I'm William Brangham and this is "Horizons."

Unexplained sightings have appeared in our skies for years.

And now the U.S.

government has started releasing declassified files about what we used to call UFOs.

[Man speaking off-screen] Well, I don't know if they're real or not.

Brangham: What explains these phenomena?

And what do we know about life beyond Earth?

Coming up next.

♪ Narrator: Support for "Horizons" has been provided by Steve and Marilyn Kerman and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

From the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, here is William Brangham.

Welcome to "Horizons."

We are talking today about one of the most profound questions facing humanity.

One that has intrigued generations and sparked widespread conspiracies.

And that is, has Earth been visited by a non-human intelligence from somewhere else?

There are many serious people in the government, at academic institutions, and in the U.S.

military who believe that we have.

Part of that¦ is driven by things like this.

[Man speaking off-screen] Brangham: A series of encounters, often filmed by the U.S.

military, of what appear to be objects flying in the sky at remarkable velocities, with no obvious form of propulsion.

[Man speaking off-screen] These sightings are not rare or isolated, they're routine.

Military aircrew and commercial pilots, trained observers whose life depends on accurate identification, are frequently witnessing these phenomena.

Brangham: While the U.S.

military has confirmed many mysterious sightings, other former officials acknowledge not being totally truthful about them.

Given the nature of our business, national defense, we've had to, sometimes, be less forthcoming with information and open forums than many would hope.

Brangham: We used to call these sightings UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

That was changed in 2020 to the broader, clunkier acronym UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.

But that has now been broadened again to unidentified anomalous phenomena.

There is legislation in Congress to force the government to fully release what it's learned about UAPs.

And the president just this month said his administration was going to be, quote, "identifying and releasing government files "related to alien and extraterrestrial life."

So, to help us understand what we do know and what we don't, we are joined by two authors who have studied this topic deeply.

Leslie Kane is an independent investigative journalist who has spent more than two decades covering this topic.

She was part of the team behind the 2017 New York Times blockbuster that revealed the Pentagon's program for studying UAPs.

She's also the author of "UFOs, Generals, Pilots, "and Government Officials Go on the Record."

And Garrett Graff.

He is a journalist and historian who has written multiple bestselling books, including "UFO, the Inside Story "of the U .S.

Government's Search for Alien Life "Here and out There."

Welcome to you both, Garrett and Leslie.

Thank you so much for being here.

Leslie, to you first, I'd like you to try and establish the basic premise here, which is, according to your reporting, what do we know?

What does the government know about these UAPs?

Well, I mean, the basic premise is basically what they know.

And, again, there's a lot they probably know that we don't know about.

But in terms of what is generally in the narrative, that we do know that there are some kind of technology that is documented through videos and other sensors that we don't, you know, that a lot of it is kept classified.

But there are objects that are seen in the sky that have been since the 1940s that demonstrate extraordinary technological abilities that we don't have the capability of creating ourselves.

I mean, that's it in a nutshell.

Yeah, I mean, that's it in a nutshell.

I don't know if you want to ask me more about it, but it's about the technology.

Brangham: We've been seeing things that professionals, not just lay people, look at and say, "We, as far as we know, "humans cannot do what that thing is doing."

Well, certainly that was true in the 40s, 50s, 60s.

And, you know, people have to realize that the documented, the data goes back that far.

And it's the same descriptive, the same observations were made then that are made now.

Of course, the further we, you know, the more forward we go in time, you can argue, well, perhaps it is our own technology.

We're... Russian or Chinese.

But there are many government officials who have actually come out and said, "It's not ours" and it's not Russian or Chinese.

And they, you know, that doesn't mean that every video you see is alien.

I mean, nobody really knows what they are.

But I think in terms of the data that we have, it's really focused on the characteristics of the technology that has been observed for decades and decades and decades.

And then the question is, what more do we know that the government is not releasing?

And President Trump is now dedicated to try and bring out more of that information.

So we'll see where that goes.

Garrett Graff, what would you add to that about what we do know about these things that we don't really know that much about?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things.

I think I stop a little bit short of where Leslie went, in that I'm not sure that we actually have seen documentation of technology that we don't yet understand.

You know, it is possible.

And this is part of what the evolution of the government's own terms for this, from UFO to UAP, is that some of this might be atmospheric, meteorological or astronomical phenomenon that we do not yet understand.

You know, there could be physics involved here that we do not yet understand.

I think a big part of this story might simply be that the world is just a much weirder place than we think it is, and that we understand less of the world around us than we likely think.

Now, at the same time, part of what has transpired, particularly over the last 25 or 30 years, is rapidly advancing scientific and astronomical understanding of the size, scale and scope of the universe that makes clear that life probably exists all over our universe, likely even intelligent life exists all over our universe.

That, you know, as late as the 1990s, we did not know that there was a single planet outside our own solar system.

And we now understand that potentially, you know, effectively every star likely has planets orbiting it.

Some chunk of those would be in what are known as the habitable zone for scientists, and that potentially they are something on the order of one sextillion habitable planets across our universe.

So you can think life is unlikely.

You can think intelligent life is unlikely.

But do you really think Earth is a one in sextillion chance across the universe?

Brangham: Right.

That is hard to believe.

It just sort of strains credulity to believe that.

I guess the question then, would those life forms have the technology?

Are they close enough to us that even if they had the technology, could they get to us or do they have the technology to get to us?

Leslie, are there... I know you have spoken to people across the entire spectrum of this, what are some of the theories that are proposed for explaining these things that we don't understand?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question, because we don't understand them as the basic premise, but there are theories of general relativity, which explain, and I'm not a physicist, so I'm not going to try to share those, but explain theoretically how an advanced civilization could travel, you know, faster than the speed of light, but they'd have to use an exorbitant amount of energy to do that.

But there are papers that have been written about that.

But there are also discussions among these people, you know, the insiders, the people who have been involved for a long time about other possible explanations or theories about if indeed we are, this is something that is not human, it doesn't necessarily mean they're just craft coming here from other planets.

You know, there are theories about what they call ultra-terrestrials that perhaps... Brangham: Ultra-terrestrials?

Yeah, that perhaps some of these, the sources for some of these are actually on our planet, that they're already on the planet, that they're interdimensional, that they're time travelers.

You know, there's lots of different possible explanations.

They all sound very far out.

But, you know, if you get to the point where you're accepting the possibility that we are dealing with some kind of sentient non-human intelligence here, you have to be open.

That alone is wild, right?

You've got to be open to lots of different possible explanations.

But I think that's one reason why the acronym UAP, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, is really better because... - It's quite a broad term.

It's broad, and the possible scenarios here have to be looked at in very broad terms.

It's not as simple as every time there's a sighting, there's something that some craft has flown here from some distant planet.

Brangham: Piloted by a little green person.

Yeah, it's something way more complicated than that.

Garrett, as you teased through this for your book, how...?

I mean, so much of this conversation already has flirted with science fiction and has had threads of plots that we have all seen in movies.

How did you go about separating fact from fiction as you went through this?

Yeah, one of the challenges, and you talked a little bit about this, or hinted at it, I think, in some of the introduction to the show, is that there very much are real government conspiracies and cover-ups that have focused in this realm over the last 80 years.

That the government clearly does know more about some of these... what the public knows as UFO sightings than the government has let on.

In the past, some UFO sightings have been, you know, our own government's advanced technologies.

A huge percentage of UFO sightings in the late 1950s and early 1960s were actually the U-2 spy plane before our government acknowledged its existence.

And that, you know, I think part of what makes this so challenging is the government also has, at times, embraced cover-ups and conspiracies in order to cover up its own advanced technologies.

Sort of telling people, "Yeah, you know, "that's probably aliens" when the government knows perfectly well what it is.

Whether that's advanced technologies of our own or advanced adversary technologies that the U.S.

government is tracking.

And this is an area where the government is just very squirrely for very understandable reasons.

I mean, a lot of, you know, UFO, UAP sighting and tracking gets at, you know, incredibly sensitive subjects about the government's own sensor capabilities, its own radar capabilities, you know, what it can see, what it understands about adversary technology.

And so anyone who starts to look at this subject very much quickly comes to understand that there are conspiracies and cover-ups here.

It's just, you know, from my study of it, at least, I don't think that the government is covering up meaningful knowledge of either crashed, you know, identified extraterrestrial spacecraft or contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.

I see.

Leslie, is Garrett getting at something that certainly comes through in your own work and reporting, that why this is so difficult to pry out information from these different pockets of the government?

Yeah, I mean, and I would have to agree with Garrett that, yes, it has been used, you know, as a cover-up for our government.

I don't think that in any, remotely explains many of the sightings that have occurred and much of the documentation that we have.

And there's a lot of government documents that deal with this topic.

But to answer your question about the secrecy, I mean, if indeed, a lot of that is to protect, this is what they'll tell you anyway, a lot of it is to protect the technology.

If indeed they have retrieved very advanced technology, they don't want our adversaries, we don't want our adversaries to have access to that technology.

And for good reason, because of the power of it.

So that, and a lot of it, you know, that's one of the reasons why it's considered a national security issue.

Just observing how these things behave, we want to understand how to create that ourselves.

And we don't want Russia or China to understand that.

But from what I understand from having talking to insiders and whistleblowers, is that those two countries are also trying to master this technology.

And I do, my understanding is that we likely have retrieved some of these craft.

That, you know, there are whistleblowers who have testified under oath to that before Congress.

Brangham: But no clear, I mean, yes, we've had, we have heard from whistleblowers saying, "I was told that this was, that this is happening."

Or "I was shown evidence of," you know, and others.

I mean, there are others that have not testified.

And this is something, I've been working on this for so long, and I've been talking to these people off the record for a long time.

And there are many that say the same thing.

And there are many who are afraid to go public about it because of the repercussions that these whistleblowers often face.

But, you know, I'm not arguing that we have proof of that.

It has to remain an open question.

But there are, you know, a number of people who have attested to that more than we know about publicly.

So it's a very intriguing question.

And I personally believe, you know, that these people are not making stories up and that they have seen legitimate evidence.

And members of Congress have been shown this evidence.

They've been, you know, briefed under secure conditions by many of these people.

And they also have come around, many of them are now working for greater transparency because they take that information seriously.

And they want to find these things.

They want to go to the locations and find them because everybody wants proof, right?

No matter how high level the people are that are providing the information, it's absolutely legitimate to say, "Okay, I hear you saying that, "but we, you know, what can you show us?"

And they can't show you anything because it's classified.

And so it's a problem.

That's a big problem.

Garrett, as Leslie's talking here, I was thinking about, I was reading some of the details of the UAP Disclosure Act.

This was written by Senator Charles Schumer and Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, not to flaming hair on fire liberal senators.

And in that, the UAP Disclosure Act defines non-human intelligence this way, quote, "The term non-human intelligence "means any sentient intelligent non-human life form, "regardless of nature or ultimate origin "that may be presumed responsible "for unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAP, "or which the federal government has become aware."

I mean, again, these are very sober senior U.S.

senators that are putting in legislation a definition of what we are talking about here.

They seem to be indicating there is something here.

Yeah, this has been an open question since Schumer and others introduced legislation like this on Capitol Hill.

You know, is this a hunting expedition or a fishing expedition?

You know, do they know something that makes them want to ask these questions or are they just simply curious?

And I don't think we have a good answer to that.

But I think in the previous answer, Leslie got at something that I think is really important for whatever the next stage of this conversation ends up being, which is we have too long left this as a national security or defense question.

And really answering it is a science question.

And that a serious effort to figure out what UAPs are, what we understand about UAPs, should be a scientific-led endeavor, not a defense-led one.

And that this is, to me, I think one of the most interesting and longstanding questions, you know, dating back to the first time that humans ever looked up at the night sky.

I mean, to me, this question of "Are we alone?"

is one of the three great questions of humanity, along with what happens after death and is there a God?

And one of the most interesting questions that I have after studying this topic for a long time now is, you know, just how unrelated are those three questions.

Brangham: Right.

Leslie, let's just say that we do get the proof that you were talking about.

Do you think our society could handle the revelation that there was non-human intelligence and we brushed up against it?

I mean, ultimately, I think yes, just based on polls that have been taken, you know, where a large portion of the population say they already believe that this is true.

But again, I really don't know.

I think it depends a lot on how it's presented and what is presented.

It's definitely going to be, I mean, there's some people that feel that society could, people could really freak out and what they call ontological shock, you know, your worldview changes and then maybe the stock market's going to crash and there'll be a lot of impacts on society.

But I really don't know.

I think that, if indeed we do have evidence that we are not alone, I think that regardless of the impact that it might have, I don't think that's a legitimate reason for holding that information secret.

It's something that everybody in the planet is entitled to know.

Holding the technology secret is understandable, but just the basic fact... But you know, we'd have to show evidence of that.

And it seems to me that, if that were ever to happen, you'd have to... I agree with Garrett too about the science.

The scientists need to be involved with this.

And I think that, if we do have evidence that's brought forward, it might have to be biological.

It might have to be an entity that has been captured or something that has been documented by scientists and be a non-human being in connection with the craft.

I mean, I don't know how it would be presented.

But it's really... Brangham: Us folks at PBS would handle all of that.

Exactly.

It's just really hard to imagine, you know, but it would be a turning point for civilization.

I mean, it's one of the most important, as Garrett said, one of the most important questions we've had since the beginning of time.

And that's why I think it's really important that we investigate it and really get the information out and do what we can.

And I think in regards to what you were reading from the legislation, Rounds and Schumer have been briefed at very high levels on this.

They're not just asking questions in this legislation.

They're really basing it on knowledge that they have, along with Marco Rubio, who's now Secretary of State, who has made very compelling statements about it.

So these people know a lot.

And I think the public has to remember that, that the people in authority who are trying to move this forward are doing that because of what they know and they can't share with us.

And they want us to, they want to share it.

Yes, that does seem to be the point of this legislation.

The efforts are underway.

And if through the investigation we find out, "Well, these are all explainable," okay, then we've solved it, but we need to solve it.

It's a mystery that needs attention.

Garrett, in the last minute or so that we have, President Trump has now made this public declaration.

They've set up a website saying they're going to go through the process of declassifying and releasing information.

Do you think that that's real?

Is that... Or is this a distraction?

I think the answer is probably somewhere in between.

I mean, certainly Donald Trump's interest in this is, I think, less genuine than he makes it out to be.

I mean, I think he really does see this as a way to distract from other negative headlines.

At the same time, the more information that comes out about this from government files, I think the better.

I've yet to see anything that comes out of these files that seems a real smoking gun or to materially change the story as we understand it.

At the same time, I think we are very likely in my lifetime to see proof of intelligent life somewhere out across the universe.

I think we misunderstand this as something that might be sort of "Independence Day" related, but I think we, the movie I mean, but I think we're actually going to probably see something that's more like discovering signs of far off life and then we'll go on with our own lives here on Earth.

Right.

Garrett Graff and Leslie Kean, thank you both so much for being here.

Really fascinating conversation.

Really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Kean: Thank you for having us.

Before we go, a quick question for you.

If we do finally encounter a non-human alien species, what do you imagine they are going to look like?

You might be thinking something like this, a big head, big eyes, scrawny body.

This is our culture's prototypical image of an alien.

It's the iPhone emoji for alien.

But where did this come from?

We didn't always imagine visitors from outer space looking this way.

In the 1888 novel, "Les Xipéhuz," a hostile troop of aliens appear as short see-through cones or cylinders.

A decade later, 1898, in "War of the Worlds," H.G.

Wells gave us squid-like aliens with long, skinny, deadly tentacles.

Our modern day image of aliens, the big oversized heads like these seen in "The Twilight Zone", began to take shape in the late 50s and early 60s.

Thanks in part to two different, widely popularized tales of alien encounters.

In 1955, 11 members of the Sutton family in southwestern Kentucky told police they'd endured an hours-long siege where they fought off multiple small green men.

These drawings, done by a local radio station employee, detail how the family described their alien attackers.

A few years later, a New Hampshire couple named Barney and Betty Hill claimed they'd been kidnapped by aliens and then returned to Earth.

Under hypnosis, they both described and Barney drew pictures of their captors.

Big heads, slits for nostrils, like those seen in the 1975 movie about their story.

Perhaps the two most famous aliens-land-on-Earth movies of all time, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T., The Extraterrestrial," both by Steven Spielberg, continued with this classic alien style.

Of course, we've now seen a remarkable range of depictions of what aliens from outer space might be like.

We've seen everything from the madcap to the murderous.

But this old iconic image endures.

President Trump recently posted this AI-generated image of a shackled alien.

But one big difference, this interstellar visitor has definitely been hitting the gym.

That's it for this episode of "Horizons."

You can watch us on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

If you like this show, subscribe and give us a rating.

It will help more people learn about the program.

Thank you so much for watching.

We'll see you next week.

Narrator: Support for "Horizons" has been provided by Steve and Marilyn Kerman and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪ You're watching PBS.