"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 49

In this episode: What UFO Conspiracies Have to Do with Jan. 6th

April 9, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 49

Episode 49: What UFO Conspiracies Have to Do with Jan. 6th

The Pentagon UFO office just released its investigation of UFO sightings going back to the 1940s. We talk with maybe the most serious historian to study UFOs, Garrett Graff, to learn what UFO questions the Pentagon investigation has laid to rest, what new questions have been raised, why it’s sometimes in the interest of national security to keep information secret, and the connection Graff sees between UFO conspiracy theories and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Peter Bergen: Garrett, have you ever seen a UFO?

Garrett Graff: I don't think so. But any one of us could be the person who looks out their window at the right moment and, like, solves the UFO mystery.

Actually, hold on. Let’s start over. That probably wasn’t the best introduction to my friend Garrett Graff. You should know first that Garrett Graff is a massively prolific historian and journalist. And he hosted an outstanding podcast last year, Long Shadow, about right-wing extremism in the U.S.

ARCHIVAL Long Shadow Podcast: Timothy McVeigh watched Waco burn too… there are 95 people inside of them, 17 below the age of 10. What he saw was an atrocity carried out by a tyrannical government….

Graff is known for writing deeply researched books on hard national security subjects—the Cold War, the War on Terror, cybersecurity, and nuclear strategy. And he wrote maybe the best book I've read on the modern F.B.I. More recently, he published a history of the Watergate scandal that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

My point is he's maybe the last person you'd expect to be an expert on flying saucers. But he recently spent two years of his life researching and writing a 500-page history of the United States government's search for UFOs and aliens. So how the hell did that happen?

Garrett Graff: I come at this subject as someone who has spent almost 20 years in Washington covering national security and federal law enforcement and the intelligence community. And from that side, there was this shift, which you might have noticed yourself where in recent years, serious people in Washington have begun to talk seriously about UFOs.

It turns out that a very specific individual among those serious people in Washington sent Graff down the UFO path. That individual was John Brennan, the canny and judicious former director of the CIA. You'll hear more about that in a minute. But first, I need you to hear why I think this is a particularly great moment for you to join me for a conversation with Garrett Graff.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Today, we finally have seen the first report due to Congress that details the history of UFOs and a whole bunch of classified government programs..

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: A Pentagon review of decades of government investigations into UFO sightings…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: A 63-page document comes from the Pentagon's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which sounds super legit.

The Pentagon has an official UFO hunting team and it is actually legit. It's the wonderfully named All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. And AARO has finally released a long-awaited report that aims to investigate every U.S. government UFO sighting dating back to the 1940s. Now that the report was officially released in March, I wanted to talk you through some of the findings with maybe the most serious historian to seriously study this subject.

You'll hear about questions the government's investigation has settled, and new questions it may have raised.

Garrett Graff: One question I have coming out of this report is what have our adversaries figured out that we haven't, what types of spacecraft, spycraft, aircraft, have we created that the public doesn't know about?

You'll also hear what the Pentagon's newly public posture towards UFOs means for the people protecting U.S. national security.

Garrett Graff: To be the person in that bureaucracy who says ‘Yeah, there's some weird stuff out there, but we don't know what it is’ is like a really unsatisfying briefing to give.

And you’ll learn how Graff’s latest work on UFOs—and the conspiracy theories surrounding them—connects to far weightier national security topics.

Garrett Graff: I don't think you get January 6th in America without the intellectual foundation laid by the UFO conspiracists of the 1980s.

I'm Peter Bergen. Welcome to another flying saucer edition of "In the Room."

[THEME MUSIC]

Maybe the oddest aspect of Garrett Graff’s offbeat turn to writing about UFOs…is how it was inspired by a guy I tend to think of as a particularly thoughtful and serious public figure—John Brennan, the former director of the CIA.

Garrett Graff: It was December 2020 and former CIA director, John Brennan was giving an interview to a DC journalist Tyler Cowen, and was asked about this modern UFO moment.

NARRATION: The interviewer was asking Brennan about UFO sightings by US Navy pilots in the early 2000’s.

ARCHIVAL Tyler Cowen: So let's say we take a concrete issue. The Navy has reported that a lot of its pilots have seen unidentified flying objects.

ARCHIVAL John Brennan: Well,I've seen some of those videos from Navy pilots, and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising.

ARCHIVAL Tyler Cowen: What do you think is the most likely hypothesis?

Garrett Graff: And John Brennan gave this very weird answer, the syntax is among the most tortured syntax you have ever heard a Washington person say.

ARCHIVAL John Brennan: Some of the phenomenon we're going to be seeing, uh, continues to be, um, unexplained and, um, might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that, um, we don't yet understand. And that could involve some type of, um, activity that, uh, some might, uh, say, uh, constitutes a, a, a different form of life.

Garrett Graff: ‘Some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.’ And that to me was like a really, really weird comment to hear someone like John Brennan give. In 2020, he had just wrapped up the better part of a decade as the White House Homeland Security advisor and CIA director. He was a career CIA officer. He was a serious guy. And for him to say at the end of that career, basically, ‘Yeah, these UFO things are really weird, we don't know what they are, and it puzzles me.’ If you're in a role like White House Homeland Security Advisor or a role like CIA Director, there can't be that many things that puzzle you.

Garrett Graff: If you wake up in the morning with a random question, you know, tell me what Peter Bergen had for breakfast last Tuesday. There's a 60-billion-dollar-a-year intelligence apparatus that will go out and answer that question, you know, satellites and signals intelligence, intercept networks and covert spies and analysts, hoovering up open source intelligence. And so for John Brennan to sort of walk out of that job and still say, ‘Man, this UFO stuff is real weird,’ like, struck me as worthy of deeper study.

Peter Bergen: Yeah. He is not a, uh, I'm trying to describe him. He's a very careful, judicious person. This was a very careful and judicious response. However, it suggests strongly that this very careful, judicious person thinks there's something here that is—

Garrett Graff: Yeah.

Peter Bergen: —that is inexplicable.

Garrett Graff: Yes. And what I tried to do with this book—so the book really goes back across 80 years to trace the U.S. government's involvement and interest in UFOs and weave together both the military's hunt for UFOs here, as well as the work that scientists, astronomers are doing to study the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

Garrett Graff: Traditionally, these are subjects that I think journalists and historians treat entirely separately and unrelated. You know, you've got the wacky tinfoil hat UFO people here, and then you've got the serious scientists doing serious science work out across the rest of the universe. And to me they are, of course, very intricately related stories because, not for nothing, the question of whether aliens are visiting Earth very much rises and falls on the question of whether aliens exist at all.

It’s not clear that the US government agrees with Graff that its interest in UFOs is related at all to the search for life in the cosmos. That question—about whether aliens exist—is not one that the Pentagon seems particularly anxious to answer. I recently interviewed the outgoing head of the Pentagon’s UFO office, Sean Kirkpatrick. And he said his team wasn’t in the business of hunting for aliens.

Sean Kirkpatrick: That's right. The office's mission is not to prove the existence of extraterrestrials. The office's mission is to minimize technical and intelligence surprise. That is the primary mission.

This need to avoid "technical and intelligence surprise" is a major focus of Graff’s book. And Graff would agree that tracking UFOs should be a matter of national security. Rival nations could be spying on the US with high-tech aircraft or advanced drones and the Pentagon should be keeping its eyes out for that. And maybe the most public example of a spying UFO actually turned out to be somewhat low-tech. Remember all those headlines about that Chinese spy balloon last year?

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: It is day two of Balloon Watch.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: China is calling it a civilian airship. The US calls it a spy balloon.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: …that Chinese spy balloon traveling across the country…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: China says that contraption over the United States is just researching weather. Yeah, okay, sure.

It's worth pointing out that America’s air defenses spotted that balloon in the first place BECAUSE of this new push from the Pentagon to get US military personnel to report weird sightings they observe. The hope seems to be that the reporting and investigation of those sightings becomes a boring, routine part of monitoring US airspace.

Garrett Graff: I think that that's exactly the right approach by the way, the way that you get a better understanding about the reality of the mystery of UFOs is by collecting better information and data. One of the challenges is we don't actually still have a particularly good understanding of what is not anomalous in the sky, meteorologically, atmospherically or astronomically. This is just a really big data collection challenge, that at the end of the day probably will be pretty boring.

Peter Bergen: Well, and it seems, Garrett, that the government is in a phase of taking this all a lot more seriously in the sense that they set up this office at the Pentagon.

Garrett Graff: Absolutely.

Peter Bergen: They've really destigmatized the flier who comes back to the aircraft carrier and says, I saw something weird. They're really encouraging people to come forward now in a way that wasn't true in the past.

Garrett Graff: Yes, and this is actually a big part of why the government has rebranded this as UAPs, which, you know, ironically, the way that people started talking about this in the 1940s was flying saucers. That was what they called it originally. And the government realized that there was a big giggle factor in talking about flying saucers.

Garrett Graff: And so the government rebranded this as unidentified anomalous phenomenon, which is a redefinition meant to encapsulate two major shifts in the thinking from UFOs: One, that not all of these things are going to be objects, that some chunk of them are going to be phenomena, you know, astronomical, meteorological, atmospheric phenomena that we do not yet understand. And not all of these things are flying, and that actually one of the few things that we know that the government has discovered in the last couple of years of studying this subject is a trans-medium Chinese drone, which is to say a Chinese drone that comes out of the water and transitions to flight, which is a technology that the U.S. did not understand that China possessed until it began to dive into these latest questions around UFOs and UAPs.

Peter Bergen: That's fascinating. And so that's exactly how the system should work, that people should report. And presumably the Chinese balloon story that got a lot of attention, about a year ago, came out of this effort at the Pentagon to say, ‘you should be reporting things that seem anomalous. There isn't a stigma to do this anymore.’

Garrett Graff: Yeah, and the Chinese spy balloon incident, to me, is reflective of another chunk of what the reality of UFOs and UAPs is going to turn out to be, which is, there's just a bunch of weird stuff floating around up there that we don't pay attention to on a daily basis. What we learned with that Chinese spy balloon scare a year ago is if you set the NORAD radars slightly differently, you start picking up a bunch of stuff that we weren't looking for originally and then all of a sudden we're like, oh wait, what is that thing?

Peter Bergen: The long-awaited Pentagon UFO report came out in March, and I thought it was a pretty devastating deconstruction of so much of the UFO history, and so my takeaway from the report, there are a few takeaways, but a big one is the extent to which this was a pretty elaborate game of telephone where a bunch of people who were not skeptical about UFOs were in positions to get the government to look into it. And then lots of people started hearing about the sort of top-secret investigation of UFOs and began to use that as proof that there was UFOs out there because there were these secret programs that were looking into it.

Garrett Graff: I think it's actually even more complicated than that. This effort by a new Pentagon office called AARO, that was set up and tasked with in recent years, basically getting to the bottom of the UFO mystery, came out and said, you know, we talked to all those witnesses, we tracked down all of the programs that they hinted at, and all of the programs exist, and are appropriately budgeted and notified to Pentagon leadership and Capitol Hill, but none of them work on UFOs. And to me, it actually raises a much more interesting set of questions, which is, ok, if those programs exist, but they're not UFO related, what is the government working on in the depths of the black budget in the Pentagon, in defense contractors, in the intelligence community that people elsewhere in the shadowy world of defense contracting think from the outside look like UFO programs?

A big complicating aspect of the UFO issue, from Graff’s perspective, is that the US Government has definitely been hiding stuff from the public. It has to. American national security depends on the government concealing its own top-secret technology. At the same time, it also has to conceal what it knows about the top-secret technology of rival nations. And a lot of that technology—to an untrained observer—can look pretty UFO-ish. Or, as Graff might say, “UFO adjacent.”

Garrett Graff: The government gets really squirrely talking about two UFO-related and adjacent subjects. A big part of this history is confusion around things like the U2 spy plane, the SR-71, the F-117 stealth bomber, the B-2 bomber, things like that. And that in fact, a lot of what the public thinks are UFOs, the government knows exactly what it is.

Garrett Graff: There's also a category of UFO sightings that are advanced adversary technology being tested against us. This is Chinese drones, Russian drones, Iranian drones, spacecraft, spy craft, etc. And the government is really squirrelly talking about what its sensors pick up and what it doesn't pick up, you know. It doesn't want to say, ‘Yes, we detected this Chinese craft at this precise latitude, at this precise speed, and that's not a UFO, we know what it is.’ So the government, very routinely covers up what it actually does know about some public UFO sightings, but part of what this report got into that I thought was so interesting is, as you said, there has been this sort of weird game of telephone inside the government really dating back to the 1980s where you see decade after decade whistleblowers and witnesses come forward to say, you know, I believe the government is hiding alien spacecraft or alien bodies, I talked to a guy who works on a program that works on UFOs, I talked to someone who touched a UFO, things like that.

And Graff thinks a lot of the public discussion of this latest UFO report has focused on the Pentagon’s insistence it’s not hiding evidence of aliens. But Graff thinks lots of observers have missed a pretty cool piece of news. And that’s the news that the Pentagon has all but admitted that it’s hiding something else: New technology so amazing that talking about it further would harm national security.

Garrett Graff: What I think people missed was the Pentagon report basically says, ‘We checked into what we are hiding, and we are not hiding UFOs, but we're not going to tell you what the thing is that we actually are hiding.’

Peter Bergen: The report says, essentially, that the people who are talking about UFOs and the people they interviewed have, quote, ‘mistakenly associated authentic sensitive national security programs and had incomplete or unauthorized access to these programs’ and adds, ‘discussion of these programs outside of secure facilities presents a high risk of exposing national security information.’ So, I take from that, in plain English, ‘Yeah, there are some secret programs. Some people heard about them. In fact, it's a security risk that they're even talking about them publicly. But we're not going to tell you what they are because they're nothing to do with UFOs.’

Garrett Graff: Exactly. But, you can imagine that they are UFO-adjacent, and what I mean by that is you can sort of imagine those types of programs that from the outside would look like a UFO-related flying saucer program. And, these could do with reverse engineering adversary technology that we have recovered, but have not yet solved ourselves. One question I have coming out of this report is what have our adversaries figured out that we haven't, what types of spacecraft, spycraft, aircraft, unmanned platforms have we created that the public doesn't know about? A third category could be, for instance, breakthroughs in propulsion systems or material sciences that the public is unaware of yet.

So. Garrett Graff and I mostly agree about the biggest takeaways from the Pentagon's long-awaited investigation into UFO sightings. First and foremost, the Pentagon's UFO office are saying: 'We've got really high security clearances. We looked at all the secret UFO files we could get our hands on all the way back to the 1940s. And we found zero evidence of aliens.'

Second, the investigators are saying, 'You know all those stories you've heard over the years about the Pentagon hiding what it knows about aliens? Well, those stories are coming from humans, who've got very human reasons for telling them.'

And there's the thing we've talked about already: Civilians, and people in the Pentagon or the military, occasionally hearing rumors about—or catching glimpses of—highly secret U.S. aircraft or U.S. programs that seem kind of otherworldly. People want answers about this stuff, and when the government doesn't provide them ... Graff's work shows us that the imagination tends to take over.

And then there's another wrinkle. These days, something like 40 percent of Americans believe that aliens are visiting the earth. And some of those believers work for the US government, or have close ties to it. And the Pentagon UFO office says that some of these believers worked to set up programs inside the Pentagon to investigate the aliens they believed might exist. And these efforts—and the paperwork associated with these efforts—ended up being wrongly trotted out as proof of the US government thinking that aliens really ARE visiting Earth.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Now to some close encounters on Capitol Hill, where there was an extraordinary hearing today about UFOs.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch appearing before house lawmakers, testifying about what he claims is a decades old government program to recover and re-engineer crashed alien spacecraft…

Garrett Graff: In many ways, this new AARO report from the Pentagon in mid March is the answer to the testimony last summer by David Grusch…

ARCHIVAL David Grusch: Mr. Chairman, ranking members and congressmen. Thank you...

Garrett Graff: …this so-called UFO whistleblower.

ARCHIVAL David Grusch: I was informed of a multi-decade, uh, UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program.

Peter Bergen: By the way, where were you, were you watching it live?

Garrett Graff: Yes, I watched the hearings live last summer.

ARCHIVAL UFO hearings / Rep. Nancy Mace: If you believe we have crashed craft, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?

David Grusch: Biologics came with some of these recoveries. Yeah.

Rep. Nancy Mace: Um, were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?

David Grusch: Non-human and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to.

Peter Bergen: What was your reaction as you heard all that?

Garrett Graff: I was pretty doubtful about his claims, in part because one of the things that he had said in media interviews was that there were 5,000 people working on this program inside the government. [Peter laughs] And, I mean, you laugh.

Peter Bergen: You know, the way to keep a secret in Washington is you don't tell anyone, right?

Garrett Graff: Right.

Peter Bergen: 5,000 people, I mean, they're gonna tell somebody.

Garrett Graff: So I'm actually just finishing up a book on D-Day that will come out in June, the 80th anniversary of D-Day. For six months, the biggest secret in the Allied war machine was the date and target of D-Day. It was kept as small a circle as possible and in those six months there were a half dozen totally inadvertent security compromises. Literally one guy accidentally mailed a set of invasion plans home to his mom in Chicago. There was a guy who left a set of invasion plans on a bus. There was a full general who got drunk at a party and started talking to other people at the party about the invasion plans.

Garrett Graff: Those are the totally inadvertent examples that we still see transpire when the government is trying to keep a secret, so to me the idea that like there are 5,000 people in the United States government working right now who know this biggest secret of all just seemed unbelievable, even before you get to the second layer of David Grusch's claim, which is that this conspiracy has been ongoing for 90 years. You know, Peter, the CIA torture program, in the wake of 9/11, that was, arguably the biggest secret that the U.S. government was keeping. In round numbers, how many people knew about that? Maybe 500? It was a secret that kept for only three years, and generated 2.2 million pages of documents that took the U.S. Senate a decade to wade through.

Garrett Graff: So, like, do you have any idea how much paperwork just 5,000 people in government would generate working on a UFO program? Just even before you get into personnel records and budget briefings and power points and, like, no one has inadvertently left one of those documents or emailed them to their roommate by accident?

Graff makes it clear he thinks the US government sometimes REALLY IS hiding information that it knows about UFO sightings ... because a lot of those sightings are actually people glimpsing top-secret US technology. And Graff is quick to debunk those more feverish conspiracy theories about the government covering up contact with aliens. Because, first of all, he says, those conspiracy theories can't weather the factual scrutiny of a serious historian.

But Graff also pushes back on the most fantastical of the UFO/alien conspiracy theories for a more important reason. He thinks those conspiracy theories have helped lead people into believing other conspiracy theories that are causing real harm today.

Garrett Graff: You see in the 1970s and 1980s the rise of UFO conspiracies. This idea that the government is hiding the truth about aliens. The sort of most fantastical versions of this are not just that we have recovered crashed alien spacecraft or alien bodies, but that, you know, the US government has entered into peace treaties with alien races.

Garrett Graff: What we can now recognize is that it is in these UFO conspiracies in the 1970s and 1980s where you have the first arrival and creation, really, of what we would now recognize as the idea of the deep state. The idea that there is this secret government cabal of military and intelligence leaders working at cross purposes with and lying to the nation's elected leadership and citizens. And the people who are that sort of first generation of UFO conspiracists in the 1980s actually become some of the founding voices of the far-right, extreme, talk-radio movement of the 1990s.

Garrett Graff: Most notably there's this radio host named Bill Cooper who sort of first surfaces in the 1980s by claiming to be a former naval intelligence officer who saw while on duty the memos about the government's contact with alien species…

ARCHIVAL Bill Cooper: All of this stuff about UFOs and extraterrestrials is interesting, contrary to the belief of the vast army of sheeple out there, it does mean something.

Garrett Graff: and then becomes one of the most popular…

ARCHIVAL Bill Cooper: I'm your host, William Cooper, and you're listening to The Hour of the Time.

Garrett Graff: …national far-right talk-radio hosts of the 1990s…

ARCHIVAL Bill Cooper: Democracy is a code word for socialism, and that's why our forefathers established a republic.

Garrett Graff: …and has two very notable and historically important superfans. The first of them is Timothy McVeigh. He and his buddy Terry Nichols actually drive out to Bill Cooper's compound in Arizona. And as they are leaving Bill Cooper's driveway, Tim McVeigh says to Bill Cooper, ‘Watch Oklahoma City.’ And of course, a couple of months later you have the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. And then Bill Cooper inspires a second really important person, a young Austin, Texas public-access talk show host named Alex Jones…

ARCHIVAL Alex Jones: That’s a military dictatorship…

Garrett Graff: …and becomes really the sort of mentor and inspiration in the 1990s for the rise of Alex Jones and his talk radio show.

ARCHIVAL Alex Jones: I'm saying recognize we are under martial law now of the UN and the medical tyranny and Bill Gates. Face that!

Garrett Graff: Bill Cooper launched the modern era of government conspiracies with Alex Jones and passed the torch to a new generation.

ARCHIVAL Alex Jones: The calm before the storm. Washington, DC braces for more than 3 million people. January 6, 1 p.m. Capitol building. Northeast side. I'll be leading that march.

Garrett Graff: I don't think you get January 6th in America without the intellectual foundation laid by the UFO conspiracists of the 1980s.

I think the idea here is not that the enraged rioters burst into the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 because they thought there might be a crashed flying saucer hidden in the basement. It’s more like alien-UFO conspiracies are like a gateway drug to worse conspiracy theories for a certain kind of radio host or listener. Because if you can become convinced there’s a deep-state cabal lying to you about something as fundamental as “Are we alone in the universe?”—who’s to say what else they’re lying to you about?

Garrett Graff: Before the 1970s there was not this idea of the existence of a deep state. The idea that you would have a professional cabal of secret-keepers who lie to the president and lie to Congress and now, of course, that becomes a very regular part of both pop culture and of course our actual modern politics.

I said earlier that Garrett Graff and I mostly agree about the biggest takeaways from the Pentagon's latest UFO investigations. But there is one area where I think we see things a little differently. That area is a mystery that's probably the hardest one to solve. No matter how closely the Pentagon's UFO office studies this subject, there will always be a small percentage of UFO sightings that won’t ever be explained. Those US Navy pilot incidents from the early 2000s are a great example. These are the ones that left former CIA director John Brennan basically at a loss for words.

ARCHIVAL John Brennan: Well, I've seen some of those videos from Navy pilots and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising.

Even though there's some video for some of these US Navy pilot sightings, there's little chance that much in the way of other useful data will come to light years from now. So we're mostly left relying heavily on eyewitness testimony to determine the truth behind these claims.

In my experience, the truth can be, sometimes, incredibly hard to find out. But once you do find it out, situations that seemed superhuman often turn out to be—all too human. When the hunt for Osama bin Laden finally ended, for example … they didn’t find him inside some kind of high-tech Bond villain lair, monitoring operations on a wall of screens. They found him instead in a ramshackle compound in Pakistan, with no phone line but lots of chickens, where the aging mastermind of 9/11 was using Just for Men hair dye to keep from going gray.

But when Garrett Graff chases after an elusive truth, I get the sense he likes to savor the mystery a little more, and leave some room for wonder. So let’s give him the last word about those unexplained UFOs.

Garrett Graff: There are only a handful of answers to what this could be, all of which would be important for us to understand. One is, the government is working on some pretty fantastical secret stuff that we don't know about yet. And that's pretty exciting. The second is there are also really mind-blowing answers to what it could be, and the answers are probably far weirder and stranger than we can possibly imagine.

Garrett Graff: You don't have to believe that UFOs equal aliens. All you have to believe is that there's, exactly what John Brennan said, there's stuff out there that we don't know what it is, and we should be interested in solving that puzzle. And I want our 60-billion-dollar-a-year intelligence apparatus to be unsatisfied with the answer ‘I don't know.’ And as a taxpayer and as a citizen, like, I want our government to try to solve this mystery in a very open-minded way.

[MUSIC]

If you're interested in learning more about some of the stories and issues we talked about in this episode. I strongly recommend Garrett Graff’s Watergate: A New History, and, of course, his latest, UFO, The Inside Story Of The U.S. Government Search For Alien Life Here—And Out There. Both are available on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

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