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Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2021
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode originally aired in July 2021
Last week, the U.S. government released a new report that attempts to categorize 144 verified sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or U.A.P. They could only definitively explain one of them.
The new report signals a shift in the way we think about U.A.P. As technology has advanced and evidence of these encounters have increased, the question has become more urgent: what exactly is happening in our skies?
Guest: Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter for the Washington Post
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody. This week we are rerunning one of my favorite shows of the year. It was a bright spot for me in a year of pretty depressing news. It's about UFOs, although that is not what the serious people call them. Anyway, it's a great episode. I hope you like it. And one quick warning, there is a little spicy language in here. Okay, here's the show. |
| 0:25.8 | I just have to ask you, have you always been into aliens? Oh, yeah, for sure. When did that start? |
| 0:34.3 | I mean, I think I've been fascinated by sci-fi movies in this topic since I was a kid. |
| 0:39.4 | It's not every day that I get to talk to a very serious journalist, in this case, Shane |
| 0:43.8 | Harris from the Washington Post, about aliens. Maybe it starts with E.T. Yeah. I was born in 76, |
| 0:50.9 | so E.T is sort of like my childhood, you know, cinematic encounter, I guess you |
| 0:55.6 | would say. But this is a general topic. Yeah, I've just generally sort of always been fascinated |
| 1:00.2 | by it. But it's only been recently that it intersected with what I write about for a living. |
| 1:08.2 | Shane covers intelligence and national security for the post. And the reason that I'm asking him |
| 1:13.8 | about something as sci-fi as aliens, besides fun, is because of a new report from the director |
| 1:20.2 | of national intelligence. A report into what most of us call UFOs, and with the military and serious |
| 1:27.4 | people who study this stuff, |
| 1:28.9 | call UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. |
| 1:33.5 | The report, released late last week, takes about 15 years of observations by military personnel, |
| 1:40.1 | mostly pilots, and tries to classify what people saw when they couldn't account for what they were seeing. |
| 1:47.5 | The kind of upshot of the report is, we've found no evidence that it's extraterrestrial life. |
| 1:51.9 | We also can't rule it out. |
| 1:54.0 | I mean, and to be clear, like, the intelligence community is not trying to, like, raise the question of whether alien species have visited the Earth. |
| 2:00.7 | That's not what this report is doing. |
| 2:02.6 | But it was kind of remarkable to see the government even talking about, you know, |
| 2:08.6 | unidentified aerial phenomenon, UAP, as we have to call them now, |
| 2:12.6 | in such an open-ended analytic way. |
... |
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