Garrett Graff
speaker
41 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 28 Apr
Garrett Graff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Briefing · King Charles addresses US lawmakers + Trump’s ‘designated survivor’ · 28 Apr 2026
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If convicted, he could face up to life in prison.
today on something you should know why you're throwing out food you don't really need to then a serious discussion on ufos our fascination with them began in 1947. none of this starts with the idea that these are aliens invading it starts with this fear that these are soviet spacecraft popular culture hollywood begins to pick up this idea of these flying saucers as aliens as martians
So I have to imagine that this is a question, you know, sort of this idea, are we alone, is one of the two or three most fundamental questions of human existence. You know, it's right up there with, you know, the questions of what happens after death and is there a God? You know, three questions altogether, by the way, that I think
may not be totally unrelated as we come to figure out as best we can the answers to any of them.
It all begins in June 1947. There's an Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold who is flying in his private plane in the Pacific Northwest near the Cascades, and he sees a series of
fast moving bright objects in the sky that he likens to flying saucers and he lands tells some buddies about it he gets picked up by the media and very quickly kicks off this summer of the flying saucer um and you know week by week summer of 47 There are now flying saucer sightings all over the United States. They're ultimately across that somewhere.
There are sightings in 34 states up and down North America, even up into Canada. And it hits at this very specific moment in our national anxiety. That summer of 47, the government is worried about these flying saucers, not because anyone thinks that they're aliens, but because they are afraid that these are secret Soviet spacecraft.
being built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists and that these flying saucer sightings might herald a new technology that could invade the United States in this early stage of the Cold War after the end of World War II.
Well, the summer of 47 is just this moment of huge upheaval for the US national security apparatus. That summer, literally within a couple of weeks of Kenneth Arnold sightings, even as these flying saucers dominate newspaper headlines across the United States, the US Congress passes what we now call the National Security Act of 1947. And it creates this modern national security apparatus.
It creates the Unified Department of Defense. It creates the position of the Secretary of Defense, it creates the National Security Council, it creates the CIA, creates the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it creates the Air Force as a standalone service branch. The Air Force up until then, of course, had been part of the Army.
So in that summer, sort of the Air Force's first crisis is to try to identify what these flying saucers are. And the Air Force simultaneously tries to poo-poo that they appear to be anything threatening. But also, there's some fascinating paperwork from that era that shows that even behind closed doors, that the Air Force didn't have any idea what any of this stuff actually was up in the sky.
And so you have the Air Force sort of racing to try to figure this out. They enlist J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for some help, then get into a classic bureaucratic tiff with the FBI. And the FBI basically says, we're getting out of the flying saucer business and leaves it all to the Air Force.
And the Air Force, through that fall of 47 and the beginning of 48, really struggles to figure out what any of this stuff actually is.
It's both. As I said, none of this starts with the idea that these are aliens invading. It starts with this fear that these are Soviet spacecraft. And What you see happen in the late 40s and early 50s is that popular culture, Hollywood, begins to pick up this idea of these flying saucers and imagines them anew as aliens, as invading extraterrestrials, as Martians, and that
what you see created in the late 40s and the early 50s is this flywheel, really, that becomes the way that our society thinks of these issues in the subsequent decades, where you have sort of popular culture fueling public sightings that then fuels national security concerns and anxieties
that then fuels more popular culture interest, that then fuels more public sightings and sort of on and on and on. And of course, part of the challenge of that is this idea that UFOs are real. All a UFO actually is, of course, is an unidentified flying object. And there are obviously unidentified flying objects. It's just in the public mind.
sort of UFO becomes this shorthand for alien spacecraft.
It is. And it's one that the government and the national security apparatus and the intelligence community and the air force all really struggle with in the years ahead, because on the one hand, the government wants to reassure the public that these UFOs, whatever they are, uh, don't pose a threat to national security, but at the same time, um,
you know it's pretty clear that the government does not know what many of these ufos actually are and you know time and time again uh you see the government sort of trying to pull together study groups or commissions or committees
to look at this phenomenon and try to put public concerns and official concern to rest, but doing so without really being able to solve what the underlying mystery actually is.
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