What are UFO hunters really searching for? — The Global Story

[0:00] I recently directed the Secretary of War. [0:03] How good is Pete Hexen doing? [0:05] He's seen government files relating to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena. [0:17] That was President Donald Trump talking at a Turning Point USA event over the weekend. [0:23] He's taking UFOs and aliens seriously. [0:26] Some other people are too. [0:27] And for the purposes of today's episode, we're going to keep an open mind. [0:31] We found many very interesting documents, I must say. [0:35] And the first releases will begin very, very soon. [0:38] So you can go out and see if that phenomena is correct. [0:41] From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redmond in London. [0:44] And this is The Global Story on YouTube. [0:47] Today on the show, what's the search for aliens and UFOs really about? [0:54] Hi, my name is Danny Lavelle. [1:00] I'm a journalist from Manchester, UK. [1:02] Danny, you're a serious journalist. [1:07] You've won the Orwell Prize. [1:10] But you quit your day job to go on a road trip across the United States with people who believe in aliens. [1:17] And you've written a book about it. [1:19] Why? [1:20] Well, it's interesting because I had no interest in aliens and UFOs at all before setting off across the States. [1:30] But I was a massive fan of Star Wars. [1:34] I think in my childhood, I was completely Star Wars crazy. [1:38] I would have day dreams about being Han Solo. [1:43] The Mancunian version. [1:45] The Manchester Han Solo. [1:51] Yeah, the Manchester Han Solo. [1:52] Yeah. [1:53] So, in a way, it was almost like following a childhood dream because it would be brilliant if aliens did exist. [2:01] Apart from, you know, science fiction and movies and aliens and real UFOs are things I didn't take very seriously. [2:08] But that all changed in 2017. [2:12] I remember it. [2:13] There was a headline in the New York Times called Glowing Auras and Black Money Inside the Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program. [2:22] I remember reading it. [2:24] Yeah. [2:25] And this article, it featured a Pentagon whistleblower called Luis Elizondo, Lou for short. [2:33] 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. [2:49] And a company in this article were a couple of leaked videos. [2:54] One was called Gimbo, and that showed this object filmed in sort of infrared camera on board the fighter jets targeting system. [3:08] And it looks so much like a, you know, a flying saucer. [3:12] And it seemed to rotate eerily on its own axis. [3:16] And you can hear on the video these Navy pilots being completely flabbergasted by it. [3:23] So, you know, this was really shocking to me because it's not like this was the ramblings of a Jolly Rancher. [3:29] No offense to Jolly Ranchers, but this was like, this was like a... [3:34] Hang on, what is a Jolly Rancher apart from a sweet? [3:37] It's a happy... [3:38] I only know it is a candy. [3:39] I guess it's a happy farmer, isn't it, somewhere in America. [3:44] Yeah, so this, you know, this was a form of spook saying, you know, UFOs are real, basically. [3:50] And they're, oh yeah, and they're behaving in ways that seem to defy the laws of physics. [3:56] So this was a bit different, right? [3:58] This is with the newspaper of record saying this. [4:00] This is the New York Times, right? [4:01] I guess one of the most prestigious newspapers on the planet. [4:06] So I thought, oh, okay, this is different. [4:08] I kept one eye on it. [4:09] And then over the years, the plot thickened. [4:12] The Pentagon eventually came out and admitted it. [4:14] Yeah, we do in fact have a UFO hunting office and we don't know what this is. [4:19] The Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, have confirmed the program was real. [4:25] And we know it studied anomalous aerial encounters, such as the now famous Tic Tac incident from 2004. [4:32] Barack Obama said a similar thing on the James Corden show, I remember. [4:36] And then fast forward a few more years, you had another Pentagon, well, military Department of Defense whistleblower called David Grush, [4:47] who went to Congress and told Congress and the world that the U.S. was hoarding spaceships and alien bodies. [4:56] Has the U.S. government become aware of actual evidence of extraterrestrial, otherwise unexplained forms of intelligence? [5:03] And if so, when do you think this first occurred? [5:06] I like to use the term non-human. [5:08] I don't like to denote origin. [5:09] Keeps the aperture open, both scientifically. [5:11] Certainly, like I've discussed publicly, previously in 1930s. [5:18] So, this was just like a paradigm shifting moment for me. [5:22] So, I thought either an alien invasion is going on under our nose, or there's some very confused people in the U.S. Pentagon. [5:31] So, I just found myself dropping everything and just being, oh, it's like a tractor beam pulling me in. [5:36] So, I just dropped everything and just fully dived into this topic, yeah. [5:42] Well, I have to level with you, Danny. [5:47] You are in good company because I have done a similar thing. [5:51] I dropped everything a few years ago, and I made a podcast series about a ghost in the house that I grew up in. [5:59] And because, and I think I approached it with a similar feeling to you, as in I had zero interest whatsoever in ghosts. [6:11] And then some unusual things happened, and I was compelled to try and seek some answers. [6:18] But I did so with an immense sense of trepidation because I did worry that no one would ever take me seriously ever again. [6:25] So, you and I, I think, are probably in a safe space, I would say, at this point in this conversation. [6:35] Oh, that's good to know. [6:36] Although it is new, perhaps, that all of this stuff is being taken seriously in the corridors of power in Washington, [6:44] interest in UFOs in the United States is not new, is it, Danny? [6:49] I mean, it goes back a long way. [6:51] There's a long history of this stuff. [6:53] When did UFOs, for you, start to become a fascination in the United States? [7:00] I think in the United States, it was right after the Second World War. [7:06] So, right after the Second World War, America pretty much emerged as the world's superpower. [7:14] The British Empire was pretty much finished by then. [7:17] Europe was a mess. [7:18] And alongside that was the beginnings of the Cold War, this fear of the other, the Red Scare and all that. [7:30] So, when the Roswell incident occurred, and for people who don't know about the Roswell incident, [7:36] it was when a flying disc was reported to have crashed in the New Mexico desert. [7:42] And eventually... [7:43] What year is that? [7:43] It's 1947, so two years after the war ended, there was a pilot called Kenneth Arnold, who was flying over Washington. [7:52] And he saw crafts, what he described, were moving like flying saucers. [8:00] Okay. [8:01] And then, I think it was a couple of days after, a disc was reported by the military to have crashed in the desert. [8:08] The disc was reported to have crashed by who? [8:11] The military themselves, they announced it. [8:14] I think there were some witnesses as well. [8:17] So, that got out into the paper. [8:19] The next day, they changed their story and said, actually, it was a weather balloon that had fallen. [8:25] So, that already created a lot of suspicion. [8:27] And then, the narrative ultimately became that it was a spaceship. [8:32] And they not only recovered the flying saucer, but also alien bodies. [8:37] And they were hoarding them at a secret facility in Nevada called Area 51. [8:43] But that was a perfect time for it to happen because this UFO crashed right at the beginning of this Red Scare [8:49] when America was the world's superpower. [8:52] And with being the world's superpower, you're very vulnerable to threats, you know. [8:57] And you just see this explosion of sightings in America after that as the decades advance. [9:02] And if you think about the JFK assassination, the Watergate scandal, McCarthyism, [9:11] there is this sense in America that there is this dark hand in the shadows manipulating everything. [9:18] Okay. [9:18] So, I mean, to hear you run through this history of ufology since the Second World War, [9:25] I mean, I'm hearing you employing a healthy dose of scepticism. [9:32] I mean, it sounds to me like you're more interested in the cultural aspects of all of this [9:39] rather than the actual question of whether UFOs are a real thing or not. [9:43] So, when you leave everything behind to go to the United States, [9:48] who are you hoping to meet and what are you hoping to get from them? [9:52] I did want to speak to Tom DeLonge. [9:54] And Tom DeLonge is this rock star who heads up the band Blink-182. [9:59] And he is one of the key players in this whole UFO story, funnily enough. [10:05] There was actually an event in California put together by DeLonge's company called To The Stars Academy. [10:13] And he said he was going to use some of the technology they were working on to create advanced aeroplanes. [10:22] Like, he even showed a flying saucer at this event he hosted, [10:26] which featured Lou Elizondo, the whistleblower, Chris Mellon, another whistleblower, and a few other individuals. [10:34] So, I really wanted to speak to him and just get to the bottom of why, like, [10:38] why did these whistleblowers at the Pentagon originally reach out to a rock star [10:43] rather than, like, a serious journalist or something? [10:46] Are you saying that he is using his fortune from music? [10:51] And I imagine that is a decent fortune because his band is pretty successful. [10:56] He's using his fortune from music to pursue his interest in UFOs. [11:01] Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. [11:03] And his bandmates have said he's been obsessed with it, you know, this whole time. [11:07] You're in the United States. [11:09] You're meeting characters in this weird world. [11:12] And let's call this the rock star, the scientist, and the whistleblower. [11:20] So, the rock star is this guy, Tom DeLonge from Blink-182. [11:27] Who's the scientist? [11:29] I mean, you would normally think that scientists would stay well away from anything like this. [11:37] You would, wouldn't you? [11:38] The scientist is called Avi Loeb. [11:41] And Avi Loeb is a Harvard physicist. [11:44] He also had something called the Galileo Project. [11:47] And the Galileo Project has ambitions to map out the entire sky with telescopes all over the world [11:53] to catch UFOs and get clear images of them. [11:58] He came to prominence when an asteroid zoomed through our solar system. [12:03] And as it passed the sun, it kind of sped up. [12:07] And his theory was that it sped up because it might be a solar sail from interstellar space. [12:13] So, not an asteroid, actually some kind of craft. [12:16] Some kind of craft, yes. [12:17] Like, so a solar sail that as it passed by the sun, it received the sun's energy and it accelerated. [12:24] That was one of his hypotheses. [12:29] Let's say other astronomers didn't share that view. [12:32] They think it's just a comet. [12:34] Anyway, I met him at his mansion in Boston. [12:36] But he's a Harvard University professor, is that right? [12:42] He is, yeah. [12:42] And like, I mean, how credible is he? [12:45] Very credible. [12:45] He's like, you know, if you're what a scientist, he's your man, isn't he? [12:48] He's, you know, he's got all these highfalutin titles. [12:51] He's at Harvard. [12:52] I think the interesting thing with Avi is the way he talks about aliens. [12:56] 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. [13:12] They felt very much like deities to me. [13:15] And I think if you are a materialist like Avi Loeb, then I think the closest thing to God would probably be an advanced ET. [13:23] So it just felt like religion dressed in a lab coat meeting him. [13:30] And I think that's the case for a lot of this UFO belief. [13:34] It's certainly one aspect of it, that it is this sort of redirected belief in an ultimate patriarch, a deity, you know. [13:45] 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. [13:58] And he was very preoccupied with his detractors when I spoke to him. [14:01] In fact, it was the main topic of conversation. [14:04] And then even weirder, the next day, he invited me to a play at his house that he was preparing for off Broadway. [14:15] So I don't know if you've ever been to a play in someone's attic before, but I have. [14:21] And in that play, he was like, he was comparing the criticism he got to the oppression that Galileo and Marie Curie experienced. [14:33] And I just, I don't think that's quite right. [14:36] OK, so we've talked about the rock star and we've talked about the scientist. [14:41] Let's talk about the whistleblower. [14:43] You've already mentioned him, Luis Elizondo. [14:45] He says that he used to work for the U.S. government on a project trying to find out the truth about UFOs. [14:57] What happened when you met him? [15:00] Well, I met him in Washington, D.C. [15:03] because I've been chasing him for years at this point. [15:06] He just wouldn't respond to me, didn't want to speak to me. [15:08] So I managed to corner him at a hearing in Washington. [15:13] He was given this UFO hearing. [15:15] When you say a hearing, do you mean in Congress? [15:18] Yeah, Congressional hearing, yeah. [15:19] And what was that like going into Congress itself to hear and see a hearing on UFOs? [15:29] Very surreal because at one point, one of the speakers were describing what the aliens look like. [15:35] And they said some of them are grey. [15:36] Some of them look like giant praying mantises. [15:40] Some of them look like elven Nordic sort of creatures. [15:43] And this was said in Congress to millions of people around the world. [15:48] So that was strange. [15:49] At this point in your journey, you're fairly deep in. [15:52] You know, you're sitting in watching congressional hearings and chasing after people like Luis Elizondo. [15:59] But one of the things that really struck me in your book is that you slightly incongruously find yourself in an increasingly political environment [16:09] because you bump into somebody that's familiar with, you bump into somebody that a lot of us are familiar with. [16:18] The guy known as Q Shaman, who was famously involved in the January 6th Capitol Hill riots. [16:26] How on earth did he enter the picture in your story? [16:30] So, yeah, Jake Chansley, otherwise known as the QAnon shaman. [16:34] And if people don't know who that is, cast your mind back to those January 6th riots. [16:40] 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, [16:51] shouting freedom through a bullhorn, right? [16:55] That's him. [16:56] I thought if I was going to take UFOs seriously, I'd take all the folklore and stuff that's attached to it seriously. [17:04] That's why I interviewed alleged alien abductee victims. [17:10] And there were also this group of people who called themselves starseeds, who claim that they're actually aliens, [17:16] that they have lived former lives on other planets as different creatures, and they can connect to these former lives. [17:25] And so can everyone else, as long as you meditate and sit on a rock somewhere in Sedona or something. [17:30] And he also claims to be one of these starseeds people. [17:36] So I tracked him down. [17:38] He was in prison at the time I was in America. [17:40] I think he's subsequently been pardoned now by Trump. [17:44] So I think that won't be on his record anymore. [17:47] That little trip to Washington he did. [17:49] But what did you make of this crossover then between the world of UFOs and aliens on the one hand, [17:57] and this more kind of political conspiracy world of QAnon on the other? [18:03] Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. [18:05] I thought that, you know, the starseed stuff was fairly innocuous until you actually look at what they're claiming. [18:13] They're claiming that they basically have special access that the rest of us don't have, [18:20] that they have these special powers to access these former lives, [18:25] and it's because their DNA has been upgraded. [18:28] So the whole history of this sort of starseed ideology kind of comes from eugenicist writers, right? [18:39] Which I found really, really strange. [18:42] But I think the dangerous thing with some of the UFO stuff is that it does intersect with political extremism. [18:49] So like the QAnon shaman, as well as believing the starseed stuff, [18:54] he also believes that evil entities have captured the people in power, [19:00] and they're responsible for all society's ills and things like that. [19:06] So you can see how people might innocently get interested in UFOs [19:12] and then get captured by this web of conspiracy and then graduate to more sort of sinister beliefs. [19:21] What's the main thing you learned from going on this journey, Danny? [19:25] What I learned is that we should probably act like we're alone, [19:34] like that religious impulse that there's something there guiding us and watching us. [19:38] I don't think anyone is going to come and rescue us. [19:41] I think it's up to us. [19:42] You know, we're all we have, and we should start looking after each other better. [19:47] That's my key takeaway, that we shouldn't be looking to the stars or the heavens. [19:51] We should just be looking to each other and doing duty by one another. [19:56] So, yeah, I think that might, yeah, it's an interesting part. [20:00] I think that might play a role in this, loneliness, the search for meaning. [20:05] Well, Danny, I mean, I find it very interesting that you've come around to that question of loneliness [20:13] because you've spent a lot of your career writing about society's most disadvantaged people, homeless people. [20:22] Yeah. [20:22] Did you have any inkling when you set out on this journey that that's where you might end up, [20:29] in a similar place, thinking and writing about loneliness? [20:31] Not at all, no. [20:33] In fact, one of the reasons I chose this topic is because I'd been covering homelessness and social exclusion [20:41] for almost a decade at that point, and I was completely burnt out by it [20:48] because I used myself as a case study for a lot of my reports, [20:53] and I almost placed my past in the care system. [20:57] I grew up in children's homes and foster homes, and I experienced homelessness myself. [21:02] I also went into special education, so I've experienced social exclusion and family exclusion all my life, [21:10] so it was very personal. [21:12] So when I'm, I did a series with The Guardian called The Empty Doorway [21:16] where we told the life stories of homeless people who had died, [21:20] and I was seeing myself in all of these people, and it was just heartbreaking, [21:25] and so I just wanted a change. [21:28] And I just think there is something aspirational about aliens as well, [21:32] that belief that they might be here to rescue us or whatever, [21:36] but there is something hopeful about it. [21:39] Did you feel sad at the end of it? [21:47] A little bit, yeah. [21:48] I did feel sad for some people. [21:51] I just think the way Avi talked about it, [21:53] and that he just lost his mum as well. [21:59] So that made me think on a kind of amateur psychological level [22:03] that he is looking for this parent figure. [22:05] That's what it's about deep down for him, [22:07] is finding guidance again, because it's all gone from him. [22:12] So I think that is sad when people don't have anyone, [22:16] when they have to look to the unknown for that. [22:20] That is sad, yeah. [22:22] Danny, thank you so much. [22:24] It's been such a pleasure to talk with you, [22:27] and am I allowed to call you Manc Solo, [22:30] as in the Manchester Han Solo? [22:32] Yeah, go for it, yeah. [22:34] That was Danny LaValle, the author of Chasing Aliens, [22:38] which is out later this month. [22:39] And that's it for today's episode. [22:41] The Global Story is also a podcast. [22:44] We're available every weekday. [22:46] You can find us on bbc.com or wherever you listen. [22:49] Thanks so much for tuning in. [22:50] We'll see you again next time. [22:52] Cheerio.