Just about 23 years ago, a band called Blink 182 put out a song about aliens existing.

It was called Aliens Exist.

But years later, something totally unpredictable happened.

The Mill House sounding dude singing that song Tom DeLong, he would sort of become

an authority on unidentified flying objects.

Tom DeLong's research on UFOs was cited in the New York Times and the Times' coverage

led to UFOs being taken way more seriously than they had been in recent memory.

And we are revisiting our episode on that renaissance on today's plane.

Today's plane, Sean Ramisfer, with Gideon Lewis Krause from the New Yorker who says UFOs

are having a renaissance.

So yes, I think we can confidently say we're in the midst of UFO renaissance.

The question is, who knows how long this will last.

I mean, there have been times where this kind of thing has flared up in the past and then

dissipated fairly quickly.

But for now, yeah, absolutely.

On the show today, we're going to try and understand how this sort of conspiratorial mainstay

came to be taken seriously in the United States.

I mean, Congress just had its first UFO hearing in half a century this May.

We're going to start with the best of the best UFO sightings.

I mean, by far the best known case at this point, and one of the cases that motivated a

lot of this renewed interest was the so-called Nimitz encounter.

It was November 2004, and the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was training about 100 miles

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