A quick warning before we start, there's a little spicy language in this episode.

I just have to ask you, have you always been into aliens?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

When did that start?

I mean, I think I've been fascinated by sci-fi movies in this topic since I was a kid.

It's not every day that I get to talk to a very serious journalist, in this case, Shane

Harris from the Washington Post, about aliens.

Maybe it starts with E.T.

Yeah.

I was born in 76, so E.T. is sort of like my childhood, you know, cinematic encounter, I guess you would say.

But this is a general topic. Yeah, I've just generally sort of always been fascinated by it.

But it's only been recently that it intersected with what I write about for a living.

Shane covers intelligence and national security for the post.

And the reason that I'm asking him about something as sci-fi as aliens, besides fun,

is because of a new report from the director of national intelligence.

A report into what most of us call UFOs,

and with the military and serious people who study this stuff, call

UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.

The report, released late last week, takes about 15 years of observations by military personnel,

mostly pilots, and tries to classify what people saw when they couldn't account for what they

were seeing. The kind of upshot of the report is, we found no evidence that it's extraterrestrial

life. We also can't rule it out. I mean, and to be clear, like, the intelligence community is

...