Is there anything new to learn from the ‘alien files’?

0:00Adam Frank:It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, what is in a trove of government files related to unidentified anomalous phenomena? That is the new term for what we used to call UFOs. Now, a few decades ago, flying saucers and UFOs were the sort of thing you would see relegated to the tabloids. But in 2023, that changed. We were primarily seeing dark gray or black cubes inside of a clear sphere. I'm sorry, dark gray or black cubes? Yes, inside of a clear sphere. The House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs called a hearing on UAPs and invited witnesses like former Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves, who you heard there being questioned by Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin.

0:44Adam Frank:Retired Air Force Intelligence Officer David Grush made some pretty explosive allegations about crashed alien spacecraft to South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace. If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft? As I've stated publicly already in my News Nation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries. Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics? Non-human, and that was the... Fast forward to this here. President Trump ordered the Defense Department to start releasing the government's files on alien and extraterrestrial life.

1:24Anything having to do with UFO or related material.

1:27Adam Frank:He teased the release last month at the White House with the Artemis II astronauts standing behind him. I interviewed some pilots, very solid people, and they said they saw things that you wouldn't believe. So you're going to be reading about it. Consider this, that first batch of, quote, alien files? It's now out. So is there anything new to learn?

1:55Adam Frank:From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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3:25Adam Frank:It's Consider This from NPR, accounts of flying disks, floating and then disappearing metallic orbs, and a mysterious cylinder tumbling through space near an Apollo spacecraft. These were just some of the details contained in government reports recently released by the Department of Defense. Now, some of this information about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, has long been in the public domain in one form or another, but the DOD report coming on President Trump's orders was another step toward the federal government taking the question of UAP more seriously. We're going to talk about all of it with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester involved in the search for intelligent life.

4:06Adam Frank:Welcome to All Things Considered. Oh, it's my pleasure. So let's start here. In your piece for The Atlantic about these so-called alien files, your first line reads, spaceships. That's all I'm asking for, just one actual stinking spaceship. Fair to say you were unimpressed by this? Yeah, because one of the things that's happened, so what I would call the modern era of UFOs, when I was a young scientist back in the 80s, UFOs were just tin hat sort of stuff. Nobody took them seriously at all. And then there was that New York Times article in 2017, which said, oh, there is actually a Pentagon program studying this.

4:39And then there's been these hearings, These explosive congressional hearings where you've seen these former intelligence agents saying that we actually have, you know, the United States and other countries are routinely capturing crashed spaceships and that we've got alien biologics or non-human, I think the term they use is non-human biologics. So these are, you know, really extreme claims that people are making. I expected, given all that, that this disclosure, wow, we're finally going to get the government disclosing documents. And it turns out it's just more of the same fuzzy blob videos or photos and unverifiable personal testimony.

5:19Adam Frank:And there's been a lot of like compelling and serious conversation about that in recent years. Why do you think it is that it doesn't get more attention, that it doesn't make more of a mainstream foothold when there are videos from the Pentagon showing objects that seem to be moving in very strange ways? Well, I'm actually going to push back a little bit on that. I think, you know, as a scientist, one of the things we've seen is that there has been an enormous outpouring of sightings and of videos. But the hard fact is that most of these videos can be explained, you know, and that most of the claims that are being made about them are unverifiable.

5:59And so, you know, you've got this mix of genuine interest in what's happening. What are these sightings about? Are they about peer state adversaries and their technological capacities? As well as a conflation of this with, are we seeing things from outer space? And as an astrophysicist, I'm, of course, deeply interested in things from outer space. But there's always been a deep problem for us as scientists is that the data that we're being shown, you can't do anything with. So that's really the mix that's going on here.

6:29Adam Frank:Look, I really appreciate you being the scully to my moulder in this conversation. I'm so sorry, man. In addition to that, though, I will say that I was among many people reading this thinking, like, get a load of these Apollo 11 transcripts to be gently and not so gently reminded that, in fact, those transcripts had been released to the public for 50 years at this point. Given that, given the way that President Trump talked about this, saying, like, you know, have fun or essentially that, is this a serious exercise by the federal government to you? It doesn't seem actually very serious. You know, there's actually, as I was going through the documents, I found, you know, it was a report about launch failures on, you know, reentry vehicles.

7:12It was like, wait, what is this even doing here? It's like somebody just typed in space, you know, into the government database and then just grabbed a bunch of stuff and threw it in there. That document had nothing to do with UFOs or UAPs. So this actually doesn't feel very serious. I am all in favor of disclosure, but I'm very skeptical, particularly of the claims made in those congressional hearings. I just see a lot of terrible science happening.

7:36Adam Frank:Given all of that, if it were up to you, what would you like to see the government do next? What do you think the responsible way to move forward and kind of engage in these questions would be? The government has been involved in studying this for 70 years. So there's a lot of documents, right? There's going to be a lot of documents. And I just think it's great that, okay, release all those documents. If there's anything in there that actually leads us somewhere, that's what I'd like to see. And I want, you know, if we actually have alien bodies, you know, in a refrigerator in some place, or we have captured alien spaceships, you know scientists have done huge amounts of studies on them.

8:18So at least, if you're not going to show me the alien bodies, There must be pages and pages and pages of the results of those scientific studies. So at least show us that. And at some point, if you can't show us that, then it's just a story. These are just stories that have been circulating around forever. And there's much better places to put our time in terms of we're interested in the study of life in the universe. Like if the government really wants to do something, then it can continue to fund something like NASA's Habitable World Observatory, which we're building, which we'll be able to see into the atmospheres of distant alien worlds and search for alien life there.

8:54Adam Frank:You heard it from Adam Frank, bodies or it didn't happen. Adam Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Thank you so much. Even though I'm a little disappointed by the outcome of this conversation, thank you so much for walking us through. I'm sorry. I know. I'm like Mr. Bummer. But, you know, but the thing people, I mean, what's beautiful is people have this interest in the night sky. They should keep that all the mystery, all the wonder is there. But it's the stars and it's all the planets we've discovered orbiting those stars. So there's more than enough mystery and wonder to go around.

9:26Adam Frank:Adam Frank, thank you so much. My pleasure. This episode was produced by Gabriel Sanchez and Jordan Marie Smith with audio engineering by Damian Herring. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

9:47Adam Frank:It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. From Spider-Man to a new Steven Spielberg movie, we know the TV and movies you'll want to watch this summer. I'm excited about this film. I just know suspense, intrigue, aliens, and I'm like, all right, Spielberg, I'm in. Check out the Summer Guide from Pop Culture Happy Hour. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. Thank you.