UFOs: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns UFOs they brought us great album art classic movie moment and of course Hugh Jackman I can't prove it yet but I'm close lots of people have reported seeing UFOs from keser to Russell Crow to even this guy I was gathered in a in a schoolyard with about 20 other men and we saw a bright light uh appear in the distant uh Western Sky eyes and it got uh closer and closer and when it uh was just above the Treetops it changed color and then it stayed there for a while and

then it disappeared into the distance and none of us could ever imagine what it was and I still don't know what it was you know between the fxy rambling story and the goofball smile he kind of reminds you of Joe Biden there doesn't he the only thing Biden would have done different was name each of the 20 men he saw the UFO with there was corn poop floppy Jeff wet dog Mexican Rick and a bunch of other names my advisers told me to stop saying out loud back in 2004 but the point is Jimmy Carter

saw a UFO and while Skeptics pushed back saying that it was probably a space cloud or Venus and that no other object generates as many UFO reports as the planet Venus Carter doubled down saying we know what Venus looks like it was not Venus and he's right everyone knows what Venus looks like not that of course because that's Titan one of Saturn's moons it doesn't look anything like the real Venus which which that also isn't that's Jupiter's moon iio I got you so good you thought you were safe cuz we were talking about space and

you were wrong the fact is though a lot of people think they've seen something in the sky in fact 16% of Americans say they personally witnessed something they thought was a UFO and right off the bat let's acknowledge this could be a difficult subject to talk about because UFOs tend to get discussed in one of two ways and the first is wildly speculative like this this Renaissance painting of bana and child seems perfectly normal however closer inspection reveals a strange craft hovering in the background with an Earthbound Observer witnessing the event look far be it

from me to quibble with the voice of Unsolved Mysteries but that is a painting not a photograph stuff in them can be real or made up and given that that's a painting of the Virgin Mary I'm guessing it's the latter the second way UFOs tend to be discussed is with borderline contempt like in this 1973 news report there were more reports today of unidentified flying objects reports from Minnesota Florida California Louisiana and other places a man in Columbus Ohio took these photographs of four strange lights in the sky Wednesday night they were seen by scores

of people two women in Texas said they saw an object with the letters UFO painted on the side I'm glad he's having such a good time laughing at them and I'm guessing it would stay funny right up until that UFO opens up and an alien labeled alien hits you with a death rate labeled death rate but in recent years you might have seen UFOs getting some more mainstream attention starting with this report in 2017 these haunting images part of a bombshell first admission by the military of a government program investigating sightings of UFOs it's Rota

this mysterious black object spotted off the coast of San Diego by Navy fighter pilots in 2004 my gosh wow I don't know what's more surprising there the UFO or the pilot responding to it with my gosh in that situation I would have gone with holy living or Jesus back flipping Christ but I guess credit to him for keeping it G-rated there might be kids watching this Navy footage that story was the beginning of a Cascade of Revelations including the dod revealing that it had 11 reports of documented instances in which Pilots reported near misses with

UFOs and a few years back Congress even held its first public hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years so if the subject is this ubiquitous with such major questions being asked now might be a good time to and I cannot believe I'm about to say this talk about UFOs what we know what we don't know and some of the problems with how we've gone about trying to find out more and right up front let me just say talking about UFOs doesn't necessarily mean you're talking about aliens UFOs are simply objects that are unidentified that's

it many researchers actually prefer the term UAP for unidentified anomal phenomena possibly to avoid the whole alien connotation because while you can believe aliens exist or not when it comes to UFOs belief doesn't really come into it whatever they are people are seeing them that poster in mda's office shouldn't have said I want to believe it should have said believe schalie what the is that thing and the fact is UFO sightings long predate any contemporary associations with extraterrestrials for for as long as people have been around they've been seeing weird things they can't explain ancient

Roman and Chinese texts speak of people seeing Fireballs Spears soldiers ships and chariots floating above them plus there were sightings near Rome in 218 BC and in Germany in 1561 and you're probably thinking well that doesn't mean much because everyone knows 16th century Germany was suffering from a rapid increase in population combined with an increase in grain prices so a lot of Germans were tripping balls due to starvation everyone went through their German confessional age Obsession in their early teams it's not news but our modern concern ception of flying Sorcerers took off in 1947 when

Private Pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine oddly shaped objects while flying past mount reer in Washington it wasn't until 1947 when a Private Pilot reported seeing a group of pie plate likee objects flying near Mount reneer that the term Flying Saucer entered the vocabulary and fueled the imaginations of movie Producers now that is almost right Arnolds didn't describe seeing flying Sorcerers though what he actually said was the objects flew like they take a sorcer and throw it across the water but reporters short-handed that to Flying sorcer and the name stuck it's one of those fascinating historical

Corrections like Viking helmets didn't actually have horns Napoleon wasn't that short and George Washington didn't really exist he was just a reflection of moonlight off Swamp gas that fooled early Americans now Skeptics have introduced various theories as to what Arnold might have seen from water droplets on his aircraft window to a meteor breaking up to a flock of pelicans and for the record uh marry kill and obviously deep mouths we can't know for sure what Arnold saw what we do know is that his account and the news that broke shortly afterward supposedly of a flying

sorcer crashing in Roswell New Mexico kicked off a public Obsession and hundreds of UFO sightings began pouring in just a month after Arnold sighting a pole asked respondents if they'd heard or read about flying sources and 90% said yes it reache a fever pitch the LA Times ran the headline flying wats itss supplant weather as number one topic anywhere people meet discussions of UFO started cropping up absolutely everywhere from tabloid Outlets to even discussions with network newsmen good evening tonight we go after a fantastic story the story that flying saucers from other worlds are visiting

our planet just as we are exploring outer space with our own rocket satellites Our Guest is former Marine aircore major Donald keyhole in his campaign to prove that flying saucers exist my name is Mike Wallace the cigarette is Parliament wow I honestly can't think of anything more 1950s than interrupting your news report to introduce yourself and your cigarette it's just not something you could pull off today my name is Lester Halt and The Vape is bubble gum melon UFOs became a pop culture phenomenon in fact Roswell has done a lot to cash in on its

associations with UFOs it's home to a UFO Museum a UFO Festival and alien themed street lights it even has the world's only UFO themed McDonald's which somehow has only three and a half stars on Yell despite again being a UFO themed McDonald's that is madness I could get stabbed in that McDonald's and my Yelp review would still read got stabbed in a UFO four stars Roswell has gone out of its way to make itself a UFO Mecca and as this coverage from the 90s shows a lot of people make the pilgrimage here the town's two

UFO museums have become magnets for the committed I have been taken aboard spacecraft by these two gentlemen you have the Curious you think they're like these guys behind you something like that but I think they'd be just like normal people the government hides things from people government distrust if they are real they're probably evil religion it's just got to be there's got to be something to it all part of this allamerican mystery many and night have looked up in the sky and said come and get me okay hard to pick a favorite person there from

the man looking for a word to describe aliens and settling on gentlemen to the guy at the end who spent many a night staring at the sky and saying come and get me that is a man who has run the numbers and figured out abduction is cheaper than divorce come and get me or my wife uh not both of us though that is a deal breaker but it's worth addressing something that woman said there the government hides things from people because from the very beginning of our modern obsession with UFOs there's been a belief that

our government is keeping something from us and that mistrust has been well earned the history of the US government study of UFOs is one ranging from the unsatisfying to the actively misleading and it began not long after that first flying sorcer sighting just a year later the Air Force formed something called project sign which evaluated 243 sightings over the course of a year and ultimately said it could find no definite and conclusive evidence to prove or disprove the existence of actual unidentified aircraft that effort was then renamed project Grudge which evaluated more sightings and concluded

they didn't threaten US security That Was Then followed by a massive investigation called Project Blue Book which took 17 years and looked at more than 12,000 sightings finding no evidence that they were extraterrestrial or a security threat and as you've probably sensed because these were all military investigations whether or not these things posed a threat was the primary concern but toward the end of Project Blue Book the government also funded a parallel scientific investigation known as the Condon committee led by physicist Edward Condon but even while it was underway there were signs that it wasn't

exactly being conducted in a spirit of free inquiry Condon was a respected scientist but was hardly impartial about UFOs before the study even began he said in a speech that the government should get out of the UFO business there's nothing to it he later wrote the authors of UFO books should be horsewhipped I mean he doesn't seem like the most objective analyst there the scientific method doesn't go one hypothesis to horse whip anyone who disagrees with you three conclusion you're thinking of religion now unsurprisingly condon's study concluded that nothing has come from the study of

UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge and that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified and it's worth noting other scientists at the time including Sean pushed back on the tone of condon's report but his attitude prevailed to the point that by 1977 a survey of over a thousand scientist found that a majority thought UFOs were worthy of further study but only two were willing to wave anonymity to say so but it's not just that the government hasn't covered itself in glory when it comes to studying UFOs it's

also actively engaged in cover-ups about them though not necessarily in the ways or for the reasons that the History Channel might have you believe take the crash in Roswell for years the government maintained that what had crashed was actually just a weather balloon which many found suspicious and that fueled a lot of rampant speculation to the point where in the mid 1990s this New Mexico Congressman started pressing for answers and the inquiry yielded a surprising admission from the government they they had indeed lied about the object being a weather balloon in order to conceal what

it actually was what was recovered near Roswell New Mexico in July 1947 was debris from formerly top secret army Air Forces research project code named Mogul project Mogul was so secret it had the same security classification as the project to build the atomic bomb these high altitude Balloons with their instrumentation were designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests they were tremendous in size as long as 650 ft and in 1947 nothing else on Earth looked like this right that does make more sense although it is hard to take the government's word for it given that they

just admitted they'd been lying for 50 years it's frankly no wonder people still speculate about Roswell to this day it's basically the boy who cried wolf if the boy was the Pentagon the wolf was a 600 foot spy balloon and the moral of the story was we got up to a lot of stupid during the Cold War and that wasn't the only time the government has done this a CIA study found that over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s s were accounted for by man reconnaissance flights which led the

Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive National Security project and on some level you can see why they did that if someone sees your top secret plane it's not like you can just say oh that's not a UFO that's our top secret plane no that's when you need to roll up your sleeves and Gaslight the hell out of them for Uncle Sam and some have argued that even when the government is not protecting its own top secret projects it may

have other reasons for trying to shut inquiries down you can cover up knowing something or you can cover up not knowing something and I think it's it's just as likely that the Air Force is covering up not knowing anything why would they do that because they can't they can't afford to look incompetent they can't admit to the public that they don't know what these things are in our sky that John C Riley character makes a good point there when you're in charge of something you do have to project a certain level of authority and control

it's the same reason I can't tell my audience how I don't know where my snake is it of cause a panic even though there's no need for that because he's not venomous I I assume the website I bought him from wasn't in English but it's a mood Point anyway because relax I I I definitely know where my snake is I I I know where my snake is and there have been examples of government officials downplaying UFO sightings that they couldn't explain take the case of the Phoenix Lights on the evening of March 13th 1997 thousands

of people saw these bizarre lights in the sky followed by a second set of Lights a few hours later understandably people freaked out and wanted some answers now the state's Governor even promised an inquiry and when he called a press conference to announce his findings many got their hopes up which is why it was so disappointing for them when he did this I issued a call for an investigation by the Arizona Department of Public safety and I'm happy to report we already are getting results we may all look upon the guilty party don't getting too

close to me please what are you doing you can't just introduce a mascot anytime you don't know what to say and I'll tell you why it's lazy it's condescending to your audience they're adults they don't need a puppet show from you they've come with real questions and they deserve real AR a I'm sorry we we we we cut we cut this bit we cut we cut it yeah I'm sorry I'm sorry we yeah we I'm sorry I'm so I'm sorry we we just didn't it didn't seem right cons I'm sorry I said I'm sorry I

said I'm sorry he's fine and the thing is that Governor later admitted that he actually saw the lights too and didn't know what they were he just didn't feel like he could say that publicly I guess he was much like me with my missing snake he'd much rather people stop stop asking questions about it so he just made a joke out of something that deep down he worried might actually be a serious problem but again again I know where my snake is later on an official explanation for those lights came from the Air National Guard

saying that the Phoenix Lights were caused by military flares and while that's not necessarily A satisfying explanation believe me a lot of people still don't buy it at least it's preferable to having your Governor dunk on you in a press conference for even asking the question and that brings us back to the more recent Revelations that have generated so many headlines and hearings because that video of Pilots startled by what they were looking at was part of a much larger series of stories concerning a government program called atip which was described in news coverage at

the time like this that encounter documented by ATP the advanced Aviation threat identification program a shadowy office in the Pentagon it examines so-called anomalous aerial vehicles that is incredible you don't expect to hear about a shadowy pentagon UFO program on Prime Time news you expect to hear it screamed at you on a webcast in between ads for canned rations and herbal Viagra that initial coverage along with the release of other startling videos like this one understandably got a lot of people extremely excited especially with the Revelation that atp's existence had been made public with the

help of a pentagon employee Luis elzando who later said he' resigned from the program to protest excessive secrecy and internal opposition and for many it seemed like finally after years of deadend bad Faith government inquiries this could be a genuine breakthrough but unfortunately as people looked into that program they found themselves coming away with more questions than answers for instance well elisondo maintains that he led this program and has documents that seem to support that claim the Pentagon insist Alando actually had no assigned responsibilities for ATP and even if you don't trust the Pentagon which

is a general rule I definitely do not reporters who dug into what a actually did have often found themselves underwhelmed because it turns out while they did information on some UFO sightings a lot of the research wasn't done by the government it was contracted out to a company owned by Robert Bigalow a budget hotel mogul space entrepreneur and Ronda santis donor who used to own a property in Utah that is known as a hotbed for paranormal activity that is where a lot of the research for atip took place Bigalow also once said that aliens are

already on earth right under people's noses and founded the Bigalow Institute for Consciousness studies whose main goal is to determine whether or not there is afterlife and this is beside the point but it does say something that for a guy who is willing to throw millions of dollars at the pursuit of aliens and the discovery of an afterlife his worst financial decision still might have been supporting Ronda santis now as for what Bigelow's company actually produced for a from what's been made public so far it seems to be little more than a series of 38

research papers speculating on Technologies like invisibility cloaking Stargates anti-gravity and a never carried out proposal to tunnel a hole through the moon using nuclear explosions they also comp post a paper on traversible wormholes that includes this actual illustration which and this is crucial features a man saying hello to a dinosaur and look I'm not saying scientists can't or shouldn't study things like wormholes but it doesn't look great when your research ends up looking like a teenager's Rick and Morty fan art and I'll say if that is the kind of work that program actually produced it's

really disappointing because people deserve serious answers to these legitimate questions especially as it takes courage to even ask them or talk about what you might have seen Naval pilots who saw an object in one of those atip videos zipping and darting around them have talked about how they were made fun of after coming forward and that the stigma attached to this subject is so strong they considered not coming forward at all you know I think that over beers we've sort of said hey man if I saw this so I don't know that I would have

come back and said anything because it sounds so crazy when I say it you understand that reaction I do you've had some people tell me you know when you say that you can sound crazy and I'll be on I'm not a UFO guy but from what I hear you guys saying there's something yes oh there's there's definitely something that I don't know who's building it who's got the technology who's got the brains but there's there's something out there that was better than our airplane yeah there's something out there that's better than our airplane it is

chilling to hear that from a Navy pilot and not the usual place the executive boardroom at boing I've run the numbers guys and pretty much everyone is doing it better but there clearly should be room for sober assessment of UFO sightings and I will acknowledge that when you do that the answers you get can sometimes end up being less fun Skeptics in this field urge people to keep several killjoy points in mind when discussing UFO sightings everyone is vulnerable to misinterpretations uh human vision is often unreliable human memory is imperfect and people's prior beliefs influence

perception which is to say what you think you saw might depend on what you expected to see historians have pointed out UFO sightings in the 50s and 60s in Germany very rarely had the sort of alien extraterrestrial Bend instead Germans saw things they couldn't explain and assumed that they were American or Russian technology on top of which a lot of unexplained sightings can turn out to have rational explanations take this striking video of floating pyramids in the air above a Navy ship shot through night vision goggles it understandably got a lot of attention when it

was first released but in Congressional testimony last year a Navy official offered a pretty benol reason for it the hypothesis is that those are uh commercial drones that uh because of the use of night vision goggles appear like triangles is that the operating assessment some type of uh of drone uh some type of uh of unmanned aerial system uh and it is simply that that light source uh resolves itself through the um through the night vision goggles onto the SLR camera as a triangle oh I mean I would rather believe those are triangle aliens who

live on a distant triangle planet and this is how they communicate in their triangle language but I guess an optical illusion caused by night vision Tech can be satisfying too even though it really doesn't feel that way right now and the good news is there does seem to be a movement toward more careful consideration of UFOs and it's encouraging that NASA recently assembled a small team made up of experts in everything from science to Aerospace safety to examine uaps and last summer we got a glimpse of what it is like to have them break down

a UFO video specifically this popular one which appears to show a mysterious object nicknamed go fast moving extremely quickly the panel explained at length as part of a 4-Hour press conference how they figured out that the object actually wasn't moving that fast at all here is just a small sample so knowing the Jet's altitude and the bearing uh to the Target we can apply basic trigonometry to figure out where that object is in altitude space so it's the ocean that looks like it's right behind it is actually 4.2 miles away and this is our first

indication that some or most of the motion that we observe the apparent motion of the object uh isn't fact due to the rapid motion of the sensing platform well that was boring as I mean no one in their right mind would want to go to a McDonald's themed after that explanation at all but but that is kind of the point here in that again 4our video they set out what they know the object speed and concede what they don't know which is what the object is and they make the argument that to get a better

understanding of UFOs a rigorous evidence-based datadriven science scientific framework is essential and they are right about that it's both promising and long overdue to see people approaching this issue soberly scientifically and perhaps most importantly boringly and I know that is hard this is an area where it is easy to fall into one of two camps hardcore Skeptics who roll their eyes at the whole subject and true believers who are convinced everything has a Fantastical explanation that the government is keeping from us you will see in comments below this piece on YouTube those two groups fighting

it out over everything I've said here and only agreeing on the fact that I am a idiot which I am not even denying but not for the reasons that they will be arguing but there needs to be room for honest inquiry because science is all about collecting small answers that eventually help us address big questions like are we alone in the universe what is that that I just saw in the sky and for the final time where actually is my snake I'm serious can everyone please look under their chairs cuz I genuinely do not know

where it is that is our show thank you so much for watching this has been Last Week Tonight I'm John Oliver And The Vape is dragon fruit banana good night oh there it is there it is there's my S I found it that's hold a second yeah that's that's not actually my snake that's a that's a different snake my snake looks like that but that's a different snake this is this is someone else's snake someone please come get your snake