How remarkable find speed roger. Thank you it so if you look at these. In isolation they do look surprising they. I should emphasize that they're very grainy low-quality videos and That's provoked controversy about them. But but you were also carrying train navy pilots express astonishment and what they're seeing. I think people of that reputation expressing and that kind of bewilderment has fed into people's interest in this so these videos from the us navy. They sound like something. That should be classified. How did these end up out of the world on youtube. Yeah so the proximate origin is a project within the pentagon called. Uap task force so you ap stands for unidentified aerial phenomena. It's what researchers today particularly in the military like to call what used to be called ufo's which were birth themselves kind of a euphemism early on but the phenomenon part means that it could just be like lens flare. It could be something. That is an object per se but the task force was set up in the pentagon in around two thousand seven at the instigation of harry reid. senate majority leader at the time. Who has a longstanding interest in. Ufo's who wanted to authorize pentagon investigations into videos like this that he had heard rumblings about and it went through a few different stages in the pentagon eventually luella zondo who has become one of the most prominently on this Who is a career. Intelligence guy in in the pentagon by his regulation took it over and and started compiling video evidence and around this time there was some agitation for greater openness. On ufo matters from the outside in particular. Tom delonge who was lead guitarist. And one of the vocalists for the band blink. Wanting to set up a group called to the stars that was meant to be sort of like a hub of information about ufo's and eventually some of these videos made their way to the stars to the stars hired luella zondo and another ex pentagon official name. Chris mellon in they started shopping. These videos to journalists eventually got them in the hands of keen and ralph blumenthal who is a former new york times reporter and from there. I got flooring gimbal into the new york times and then go fast was leaked a few months later and so it was really a security process. And i think you're right. And in some of these cases these videos that you would assume would be classified but they were declassified by the time that they were released at and had gone through this process of internal review by the uap task force so just to be clear. We have harry reid. The senator from nevada where area fifty one is starting up an effort back in two thousand seven and then there is a member of lincoln. Eighty-two involved in eventually these videos ended up being published by the new york times what happened next. Was there a response from the government. Wants these were out in the open. Yeah i think there was a major cultural shift after the new york times story. I think some of the material and the story was was well known to people in the ufo community. There has been long been online community of people interested in the stuff. Some of the videos have leaked and unofficial form already but the the new york times being interested in kind of put a degree of legitimacy on the story that hadn't existed before so not only did the time. Do a bunch of follow up stories. do more interviews with pilots about their their Witness experiences But one thing that happened in two thousand nineteen is that the the navy started authorizing navy pilots to report incidents like this and encouraging them to add to data on on these encounters with strange objects or phenomena and that changed the culture a bit internally in the navy and then there's sort of culminated in a request from congress for an unclassified version of the ip task force report. To what degree. Do you expect that report to be explosive versus boring. What do you think is going to be an and what do you think is going to be in it. So i have no special knowledge on what it's going to say. It's not released as of our recording. What we heard. Thanks to report from helene. Cooper and julian barnes In the new york times Is that it will confirm that in the incidents reviewed and we solo no which incident specifically. They're going to review but that none of the the things seen were american vehicles. And that's important in that that's one hypothesis for what these were In hypothesis that's been correct in the past area. Fifty one became infamous because it was a testing center for sr seventy one and you youtube reconnaissance planes Which are very a secretive deliberately. Spooky looking planes That unsurprisingly. Prompted a lot of reports when they were in fact unidentified flying objects they were just like. Us military spy planes but the report is expected to rule that out as an explanation for the current crop of videos and reports beyond that The times also reported that they can't demonstrate any evidence that these are extraterrestrial in origin which we should expect. This is not going to be a big blockbuster. Report where the government says aliens or real Beyond that we don't have a lot of detail. And i'm really eager to dig into it. So it sounds like explanation could be that their aircraft from another country or someone else's spy planes. Yeah so again tyler. Rogue away has has this theory at length and i encourage people to read his work on this. It's very detail than to me persuasive. So his theory is that this is many of. These incidents are drone swarms off from russia or china The idea there being drones a really cheap to manufacturer they're not Very difficult Technology of country like china. That has long lagged. The us and aerospace stuff would be capable of deploying them and just as we had u2's and as seventy wants to spy on soviets it makes sense that other countries would have reconnaissance reconnaissance drones and that they would be seen near naval bases of which is the kind of thing that those drones would would be looking at if they were real. There are people who believe that this is extraterrestrial. Who'll insist that the things that they see. These vehicles doing cannot be done by drones. True and rogue away has has more technical detail on this but A lot of things that look crazy about these videos are like tricks of the eye or an effect of cam. Replacement and While there aren't obvious explanation for everything the drone explanation this russia china joined explanation. I think has a lot of evidence plane. Its way and it's obviously the kind of thing that if true with of great concern to the us military. So there's been sort of an ebb and flow of work the doing but and that sort of been reflected by the ebb and flow of mainstream public interest as well. Ufo's were big when x. Files were on in. The nineties of the cold war was still a recent memory. What do you think has has made it possible for you. Oppose to jump back into the to the mainstream now. Why do you think that's happened. So i think of it as as you say the after the nineties they were sort of technological shift that made this easier for people to to dive into and ensure stories about A lot of ufo culture now us on podcast and on youtube where people can dig into. Specific videos can interview people who've seen specific things And youtube and podcasts are great for for that That this is the kind of thing that they're built for And i think we're also at a point of near bottom trust in government institutions. I think you see that manifest itself in various ways but one of the ways is through conspiracy theories hesitate to use that term. Because i think a lot of people in the world have theories about these things that they hold in good faith and we generally don't have a definitive explanation of a lot of these these things. It's not a situation like the jfk. assassination where like. There's a real thing that happened. And then there are all these theories but as people lose faith that the government is telling them everything people start to wonder about. What the government's hiding from them one thing that's been interesting about the government's response here is that it's been very actively trying to suggest that it's not hiding anything from anybody that they wanna proactively. Release things. They wanted to classify things they want to build some kind of public. Trust that that they're on the level on this stuff with with the public. The difficulty is that. There's there's never going to be enough for some quarters. And there's there's a classified annex to this new report that's coming out. I'm sure that that's going to feed suspicions that the classified annexed is actually full of evidence that aliens visited us but think that's just symptomatic of a broader decline in social trust and trust in government. And i also have to wonder if increased interest in space. Travel has something to do with it too. I mean amazon. Ceo jeff bezos is about to become an astronaut. Musk is talking about sending rockets to the moon in. It's almost like we have different kind of space race happening right now. That has more people looking to the sky. Yeah we're we're in a private sector space race for the first time and at. Yeah i. I've never heard that positives an explanation for some of these sightings. I don't think spacex is is pretty good but that do a good job of telling the government when they're doing something but But yeah there's there's more public nation with with space and space travel and Yeah it's make sense that it would translate to this. Take you for joining us to read. Dylan's full story. Explaining this uptick in ufo interests had to vox dot com. Thanks so much adam. This podcast is supported by a t and t active armor right now. 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