Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Last Friday was a pretty big day for those who believe the US government is hiding something.
UFOs? Real. The Trump administration released its first tranche of declassified UFO files from the Pentagon, NASA and the FBI. It's a thing. It's a real thing.
The trove of documents released by the Pentagon details reports of alien encounters, sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena and videos of strange objects flying through the sky. There's a whole fleet of them.
Look on the SA. My gosh.
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Chapter 2: What is the latest update on hantavirus and the MV Hondias?
And from spaceships to cruise ships, namely the Hantavirus hit MV Hondias. As scientists analyse the virus and health organisations continue in their response, the passengers have finally been allowed to disembark. But many will now be facing six weeks of quarantine. A question they might be asking themselves is how to stay occupied. And they could do worse than indulging in some arts and crafts.
According to a new study, activities like singing, dancing and painting have been linked to slower biological ageing. So today I chat to Ian Sample about the stories that have caught our eye this week. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly.
Ian, since our episode about Hantavirus last week, the epicentre of the outbreak, the cruise ship MV Hondias, has been on quite a voyage. So where do things stand now in terms of the numbers of cases and what's happening with the response?
So at the moment, the latest figures at the time of recording are 11 cases reported, though only nine of those have been confirmed. So two of those 11 are probable, but they're still awaiting the checks. And we know, of course, there have been these three deaths, the Dutch couple and a German couple.
But the World Health Organization has warned that countries should prepare for more cases due to the interactions of those passengers before the ship really went into sort of infection control measures. So all of those passengers now have scattered to their various countries, but they're being either kept in various facilities or they're self-isolating and being monitored.
But some of those may pop up as extra cases still.
And of course, this has such a long incubation time as well that there's some delay in the cases coming to light. But do we know any more about how the virus actually made it onto the ship and then spread among the passengers? You know, it's been confirmed that this is the Andy strain, which is known to sometimes transmit between people, but that is very rare.
Yeah, we don't know for sure how the virus got onto the ship, but the strongest suspicion has fallen on the first two cases, the Dutch couple who sadly died. But they had travelled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a birdwatching trip prior to boarding.
And when authorities went through their itinerary, they stopped at sites and reportedly even a landfill where you can see various birds, but you also find the type of rat that carries the Andes virus. So It's possible one or both of them contracted the virus during that trip and that would be from infected rat droppings or urine and then spread it to others when they boarded the ship.
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Chapter 3: What new information did the Pentagon release about UFOs?
And in that event, three people who came into contact with infected rodents spread the Andes virus to 34 other people and 11 of those died.
Chapter 4: How did the Pentagon's UFO files come to be declassified?
So what it suggests so far... is that the cases on that ship are the result of a single spillover event from these infected rodents rather than the emergence of a radically different strain. And there's currently no evidence that this is a version that spreads more easily or causes more severe disease than any of the other Andes viruses.
OK, so some really reassuring stuff there. Now, what's happened to the passengers of the MV Hondias?
This is a Dutch-flagged cruise ship that was originally sailing from Argentina to Cape Verde. Some passengers had left at various stops along the way, and others who tested positive were evacuated to hospitals in Europe and elsewhere. But the rest all disembarked at Tenerife, and all those passengers had medical checks before basically being repatriated.
Passengers from Britain who left in Tenerife, they were taken to Arrow Park Hospital in Merseyside, a block that was actually last used to quarantine Britons returning from China at the start of the COVID pandemic.
Chapter 5: What evidence of alien encounters is included in the Pentagon's UFO files?
None of them are ill, but symptoms can take six weeks or so to emerge. So they're all being monitored. Ten people from these UK territories, St Helena and Ascension, will be brought back to the UK to complete their self-isolation here. And we know that there's two other British nationals who are being treated in hospitals in the Netherlands and South Africa. They're among the confirmed cases.
So there's a big effort afoot containing these people.
And those Brits you mentioned in Arrow Park, they're now starting to leave to go back to their own homes for a further 42 days of self-isolation. It's an awfully long time to be stuck inside. But look, Ian, what are health authorities going to be thinking about now?
Well, as I say, the World Health Organization has warned countries and basically warning the public that we may see more cases in the coming weeks. And that's really because what I was saying earlier is that people are most infectious early on.
And there was a lot of mingling on that ship between the passengers before it really went into sort of its own little lockdown and people were taking these precautionary measures. So some of those people are still within their sort of six week period where they may have had last exposure.
But obviously, WHO has also urged countries to, apart from this quarantine, they want constant monitoring of their sort of high-risk contacts. So that will be people that they're in relationships with or people they're sharing houses with. The message to the broader public is still that the risk to them is very low.
And again, there's nothing in the genetics that points to this being anything particularly unusual. So I think as long as that quarantine and self-isolation is adhered to well, then this should fizzle out pretty quickly. Maddy, late last week, the Pentagon released a batch of 162 never before seen secret files on UFOs. What brought this on?
Yes, no longer secret. Well, in February, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to begin to identify, declassify and release the government files that they had on UFOs, which are now more commonly called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs, by authorities, and also files on the possibility of alien life beyond Earth.
And Trump said this was because there was tremendous interest from the public in what the US government knows about aliens and UFO sightings and how it's all being tracked and monitored.
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Chapter 6: What cultural activities are linked to slower biological aging?
They're not massively exciting. If you were hoping for a picture of a slimy alien, you're not going to get one. And the video files, they also include more dots moving in weird ways. And it's been reported that there are some over Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. When it comes to the written documents, it's all sorts of things, really.
So there are pamphlets, there's correspondence, interview transcripts, eyewitness accounts of supposed encounters and sightings of UFOs. And so one example our colleague Richard Luscombe gave in his article about this was a 1947 report from L.A.
Air Defence Command headquarters in New York of an account by a pilot and navigator of a Pan Am aircraft who said they momentarily sighted a mystery bright orange object in the sky that was visible for just a few seconds and then it disappeared behind a cloud and wasn't seen again.
But actually, I think some of the most interesting are the transcripts from debrief interviews with Apollo astronauts.
So let me check one thing before I move on, Maddy. You mentioned interview transcripts, presumably not interviews with aliens.
No, no, just with people who say that they've seen them and the FBI.
Just in case the conspiracy theorists wondered if we were sort of hiding that. OK, so what did the astronauts report?
Yeah, so Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, so that's the second man to walk on the moon, in his 1969 debrief, he says about seeing a sizable object close to the lunar surface and a, quote, fairly bright light source. And... supposedly the crew felt it looked like a laser. And later Apollo astronauts also reported seeing these bright lights in space.
Now it's thought that some of these were maybe something to do with the cameras. They were using faults on the cameras or the camera film, or maybe they were very small rocks colliding with the moon. So there's a few different theories to explain this.
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Chapter 7: How is the hantavirus affecting passengers on the cruise ship?
That jump is still quite big because we might not be able to explain them, but they're still probably Earth-based phenomena. But I have to admit, they are really interesting to go and have a look through. And there are more coming. And if any of our listeners want to go and have a look...
They can go to war.gov slash UFO and they'll land on a very sci-fi style website from the US government where they can have a look through the pictures and files themselves. Coming up, does engaging in art and culture keep you younger for longer?
I'm Kai Wright. I'm Kari Sherman.
And we are here to tell you about our new show, which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have, I know you have, where it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face with a fire hose of news, right?
There's war. There's authoritarianism. Our planet is burning.
I could go on and on and on. And on and on and on. But we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? How do you manage it?
I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out, okay, how can I be smarter about this particular topic? And who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it?
And who can tell me who's responsible for the mess that I'm reading about? So that's our mission. That's the show.
Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from The Guardian.
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