Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.”
He recently interviewed Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon UFO investigation office, AARO.
We chat about UFOs, National Security, Self-licking ice cream cones, and aliens.
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Jason Colavito is an author and journalist with a focus on “alternative archeology” and, more recently, the UFO cultural phenomenon. In May 2021, he wrote the article: “How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers” in the New Republic, describing how “a collection of well-funded UFO obsessives are using their Capitol Hill connections to launder some outré, and potentially dangerous, ideas.”
Investigating UFOs presents a number of challenges, many of which are not immediately obvious, but swiftly rear up to impede progress. There are straightforward issues, like military secrecy and people being afraid to talk because of ridicule. But there’s also the issue of “UFOs” being things that are so far outside our common experiences that it’s difficult to establish a shared baseline for conversations, leading often contentious and frustrating outcomes. Especially on Twitter.
Michael posts on Twitter as “UFO Today”. For most of his life, he’s had experiences that seem to him to be some kind of alien visitors. We talk about these, starting with his first experience of lost time when he fell off a slide. I compare them to some experiences I’ve had myself, which I don’t think are due to aliens.
Gary Voorhis was a computer technician on the USS Princeton during the 2004 “Tic-Tac” UFO incident (commonly referred to as the “Nimitz Incident” after the aircraft carrier heading the strike group.) Gary first saw “UFOs” as slow-moving radar targets on the ship’s SPY-1B radar, which he helped maintain. He also saw lights in the direction of those targets. Initially, the radar targets were thought to be radar clutter (false targets) but after a couple of days, planes were sent out to take a look. Gary saw some video from that “interrogation” and remembers a longer and more impressive video than the one that was later leaked to the public. He thinks what he saw was some kind of advanced technology, possibly alien technology.
UFO Jesus is a popular advocate of UFO “disclosure”, the belief that the US Government is close to revealing that it knows that some UFOs actually are the result of alien visitors. We talk about this and our different interpretation of the evidence used to support this case. In particular, we focus on the 2004 case of the USS Nimitz, where, over several days, unexplained sightings and radar returns culminated in two fighter planes observing what one pilot, Commander David Fravor, described as a “white Tic-Tac shaped craft” performing impossible maneuvers. A later video was also taken, which I think shows a distant plane, and UFO fans think is this Tic-Tac. There are rumors of a higher-resolution longer video that shows more.
Nick Pope is a journalist and media commentator who writes and talks a lot about the UFO phenomenon. He is perhaps best known for a role he undertook for the British Government from 1991 to 1994 which involved investigating reports of UFO sightings. We talk about his recent trip to view the storming of Area 51, his history of investigating UFO sighting, the current state of UFOlogy research and culture, and interaction with people on the internet
Ian goes by the name TheoryQED on Metabunk and his YouTube Channel, where he posts about UFOs. Unlike me, and definitely unlike my last guest (Seth Shostak), Ian thinks there’s something highly significant to the UFO phenomenon, maybe even alien visitors. Like most Americans, he also suspects the government is not telling us everything it knows.
Seth Shostak is the Senior Astronomer for the SETI Institute and former Director of Center for SETI Research. A popular science communicator, Seth has hosted SETI’s weekly radio show (and now podcast) Big Picture Science since 2002. We discuss the work of SETI, and some of the more interesting developments. We also talk about the UFO “Disclosure” conspiracy theory, which suggests the US government is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial encounters and is (perhaps) on the verge of disclosing this information. We also discuss the related cultural phenomenon, Storm Area 51.
In this second part of my extended conversation with Stian Arnesen (