Good morning, everyone. I'm Playbook co-author Ryan Liza. It's Thursday, November 16th. Here's what's driving the day. After a last-minute hiccup last night from Senator Roger Wicker concerning the National Defense Authorization Act, the two-tiered continuing resolution passed the Senate. After President Biden signs the latest

stopgap measure, the next two funding deadlines will be January 19th and February 2nd. So enjoy

the holidays. With that out of the way, we're focusing on something a little different this morning,

UFOs. Garrett Graf has written a new book on the subject. It's called UFO, the inside story of the

U.S. government's search for alien life, here and out there. And we have a first look at that

book this morning at Politico magazine, and Garrett is here to tell us all about it.

You've got two pieces coming out, one today and one very soon. Let's dive into the subjects that they tackle. The first is an essay about what it would take for the U.S. government to take UFOs more seriously. So let's just start with that. What would it take?

Ryan, I got interested in this subject through a series of events that, you know, you have lived through in your time in Washington as well, which is this, like, huge shift we have seen since 2017 when serious people in Washington began to talk seriously about UFOs, what the government now calls UAPs, unidentified

anomalous phenomenon. And as you surely remember, there was this series of blockbuster reporting

by Politico and the New York Times in 2017 that sort of outlined a more extensive

series of secret projects and programs at the Pentagon,

looking at UFO's paranormal phenomenon, and a series also of sort of documented sightings by Navy aviators,

Navy fighter pilots, who had encountered technologies that they did not believe

were of terrestrial origin and that they did not believe the U.S. had technology to counter.

You know, my background is as a national security writer.

And so I came at this, you know, not as a, you know, UFologist, sort of someone who, you know, had sort of a vested stake in either being a believer or a skeptic, but as someone who was like, what is the government actually doing about this?

What does the government actually know?

And what is the government's history here?

And what I found was a puzzling mix of

secrets and mysteries. You know, that is things that the government was covering up, you know,

secret projects, secret flight tests, secret operations that had nothing to do necessarily

with aliens, but were things that the government did not want to talk about publicly.

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