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From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson, and I'm Joanne Freeman.

Today we're going to talk about a topic that probably has been on the minds of a good number of you who are listening given events that have happened over the course of the last few weeks.

And it has to do with UFOs, although apparently the government now refers to them as unidentified aerial phenomena.

So UAP, I think UFO has more zip and I did a five-flying object, but still.

So there have been a number of episodes. The first one, the one that probably most people have heard about on February 4th, Chinese spy balloon was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.

And you know, it was sort of clothed in mystery somewhat as to what was happening there and what it represented.

Thought is now that it was intended to have surveillance over military bases and Guam and maybe Hawaii, but that it got carried off course and drifted to Alaska and Canada and then entered the United States.

I think somewhere around Idaho on January 31st, surprising the Pentagon.

And then on February 1st, it made its way to the skies over a military base in Montana, where it was publicly reported. And that's when it came on our, I use radar screen a lot in conversation and it's rarely appropriate and yet here it is.

So then in addition to that, which we actually knew what it was in February, there were three UAPs shot down one was shot down off of Alaska and it broke into pieces, probably not a balloon supposedly a White House official said it was the size of a small car, which is rather impressive.

Then the next day, February 11th, another one was shot down over Canada, it was downed over the Yukon, which borders Alaska, it was described by a Canadian official as being cylindrical and smaller than the Chinese spy balloon.

And then the next day, February 12th, another UAP was shot down over Lake Huron, was octagon shaped and had strings hanging off of it, but it's unclear what any of these three things were, they're still really not a consensus over what they are.

So the Chinese spy balloon is what started this whole phenomenon and now in a way we and others are looking up at the skies and finding other things up there.

There's a lot of things going on up there, Joanne, he said from Maine.

The whole idea of the way that people living in the United States have looked at UFOs and interpreted UFOs really since even before there was a United States says a lot about who we are and a lot about our hopes and our fears.

I'm going to try to play this one absolutely straight because I think it's important to take cultural phenomena really seriously.

I agree with your point, which is what we're talking about one way or another today is the fact that these various UFOs, what's fascinating about them or at least what fascinates me about them is that they say a lot more about the people seeing them than about anything else.

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