one during the time when the next commander in chief who was the former commander in chief, is trying to assemble a cabinet, is trying to assemble a White House staff, is busy trying to prepare for his second stint at the presidency. And you might imagine that some judges wouldn’t love that period of time. But as a legal and constitutional matter, there is no bar. As for your related question, if the trial results in a guilty verdict, what impact would it have?

I’m not aware again of any legal or constitutional bar to Donald Trump even having been convicted of a crime from serving as president. Now, there’s a more complicated question, which I don’t really have an answer to, of what happens if he’s convicted of a crime before he takes office again in a sentence to prison. Depending on which case we’re talking about, I think there are higher or lower chances of there being a prison sentence associated with a guilty verdict. And in some of the cases, I think a term of imprisonment is rather unlikely. But the question of what happens if a convicted defendant is simultaneously supposed to take the reins back at the White House and also report to a correctional facility, that’s something that we’ve never encountered before, and I’m not sure how the country or the legal system would handle such a thing.

This question comes in an email from Jason who asks, “Could you explain why the amount awarded to E. Jean Carroll in her defamation trial against Donald Trump was so high?” Well, Jason, that’s a great question. As you have no doubt heard by now in E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial against Donald Trump, the jury in fairly record time, about two hours and 40 minutes or two hours and 45 minutes rendered a verdict awarding her total damages of $83.3 million, a portion of that compensatory and another portion of that punitive. And it’s I think, a legitimate question to ask why such a large number? And I think you can attribute it to a couple of very powerful arguments made by E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers at the trial. One is, and remember, Donald Trump has engaged in defamation after defamation, after defamation of E. Jean Carroll, even after being found liable on a prior occasion.

So the issue here is not just compensation, it’s not just punishment, it’s how do you get Donald Trump to stop? And E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers argued repeatedly in court, the jury has to determine “What it will take to get Donald Trump to stop.” And so that’s a question that turns on the identity and the wherewithal financially of the defendant in the case, Donald Trump. And so in a related argument, again and again and again, E. Jean, Carroll’s lawyers push the point about how Donald Trump is no ordinary defendant with ordinary means. At one point, the lawyer said, “The law says you can consider Donald Trump’s wealth as well as his malicious and spiteful continual conduct. It’ll take an unusually high punitive damages award to have any hope of stopping Donald Trump to have a chance of allowing Ms. Carroll’s life to return to normal.”

And by the way, in service of that argument about how the amount of punitive damages has to be high enough to have a deterrent effect on Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers repeatedly pointed out how Donald Trump had bragged and boasted about his own pocketbook and bank accounts and use his boasts of his wealth against him. So it’s an awfully large number, there’s a possibility it gets reduced either by Judge Kaplan in the district court or by a court of appeals. I think it’ll remain even if it’s reduced a very substantial and large number for the reasons that I described to you, because I think those arguments are compelling and meritorious.

But Donald Trump is unlike other defendants who usually learn the lesson after they first have defamed someone and are held accountable for it. So a combination of his persistence in maligning this plaintiff and his financial standing make this judgment not as outlandish as some people make it out to be. And by the way, the fact that Donald Trump has means is in some ways good news for E. Jean Carroll. And this case, is to be distinguished in that respect from the other high stakes defamation trial and verdict by two Georgia election workers against Rudy Giuliani, that verdict was in the amount of $148 million.

Now, whatever you think about Rudy Giuliani, he does not have 148 million. Those two women unfortunately, will probably not see anything but a fraction of the judgment. That’s not true in E. Jean Carroll’s case. At some point when appeals are exhausted and at the end of the day E. Jean Carroll will see, I suspect every penny of the judgment found in her favor.

THE INTERVIEW

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Garrett Graff. Garrett Graff knows a lot about UFOs, but are we getting the whole story? Garrett Graff, welcome to the show.

Garrett Graff:

Thanks so much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m very excited to have you to talk about something that has been an interest of mine and millions and millions of people for a very long time. But I want to start with something in the nature of nomenclature. And you probably know what I’m going to ask you. Your book is entitled, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government Search for Alien Life Here and Out There. So just as I felt with the demotion of Pluto from planet to whatever they call it now, because I used to have a great interest in astronomy, as some of my listeners know, we’re not supposed to call them UFOs anymore. Unidentified flying objects, we’re supposed to call them UAPs. And even UAP, I’m not sure exactly what it stands for. Can you enlighten us?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. So the funny thing is that these started off as I traced in the book, as flying saucers. That was how they first arrived in the national popular Imagination in the spring and summer of 1947. There was a high giggle factor, one might say, in talking about flying saucers. And so when the military stepped in to begin to study this and try to solve the mystery, they tried to popularize the term UFO, unidentified flying object, which was-

Preet Bharara:

And they succeeded.

Garrett Graff:

And they succeeded. And they meant to both destigmatize the conversations around flying saucers and also encompass and recognize the fact that not everything that was spotted in the sky was saucer shaped. So then you fast-forward a couple of decades and you end up with the modern era. When the US government really began to reengage on this issue in the last 10 or 15 years. They changed the nomenclature again in part to destigmatize the conversation around UFOs, which over the last 80 years has become just as much a giggle factor as the original flying saucer. And it was originally unidentified aerial phenomenon UAP, which was meant to encompass the idea that not all of the things that people are reporting are going to be physical objects, that some of them are going to be phenomenal.

Preet Bharara:

Could be lights or things, right.

Garrett Graff:

And then even more recently, they changed it again, and now unidentified anomalous phenomenon is the official UAP abbreviation. Because the government now also wants to encompass that not all of these things are flying or aerial. And that in fact, one of the things that the US government is particularly interested in is what you would call USOs, unidentified submerged objects or swimming Objects.

Preet Bharara:

I didn’t know about the swimming objects. Who’s doing this exactly? Is this Garrett, the deep state?

Garrett Graff:

So it’s funny that you say that, because-

Preet Bharara:

I mean, I was kind of joking.

Garrett Graff:

… you’re not quite as wrong as you think that you are with that joke, and we can talk about this more later. But I actually believe very strongly that you don’t get the modern era of conspiracies in political culture without the foundation of the UFO conspiracies of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. And that to me, in fact, there’s actually a very straight line from the UFO conspiracies of the 1980s to January 6th. And that for a whole bunch of reasons that we can discuss, and you probably have your own thoughts on, I am dubious of the idea that the government is involved in some large-scale cover-up of meaningful knowledge of alien craft or alien bodies. One of the things that covering national security for 20 years has taught me is to doubt government conspiracies because they presuppose a level of competence planning and forethought that is not-

Preet Bharara:

Our government is not that smart.

Garrett Graff:

… that is not on display in the rest of the work that the government does, but that there is actually, I think a very dark undertone to the UFO story that helps plant the idea of the deep state for the first time in American political culture in the 1980s.

Preet Bharara:

We’re going to get into all this, because I think it’s fascinating in the analog you just mentioned or the origin story of a lot of deep-seated conspiracy thinking in the minds of a lot of Americans and how it flows from the subject. But before we get to that, and this is a theme of your book and your writing, why is it even in the first place the job of the government to decide or to promote particular terminology or nomenclature? That’s not how it works when we’re talking about other things in our solar system, our galaxy, et cetera. Isn’t this usually the domain of scientists, some government, some otherwise? Why is this a government-directed thing?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. And that was one of the things that I actually really tried to untangle with this book, was tracing two threads that are normally considered parallel and treated very separately by journalists and historians. You have the wacky UFO history of flying saucers and little green men here on earth, and then you have the serious scientists doing serious astronomy work in what’s called, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence across the rest of the universe. And that these are subjects that normally people write about separately, but there’s actually a lot of overlap, and in fact, there’s a lot of arguing back and forth between the two camps.

It is in many ways the task of the military and the intelligence community to try to solve the mystery of what’s in our own airspace. That’s a very basic air force and NORAD, Northern Command-specific task. But that for much of the last 80 years, the science community has been really reticent to engage in the hunt for UFOs, the trying to untangle the mystery of UFOs and UAPs because they have been worried not wrongly, about that giggle factor. They’ve been worried about being taken seriously as scientists when you’re out there saying that you’re studying UFOs.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but it’s interesting. The giggle factor arises from what? Obviously, it is interesting and important to know and understand what’s out there, whether submerged as you just mentioned, or in the air, whether they are prototypes of weapons or other flying objects by our adversaries or even perhaps our allies. And then there’s the separate question, which is the other theme of your book and maybe the more important theme of your book and this inquiry, because when you ask the question, “Are there UFOs?” What you’re really asking as you say is, “Are we alone?” And that causes people to giggle in a way that maybe they shouldn’t. Do you agree with that?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. To me, one of the biggest revolutions I think we’ve had in human knowledge and understanding of the universe in the last quarter-century is that the math is almost inescapably on the side of the aliens.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, I was really struck by the math. Can you do some of it for us? Can you show your work as they say?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. So as late as the 1990s, we did not understand that there was a single planet outside of our own solar system. Now we understand that effectively every single star out across the universe is going to have planets, many of which will fall into what scientists call that Goldilocks Zone. Things that are not too hot, not too cold, could support water, could support an atmosphere, could support what we would recognize as life. And that across the universe, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of one sextillion habitable planets that’s a billion trillion habitable planets. So you could believe that-

Preet Bharara:

That’s a lot.

Garrett Graff:

Exactly. That’s a really, really big number. You could believe that the odds of life are low, the odds of intelligent life might be even lower, but it’s hard to look out across the universe and think that we are a one in sextillion chance, especially when you begin to realize how quickly on earth life began to appear. And this is one of the things that really begins to boggle my mind as I went through the thought experiments of this. The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming our understanding of the universe on a almost daily basis right now. And one of the things it has uncovered is it has photographed stars and solar systems far away that began to form as little as 300 million years after the creation of the universe, after the Big Bang.

Preet Bharara:

And the Big Bang, remind folks, the Big Bang is about 14 billion years ago.

Garrett Graff:

Sort of circa 14 billion, and that we are an incredibly young civilization on a pretty young planet in a pretty mediocre average solar system in a really, really old universe. And so our solar system’s about four, four and a half billion years old. So you begin to see these James Webb discovered galaxies and realize we could have missed billion-year civilizations. I mean things that have come and gone and would be far longer and more technologically advanced than anything that we could possibly imagine. And you could have had multi-billion year civilizations rise and fall across the universe before our solar system ever began to gather out of dust.

Preet Bharara:

There are two mathematical issues here as you just pointed out, but I just want to parse them. One is, given the multiplicity of stars that have habitable planets, it seems unfathomable, I agree, although I’m not a scientist, that somewhere out there perhaps in millions and millions of places, far-flung places in our galaxy and in other galaxies, there emerged life that evolved into intelligent life. If the Darwinian laws apply elsewhere, and I imagine that you would say that they do, the problem is three things have to be true for UFOs to be signs of extraterrestrial life, right? One, the existence of that emergence of life elsewhere. Two, the timing of that being simultaneous with our existence, which is pretty recent. And three that they had any interest in or would bother to show up here. Is that a fair analysis?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. And that last one actually to me was one of the most fun things to untangle and think about and write about in this book, which is we probably wildly mis-imagine what that first contact scenario would be. Hollywood has given us three different scenarios of how the aliens would make themselves known to people on earth. And they’re all wonderfully human-centric. They all presuppose, as you’re laying out there, that anyone would bother crossing interstellar space to visit us, which is on the surface-

Preet Bharara:

Intentional.

Garrett Graff:

Right, intentionally. Which is a pretty far-fetched idea once you begin to get into it. So you have these three scenarios. You have the Independence Day flying saucer over the White House, “Take me to your leader.” “We’re here to make friends.” Or “We’re here to harvest your organs for food and energy.”

Preet Bharara:

[inaudible 00:23:44] yes, right.

Garrett Graff:

You have the second scenario, which is the Jodie Foster contact radio message from outer space. And you have the third, which is the E.T. Stranded lone travelers type scenario. And when you get into this and begin to talk to the scientists who work on this, the problem with all three of those scenarios is that they are clear and unambiguous. And that the most likely scenario for what our first contact would be is going to be something far more confounding and ambiguous and mysterious. Because what we are most likely to actually encounter first, is some piece of space trash from another civilization, the equivalent of a broken spaceship or piece of wreckage or defunct space probe, not unlike another civilization uncovering our own Voyager or Pioneer space probes as they cross interstellar space as well.

And that Harvard astronomy chair, Avi Loeb talks about this as really the equivalent of a empty plastic bag blowing through our cosmic backyard, that we’re going to have this telescopic image someday and look up and say, “Well, that’s not from our Walmart. Whose Walmart do you think that bag came from?” And we’re going to be left with this question of, is this civilization nearby? Is this friend or foe? Does this civilization still exist? And that we will probably first recognize some sign of intelligent life without being clear at all what it actually means.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting to me that these scenarios that you describe, and I wonder what you think about this, are all incredibly self-regarding that in almost every scenario they presuppose not only that there’s intelligent life, not only that they would come here intentionally, not only that they would want to intermingle with us during the period of time that we’re here, but that we matter so much to them on the idea of invasion. Isn’t that also self-regarding? In other words, what does it say about human psyche that the doomsday scenario of attack from without is the most dominant of the three?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. Carl Sagan, probably the most famous astronomer of the 20th century. He was simultaneously the biggest proponent of that search for extraterrestrial intelligence out across the universe (SETI) and also the primary arch-skeptic that UFOs here represented signs of extraterrestrial life, but his argument was never that aliens didn’t visit Earth. It’s that no one would care or have noticed the existence of humans on earth, and that statistically you would expect aliens and intelligent civilizations to cycle through earth visiting every a hundred thousand or 200,000 years basically treating earth as we would treat a rest area on the Jersey Turnpike, a stopover randomly chosen on the way from one interesting place to another. And his argument was not that aliens wouldn’t visit Earth, it’s that the thing that you saw out your window last Tuesday night is statistically unlikely to be the one time in the last a hundred thousand or 200,000 years that an alien spacecraft came by.

Preet Bharara:

Is it also possible as we do the math, we can kind of do the math in an intelligent fashion as you did earlier, and say, well, there are this many stars in the universe. This percentage of them are likely to have habitable planets in the Goldilocks zone, and then you come up with this large number one sextillion. Isn’t it possible that none of these civilizations if they exist, because physics won’t allow it, none of them will ever be capable of or never have been capable of interstellar travel because they can’t travel at some fraction of we’re at the speed of light, and that this idea of intersecting civilizations just is as a matter of physics and math an impossibility?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. The bigger impossibility, and I’ll come back to the question of interstellar travel in a second, but when scientists began to study this and think about it in the ’50s and ’60s, one of the pioneers in the field, Frank Drake, put together something that was called the Drake equation, which has come to be probably the most famous equation of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And it lays out the variables of how you would know how many civilizations out there were capable of interstellar travel. And it’s how many planets are there, how many planets are… What percentage of those are habitable, on what percentage of habitable planets does life evolve, on what percentage of places where life evolve does intelligent life evolve, so on and so forth. The biggest factor in that equation though turns out to be what the scientists and astronomers call L which is the length of time an intelligent civilization lasts.

And if that number is in the tens of thousands that an intelligent civilization is only going to last 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 years, we are functionally alone in the universe, even if intelligent life is common. That basically there wouldn’t be enough civilizations around at any one time to ever notice the existence of the other ones. If that number L is a million years or a hundred million years or a billion years, our universe might team with life. And so to be part of this question ends up being this really profound and almost spiritual one, arguing for why humanity really needs to take care of itself, which is if you look around, here we are in 2024, there are a lot of reasons to expect that humanity doesn’t thrive for another thousand or 10,000 years.

Preet Bharara:

Or eight.

Garrett Graff:

Or another decade or another century even. And yet if we do, if we’re able to last think of all of the things we will discover about the world around us, about the universe around us. Think of the potential for the discovery of what humanity could still accomplish if we give ourselves the chance to last that. So then-

Preet Bharara:

You say, just, I want to point out what’s something you say that is obvious and known to everyone, but just when you put it this way, it was very stark and striking that almost everything we know about modern physics we’ve learned in the last a hundred years, which is the span of one lifetime.

Garrett Graff:

Yes. So almost exactly a year ago, the world’s oldest woman died. She was a French nun, she was 118 years old. Everything that we have learned about relativity and quantum physics we learned in her lifetime. So imagine what we could learn about physics in the next hundred or 200 years or next thousand years. And to me, that’s actually where probably a big chunk of the mystery of UFOs and UAPs actually lies, in undiscovered and heretofore to us mysterious physics, where you could have really bizarre stuff that helps explain UFOs and UAPs that still isn’t aliens, but is just as transformative and world changing in terms of the discovery of parallel universes, multidimensional travel, time travel from the past or future, I mean things that would really blow our minds and that we just don’t understand yet how they’re possible.

Preet Bharara:

It sounds like you’re sort of answering my question about the limitations of physics and space travel as a physical matter, and as a mathematical matter with the response that, well, perhaps anything is possible if a civilization can continue to grow and learn in accelerating fashion over the course of long periods of time. But I want to rephrase what I asked. Some things are just not possible. It may be the case that time travel is, it may be the case that time travel just isn’t possible no matter how advanced or how smart your civilization is and how long it lasts. And so I go back to that original question, if you know, scientists have talked about this, that may be that kind of thing, I’m not talking about interplanetary travel, and maybe it’s true that if you evolve, I guess one scenario that as a lay person off the top of my head, the problem with the math question and the physics question is time.

And let’s say you build a spacecraft that takes just a long time to get from one place to another, hundreds, thousands of light years away, in our understanding of how life works, nobody lives that long. So I guess, one solution is not being able to travel faster necessarily, but be able to live longer, and maybe that’s a solution. But otherwise, I’m still curious to know if there’s anyone who’s saying, well, interstellar travel at these distances is just never going to be possible because wormholes are a thing of science fiction alone.

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. The flip side of that is, we don’t have any technology right now that would detect something moving at a fraction of the speed of light through our own solar system. That it might be that other people, not other people, other civilizations have mastered some fraction of the speed of light travel, which seems maybe possible, maybe not at the speed of light, but a fraction of the speed of light even. And that it could be passing through our solar system all the time, and we wouldn’t have any idea, that we would see those objects as no more than a blurry pixel on a telescopic image that we would probably think was an error or a piece of dust or something. And it’s possible that interstellar travel is easier than we think it is, or that other civilizations live lives that could encompass travel of thousands or tens of thousands of years. That’s the other equation is that we might just misunderstand what a lifetime is. If you are a civilization that has figured out how to live for 10,000 years, suddenly space is a lot more accessible than if you are pushing 118 years.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, the other example is, when you think about it’s only been true that this civilization has figured out a way to fly 121 years ago. Four billion years the planet has existed as far as we know, only one species has learned how to fly without wings, without the natural ability to fly recently. So what’s possible in the future? I guess that’s right. I will be right back with Garrett Graff after this.

I’m want to come back to the issue of how our government treats these phenomena and the degree to which there seems to be a lack of transparency, some would say cover-up has spawned, as you started to say at the beginning, these cycles of conspiracy theories that maybe have spawned other conspiracy theories or that kind of thinking. You quote a famous astronomer, J. Allen Hynek as saying the following back in 1977, “There are two kinds of cover-ups. You can cover up knowledge and you can cover up ignorance. I think there was much more of the latter than of the former.” And you developed that theme and thesis yourself. Explain that to folks.

Garrett Graff:

1. Allen Hynek was the primary government astronomer on the military’s UFO hunt for about a quarter century. For the latter half of the 20th century, was probably the most famous astronomer focused on questions of UFOs and aliens and extraterrestrial life. And actually, wrote the definitive book on the subject in the early 1970s as he was leaving the government and comes up with the nomenclature of close encounters of the first kind, second kind, third kind. And the Steven Spielberg movie famously is based on his book and his work. And he started off in the 1940s very dubious of the idea that UFOs represented alien visitors.

And then over the course of his work came to be, if not a full-on believer, then at least highly sympathetic to the idea that there was something really fascinating and mysterious at the core of the UFO mystery. And that was in part because he saw enough evidence and talked to enough witnesses that he was convinced that there was something to the phenomenon, and that he was convinced that the government didn’t really know what it was, that the military and the forerunners of NASA on the civilian space side really couldn’t explain the totality of the flying saucer and UFO sightings that the public was coming forward with. And that at the same time, he didn’t see, and I would argue we haven’t seen still, the evidence that the US government is covering up meaningful knowledge about alien spacecraft or alien bodies or non-human intelligences as people in the field call it.

And that in fact, all of the evidence that we have from declassified memos, and documents, and conversations, and classified briefings and all over the decades, is that the government is really just as puzzled about UFOs as the rest of us. Which is not to say that the government doesn’t cover up its full understanding of UFOs-

Preet Bharara:

It just doesn’t have as great an understanding as we may presume.

Garrett Graff:

Right. Because there are two obvious cloaks of secrecy that fall across a lot of the UFO sightings. One is some chunk of this is our government’s own secret projects being tested in the skies around us. Big chunk of the UFO sightings of the 1950s turned out to be the U-2 spy plane. And in the years since, that’s been the development of the SR-71, the A-12 Oxcart, the stealth bomber, the stealth fighter drones, et cetera. There’s also a layer of secrecy that the government has around what it knows to be advanced adversary technology being tested against us.

This is secret Soviet craft during the Cold War, more recently, secret Chinese drones, Russian drones, Iranian drones. And we know that some chunk of this is what we consider UFOs, because one of the things that the Pentagon has said in the last couple of years as it has begun to take UAPs more seriously is that, through sightings of UFOs and UAPs, it uncovered a heretofore unknown transmedium Chinese drone, which is to say a Chinese drone that came out of the water and transitioned to flight, which was a technology that we did not understand that China had until the military began to dive into these modern UAP sightings.

Preet Bharara:

So give us a sense, both in the ’40s, ’50s and in very recent times of how many such sightings there are, what percentage of them generally get resolved with some kind of plausible non-alien, non-extraterrestrial explanation, and how many do not and what that should cause us to believe?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah. To me, as you say, what the public considers UFO sightings is generally not that interesting to me, that so many of the public sightings are things that turn out to be relatively easily explained. The planet Venus historically accounts for a huge number of UFO sightings. More recently, a big chunk of UFO sightings in the modern era turn out to be Starlink satellite launches that appear in weird, bright straight lines up in the sky. So what’s interesting are the sightings that the US government itself can’t solve. And historically through the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, that number was around 20% of reported UFO sightings. Now we have much better data, much better analysis, much better technology, and that number in the modern era, according to the Pentagon hovers between about 2% and 5% of sightings that when the government really bears down into it’s not able to explain.

Preet Bharara:

Why isn’t the government more transparent in the areas outside of our own national security and other countries capabilities? Is it just habit? Is it really about worrying that they don’t know a lot? I don’t understand why they persist in the secrecy?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah, I think it’s three things. One is, the government’s, as you know, not always that good about knowing what it knows. And that one of the weird threads of the UFO story across decades is parts of the government reporting a UFO sighting that turn out to be a secret project run by another part of the government that the people involved didn’t know about. The crash in Roswell, that is the founding myth in many ways of so many UFO conspiracies, turns out as we now understand it, to have been a secret balloon project that the military was developing to try to detect Soviet atomic tests. And yet it was the air force that reported the crash in Roswell because they looked at the wreckage and were like, “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

Preet Bharara:

One hand not knowing what the other hand is doing.

Garrett Graff:

Right. The second thing is the government is really squirrely about what its censors pick up and don’t pick up. And so a lot of this is, I think the government not really wanting to give adversaries any advantage about what the US can detect or understand anywhere across the planet. We saw this, by the way, in the crash of the Titanic submersible last summer, which is, there was this big public hunt for it, and then about a week later after the wreckage was found, the Navy sort of said, “Oh, yeah, we actually detected that with our anti-submarine audio surveillance system. And we heard it explode in crush in real time the moment it happened and knew that they were all dead instantaneously.” And it took a couple of weeks for the government to come out and admit that.

And then the third category again, which I think you would understand with your government background is, it’s really hard for bureaucracies to say I don’t know. And I think that the government really doesn’t know what some chunk of these UFO and UAP sightings is. And that’s a really hard thing for a country where we spend $60 billion a year on intelligence, a trillion dollars a year on national defense and homeland security. For that bureaucracy to come out and say, “Man, there’s some weird stuff out there that we don’t have any idea what it is or how it operates or how it moves.”

Preet Bharara:

But call it UAP.

Garrett Graff:

Right. That’s not a real satisfying answer for the public and the taxpayers and the elected leaders to hear.

Preet Bharara:

You made a reference to the idea and speculation that not only does our government and perhaps other governments have in their possession one of these craft or also potentially alien bodies. Given everything you’ve studied and researched and that you know about this area and about life generally, and also probability, which is the longer odds? That there is intelligent life or has been intelligent life on one of these sextillion, habitable planets or that there’s a massive impenetrable conspiracy theory that is keeping alien dead bodies from the public?

Garrett Graff:

To me, I can’t wrap my head around the government being able to pull off a conspiracy of the size and scope and scale that the people who argue that the government is covering up alien bodies and alien craft to believe it to be. So there was last summer, this whistleblower from the intelligence community who comes forward, testifies before Congress, that the government has a UFO crash retrieval program that has recovered what he calls non-human biologics.

And that according to him, this conspiracy traces back 90 years. He’s also said in interviews that there are 5,000 people who work on this program. And to me, those two things are in direct conflict in the ability for it to be successful. I would believe a very small program might be able to keep a secret like this for some period of time, but it couldn’t last for 90 years. And 5,000 people couldn’t keep that secret. If only because think of how much paper 5,000 people in government generate. The CIA torture program was arguably one of the biggest secret programs that the US government ran in that timeframe.

It lasted, let’s say three years, and it was known within government by, let’s say on the order of 500 people, might’ve been 300, might’ve been 800, but it wasn’t a thousand, and it wasn’t 10,000. That generated 2.2 million pages of documents that took the Senate the better part of a decade to sort through. I just don’t believe on the paperwork basis alone that the government could keep a 5,000 person conspiracy secret without someone accidentally sending a PowerPoint briefing to their roommate or leaving a briefcase behind when they’re switching in a cab or an airplane. Even before you get to the idea that this would be the biggest secret of all time, this would be the most important secret that you could imagine the US government keeping short of the US government is in direct contact with God.

Preet Bharara:

Well, isn’t it?

Garrett Graff:

Maybe it is. You’d know better than me. You’ve had a clearance. And that the idea that that population would not at some point break and spill this secret just feels really literally unbelievable to me.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So what’s the story of Area 51?

Garrett Graff:

Yeah, so Area 51 is in many ways the heart of this story, of the UFO conspiracies. And my most recent book before this UFO one was a history of Watergate. And in a very weird way, the story of UFOs in American life ends up being a sequel to a book about Watergate. Because the second half of this book is really about the rise of UFO conspiracies in the wake of Watergate, Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, and the collapse of faith and trust and truth in government institutions. And you see this really appear in the 1950s, and grow up around the idea of the Roswell crash, where in theory, the government recovered alien craft and alien bodies, all of which end up being stored according to these conspiracies at Area 51 in the Las Vegas, in the Nevada desert, north of Las Vegas, where the government has this massive flight test zone that’s secret and closed to the public.

And one of the guys who really becomes the leading voices of these conspiracies in the 1980s is this guy Bill Cooper, who ends up claiming to be a former naval intelligence officer who says that he’s seen the reports about the secret government cover-up of aliens and alien spacecraft. Bill Cooper becomes one of the founding voices of the far-right conservative talk radio in the 1990s. He has one of the most popular conservative talk radio shows in the country.

And one of his biggest fans in the 1990s is a guy named Timothy McVeigh, and Tim McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols go out to visit Bill Cooper in his Arizona compound in the spring of 1994, and say to him, “Watch Oklahoma City.” And then this becomes, of course, the duo that bombs the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. And inspired in no small part by the radical extremism of Bill Cooper, who also in the 1990s inspires a second figure and becomes the inspiration to a young Austin, Texas public access host named Alex Jones, who models his approach and view of the world, conspiratorial view of the world on Bill Cooper.

And the two of them have a vicious falling out on 9/11 when Alex Jones veers into what we now call 9/11 trutherism, which Alex, which Bill Cooper sort of very vociferously rejects the idea of that 9/11 conspiracy. But at that time, Bill Cooper is locked into a battle with a local Arizona prosecutor named Janet Napolitano, and that he ends up dying in a shootout with police in December, 2001, just a couple of months after 9/11. When the sheriff’s deputies come to arrest him, he opens fire on the deputies, shoots one of them, they return fire and kill him.

But by that point, he has really helped launch the career of Alex Jones. And so to me, there is this real idea of the deep state as this shadowy cabal of permanent government operatives operating at cross purposes with elected officials and the American public that begins in UFOs in the 1980s with Roswell, with Area 51, that leads, I think in pretty direct ways straight through January 6th.

Preet Bharara:

So that’s super fascinating and seems plausible to me. But having connected those dots, what is the lesson there for non-conspiracists, the rest of the population, politicians, scientists, government officials, bureaucrats, for that whole population or multiple populations of people, what do they do about it? Because it is harmful and a problem and a violence problem as evidence on January 6th, what do we do about it?

Garrett Graff:

I think in some ways the answer is, this is going to be a real hard Humpty Dumpty to put back together again, as you know and as we’ve been living through for the last couple of years. To me, the flip side of that is what we are seeing right now in the world of UFOs, which is the last couple of years have seen this tremendous shift in serious people talking seriously about this subject. That’s a big part of why I wanted to write this book, was to lay out some of the background as the national conversation shifts around this subject.

And you are seeing real bipartisan engagement on Capitol Hill for transparency around UFOs and UAPs. That this is actually in some ways one of the seemingly last bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill. And you see people like the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner and Marco Rubio year after year, pushing for better transparency, better understanding of what the Pentagon, the Office of Director of National Intelligence, the intelligence community, and NASA all understand about the reality of UAPs and UFOs.

And so in some ways, to me, the answer to a lot of conspiracies ends up being better transparency and more accountability for government officials. And I think that that’s exactly what we’re actually seeing in this space, that leaders like Mark Warner and Marco Rubio are actually making a difference in the public’s knowledge around this subject.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think therefore the giggle factor has in fact been reduced?

Garrett Graff:

I think it has. And that’s what drew me to this subject in the first place, which is I am not a lifelong Trekkie or someone raised in sci-fi novels or UFOlogy. I come at this as someone who has covered national security for 20 years. And that to me, I got interested because I began to hear serious people talk seriously about this subject. There was this blockbuster reporting by the New York Times and Politico in 2017 around the existence of a then unknown Pentagon UFO study program.

There were reports at that time also of encounters by Navy pilots, Navy aviators around things that they could not explain, craft that moved in ways that they did not understand. And there was a very specific interview that I talked about in the book that got me to pay attention to this, which was John Brennan gave an interview in December, 2020 to a DC journalist named Tyler Cowen where John Brennan said, “There’s stuff out there that we don’t know what it is. It puzzles us. And some might say this phenomenon could constitute what some might say would be a new form of life.”

It was really weird and tortured syntax. But John Brennan’s a really serious guy. He had been at that point, just wrapped up the better part of a decade as the CIA director and White House Homeland Security Advisor. And I figured if John Brennan is leaving office, and he’s puzzled about this, and he thinks that there’s something interesting here, there probably is. There can’t be that many mysteries in John Brennan’s life. When he wakes up in the morning with a random question, we have an entire national intelligence community that goes out and tries to answer it.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, we had some time with him recently to talk about Yemen and the Houthis. So he’s a person who knows a lot of things, I agree with that. There’s another subject that occupies the imaginations of people and has been a storyline in many movies. Talk to us about our government’s plans for continuity of government, and tell us what Raven Rock is.

Garrett Graff:

So this is one of my previous books that, again, in a weird way, is a sequel or parallel story to the one that I tell in UFOs, which is-

Preet Bharara:

Before you do that, can I mention the title?

Garrett Graff:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a great title. Raven Rock: The Story of the US Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die.

Garrett Graff:

So this was a book that tried to dive into and explore the reality of all of the weird stuff that would happen during and after a nuclear attack. Programs that the US government calls, continuity of government. And what the public really shorthands as the doomsday plans. And this was a series of plans that grew up during the Cold War that focused on how the government would function, who would lead it, questions of presidential succession, who would be able to launch the nuclear weapons in the event of a catastrophic attack on Washington. And all of the weird apparatus that we built up around this in terms of bunkers and airborne command posts. The title of the book, Raven Rock, is the name of the bunker along the Pennsylvania-Maryland line that would be the backup Pentagon. There’s another bunker at Mount Weather, Virginia that’s a FEMA facility that would be the home to the executive branch, which would be presumably where the president and the cabinet would go in the event of an evacuation of Washington.

And then there’s a whole fleet of airplanes known as NECAP, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post that were these 747s specially configured to take to the skies in the minutes before a nuclear attack, and where the president could run the US government from these airborne command posts for 72 hours before the planes would have to land. And that these plans are weirdly and wonderfully developed down to the IRS plans of how to levy taxes-

Preet Bharara:

Collect taxes.

Garrett Graff:

… on nuclear damaged property. The Department of Agriculture’s plans of how the American public would be fed, the National Park Service would be the ones in charge of running the refugee camps, which would be set up in national parks across the country because the presumption was National parks would not be a primary target of a nuclear attack.

Preet Bharara:

Are these serious plans? Do you take them seriously, or? I take it from your tone that you don’t necessarily do so.

Garrett Graff:

Yeah, I think there’s an old Eisenhower quote about, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” And that’s what I think a lot of this nuclear thinking and these continuity of government plans end up being, which is how almost none of the plans would actually work in the way that they were intended to in that moment, but that the government needed to, and still does need real plans about how to respond to catastrophes. Because even a full out nuclear attack on the United States would leave about 60 to 70 million Americans alive across the country. That’s actually still a pretty big country that would need governing.

And who the president is in that situation, who the leadership of Congress, how the three branches of government would operate are all a big part of these plans and still something by the way, that we sort of wrestle with and that pop up in weird ways. I mean, the whole thing that we lived through last fall where the house lost its speaker in Kevin McCarthy, and then Patrick McHenry ends up as the speaker pro tem. That was actually a continuity of government plan in action, which is that there’s a whole list of who becomes speaker when the speaker is incapacitated, killed, or removed, such that the House of Representatives will always have a speaker no matter how many people die.

Preet Bharara:

Right. You mentioned Eisenhower and plans and planning. I don’t know if it was Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali who said, I think something like, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Garrett Graff:

Absolutely. And that’s really what these plans end up being, I think. And one of the things that I had a lot of fun with in this book is realizing the weird ways that bureaucracies intersect with plans and operations. The Federal Reserve created a massive bunker outside Richmond, Virginia, where it was going to keep all of the currency that the US would need for 18 months after a nuclear attack, which would be how long it would take the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to get back to printing paper currency. But what they filled it with in the 1970s were $2 bills. Because when they introduced or reintroduced the $2 bill in the 1970s, it turned out no one in America wanted a $2 bill. So rather than pulp them, the Federal Reserve was like, “Well we’ll just put them aside for nuclear war because after a nuclear attack, people will probably be a lot less choosy about what currency they’re using.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I think they’re still not going to like the $2 bill. They’re collectors. My father-in-Law, my late father-in-Law would give $2 bills to his grandchildren as gifts, and trust me, they were never used to buy any confections. They’re just kept. This continuity of government plan, you keep talking about the nuclear war scenario. Are these adaptable to the asteroid scenario?

Garrett Graff:

Yes, and they’re actually very expressly designed for any sort of widespread catastrophe. One of actually the main drivers of the planning in the 1990s was the possibility of a chemical or biological attack on Washington. What happens if there’s a runaway pandemic? That’s where you see a lot of these plans actually being put into use. And we again, sort of lived through some of this when Donald Trump goes into the hospital for COVID, and by the way, a big part of the reason why people got so upset about Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization in this last month was the fact that the Secretary of Defense has all of these unique responsibilities in the event of nuclear attack that make him uniquely important in that constitutional line of succession and what’s called the National Command Authority, which is the system for launching nuclear weapons. And so for those reasons, you don’t want to not know where your Secretary of Defense is.

Preet Bharara:

Last question on the subject, because I find this more interesting than I realized I would. In the movies, when you have these bunkers and you have the calamity, the approaching nuclear war or the approaching asteroid, there is a provision for artists and certain kinds of scientists and botanists and others to preserve culture, not just continuity of government. Is any of that contained in these plans?

Garrett Graff:

So two different semi-conflicting answers to that. One is, not only are ordinary non-government elected officials not included in this, but their spouses weren’t even. And to me, one of the biggest problems that I always had in studying these plans was the idea that you would have these cabinet officials or government managers and department and agency leaders, who in that moment would just get up and walk away from their families and leave their families to die in the coming catastrophe while they went off to some secure bunker to keep the country running.

And Congress actually ran into this with its bunker. It built a secret bunker at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and the people behind the bunker, behind the bunker doors were going to be the members of Congress, and each of them could bring in aid. And then they realized that that was probably a bad look for the families that would be left behind. So then they… “Don’t worry, honey, I’m just taking my secretary here behind the bunker door.” In 1950s style government. And so they built a facility just outside the bunker door where the families could go. But one of the things, and this is actually to me, one of the most profound aspects of the continuity of government planning, was that’s not to say that the government didn’t think really hard about culture and continuity.

That actually they developed very elaborate plans during the Cold War to evacuate the nation’s totems, the constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. There was even a specially trained team of park rangers in Philadelphia whose job it was to evacuate the Liberty Bell in the event of a surprise Soviet attack. And that to me, it actually points to this really profound understanding and revelation, which is, if you are going to preserve America in a nuclear attack or in a catastrophe, what’s America?

And the answer is, it’s an idea that it’s bigger than any one president, it’s bigger than any one cabinet secretary. It’s bigger than any member of Congress, and that what you’re actually looking to preserve is this idea of a government of the people by the people and for the people. And that doing that wasn’t about just having a president or a Speaker of the House or a Secretary of Agriculture. It was about preserving those things that we have passed down generation to generation like the constitution that tell us what our country is supposed to be.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve been really generous with your time, Garrett Graff. People should read all of his books. We’ve mentioned several of them, but the most recent is, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here and Out There. Garrett, thanks so much.

Garrett Graff:

Absolutely a pleasure. Thanks, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Garrett Graff continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, we discussed the relevance of Watergate to the never-ending cascade of Trump scandals.

Garrett Graff:

The defining difference was that the Republicans in Congress during Watergate understood that their most important responsibility was to their constitutional role as legislators.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month. Head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week by returning to the E. Jean Carroll verdict. As you know, E. Jean Carroll is a writer who sued Donald Trump for making defamatory statements about her after she accused him of sexual assault. After a trial last year, the jury found the former president liable for sexual abuse and defamation. This year there was a new trial solely on the amount of damages E. Jean should be awarded. After less than three hours of deliberations, the jury came back with a verdict in the total amount of $83.3 million.

Broken down, that’s $18.3 million in compensatory damages, which includes both emotional and reputational harm and $65 million in punitive damages. This was, of course, a tremendous victory and vindication for E. Jean Carroll, the plaintiff and victim in this case. But it was also a victory for sexual assault victims across the country and around the world. E. Jean Carroll’s courage and persistence at 80 years of age is an inspiration to victims everywhere.

According to the World Health Organization, one in three women will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. And according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network out of every 1,000 instances of rape, only 13 cases get referred to a prosecutor, and only seven cases will lead to a felony conviction. Setting aside the legal hurdles and bringing a case like this and hoping to get justice, even with the odds stacked mightily against you, imagine that the person you’ve accused is the most powerful man in the country. What this jury did by awarding E. Jean $83.3 million sends a resounding message that Donald Trump and others like him can’t get away with it. E. Jean Spoke with Rachel Maddow this week about what she felt as she looked at Trump from the witness stand.

1. Jean Carroll:

Amazingly, I looked out and he was nothing. He was nothing. He was a phantom. It was the people around him who were giving him power. He himself was nothing. It was an astonishing discovery for me. He’s nothing. We don’t need to be afraid of him. He can be knocked down.

Preet Bharara:

“He can be knocked down.” Indeed. And hopefully Trump will continue to be held accountable as the rest of the cases against him move forward. When asked what she plans to do with the money, E. Jean and her team of lawyers are working on a few ideas, but above all, she wants to help, “restore women their rights.” I leave you all with what E. Jean had to say when asked about how she felt after the verdict.

1. Jean Carroll:

I feel that this bodes well for the future. I think we’ve planted our flag. I think we’ve made a statement that things are going to be different, that there’s going to be a new way of doing things in this country.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Garrett Graff. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and lead me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE from the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai. The audio producer is Nat Weiner, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.