What are UFO hunters really searching for?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30business needs in one place, saving you time, headaches, and serious money. Stop paying for missing pieces. Go to odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com to learn more. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. On Saturday, President Donald Trump spoke at a Turning Point USA event in Washington, D.C., and he said that his government would be releasing, quote, interesting documents about UFOs.

1:14And the first releases will begin very, very soon, so you can go out and see if that phenomena is correct. You'll figure it out. Let me know. A U.S. president taking UFOs seriously. Maybe the only surprising thing about that is that it's not that surprising. Because it's not just Donald Trump. When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files. Here's the vice president, J.D. Vance, on the Benny Johnson show a few weeks ago. I don't think they're aliens. I think they're demons anyway, but that's a longer discussion. Barack Obama speaking to podcaster Brian Taylor Cohen. Are aliens real? They're real, but I haven't seen them.

1:56And there have been multiple hearings in actual Congress in the last few years about UFOs. Long story short, you're not a crank if you're talking about this stuff these days. Is that because there's actually something new and compelling in terms of evidence? Or is something else going on? From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman in London. And today on The Global Story, what's the search for aliens and UFOs really about?

2:34Well, it's interesting because I had no interest in aliens and UFOs at all before setting off across the States. Danny Lavelle is a journalist from Manchester in the UK. He's won awards for his writing about social care and homelessness for publications like The Guardian. But a few years ago, he decided he needed to change. He packed his bags and he set off on a road trip across the United States to talk to people who are searching for extraterrestrial life. For a book he's got coming out soon, it's called Chasing Aliens. And we wanted to speak to Danny because he's less interested in assessing the evidence for or against aliens existing.

3:17And he's more interested in understanding why people want to believe. What deeper meaning they're searching for up in the skies. I had no real interest in real UFOs and aliens, but I was a massive fan of Star Wars. I think in my childhood, I was completely Star Wars crazy. I would have daydreams about being Han Solo, the Mancunian version the Manchester Han Solo yeah the Manchester Han Solo yeah so in a way it was almost like following a childhood dream because it would be brilliant if aliens did exist he wasn't exactly a ufologist or maybe a ufologist I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that but that all changed in 2017 I remember it there was a headline in the New York Times called Glowing Auras and Black Money Inside the Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program.

4:17I remember reading it at the time. Yeah. And this article, it featured a Pentagon whistleblower called Luis Elizondo. And he blew the whistle on a secret Pentagon UFO hunting program that had beguiled people in the military because they had close encounters with UFOs on their naval vessels and at military bases. and accompanying this article were a couple of leaked videos. There's a whole fleet of them, look on the SA. That showed this object filmed in sort of infrared camera on board the fighter jet's targeting system. My gosh. And it looked so much like a flying saucer and it seemed to rotate eerily on its own axis.

5:09They're all going against the wind. and the wind's 120 knots from the west. What a whole thing, dude. And you can hear on the video these Navy pilots being completely flabbergasted by it. That's not an LNS though, is it? It's not an LNS, dude. Well, if there's a little thing, it's rotating. So, you know, this was really shocking to me because it's not like this was the ramblings of a Jolly Rancher. No offence to Jolly Ranchers, but this was like... Hang on, what is a Jolly Rancher? apart from a sweet, a candy. I only know it is a candy. I guess it's a happy farmer, isn't it, somewhere in America?

5:48Yeah, so this was a form of spook saying UFOs are real, basically, and they're behaving in ways that seem to defy the laws of physics. So I thought, oh, okay, this is different. I kept one eye on it. And then over the years, the plot thickened. The Pentagon eventually came out and admitted it. yeah, we do in fact have a UFO hunting office, and we don't know what this is. The Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, have confirmed the program was real, and we know it studied anomalous aerial encounters such as the now-famous Tic Tac incident from 2004. Barack Obama said a similar thing on the James Corden show, I remember.

6:28There's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they moved, their trajectory. And then fast forward a few more years, you had another Department of Defense whistleblower called David Grush, who went to Congress and told Congress and the world that the U.S. was hoarding spaceships and alien bodies. I can't get into the specifics in an open environment, but at least the activity that I personally witnessed, and I have to be very careful here because you don't, you know, they tell you never to acknowledge tradecraft, right? So what I personally witnessed myself and my wife was very disturbing.

7:14This was just like a paradigm shifting moment for me. So I saw either an alien invasion's going on under our nose or there's some very confused people in the US Pentagon. So I just found myself dropping everything and just being, I don't know, it's like a tractor beam pulling me in. So I just dropped everything and just fully dived into this topic. Okay. Well, I have to level with you, Danny. You are in good company because I have done a similar thing. I dropped everything a few years ago and I made a podcast series about a ghost in the house that I grew up in. And I think I approached it with a similar feeling to you, as in I had zero interest whatsoever in ghosts.

8:03And then some unusual things happened and I was compelled to try and seek some answers. But I did so with an immense sense of trepidation because I did worry that no one would ever take me seriously ever again. So you and I, I think, are probably in a safe space, I would say, at this point in this conversation. Oh, that's good to know. Although it is new, perhaps, that all of this stuff is being taken seriously in the corridors of power in Washington, interest in UFOs in the United States is not new, is it, Danny? I mean, it goes back a long way. There's a long history of this stuff. When did UFOs for you start to become a fascination in the United States?

8:50I think in the United States, it was right after the Second World War. America pretty much emerged as the world's superpower. The British Empire was pretty much finished by then. Europe was a mess. And alongside that was the beginnings of the Cold War, this fear of the other, the Red Scare and all that. So when the Roswell incident occurred, and for people who don't know about the Roswell incident, it was when a flying disc was reported to have crashed in the New Mexico desert. What year is that? That's 1947, so two years after the war ended. There was a pilot called Kenneth Arnold who was flying over Washington and he saw crafts, what he described, were moving like flying saucers.

9:40And then I think it was a couple of days after a disc was reported by the military to have crashed in the desert. The disc was reported to have crashed by who? The military themselves. They announced it. I think there were some witnesses as well. So that got out into the paper. The next day, they changed their story and said, actually, it was a weather balloon that had fallen. So that already created a lot of suspicion. And then the narrative ultimately became that it was a spaceship and they not only recovered the flying saucer, but also alien bodies. and they were hoarding them at a secret facility in Nevada called Area 51.

10:22But that was a perfect time for it to happen because this UFO crashed right at the beginning of this Red Scare when America was the world's superpower. And with being the world's superpower, you're very vulnerable to threats, you know. So that fear of the other is beginning to fester. And then when you move on through the decades, Hollywood starts pushing aliens and everyone. There's the big sci-fi boom in the 50s. And you just see this explosion of sightings in America after that as the decades advance. And if you think about the JFK assassination, the Watergate scandal, McCarthyism, there is this sense in America that there is this dark hand in the shadows manipulating everything.

11:08Okay, so I mean, to hear you run through this history of ufology since the Second World War, I mean, I'm hearing you employing a healthy dose of skepticism. skepticism. I mean, it sounds to me like you're more interested in the cultural aspects of all of this rather than the actual question of whether UFOs are a real thing or not. So when you leave everything behind to go to the United States, who are you hoping to meet and what are you hoping to get from them? Yeah. First, I did want to speak to Tom DeLonge. And Tom DeLonge is this rock star who heads up the band Blink-182 and he is one of the key players in this whole UFO story funnily enough.

11:57Okay. The last show I played was in front of 100 ,000 people and then they wonder why I'm not doing that now and I'll say because this is the one moment in my life where I'm going to be able to look back as an old man and say oh my god I was a part of the team that change the world. Carry on. There was actually an event in California put together by DeLong's company called To The Stars Academy. Hello, I'm Tom DeLong and thanks for joining us live today. And he said he was going to use some of the technology they were working on to create advanced aeroplanes. Like he even showed a flying saucer at this event he hosted.

12:37To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science aims to communicate historic events and forward-thinking ideas through motion picture and includes you on ongoing scientific discovery and build an exotic craft with an energy source that can revolutionize the world. Which featured Lou Elizondo, the whistleblower. The truth, you know, she's funny. She always speaks. Sometimes she whispers. So you have to listen real carefully. Chris Mellon, another whistleblower, and a few other individuals. So I really wanted to speak to him and just get to the bottom of why, like, why did these whistleblowers at the Pentagon originally reach out to a rock star rather than, like, a serious journalist or something, you know?

13:21Are you saying that he is using his fortune from music? And I imagine that is a decent fortune because his band is pretty successful. He's using his fortune from music to pursue his interest in UFOs. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. And his bandmates have said he's been obsessed with it, you know, this whole time. When I signed my first major record deal, I took my first check, bought a desktop computer so I could research the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. I'd stay up all night cataloging, archiving, and highlighting small pieces of data, thinking I could find a unified theory of sorts, something to make sense out of the many elusive and mysterious events that seem to have interacted with mankind for thousands of years, sometimes for good and sometimes not so much.

14:10Okay, all right. So you're in the United States. You're meeting characters in this weird world. Let's call this the rock star, the scientist, and the whistleblower. So the rock star is this guy, Tom DeLonge from Blink 182. Who's the scientist? I mean, you would normally think that scientists would stay well away from anything like this. You would, wouldn't you? The scientist is called Avi Loeb, and Avi Loeb is a Harvard physicist. He also heads something called the Galileo Project, and the Galileo Project has ambitions to map out the entire sky with telescopes all over the world to catch UFOs and get clear images of them.

14:58Two days ago, we reported to you that according to Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University, an alien object passed through our solar system in 2017, thus proving that we are not alone in the universe. He came to prominence when an asteroid zoomed through our solar system. And as it passed the sun, it kind of sped up. And his theory was that it sped up because it might be a solar sail from interstellar space. So not an asteroid, actually some kind of craft, is that what you're saying? Some kind of craft, yes. So a solar sail, as it passed by the sun, it received the sun's energy and it accelerated.

15:37That was one of his hypotheses. Let's say other astronomers didn't share that view. They think it's just a comet. Astronomers that are from the mainstream, that try to explain it in terms of natural processes, had great difficulties. They had to invoke, again, something that we have never seen before, like a hydrogen iceberg. And the problem with that is that it would evaporate very quickly. Anyway, I met him at his mansion in Boston. What are you feeling at that point? I think the interesting thing with Avi is the way he talks about aliens. He talks about them like they would be these highly advanced sages in a way that would kind of descend on us and impart their advanced wisdom and maybe shepherd us to some sort of utopia or something.

16:26They felt very much like deities to me. And I think if you are a materialist like Abbey Loeb, then I think the closest thing to God would probably be an advanced ET. So it felt like religion dressed in a lab coat meeting him. And I think that's the case for a lot of this UFO belief. It's certainly one aspect of it. that it is this sort of redirected belief in an ultimate patriarch, a deity, you know. But the interesting thing about Avi Loeb is that he gets a lot of criticism from his peers who say that he's not conducting science well, that he's jumping to conclusions. And he was very preoccupied with his detractors when I spoke to him.

17:15In fact, it was the main topic of conversation. and then even weirder the next day he invited me to a play at his house that he was preparing for off broadway so i don't know if you've ever been to a play in someone's attic before but i have and uh in that play he was like he was comparing the criticism he got to the oppression that Galileo and Marie Curie experience. And I just, I don't think that's quite right.

17:59Okay, so we've talked about the rock star, and we've talked about the scientist. Let's talk about the whistleblower. You've already mentioned him, Louis Elizondo. He says that he used to work for the US government on a project trying to find out the truth about UFOs. What happened when you met him? Well, I met him in Washington DC because I've been chasing him for years at this point. He just wouldn't respond to me, didn't want to speak to me. So I managed to corner him at a hearing in Washington. He was given this UFO hearing. When you say a hearing, do you mean in Congress? Yeah, congressional hearing, yeah.

18:36And what was that like going into Congress itself to hear and see a hearing on UFOs? Very surreal because at one point, one of the speakers were describing what the aliens looked like and they said some of them are grey, some of them look like giant praying mantises, some of them look like elven Nordic sort of creatures. And this was said in Congress to millions of people around the world. So that was strange. But at this point in your journey, you're fairly deep in. You're sitting in watching congressional hearings and chasing after people like Luis Elizondo. But one of the things that really struck me in your book is that you slightly incongruously find yourself in an increasingly political environment because you bump into somebody that a lot of us are familiar with, the guy known as Q Shaman, who was famously involved in the January 6th Capitol Hill riots.

19:37How on earth did he enter the picture in your story? So, yeah, Jake Chansley, otherwise known as the QAnon shaman. And if people don't know who that is, cast your mind back to those January 6th riots. There was a figure who was featured on every newsreel at the time, wearing a fur headdress, his face covered in star-spangled banner paint, shouting freedom through a bullhorn, right? That's him. I thought if I was going to take UFOs seriously, I'd take all the folklore and stuff that's attached to it seriously. That's why I interviewed alleged alien abductee victims. And there were also this group of people who called themselves Starseeds, who claim that they're actually aliens, that they have lived former lives on other planets as different creatures, and they can connect to these former lives, and so can everyone else, as long as you meditate and sit on a rock somewhere in Sedona or something.

20:42He also claims to be one of these starseeds people. So I tracked him down. He was in prison at the time I was in America. I think he's subsequently been pardoned now by Trump. so I think that won't be on his record anymore that little trip to Washington he did But what did you make of this crossover then between the world of UFOs and aliens on the one hand and this more kind of political conspiracy world of QAnon on the other Why are these two things interlinked? Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating I thought that, you know, the Starseed stuff was fairly innocuous until you actually look at what they're claiming.

21:25They're claiming that they basically have special access that the rest of us don't have, that they have these special powers to access these former lives, and it's because their DNA has been upgraded. So the whole history of this sort of starseed ideology kind of comes from eugenicists of writers, right? Which I found really, really strange. It felt very fascistic, like where our DNA has been upgraded, which allows us to receive these light codes to past lives. I think the dangerous thing with some of the UFO stuff is that it does intersect with political extremism. So like the QAnon shaman, as well as believing the Starseed stuff, he also believes that evil entities have captured the people in power and they're responsible for all society's ills.

22:21So you can see how people might innocently get interested in UFOs and then get captured by this web of conspiracy and then graduate to more sort of sinister beliefs. What was your overwhelming impression as you made your way through this world about, was there anything that unified all these people for you? What kind of people are they? well like it's like what i said with avi lobe he thinks they'll be very highly advanced um and they'll have all the answers in a way they'll be able to come here and and show us what utopia looks like they'll have figured it all out because if they could figure out how to get here then surely they've got all the answers um i think ego comes into it a lot i just think this desire to be special so on the ufo hunters side they want to be the people who find the aliens and reveal them to the world.

23:16You know, the starseeds want to believe they're different somehow and special than the rest of us, that they have this access we don't have and insights we don't have. Some of it just comes down to curiosity. There's not one size fits all explanation for why people get drawn to this topic. There's a variety of things pulling people in. What's the main thing you learnt from going on this journey, Danny? That we should probably act like we're alone. I don't think anyone is going to come and rescue us. I think it's up to us. You know, we're all we have and we should start looking after each other better.

23:53That's my key takeaway. That we shouldn't be looking to the stars or the heavens. We should just be looking to each other and doing duty by one another. So, yeah, I think that might, yeah, it's an interesting part. I think that might play a role in this, loneliness. search for meaning. Well, Danny, I mean, I find it very interesting that you've come around to that question of loneliness, because you've spent a lot of your career writing about society's most disadvantaged people. Did you have any inkling when you set out on this journey that that's where you might end up in a similar place, thinking and writing about loneliness?

24:36not not at all no in fact the one of the reasons I chose this topic is because I'd been covering homelessness and and social exclusion almost a decade at that point and I was completely burnt out by it because I used myself as a case study for a lot of my reports and I almost placed my past in the care system I grew up in children's homes and foster homes and I experienced homelessness myself i also went into special education so i've experienced social exclusion and family exclusion all my life so it was it was very personal so when i'm i did a series with the guardian called the empty doorway where we told the life stories of homeless people who had died and i was seeing myself in all of these people and it was just heartbreaking and um so i just i just I just wanted a change.

25:30And I just think there is something aspirational about aliens as well, that belief that they might be here to rescue us or whatever. There is something hopeful about it. Did you feel sad at the end of it? A little bit, yeah. I did feel sad for some people. I just think the way Avi talked about it and that he just lost his mum as well. That made me think on a kind of amateur psychological level that he is looking for this parent figure. That's what it's about deep down for him, is finding guidance again because it's all gone from him. I think that is sad when people don't have anyone, when they have to look to the unknown.

26:18That is sad, yeah.

26:27Danny, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. And am I allowed to call you Manc Solo, as in Manchester Han Solo? Yeah, go for it, yeah.

26:46That was Danny Lavelle. His book, Chasing Aliens, Faith and Conspiracy in the UFO Heartlands, is out at the end of the month. If you have any questions, comments, or thoughts on what you'd like us to cover next, email us at theglobalstory at bbc.com. Today's episode was produced by Hannah Moore. The executive producer was James Shield. It was mixed by Travis Evans. The video producer was Matt Pintus. Our senior news editor is China Collins. Our studio manager is Mike Regard. And I'm Tristan Redman. Have a lovely weekend, everyone. We'll speak to you again on Monday. Cheerio. You