The Red Shed Tapes, B-side: Podcast Episode 7
Garrett Graff Examines the Government’s History of UAP Secrecy
Speakers: Shannon McMenamin, Garrett Graff
This episode is a Red Shed Tapes, B-side, where we press “play” on stories and conversations from McMenamin’s vault of recordings and interviews from the last 40-plus years.
Shannon McMenamin (00:13)
You’re listening to The Red Shed Tapes, B-side, and I’m your host Shannon McMenamin.
Today we’re continuing our special three-part series in celebration of the 25th anniversary of McMenamins’ UFO Festival. It takes place every May at our Hotel Oregon in McMinnville.
In this final installment we travel back to UFO Fest 2024 to hear from Pulitzer Prize finalist, historian and journalist Garrett Graff. In his book UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There, he chronicled the 80-year history of the federal government’s quest to understand UFOs.
Garrett Graff (00:51)
One of the challenges of covering this–and I say this as someone, again, who has spent a lot of time covering national security and classified programs – is that the government is absolutely covering up the full scope and scale of its understanding of what UFOs actually are. It may just not be for the reasons that many people believe.
Shannon McMenamin (01:16)
Grab a pint and settle in.
. . .
Shannon McMenamin (1:25)
Garrett Graff is a journalist and former editor of Politico. He’s written for the Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, and others, and he’s the best-selling author of numerous books on national security. UFOs are not the topic you would expect him to cover, but by 2017, the conversation was changing, and Garrett took notice, especially when national security was becoming a clear part of the picture.
In his UFO Fest presentation he covers The Goldilocks Zone, government skittishness, space trash, what first contact might really look like, and even Carl Sagan.
Here’s Garrett Graff at UFO Fest 2024…
Garrett Graff (02:05)
Good morning, everyone. I’m incredibly pleased and excited to be here to speak with you all this morning. I was in Washington last weekend at a party, the sort of type of official Washington event. And I was telling a friend about coming out here and how excited I was to be here, and he said to me, “you don’t realize, Garrett, what’s happened here, do you?” And I was like, “No.” And he says, “You’re the alien at this event. You are the preppy national security writer from Washington, DC. and you are the foreign object that they have invited to attend this year’s festival.” So I want to say, “Greetings, Earthlings. I come in peace to your festival.”
(03:00) I think you can probably tell I am not the normal person you would expect to be writing a book about UFOs, that my background is covering the war on terror and the Cold War, cybersecurity, nuclear weapons, 911, Watergate. But what I noticed, and what got me interested in this subject, is the way that in the circles that I spend my time reporting and writing in Washington, the conversation about UFOs has changed over the last seven years; that since 2017 you began to see serious people in Washington talking seriously about this subject.
(03:43) And for me, there was sort of one very specific moment that got me interested in this subject, which is: I am not like many of the other speakers you will hear from this weekend, a lifelong ufologist. I am not someone sort of born and raised on sci-fi novels. But in December 2020, former CIA Director John Brennan gave an interview to a journalist colleague of mine named Tyler Cowen, that some of you in the audience will probably know the precise interview that I’m talking about, where he’s asked about UFOs, and he gives this incredibly strange answer. And it is some of the most tortured syntax I have ever seen a government official ever use.
And he says, in essence, “There’s something about UFOs that puzzles me. We don’t know what they are.” And then he has this sentence that I sort of will attempt to capture, where he says, “Some might say that the phenomenon might constitute something that some might recognize as a new form of life.” [Laughter] And that sort of comment really caught me, because that’s an incredibly strange sentence for someone like John Brennan to say.
(05:10) I have written about John Brennan. I’ve actually traveled with John Brennan when he was CIA director at one point. He is a very serious person who has spent effectively his entire career inside the US intelligence community, and that he, in 2020, had just wrapped up the better part of a decade as the CIA director and the White House homeland security advisor. And I thought, “if you are the CIA director, there are not that many things that probably puzzle you. That if you wake up in the morning with sort of the weirdest possible question, like, ‘tell me what they had for breakfast at Hotel Oregon in McMinnville last Tuesday,’ there’s an entire 60-billion-dollar-a-year apparatus that we have in the intelligence community that goes out to answer that question for the CIA director. We’ve got satellites, we’ve got sensor systems, we’ve got signals intelligence intercept networks. We have intelligence officers. We have CIA agents and spies. We have covert action teams. We have intelligence and analysts.
(06:25) And so for John Brennan to wrap up a decade atop the US intelligence community and to leave that job saying, “There’s something about UFOs that puzzles me still,” felt to me like a really important moment in an admission that there was sort of something interesting here to dive into. So that launched me on this book, and it was an attempt to try to retell and synthesize the 80-year history of the US government’s quest to understand UFOs. This is a story that begins in 1947, it begins with Kenneth Arnold, it begins with that summer of flying saucers.
(07:17) But what was interesting to me, as someone who has written about the Cold War, is the extent to which the first stage of America’s UFO fascination begins in the shadow of the Cold War – that that summer of the flying saucer in 1947 when Kenneth Arnold sees those nine objects near the Cascades, traveling at tremendous speed, that sort of launches, in June 1947, this national fascination of the flying saucer. That summer, where you have sightings all across North America – 34 states, up into Canada – day after day, newspaper headlines, photographs… just sort of an entire summer of flying saucer sightings. The government’s panic is not that these are aliens visiting. The government’s panic is that these are Soviet spacecraft penetrating US airspace, built by and developed by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists. Because, of course, what is the United States doing in the summer of 1947? We are attempting to build sort of our first entries into the Space Age. We would not say that we kidnapped the Nazi rocket scientists. We would say that we presented unique employment opportunities [laughter] for war crimes criminals in places like Los Alamos.
(08:55) But we had brought our own teams of former Nazi rocket scientists over to the southwest to places like Los Alamos and the White Sands Proving Grounds, and were racing to build new technologies atop the V-2 rocket that would sort of begin the era of space travel. That summer of ‘47 is the most important moment in the history of the US national security apparatus. That summer, just weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, one week after whatever happened at Roswell happened is when the US Senate and the US Congress takes up the National Security Act of 1947, the most significant reorganization of US national security that we have ever seen. This is the moment that the US creates the CIA, the first peacetime intelligence agency that the United States has ever had. It’s the moment we create the Defense Department as a unified military establishment and the post of the Secretary of Defense. And, notably, it’s the moment, it’s the summer that we create the US Air Force as a standalone, independent service branch.
(10:12) And what is the first crisis of the newly formed US Air Force? It is the flying saucer. It is the Air Force’s inability to understand and tell what these flying saucers are that are penetrating the national airspace and sort of sending the nation into this incredible crisis and moment of fascination, where you have these public sightings driving national security panics that then, in turn, inspire pop culture moments, movies, sci fi, books, magazines articles that then drive more public sightings, that then drives more national security panics, that drive more popular culture attention and sort of on and on and on.
(11:03) And of course, the question when you begin to write a book about UFOs that everyone wants to know is are UFOs real? But that’s not the question, as I came to understand, that people actually mean when they ask, “Are UFOs real?” Because, of course, the answer is: UFOs are real. All a UFO is is an unidentified flying object., and we know that they exist, and there’s a long record of them.
(11:35) What people actually mean when they ask you, “Are UFOs real?” is, “Are we alone?” And it is this question that animates so much of our popular attention and fascination with the subject, because this question of, “Are we alone?” is one of the two or three biggest questions of human existence – up there with questions like, “Is there a God?” and “What happens to us after death?”
(12:10) This question of are we alone? becomes this sort of fascinating, animating push behind this national fascination with UFOs over the last 80 years. And it creates, to me, what is this amazing interplay of sort this very spiritual question with hard national security and technological choices and decisions and quests. And so, my book tried to weave together two threads. One is the military’s hunt for UFOs here, and then the broader evolving astronomy and science around the search for extraterrestrial intelligence out across the rest of the universe.
(13:00) And I think in that sense, one of the things that I spend some time in the book trying to unpack and discuss is the extent to which we have undergone this incredible revolution in human knowledge and understanding over the last 25 years – that today, almost no one doubts that the math is on the side of the aliens. That as late as the 1990s we did not understand that there was a single planet outside of our own solar system. We had hypothesized about it. We had wondered about it.
(13:45) You know, this quest of are we alone?, it is one of the few things that probably unites every generation of humans, back to the first humans who looked up at the night sky and wondered what was beyond. But it is only been since the 1990s that we have recognized and identified for the first time, planets outside of our own solar system.
But what we have recognized and identified in these last 25 years, to me, is one of the biggest revolutions in our knowledge across any field of science that we have seen in the 21st century, which is that we now understand that almost every star, essentially every star outside of our own solar system, has planets. And that due to the size and scale and scope and depth and breadth of the universe, that not only does every star have planets, but that a large number of those – not even necessarily a large percentage, but a large overall number of those planets are going to fall into what scientists and astronomers call the “Goldilocks Zone,” the planets that are not too hot, not too cold, capable of supporting an atmosphere, capable of supporting oxygen, capable of supporting life as we would recognize it.
(15:10) And that estimate is that there are one sextillion habitable planets across the universe. That’s a billion trillion habitable planets across the universe. So, you can believe that the odds of life are long. You can believe that intelligent life is even more rare still. But you look at something like one sextillion habitable planets that would support life as we recognize it… do you really think we are a one in sextillion chance? This idea that the math is now on the side of the aliens changes, I think, our entire civilization’s understanding of where we rank in the universe, and also how this conversation will unfold in the months, years, decades and centuries ahead.
Life may teem across the 14 billion years of the history of this universe, but based on the size and scope and scale of the universe, we might be functionally alone right now. And because what we are coming to understand is just how young of a civilization we are right now. We are, of course, a civilization that ranks, in round numbers, in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.
(16:50) We are on a planet in a solar system of, you know, of circa 4 billion years old, four and a half billion years old in a 14 billion-year old universe. So, we are an incredibly young civilization in a relatively young solar system, in an incredibly old universe. And one of the things that we are now beginning to understand – again, just in the last couple of years – is we have technologies like the James Webb Space Telescope that are showing us just how old the universe could actually be. The James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies that formed just 300 million years after the creation of the universe. So, you’re left with this thought experiment that multiple civilizations could have come and gone, civilizations that would be more advanced than anything that we could possibly imagine, civilizations of intelligent life that lasted for a billion years, that could have risen and fallen before our solar system ever begins to gather out of dust.
(18:08) And so this, to me, ends up raising this fascinating thought experiment: Have we mis-imagined, as a civilization, what first contact might actually be like? Hollywood over these last 80 years, has given us sort of three broad scenarios of first contact: You have the Independence Day/Will Smith/UFO over the White House/“take me to your leader” scenario, you have the Jody Foster/radio message from outer space/Contact scenario, and then you have the sort of ET/stranded lone traveler scenario. I’m a child of the 1980s; of course ET is what I grew up with, and all three of those are totally unambiguous – they are sort of this moment that all of government, all of society would realize in the same instant that there is intelligent life beyond and intelligent civilizations beyond.
(19:17) In some ways, the most likely first contact scenario that we will have in the years ahead is something much more confusing, puzzling and ambiguous, which is that we are going to see perhaps a piece of space trash – sort of the equivalent of a empty plastic bag blowing through our cosmic backyard, where we look up with a telescope one day and see something that we know is not ours, but we don’t know whose it is. A piece of a defunct space probe, much like our own Voyager or Pioneer would appear to another civilization someday, possibly old spacecraft, possibly some piece of wreckage of something. And we’re going to look up and we’re going to say, “Well, that’s not from our Walmart. Whose Walmart do you think that came from?”
(20:14) And that it is going to be this moment where we’re going to be forced to confront a much more puzzling and ambiguous question of intelligent life is out there, and we recognize that, and can discuss that, but we don’t know whether these civilizations still exist, whether they are close by, whether they are friend or foe. And this is in some ways where Carl Sagan ended up in the end of his time looking at the subject. Carl Sagan, of course, probably the best-known astronomer of the 20th century, and someone who was simultaneously the leading proponent of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence out across the universe and the leading skeptic that UFOs here represented aliens.
(21:08) Sagan’s argument, though, was never that aliens don’t visit Earth. It’s that we haven’t been around long enough that any alien civilization would have noticed or cared that we are here. And that in Sagan’s argument, you would expect mathematically, statistically, that aliens visit Earth every 100,000 or 200,000 years, and that they treat it sort of in the way that we would treat a rest area on the interstate – that it’s sort of a place where the aliens are stopping on their way from one interesting place to another, without any actual intention of paying any attention while they are here. His argument was, that thing that you saw last Tuesday out your window is unlikely to be the one time in these last 100,000 years that aliens happened to stop by.
(22:10) Now, one of the things I think that I took away from studying this subject was that even if UFOs don’t end up being aliens, we should be more interested in studying them, that as a taxpayer and as a civilian, I want our government to be more interested and to pay more attention to solving the mystery of UFOs. That one of the challenges of covering this – and I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time covering national security and classified programs – is that the government is absolutely covering up the full scope and scale of its understanding of what UFOs actually are. It may just not be for the reasons that many people believe.
And this is where it gets really hard to have the conversation that we should be trying to have with the government and the scientific community and the military and intelligence communities about what they know about UFOs, because UFOs end up in the government’s mind being cloaked with two layers of sort of natural obfuscation. One is the government gets really squirrely talking about its own sensor networks. It does not like telling us what it sees, what it doesn’t see, when it sees something, when it doesn’t.
(23:50) We had this moment, remember, in a sort of unrelated setting, with that submersible that went down to the Titanic, where we sort of have this, international headline-grabbing search for this submersible, goes on for days. Government finally finds the wreckage of the sub, and then a couple of days later, there’s a story in The Wall Street Journal that the Navy’s like, “Yeah, yeah. Our anti-submarine sensor network picked up the implosion of the submarine in real time, and we knew from the first moment that it imploded that they were all dead. We just didn’t want to tell anyone.” And, you know, it’s this network that we built to sort of combat Soviet submarines during the Cold War that still exists, still an important part of the national security defense network of the North Atlantic. But, like, the government knew immediately what had happened to that submersible, and it still took about two weeks for that knowledge to come out, only after it had been independently confirmed by actually finding the wreckage.
(25:07) That same type of skittishness exists in the detection of so much of these objects and other suspicious objects, in part, because some chunk of these sightings are advanced adversary technology being tested against us. You know, these are Chinese drones, Russian drones, Iranian drones. And we know this, in part, because one of the few things that the Pentagon has actually said since 2017 when it began to pay much more public attention to this subject, is that it used UAP sightings to identify a Chinese drone that came out of the water and transitioned to flight; that the Pentagon did not know that China possessed that technology until it began to dive into these reported UAP sightings. That’s true of all manner of other technologies that the government is currently studying with our adversaries, including hypersonic missiles.
(26:11) There’s also the sort of cloak of secrecy around the subject of the government’s own technologies. You know, that some chunk of what the public considers UFO sightings, that some chunk of what even commercial and military pilots consider UAPs are classified government technologies being tested and developed in our own skies. And so there’s also, I think, a weird level of this that also explains some of the government’s skittishness in talking about this, which is, I think, that John Brennan was telling the truth in 2020 which is there are things that genuinely puzzle the government. And that’s a really hard thing for a government to admit.
We spend, in round numbers, $1 trillion a year on national defense and Homeland Security and the intelligence community. You don’t want to be the analyst standing there in front of the CIA director being like, “Man, there is some weird stuff out there, sir, and I have no idea what it is.” And you don’t want to be the CIA director standing in the Situation Room telling the president, “Mr. President, you would not believe some of the weird stuff we’re seeing out there that I just cannot explain to you at all.” That is a really bad way to advance your successful career inside the government, and I think that there’s actually sort of more truth to that in the government’s knee jerk cover-up of UFO discussions than we would perhaps like to admit as a society.
(28:00) So, what are these things? I think that what we’re going to find is that UFOs and UAPs- – the terms are a little bit different, but I use them pretty interchangeably when I’m talking about this – that it’s going to represent at least four different slices of pie. One is, and by the way, when I say this, what I mean is, what are the sightings that puzzle professionals, because I think a huge chunk of UFO sightings are very easily explainable. You know, it is Starlink satellites and Venus represent a huge chunk of what the public thinks are UFO sightings, but we know that there is this core of sightings that puzzle even the classified levels of government knowledge and investigation.
The first is advanced adversary technology being tested against us. This is, of course, what I talked about, Chinese drones, Russian drones, Iranian drones. Maybe “Tony Stark” is developing some new things in his mountain lair that we don’t yet know about.
(29:13) The second is a chunk that I define as a highly technical and scientific term called “space junk,” or “sky junk,” which is: there’s just a bunch of weird stuff up there floating around that we’re not paying attention to on a regular basis. This is sort of what we went through with the Chinese spy balloon last year, which is this sort of national panic over something that we were not looking for that then it turns out, if you sort of change the settings on the NORAD radars a little bit, we start picking up all sorts of different things, and then we send up the world’s most advanced fighter jet with quarter million dollar missiles to shoot down some weather balloons over the Great Lakes.
(30:00) The third category is where you begin to move, I think, into the “P” of UAPs, the phenomenon. You know, the world is weirder than I think we give it credit for. And I think we need to be really humble in our quest to understand this phenomenon and imagine that sort of some chunk of this is going to be meteorological, astronomical and atmospheric phenomenon that we don’t yet understand, that I think we sort of forget how much of our knowledge of science is new and relatively new, and that we have a lot more to do to understand the world around us.
(30:50) Then the fourth category – and I don’t know that this is going to represent a big chunk of UFO sightings – is the truly weird. And this is where I think we get into advances in physics that we don’t yet understand. This is where I think that it is entirely possible and perhaps even likely, that some chunk of what we consider UFO sightings, are going to prove to be beyond the boundaries of known physics in ways that we do not yet understand or recognize. This is where we get into talking about things like parallel universes, interdimensional travel, time travel from the past and future, things that sort of sound really crazy to us as we understand the world today, but that are well within the possibility of where human knowledge may advance in the decades, centuries or millennia ahead.
We forget just how new our knowledge of physics actually is, that almost all of human knowledge about advanced physics has occurred in a single human lifetime. That last year, the world’s oldest woman died. She was 118 years old. She was a French nun. In her lifetime, we learned everything that we know about relativity and quantum physics in her single lifetime.
(32:25) So imagine what we will learn about physics in the next human lifetime. Imagine what we might learn in 500 years, in 1000 years, in 10,000 years. And this, to me, becomes actually one of the most interesting and sort of most optimistic and hopeful parts of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Is this, to me, is the greatest reason why we need to do a much better job as a human civilization right now, taking care of ourselves, our planet and our civilization.
We have so much of the world and the universe to still unlock, and that what’s exciting when you talk to people who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is the idea that they are setting off on intellectual quests that will probably not be resolved in their lifetimes; that they are laying the foundation for generations of scientific advances and understanding and technological leaps that might not take place for 500 or a thousand years, that may not take place for 10,000 years. And that when you look at the average length of time a species gets on Earth, the average species on Earth lives for about 5 million years. We are in the tiny, tiny start of the fraction of what that could mean for human civilization.
(34:08) And so imagine what we might uncover about the weirdness of the universe and the world and physics and other dimensions and other things we can’t even fathom today, if we give ourselves the chance to live to see that million, 2 million, 5 million year mark. But I hope that you walk away from this weekend with a sense of sort of renewed optimism and hope for the human spirit and what we can accomplish if we give ourselves the chance as a species.
Shannon McMenamin (34:59)
That wraps up our 3-part series in celebration of our UFO Festival’s 25th anniversary!
Thank you to Garrett Graff and 25 years of UFO speakers! A special thanks to so many of our speakers from the early years who presented their research in the face of doubt.
People like ufologist and nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman laid the groundwork for the conversation about UFOs that continues today.
We would also like to thank the McMinnville community who welcomed us and embraced the wild and wacky party that takes over their entire town each May… May the force be with you.
We hope to see you this year at McMenamins’ 25th Annual UFO Fest, May 16th and 17th at Hotel Oregon in McMinnville!
I’m Shannon McMenamin, thanks for listening to The Red Shed Tapes, B-Side.
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Credits (35:49)
The Red Shed Tapes: B-side is written and produced by McMenamins and Gretchen Kilby.
Sound editing by Gretchen Kilby.
Writing by Michelle “Jake” Robbins.
McMenamins’ production team includes Kat Nyberg, Michelle “Jake” Robbins, and Renee Rank Ignacio.
UFOfest A/V Engineer is Rand Deahl.
UFOfest archival audio and video by Kat Nyberg and Patrick Chapman
Our podcast theme music was composed by Jim Brunberg & Ben Landsverk at Wonderly.
Podcast artwork is by Lillian Ripley.
You can get in touch with us here at The Red Shed Tapes by emailing podcast@mcmenamins.com.
The complete version of the presentation you heard today is available on YouTube.
Learn more about McMenamins UFO Festival at ufofest.com