Last week, in an exit interview with Politico, the outgoing Pentagon official responsible for investigating UFOs was asked if aliens are real. “The best thing that could come out of this job,” he replied, in a predictably news-making comment, “is to prove that there are aliens. If we don’t prove it’s aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard.”

Headlines like this have become a common feature of the mainstream news cycle over the past several years, as the public has gained insight into the government’s cloak-and-dagger investigations concerning all manner of strange phenomena up above. From 2017’s New York Times exposé about a $22 million Defense Department program for unidentified aerial phenomena to February’s sci-fi-esque frenzy over mysterious objects being shot out of the sky in the northern US to this past summer’s congressional testimony featuring suggestions of dead alien pilots, our relationship to the unknown has shifted profoundly. A new book by Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—And Out There, ventures down the rabbit hole of this awe-inspiring subject, from the Roswell age to some of our latest possible, though not necessarily plausible, encounters with the extraterrestrial. (A few chapter titles to wet your whistle: “Saucer-Mania”; “‘Who Killed JFK?’”; “Sex With Aliens.”)

“The government absolutely is covering up the full extent of its interest and investigation into UFOs. Plenty of revelations, declassified documents, and public reports prove an active, ongoing cover-up over decades, and even today, the US government is surely hiding information from us about its knowledge, beliefs, and working theories about what exists in the skies above and beyond us,” Graff writes. “What is unclear is whether the government is covering up meaningful information about UFOs or UAPs—the verdict is much more mixed about whether the government has intelligence that would forever alter our understanding of ourselves and our universe.”

Last week, I hopped on a Zoom with Graff, and we got deep into all this stuff. It was a fascinating conversation; you can read a condensed and edited transcript below.

Vanity Fair: The spark for this book was an interview in December 2020, where former CIA director John Brennan said he didn’t know what to make of unidentified aerial phenomena and that some types “could involve…a different form of life.” This was three years after The New York Times ran a truly jaw-dropping front-page exposé on the Pentagon’s secret UFO program. What was your reaction to that earlier Times story, which sort of normalized coverage of this stuff in the mainstream press? 

Garrett Graff: It was a very startling story. And then Politico had some follow-up coverage as well, and other outlets began to cover this more seriously, which is what sets up this John Brennan interview and that [Barack] Obama interview.

The one from one of the late-night shows, where he talks about being briefed on unknown flying objects?

It was James Corden. But the Brennan interview really struck me because it was a really interesting thing for a senior intelligence leader to say, and also a very humbling comment by a bureaucrat. It is very hard for an intelligence professional, a military person, a government leader, to sort of say, ‘I don’t know. We have looked at something and we don’t know what the answer is.’ In some ways that alone was enough for me to want to dig into this story.

You’ve reported a lot on national security.

I came at this as someone who has spent almost 20 years covering hard national security subjects, and the Cold War, and the war on terror, and cybersecurity, and nuclear strategy, and doomsday plans. To me, this was, what has the US government done about this, and how has it thought about it over time? What I found was there are these two related but distinct threads. One is the military’s hunt for UFOs. And then there’s sort of this astronomical, scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Normally, the literature treats these as entirely separate subjects. When you look at the hundreds of books written about UFOs and aliens and extraterrestrial life over decades, they’re almost all one or the other. It’s like this story of these kooky UFO people or these very serious, very thoughtful scientists who are studying this question. When you get into the history, what you find is that there’s a lot of cross-pollination between these threads. And so my goal with this book was to really try to tell these stories together, how they relate and have evolved alongside one another since the dawn of the modern flying-saucer age in 1947.

Back then you had this strange crash in New Mexico with recovered material that was officially determined to be from a military balloon. Fast-forward to that Times story in 2017, and we’re reading about “metal alloys and other materials…recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”

One of the challenges across the entire history of UFOs is, yes, there have been some pranksters, and some of them have been very high-profile. But most of the people who work in and around these subjects and study ufology are pretty earnest and are saying things that they believe are true. Particularly over the last 40 years, you have this long-standing tradition of people coming forward to testify about secondhand knowledge of UFOs, recovered spacecraft, weird technologies, things like that. And in sort of the mythology of UFOs, there’s actually a word for it. They’re called “FOAF tales.”

Not folk tales, but…

Friend-of-a-friend tales, where you have people come forward with a hundred percent sincerity and say, “My buddy told me this,” or “A guy I met in a bar says he saw this thing.” And the government cover-up is sort of just always out of reach.

So in the instance of the alloys, someone has sincerely told someone else that these exist, someone has earnestly conveyed that information, but as readers, that’s about as far as our certainty can go.

Right.

The majority of your book unfolds in the decades prior to 2017. Do you think you could’ve written this book and expected it to be taken seriously if the subject matter hadn’t become normalized in the mainstream media over the past few years?

I would go one step further and say I wouldn’t have written this book in 2016. What has changed is that you have serious people talking seriously about this. You have Obama’s comments and Brennan’s. You have, on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Marco Rubio and Mark Warner both talking about this and thinking it’s worthy of further study. Some of that is the changing conversation in the media since 2017, and some of it is the changing conversation in science. Part of this backdrop is not just the way the media and the national security story has changed about UFOs, but also that astronomy and science are much more confident that there is not just probably life in a lot of other places, but intelligent life in a lot of other places.

But your average person, though, is probably more attuned to the headlines about a former intelligence officer testifying before Congress this past summer that the government is in possession of “nonhuman” spacecraft and their “dead pilots.”

I think David Grusch [the ex-intelligence officer mentioned above] is a very clear example of this particular style of self-proclaimed UFO whistleblower. It’s probable that every bit of what he says he believes is true, and it may very well have kernels of truth in it. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that I think the public ends up hearing.

Well, what do you think about what Grusch said?

His claim was basically that the US has a UFO crash-retrieval program that has recovered unknown technologies that the US government believes are extraterrestrial. Almost every bit of that is almost certainly true. The US does have a UFO crash-retrieval program. I’ll bet a huge part of that unit’s job right now is racing around the world and capturing Chinese drones and Russian drones and Iranian drones when they go down. I would even bet that the unit has recovered technology that they don’t understand yet. There’s probably someone on that team who goes around saying, “This doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen on Earth. I’ll bet this is alien technology.” All of that can very well be true, and all of that could have been told to David Grusch by people who absolutely are telling him the truth as they understand it.

I’m with you until he gets to the part about the dead pilots.

The challenge is the average American hears everything we just talked about and sort of thinks that’s equal to an official US government conclusion that has been told to the president in a PowerPoint in the Situation Room that the US is in possession of alien technology. Those two things are not equal. We can believe everything about the former and not necessarily believe the latter at all. So then you get to this weird twist on all of that—the sort of nonhuman bodies—I think there is a lot of reason to doubt that the US government is capable of covering up meaningful knowledge of extraterrestrial civilizations.

In the same way, it wouldn’t be easy for the government to cover up the type of conspiracy that would have been required for an event like, say, 9/11?

You don’t need to look any further than this past year. The inner sanctum of the most secret secrets that the US government is keeping right now is our knowledge of Ukraine’s ability to fight. That is the most sensitive secret that we are sort of keeping day-to-day right now because it has huge implications for the US, for Ukraine, for our relationship with Ukraine, for the war with Russia, for all sorts of relationships with allies, et cetera. As it turned out, as we now know from the Discord leaks, we were not competent enough to keep the briefings being given on that subject to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs from being read by a random Massachusetts Air National guardsman, who was photographing them and posting them online in a video game server for a year before anyone noticed. [Editor’s note: The National Air guardsman, Jack Teixeira, has pleaded not guilty to charges of retention and transmission of classified information.]

So if there was evidence of dead alien bodies, certainly some lower-level security official would’ve posted it in the video game server by now.

The other thing is you don’t need malice for a cover-up to fall apart. This is something that would require thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people to be read in on and to have worked on for decades. I mean, just think about how much paperwork there would be involved in collecting and keeping alien bodies, and that no one has ever left a file folder of that in a cab by accident, or mailed it to their mom without meaning to, or abandoned a briefcase at a TSA checkpoint that no one was paying attention to.

Or, like, DM’d Julian Assange.

I just don’t see the possibility that there is a large-scale cover-up of meaningful knowledge of the government’s understanding of UAPs and UFOs and aliens and extraterrestrial intelligence that has lasted for any period of time. That’s not to say that if aliens landed next Thursday, maybe the government could cover it up for a couple of hours or a couple of days or a couple of weeks.

You write in the intro that it’s unclear “whether the government is covering up meaningful information about UFOs that would forever alter our understanding of ourselves and our universe.” It sounds like you don’t think it’s all that unclear.

I think the government really doesn’t know what these things are, and it’s embarrassed to say that. It’s tough for a bureaucracy to admit that. To me, the thing Americans should be upset about is not that the government is covering up alien bodies in Area 51—because I don’t think it is. It’s that the government is so uninterested in figuring out the answer to this clearly real phenomenon. I want the government to be more curious about things flying in our sky that we don’t know what they are. I want our government to be more interested in figuring out what that thing actually is.

Why do you think they’re not curious or interested enough?

I’ve covered a lot of secret programs. I wrote a book on the US government’s doomsday plans and all of the weird stuff that would happen during and after a nuclear attack. You sort of get a sense of when the government is hiding things because there are signs of the government hiding things. I just don’t think we have real signs that the government is running some big, secret UFO study program that we don’t know about, and I wish we did. I wish I was coming out the other end of this project saying, “We don’t know what these things are, but I have a really good sense that the government is working hard on solving this, and they have a secret cave in Colorado under Denver International Airport where there are big teams working on studying UFO sightings.”

Let’s shift to the other thread of the book, the scientific narrative. One character is the Harvard physicist Avi Loeb. Your average person probably heard of him first through his theory about that cigar-like interstellar object with the unpronounceable name [Oumuamua], which he suggests could be an alien craft, and then more recently through his claims that these tiny fragments from a meteor that landed in 2014 in the waters off Papua New Guinea are evidence of alien technology. I’m no Harvard physicist, but I’ve seen some debunking of both claims. What should we make of them?

We actually did an event together on Sunday at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and I think he is really pushing the boundaries of science in some good ways and some uncomfortable ways. I think that there are going to be really interesting and fascinating and meaningful answers to this mystery, even if none of the answers end up being aliens are visiting Earth. As I talk about in the final pages of the book, once you rule out all of the simple confused sightings, when you get down to the corpus of the true unknowns, to me, there are four categories of stuff. One is advanced adversarial technology being tested against the United States. The second category is what we ended up with in February amid the Chinese spy-balloon stuff, which is that there’s a bunch of weird clutter up in the sky that we’re not paying attention to on a daily basis. And then you get into two categories where I think there are going to be amazing answers. One is an atmospheric, meteorological, and astronomical phenomenon that we don’t really understand right now. I think we need to be humble about how much weirder the world is than we understand right now. There can be weird, exotic things that are not necessarily evidence of intelligent alien life.

Like Avi Loeb’s tiny orbs.

Exactly. Then there’s a fourth category where the truly weird is going to live: the physics of our universe and our world that we don’t understand yet. This category could be incredibly weird—parallel dimensions, wormholes, time travel, and all sorts of stuff that we just can’t even fathom right now but that we’ll probably figure out and solve in a hundred years, 500 years, 10,000 years.

It sounds like you’re more open to the possibility of the cigar comet and the orbs being something we will come to understand from new discoveries in physics, as opposed to the possibility of alien origins.

I don’t think we know enough to know one way or the other. Part of the challenge is this weird binary where it’s the Star Trek Enterprise or a rock, and therefore, uninteresting. I think I land where I doubt it’s an extraterrestrial spacecraft. I don’t think that that’s the most likely answer. But I think there’s a spectrum of mind-blowing answers to a lot of these UAP sightings that would still be worth investigating and trying to understand.

And which could perhaps be as mind-blowing as the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Right.

Your book goes back to the 1940s. Of all the many alleged encounters you researched, is there one in particular that feels the most convincing to you?

There is a category of witnesses that I find most intriguing and most believable. The one I always point to is Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico, in 1964. Lonnie Zamora was a local police officer, an extremely ordinary guy who was chasing a speeder on the outskirts of town when he saw what looked to him like an overturned white car in a ditch out in the desert. He turns off the road and sort of bumps his way toward this scene. He’s coming in and out of view of this thing. It’s white. He sees two figures standing next to it who are not quite fully adult-size but larger than children. As he gets closer, they get back into the craft, and the craft flies away. There’s a New Mexico state trooper or some other witnesses who arrive at the scene within a couple of minutes and see him really shaken up by whatever the thing is that he encountered. There’s physical evidence that he had some type of encounter there. It’s not that there’s wreckage that he misidentified, that when he got closer, it was a weather balloon. There’s no real reason for Lonnie Zamora to make up that story. There’s pretty good circumstantial evidence that something happened to him out there, and we don’t have any explanation of what it is. And the guy goes on and leads a sort of totally ordinary life for the rest of his life.

He doesn’t turn into an obsessive UFO hunter.

He just sort of goes on about his life. A possible, very simple explanation is that Socorro, New Mexico, is right next to a big secret military test facility. This is the height of the space race. Maybe he stumbled on some part of the Apollo program that was building a secret moon lander that they were testing out in the desert, and it flew away. Except, it’s 50, 60 years later, and we’ve never seen any craft emerge from the government archives that does anything or looks anything like the thing that he saw. And there are a lot of people over the years, like Lonnie Zamora—not tens of thousands, but scores or hundreds of people—who have these sort of singular detailed encounters, with some level of documentary or circumstantial evidence that something happened, who have no apparent reason to lie about the thing that they saw. And by the way, ordinary people have a lot of reasons to lie about seeing UFOs. There’s almost no scenario where, as an ordinary person, saying that you encountered a flying saucer helps you.

What sort of evidence would it take to make you a true believer?

One of the things that Hollywood and pop culture get wrong are the sort of scenarios where aliens present themselves to us for the first time, and it’s something highly dramatic, like where the alien spacecraft hovers over the White House and destroys it. The vastly more likely scenario is that we are going to first encounter the interstellar equivalent of an empty plastic bag from another civilization blowing through our solar system. We probably vastly overestimate how much any alien civilization anywhere would care about us. We’re a pretty mediocre society on a pretty average planet, on a pretty average star in the middle of what we think is an average galaxy. The chances that even incredibly advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe have any idea that we exist or would care about us are probably laughable.

And who knows how much longer we’ll be around for them to find us.

Which, by the way, is not unrelated to this larger subject. There could have been intelligent civilizations that predated us, that we have missed by hundreds of millions or billions of years, and they might still have various crafts or probes or literal space trash floating around out there.

Do you think we’ll find a piece of that trash in our lifetime?

I hope so. It’s impossible to study this and not be overwhelmed with the hope and optimism of the scientists who work on the subject. I can’t think of anything that would transform our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe more than answering the question, are we alone?