Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power, politics and society.

On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America about something that's going on in America in

2023. I am delighted to be joined today by the spectators' much adored contributor,

Sean Thomas, who is an author of fiction and lots of great journalism. And we're going to be

talking about UFOs or, as the

Pentagon prefers to call them, UAPs, which stands for unidentified aerial phenomena or unidentified

anomalous phenomena. Sean, UFOs, I'm going to stick to calling them UFOs, have been in the news a lot recently.

There was a congressional hearing the other day into UAPs, UFOs, and quite a lot of high-level, very respected people in America, from President Obama to John Brennan, former director of CIA, to many others, have been

talking about this phenomenon and talking about it quite seriously. And so it sort of seems to be

moving in kind of Washington, at least, or among elite Americans, it seems to be moving from

the realm of conspiracy theory, X-Files, crazy talk, to something that serious people, if you'd like to call people serious people, are talking about very seriously.

You wrote an excellent piece about this.

Can you just try and sum it up and explain for us what you think is going on here?

I think I gave five different possible explanations as to how you

can explain what is going on in Washington holistically. You've got to take it in the round.

The actual evidence for UFOs, UAPs that we've been shown is quite meager, if not feeble.

Given them we've all got iPhones and stuff, there should be billions of amazing photos of these things

if they really are flying around,

but there's lots of typically blurry, grainy photos and videos,

which are very disappointing, ultimately.

But the bigger evidence is the reaction of people who are on the inside,

or in the elite, politically, journalistically,

...