Book Review: UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There

Even mentioning I was reading a book about UFOs made me self-conscious, given how laden the topic is with conspiracy theories, crackpots and grifters, and unseriousness throughout the years. And yet, as a matter of scientific and philosophical inquiry, the question, “Are we alone in the universe?” deserves serious, rigorous investigation and attention. Attempting to answer that question sheds light on our humanity, our origins, our understanding of the universe, and certainly, our place within it. As such, I’m grateful that journalist Garrett Graff, former editor-in-chief of Politico Magazine, wrote 2023’s, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There. Graff also wrote the captivating and timely 2022 book, Watergate: A New History, I reviewed here. Graff’s book addresses the aforementioned silliness and hoaxes permeating UFO discussions, but cuts through to offer insight into the United States government and scientists’ search for extraterrestrials, with a poignant examination of our longing gaze into the cosmos.

The idea of aliens, UFOs, and flying saucers particularly came into the popular imagination in America with a young Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds CBS broadcast in 1938, which is where Graff begins his book. War of the Worlds, a broadcast that appeared to be legitimate and didn’t announce itself as a fictionalized radio production until deep into the show, is probably oversold in terms of how many people genuinely believed an alien invasion was occurring and as a lesson learned about the gullibility of the populace. Nonetheless, it is a fitting place for Graff to start to show how intertwined the UFO “phenomenon” is with popular culture. (It also made me wonder if anyone three years later during the Pearl Harbor attacks initially assumed that was also a fictionalized radio production.)

While UFO sightings and reports go back to antiquity, two things happened after WWII: a.) they increased in frequency and b.) the U.S. government, specifically the U.S. Military and the U.S. Air Force, and scientists began seriously investigating and/or discussing the possibility of extraterrestrials and UFOs. Of course, “ufologists” would argue that the U.S. government was already intertwined with the subject and hiding something; the post WWII era only marked heightened questioning about what the government knows. But importantly, Graff reminds us that there is a difference between secrets — concealed facts — and mysteries. Our intelligence agencies deal in and trade with secrets, known facts. So, are UFOs secrets of known facts about the universe or mysteries? Given the myriad scientific and logical reasons it’s unlikely aliens have ever visited earth, UFOs more so slot into mysteries and that itself is only a sliver of the flying saucer sightings: most are hoaxes, misinterpreted natural phenomenon, or otherwise explainable. After all, eyewitnesses are not exactly reliable, especially, I imagine, trying to spot something otherworldly and unimaginable to our level of technology and sophistication. However, that still means a not insignificant number slot within “mysteries.” Which gets to one of my favorite lines in the entire book, befitting a summation of the entire field of ufology. It’s not that the government is covering up something it doesn’t know or understand, i.e., something extraterrestrial, but rather it’s covering up the embarrassment of admitting to not knowing. For example, they could be covering up embarrassment about not knowing about a superior technology Russia or China possess. The other possibility, too, is that as a broad matter, the U.S. government has an overclassification problem. Too much of what the government does is classified when it likely need not be, but I digress. One more note on the historical context that’s intriguing is how many people theorized at the time aliens began visiting us because of our use of atomic bombs. In this depiction, aliens are the benevolent stewards of the universe visiting to impart wisdom on the follies of humans.

To the point about Russia, though, the salience of UFO sightings and U.S. government attention turning to extraterrestrial life in the universe occurring post-WWII is such attention also occurred in the thick of the Cold War. With that context, it’s not difficult to imagine the American populace, and the American government, wondering if Russia was actually ahead of them in technology or otherwise spying on our military bases. Area 51, which construction began on in 1943, was an attempt to spy on what was going on in the Soviet Union. Our spy planes, U-2s (high altitude reconnaissance aircraft), and dummy bodies would be confused for UFOs. Amusingly, in 1952, the U.S. was actually trying to build its own flying saucer with the help of British scientist Jack Frost (amazing). It never got off the ground (heh). The other concern the U.S. government had was that an adversary, such as Russia, could use UFO sightings to induce panic in the population, thus generating a national security threat. That’s a backchannel way for the military to investigate such UFO sightings. The Cold War is also the context in which the space race itself happens. Graff points out the U.S. government didn’t go as hard in that direction as they could have, and Russia beat us there, at least initially. Sputnik, the first satellite launched into space by Russia, was seen as an “intellectual Pearl Harbor” by American scientists. Even then, once the U.S. ramped up with what Graff called a “revolution in science and education,” and landed on the moon (a legitimate concern was that Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts would bring back novel bacteria that would be devastating; they didn’t, of course), interest in investing in and exploring space dwindled. That’s the other undercurrent of Graff’s book, the waxing and waning of both public and legislator interest in funding and supporting the search for extraterrestrials.

When sightings first began, the media thought it wacky, zany, and unserious. Indeed, in some respects, it was considered harmless. That is until 1948, when Captain Thomas Mantell with the Kentucky Air National Guard, crashed his plane and died in pursuit of a UFO. It was the first time the orientation around UFOs went from amusing curiosity to, are they hostile? Of course, it wasn’t actually aliens, but rather most likely a top secret skyhook balloon for atmospheric research. Not long after this incident, Project Blue Book was created in 1952, a systematic study of UFOs by the Air Force and headquartered not that far from me at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Its precursors included Project Sign, where “almost all cases were explained by ordinary causes,” and Project Grudge, which came to a similar conclusion. Project Blue Book investigated 12,618 sightings and 701 remained “unidentified.” That’s the sliver I mentioned earlier; it represents almost 6 percent of cases. A civilian UFO research group, National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), claimed Blue Book with covering up UFO evidence. So it goes and would continue in such a manner for decades to come. I mean, the U.S. government took seriously enough these UFO sightings and the public concern that the Air Force, which was still nascent at the time, held regular press conferences to assuage the public (the Air Force would grow increasingly frustrated over the years, particularly with Area 51 and Roswell). The military and the FBI even investigated and talked to “contactees,” people who claimed to have contact with extraterrestrials. I couldn’t help but scoff at it because it’s so absurd and yet, it had to be taken seriously.

Scientifically speaking, given how many billions of stars and earth-like planets there are, the odds are favorable for the existence of extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial civilizations. However, there has not been any evidence such beings or civilizations exist, which is what’s known as the Fermi paradox. Scientists and philosophers have posited a number of explanations, including that we’re not looking in the right place — the universe is unbelievably vast, far more vast than we realized even 100 years ago, and also, extraordinarily old, especially in comparison to any human scale —, or that when a civilization develops far enough to create the necessary technology for interstellar travel, they also develop the means to wipe themselves out, or the “great filter” theory, which is that all civilizations hit a natural progression endpoint prohibiting interstellar travel and communication. Until recently, we didn’t even, and still to some extent are discovering, our own origins, much less ascertaining and discovering the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Why did intelligent human life emerge? After all, dinosaurs had 165 millions to get smart like us and they didn’t. Dolphins and whales and other intelligent sea life, for all their intelligence, are not looking through a telescope into space wondering about other life. What if similar creatures exist elsewhere unable to send radio waves to us? Carl Sagan, one of the most popular scientists of the 20th century, demonstrated how difficult it is to scan the cosmos and identify intelligent life. He showed lawmakers photographs of earth and from all appearances, there was no sign of life, so, aliens wouldn’t know we’re here, much less if they made a “flyover” 100,000 years ago or even earlier. But what’s appealing about Sagan’s argument is that it cuts the other way, too, i.e., don’t write off other planets, even Mars, for being lifeless because we just may not be seeing what is there. I wonder about water, though. Wouldn’t pictures of earth show water and wouldn’t water at least indicate life?

One of the most significant ways in which scientists have tried to “listen” for communication from extraterrestrials is through the SETI Institute. On our home planet, we can’t speak to other animals or necessarily understand their language (besides in extremely selective, rudimentary ways). Project CETI, part of the SETI Institute, is tasked with that with respect to sperm whales. There have been instances over the years where people think an extraterrestrial communication reached us, but nothing definitive has ever come across the airwaves. We’ve also tried other ways over the years. In 1972, aboard Pioneer 10, was a gold plaque drawn by Sagan and his wife as a message to aliens. The plaque depicts a nude male and female with several symbols explaining the spacecraft. It caused controversy because of the nudity (my eyes are rolling here). For what it’s worth, Sagan was very much against ufology, seeing it as a pseudoscience.

J. Allen Hynek, who was behind the aforementioned Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book, was a “UFO star” for 25 years, and the one who came up with our different classifications for alien encounters, including close encounters of the third kind (interacting with actual beings). Steven Spielberg shortly thereafter made the hit 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was a box office bonanza furthering the interconnectedness of UFOs and popular culture. Graff segues close encounters into a conversation about alien abductions and how fascinating it is so many disparate people around the country experience PTSD-like symptoms from such “encounters.” But obviously, like UFO sightings, there is no evidence of physical assault or abduction. John Mack, an American psychiatrist at Harvard, ruffled academic feathers by trying to attribute some sort of legitimacy to abductions. He even appeared on Oprah’s show, which goes to a longstanding view I have of Oprah’s counterintuitively corrosive effect on our culture because of the cranks she brought on. Again, I digress. Even more bizarre, somehow, than supposed alien abductions are reports of cattle mutilations (why? and it was more of a victim complex from farmers angsty about the federal government; Graff draws a line from such reports to the Sagebrush Rebellion in the 1980s to the Bundy standoff in Nevada in 2014) and crop circles (hoaxes and stunts), which I didn’t realize started in the UK.

The other significant throughline from Graff’s book is how ufology and conspiracy minded cranks and grifters are a direct throughline to, and influencers of, Timothy McVeigh and Alex Jones and others on the far-right, who obviously, became ascendant in the past 10 years, thanks to Donald Trump. The throughline is aliens and the “new world order.” If you want to go down an internet rabbit hole, just look that up. One of the more significant figures for such a pipeline was Bill Cooper, best known for his 1991 book, Behold a Pale Horse, which influenced episodes in the TV show, The X-Files, and McVeigh and Jones.

Graff navigates other interesting tidbits throughout the history of ufology and pop culture, including, of course, Roswell, which somehow created a tourism boon out of nothing, and interestingly, did so largely decades after Roswell had lost relevance. Project Mogul, top secret high-altitude balloons to detect Soviet Union atomic bomb tests, was the real “cover-up” at Roswell, not aliens. Nonetheless, in 1995, Fox ran a faked alien autopsy ostensibly conducted after the Roswell incident in 1947 called, Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, viewed by millions of Americans and people across the world. When the creator of the fake documentary, Ray Santilli, tried to offer proof that it was legitimate with the film canisters he possessed, they said the Department of Defense on them. That’s amusing (and lazy!) because the Department of Defense was established after the Roswell incident. (Funny enough, The X-Files would go on to make fun of the faked documentary.)

And of course, the 21st century has been replete with various curiosities and government releases, such as the USS Nimitz carrier strike group’s encounter known as the “Tic Tac” UFO sighting in 2004, or that someone as notable as former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lending credence to government secrets around UFOs. In 2017, The New York Times published a report, “Glowing auroras and black money: the Pentagon’s mysterious UFO program.” It’s not altogether surprising that the U.S. government has off-the-books programs hidden away in its bloated military budget, but it’s still noteworthy. The report found $22 million spent (out of the then-$600 billion annual budget) on something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Like government officials before through Project Blue Book and otherwise, the Defense Department was investigating UFOs. The program was funded at the request of none other than Reid and his friend, Robert Bigelow, the businessman behind Budget Suites of America. I don’t have an issue with the government investigating purportedly unexplained phenomena. I’m not sure, however, of the rationale for keeping it a secret. Finally, there’s ʻOumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first”, the first confirmed interstellar object detected in our Solar System in 2017, fittingly, in Hawaii. Harvard scientist Abraham Leob argued it was an alien probe, but other scientists think that’s wild speculation, with the object more likely to be an “exotic iceberg” of sorts.

Graff’s book is an extraordinarily robust, detailed, serious, and compelling cataloging of the UFO phenomena in American society over the past 75 years, and how it intersects with government, the military, scientists, popular culture, and the American imagination. It is a credit to Graff’s research, writing, credibility, and poise that UFO leaves one waxing philosophical and longingly about our place within the cosmos rather than feeling fleeced by someone with ulterior motives.