Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s11e09 Episode Script
UFOs
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It has been a busy week.
From Trump apparently falling asleep
during his hush money trial
to Tesla recalling all Cybertrucks
thanks to a faulty accelerator pedal,
meaning the list of things
that can break a Cybertruck
now includes driving it.
All over the country, there continue
to be protests over the war in Gaza.
This week, protestors shut down
the Golden Gate Bridge and in Chicago,
blocked the road to O'Hare Airport,
leading to coverage like this.
Some missed their flights
because of the traffic from the protest.
- I'm gonna miss my flight, yeah.
- What do you think about this?
It's wrong.
I hope the protesters are put in jail.
The cause maybe right.
there's two sides to every situation.
But it's not the way to do it.
They're not gaining any fans.
Okay. First, quick travel tip:
if you think
you're gonna miss your flight,
maybe try running to the gate
instead of talking to the press.
But I do get
that that is annoying.
Although, for the record, protest
is kind of meant to be disruptive,
it's a little bit the point.
As for "the cause is maybe right",
that is putting it mildly.
Because the situation in Gaza
is horrific.
At least 34,000 people
have been killed,
most of them
women and children.
Many Israelis are also protesting
their government's actions,
which have,
for all the bloodshed they've caused,
failed to secure the freedom
of the remaining hostages.
And yet, the U.S. continues
to supply Israel
with funding and arms for all this,
even as Gaza sinks into famine.
If that's not worth protesting,
I'm not sure what is.
And to be fair,
even some of those disrupted
passengers seemed to concede,
when pressed even slightly,
that the inconvenience wasn't that bad.
I think
Chicago Police Department failed.
They should've anticipated this,
they should've known about it.
What are they doing?
And what's going to happen
to you and your flight?
I'll just get another one.
Yeah. Yeah, it'll be fine.
That deescalated fast there.
I guess it was always going to,
because what kind of question is:
"What's going to happen
to you and your flight?"
What else is that man gonna say?
"Have you ever seen The Terminal?
Yeah, I have to live here now."
"But do you know what?
I'll just do it. It'll be fine".
I'm not saying every protest
has been universally well-executed.
But it is notable the degree to which
demonstrations concerning Palestine
tend to get shut down,
and how comfortable some have been
in advocating
violence against protestors.
This week, Senator Tom Cotton,
a man with, I think it's fair to say,
entirely too much neck,
called into Fox News to say this!
If this happened in Arkansas,
let's just say I think there'd be
a lot of very wet criminals
that have been tossed overboard.
I'd encourage most people,
anywhere,
if they get stuck
behind criminals like this,
who are trying to block traffic,
to take matters into their own hands.
It is the least important part of this,
but you don't say "overboard"
when you're talking about a bridge.
You're thinking of a boat, bitch.
If you're gonna advocate
for vigilante bridge murder,
at least get the terminology right.
And it's not just the protestors
feeling pressure.
Even Muslims who've expressed
no public views on Gaza
have come under attack.
And for a high-profile
example of that,
look no further than what's been
happening to Adeel Mangi,
one of Joe Biden's nominees
to the federal bench.
He's a Pakistani American
who'd be the first Muslim appointee
to the federal appellate courts,
it's one of those moments
that we refer to as a "historic first"
because it sounds a lot nicer
than "we didn't consider Muslims for
this job until shockingly recently".
Mangi is a respected attorney,
unanimously rated
as "well qualified" by the ABA.
His nomination's been supported
by all these organizations,
among over 100 others,
and he's done pro bono work in cases
involving Muslim and LGBTQ rights.
But in his confirmation hearing
last December,
Republicans didn't ask about
any of that, instead, they did this!
Do you believe
that Zionist settler colonialism
was a provocation that justified Hamas'
atrocity against Jews in Israel?
Does Israel have a right to exist?
My question is simple:
do you condemn this event
that was celebrating
Palestinian-Islamic jihad?
Yes or no?
Okay, that is a shocking display
of Islamophobia,
even for these three, some of the least
likable people in human history,
and, perhaps scientifically,
the ultimate nightmare blunt rotation.
I'm sure you can think
of other people to put into that list.
But who are you taking out?
That's my point.
I should explain what those questions
were based on because it is ridiculous.
Mangi was on an advisory board
for this center at Rutgers University.
And those senators were grandstanding
about some speakers
who'd been invited to its events,
including one
marking the anniversary of 9/11,
something that prompted
this extraordinary question.
Is this the way you celebrate 9/11?
- Have I said anything inaccurate?
- Yes, Senator.
Yes, you have.
You just asked a Muslim man
how he "celebrates 9/11".
Unless you are absolutely sure
that that is also his birthday,
that is completely
inappropriate.
The questioning
around that event was so relentless,
Mangi felt that he had
to make two compelling points.
Number one,
on 9/11, I was in New York,
I saw what happened.
It was my city that was attacked.
Number two, I've never heard
of this event prior to today.
It was never brought
to the advisory board,
which met once a year
to talk about academic issues.
That is a pretty solid answer.
And congratulations, by the way,
to those Republicans,
who've outed Mangi as two of the most
sympathetic things you can be:
a New Yorker
who was attacked on 9/11,
and a guy who signed up to do the bare
minimum at a college function.
"Yeah, I can't really
meet most weeks, or ever,
but if you need someone
to show up once a year
and nod off in an office chair,
I am your guy for that."
This hearing
was a total disgrace.
And it's not just me saying that,
even the Anti-Defamation League,
an organization not reticent about
leveling charges of anti-Semitism,
defended Mangi,
saying the senators' questions
"appear to have been motivated
by bias towards his religion"
and that it was
"profoundly wrong".
And yet, those Republicans
still refused to vote for him,
even as outside groups launched
bonkers attacks on him like this ad,
which aimed to pressure
Democratic senators to follow suit.
Tell Jon Tester to vote no
on giving antisemite Adeel Mangi
a lifetime position in our courts.
Between the gross fearmongering
and the actual footage of 9/11,
that ad feels like you told
an AI program
to make something that'd give
the average Fox News viewer
a heart attack, an erection,
or both of them.
Although there are also
some unforced errors in there,
like including the tweet
that they were referencing,
which clearly doesn't say anything
like what they just claimed it did,
and saying
"the most extreme judges he can find"
over pictures of these two.
And come on.
These are the faces of
two people whose hobbies are books.
These are two people whose
favorite vacation destination is books.
They look like, in high school,
they were voted most likely to books.
If you asked them if you could
bring anything to a potluck dinner,
They don't eat books.
They know you can't eat books.
But because Democrats
control the Senate,
the confirmation
should've been a non-issue.
Unfortunately,
not all Democrats are holding firm.
Because while they may not have
embraced the Islamophobic attacks,
some have gotten suckered in by
a different sort of racist dog-whistle.
Democrats against Mangi worry about
his ties to controversial organizations,
including the Alliance
of Families for Justice.
The New Jersey State
Patrolmen's Benevolent Association
says the group calls for, quote:
"cop killers to be freed from prison".
That is a concern of mine,
not only as a former prosecutor,
but as somebody
who's married to law enforcement.
I'm not sure why you're bringing up
who you are married to.
You could have been married
to Ronald McDonald
and it wouldn't be relevant
to the situation at hand.
It would raise other questions,
though, like:
"Why Ronald when Grimace
is unquestionably hotter?"
"How'd you end up with a clown
dressed like a traffic cone"
"instead of six feet
of pure purple sex?"
"When Ronald
is talking about fries or whatever,"
"does your mind drift"
"to this oblong stunner with an ass
that goes all the way out?"
But again, that is a distraction
from the key issue here.
That is that as with
the Islamophobic attacks on Mangi,
the evidence for claims that he's
"anti-police" are laughably thin.
It's yet more "six degrees
of separation" nonsense,
again focused on an advisory board
that he serves on
for this judicial advocacy group
that called for the release
of an 85-year-old man with dementia
who'd been convicted
of killing a police officer in 1973,
a decision I'm assuming Mangi
didn't even have anything to do with,
because the board, fun fact,
"has never even met".
Yet, not only is Cortez Masto refusing
to support Mangi over this accusation,
so is her fellow Nevada senator,
Jacky Rosen.
And on top of all of this,
Joe fucking Manchin
has decided he's probably
a "no" vote, too, saying:
"if my Democratic
colleagues and friends"
"can't get one Republican vote,
don't count on me".
"I'm not leaving this place
unless I can practice what I preach,"
"and I'm preaching
basically bipartisanship."
Which sounds benign, until you think
about what we're dealing with here.
At a moment when this man is being
targeted with a bigoted smear campaign,
you can't be offering
to meet those bigots in the middle.
Because when you do that,
guess what that makes you?
And while Biden and other Democrats
have stuck by Mangi's nomination,
Manchin's argument speaks
to what can be so dispiriting
about our current politics.
Because while there is nothing wrong
with civility and compromise,
it does depend
on who you're being civil to,
and what you're compromising with.
This is a moment when one
of the loudest voices in the Senate
campaign against Mangi
is also happily encouraging people
to "take things into their own hands"
when it comes
to those they don't agree with.
And it's pretty scary to think that
in the name of "building bridges",
some appear to be perfectly fine
finding a middle ground
with those willing
to throw protestors off them.
And now, this!
And Now: A Tribute to CNBC
on Its 35th Anniversary.
It's a momentous day for us at CNBC
as we mark our 35th anniversary.
A heartfelt and very large thank you
to all those who helped us get here,
and it does take a village.
How is a a phone that is an MP3 player
technologically innovative?
Is the housing crisis really a crisis,
or just a problem blown
out of proportion?
Could this be the future
of preventative medicine?
It's reasonable to compare you,
I usually don't do this, to Steve Jobs.
J.P. Morgan of this generation,
Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX.
I'm not saying
this is the generic type flu,
but maybe we'd be just better off
if we gave it to everybody
and then in a month, it would be over.
I see a new Boeing.
I see just straight-line growth.
I think that this is their year.
Buy the stock of Boeing.
If I call you a tosser,
what does that mean?
Are you allowed to say "putz?"
- I had no idea, I'm gonna Google it.
- You don't know what a putz is?
Is it so offensive we're not
supposed to say it on television?
ED is not an underlying
medical condition, is it?
- You have euros in Ireland?
- We have euros, yes.
- Why do you have euros in Ireland?
- Why wouldn't we have?
I'd use the pound.
I'm doing what maybe you should do,
be a reporter and talk to people.
Every single bit of advice you gave
would have lost people money, Rick.
You're doing a disservice
to the viewer,
because the viewers
need to understand it.
You are doing a disservice!
You are! You are!
Moving on.
Our main story tonight concerns UFOs.
They've brought us great album art,
classic movie moments,
and of course, Hugh Jackman.
I can't prove it yet.
But I'm close.
Lots of people
have reported seeing UFOs,
from Kesha, to Russell Crowe,
to even this guy.
I was gathered in a schoolyard
with about 20 other men,
and we saw a bright light
appear in the distant western skies,
and it got closer and closer,
and when it was 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.
Between the folksy, rambling
story and the goofball smile,
he kind of reminds you
of Joe Biden, doesn't he?
The only thing Biden
would've done different
was name each of the 20 men
he saw the UFO with.
"There was Corn Pop, Floppy Jeff,
Wet Doug, 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 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, because that's Titan,
one of Saturn's moons.
It doesn't look anything
like the real Venus,
which that also isn't,
that's Jupiter's moon IO.
I got you so good!
You thought you were safe,
'cause we were talking about space,
and you were wrong!
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 can 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 Madonna and Child
seems perfectly normal,
however, closer inspection
reveals a strange craft
hovering in the background
with an Earth-bound observer
witnessing the event.
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.
I'm guessing it would stay funny,
right up until that UFO opens up
and an alien labeled "alien" hits you
with a death ray labeled "death ray".
But in recent years,
you might've 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.
This mysterious black object
spotted off the coast of San Diego
by Navy fighter pilots in 2004.
I don't know
what's more surprising there,
the UFO, or the pilot
responding to it with "my gosh".
In that situation, I might have
gone with "holy living shit",
or "Jesus backflipping 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.
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.
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 prefer the term UAP
for unidentified anomalous 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.
The poster in Mulder's office shouldn't
have said: "I want to believe",
it should've said: "Believe, shmelieve,
what the fuck is that thing?"
And the fact is, UFO sightings
long predate any contemporary
associations with extraterrestrials.
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.
You're probably thinking,
that doesn't mean much.
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 confessional
age obsession in their early teens.
It's not news.
But our modern conception
of "flying saucers" took off in 1947,
when private pilot Kenneth Arnold
spotted nine oddly shaped objects
while flying past Mount Rainier
in Washington.
It wasn't until 1947
when a private pilot
reported seeing
a group of pie plate-like objects
flying near Mount Rainier
that the term "flying saucer"
entered the vocabulary
and fueled the imaginations
of movie producers.
That is almost right. Arnold
didn't describe seeing flying saucers,
though, what he actually said was,
the objects
"flew like they take a saucer
and throw it across the water".
But reporters shorthanded that to
"flying saucer" 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 a reflection of moonlight
off swamp gas that fooled Americans".
Skeptics have introduced 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, marry,
kill, and obviously, fuck.
Deep mouths.
We can't know for sure
what Arnold saw.
We know is that his account, and the
news that broke shortly afterward,
supposedly of a "flying saucer"
crashing in Roswell, New Mexico,
kicked off a public obsession
and hundreds of UFO sightings
began pouring in.
Just a month after Arnold's sighting,
a poll asked respondents
if they'd heard or read about
flying saucers, and 90% said yes.
It reached such a fever pitch,
the LA Times ran the headline:
"Flying 'Whatsits' Supplant Weather
As No. 1 Topic Anywhere People Meet".
Discussions of UFOs 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
Air Corps Major Donald Keyhoe
and his campaign
to prove that flying saucers exist.
My name is Mike Wallace.
The cigarette is Parliament.
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 Holt,
and the vape is bubblegum melon".
UFOs became
a pop culture phenomenon.
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 streetlights.
It even has the world's
only UFO themed McDonald's,
which somehow
has only 3,5 stars on Yelp,
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 shows,
a lot of people make the pilgrimage.
The town's two UFO museums have
I have been taken aboard spacecraft
by these two gentlemen.
The curious.
- You think they're like these guys?
- I think they'd be normal people.
The government
hides things from people.
Government distrust.
If they are real,
they're probably evil.
Religion.
There's got to be something to it.
All are part
of this all-American mystery.
Many a night I have looked up at the
sky and said, "Come and get me".
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's spent
"many a night" staring at the sky
and saying "Come and get me".
That is a man
who's run the numbers
and figured out abduction
is cheaper than divorce.
"Come and get me!
Or my wife!
Not both of us,
that is a deal breaker".
But it's worth addressing
something that woman said there,
"the government
hides things from people".
From the very beginning
of our modern obsession with UFOs,
there's been a belief that government
is keeping something from us.
And that mistrust
has been well earned.
The history of the U.S.
government's study of UFOs
is one ranging from the unsatisfying,
to the actively misleading.
And it began not long after
that first flying saucer 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 renamed Project Grudge,
which evaluated more sightings,
and concluded
they didn't threaten U.S. 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.
As you 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".
He doesn't seem like
the most objective analyst there.
The scientific method doesn't go
"One, hypothesis".
"Two, horsewhip
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 study of UFOs
probably cannot be justified".
And it's worth noting,
other scientists at the time,
including Carl Sagan, pushed back
on the tone of Condon's report.
But his attitude prevailed,
to the point that, by 1977,
a survey of over 1,000 scientists
found that a majority thought
UFOs were worthy of further study,
but only two were willing
to waive 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
that 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 a formerly top-secret
Army Air Force research project,
code name 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 feet,
and in 1947, nothing else
on Earth looked like this.
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 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 shit
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"
"were accounted
for by manned reconnaissance flights,"
which "led the Air Force to make
misleading 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
"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 not knowing something.
It's just as likely that the Air Force
is covering up not knowing anything.
Why would they do that?
Because they can't afford
to look incompetent.
They can't admit to the public
they don't know what these things are.
That John C. Reilly 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'd cause a panic,
even though there's no need for that,
because he's not venomous,
I assume.
The website I bought him
from wasn't in English,
but it's a moot point anyway
because, relax!
I definitely know
where my snake is!
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.
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.
I'm happy to report
we already are getting results.
We may all look upon
the guilty party.
Don't get him too close to me,
please.
What are you doing?
You can't introduce a mascot
any time 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 fucking puppet show from you.
They've come with real questions
and they deserve real answers.
Shit, I'm sorry! We cut this bit.
We cut it. Yeah. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry!
I said I'm sorry!
I said I'm sorry!
He's fine!
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 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,
I know where my snake is, so.
Later on, an official explanation
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,
and 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 AATIP,
which was described in news coverage
at the time like this.
That encounter
documented by AATIP,
the Advanced Aviation
Threat Identification Program,
a shadowy office in the Pentagon.
It examined so-called
anomalous aerial vehicles.
That is incredible.
You don't expect to hear about
a "shadowy Pentagon UFO program"
on primetime 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 AATIP's existence
had been made public with the help
of a Pentagon employee, Luis Elizondo,
who later said he'd resigned
from the program to protest
"excessive secrecy
and internal opposition".
And for many, it seemed like finally,
after years of dead-end,
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, while Elizondo
maintains that he led this program,
and has documents
that seem to support that claim,
the Pentagon insists that Elizondo "had
no assigned responsibilities for AATIP"
And even if you don't trust
the Pentagon,
which as a general rule,
I definitely do not,
reporters who've dug
into what AATIP actually did,
have often
found themselves underwhelmed.
It turns out, while they did collect
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 Bigelow,
a budget hotel mogul,
space entrepreneur,
and Ron DeSantis 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 AATIP took place.
Bigelow also once said that aliens
are already on Earth
"right under people's noses"
and founded the Bigelow Institute
for Consciousness Studies,
whose main goal is to determine
whether or not there is an 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 might
have been supporting Ron DeSantis.
As for what Bigelow's company
actually produced for AATIP,
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, antigravity,
and a never-carried out proposal
to tunnel a hole through
the moon using nuclear explosions."
They also composed
a paper on traversable wormholes
that includes this actual illustration
which, and this is crucial,
features a man
saying hello to a dinosaur.
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.
If that is the work that program
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've seen.
Naval pilots who saw an object
in one of those AATIP 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,
that they considered
not coming forward at all.
I think that, over beers,
we've sort of said
"Man, if I saw this solo,
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.
I've had some people tell me: "When
you say that, you can sound crazy".
"I'm not a UFO guy."
But from what I hear you guys saying,
there's something?"
- Yes.
I don't know who's building it,
who's got the technology,
but 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 Boeing.
"I've run the numbers, 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,
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."
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 got a lot of attention
when it was first released.
But in congressional testimony
last year,
a Navy official
offered a pretty banal reason for it.
The hypothesis
is that those are commercial drones
that, because of the use
of night-vision goggles,
appear like triangles,
is that the operating assessment?
Some type of drone, some type
of unmanned aerial system
and it is simply
that that light source resolves itself
through the night-vision goggles
onto the SLR camera as a triangle.
I would rather believe
that 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.
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 "GoFast",
moving extremely quickly.
The panel explained, at length,
as part of a 4-hour press conference,
how they figured out that the object
wasn't moving that fast at all.
Here is just a small sample.
So, knowing the jet's altitude
and the bearing to the target,
we can apply basic trigonometry
to figure out where that object is
in the altitude space.
So, it's the ocean
that looks like it's right behind it
is actually 4.2 miles away.
This is our first indication that some
or most of the motion that we observe,
the apparent motion of the object,
is in fact due to the rapid motion
of the sensing platform.
That was boring as fuck!
No one in their right mind
would want to go to a McDonald's
themed after that explanation.
At all!
But that is kind of the point here.
In that, again, four-hour video,
they set out what they know,
the object's 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, data-driven
scientific framework is essential.
And they are right.
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's 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 fucking 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?
'Cause 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.
Shit, there it is!
There it is! There's my snake!
I found him!
Wait a second!
That's not actually my snake.
That's a different snake.
My snake looks like that,
but that's a different snake.
This is someone else's snake.
Someone please
come get your snake!
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It has been a busy week.
From Trump apparently falling asleep
during his hush money trial
to Tesla recalling all Cybertrucks
thanks to a faulty accelerator pedal,
meaning the list of things
that can break a Cybertruck
now includes driving it.
All over the country, there continue
to be protests over the war in Gaza.
This week, protestors shut down
the Golden Gate Bridge and in Chicago,
blocked the road to O'Hare Airport,
leading to coverage like this.
Some missed their flights
because of the traffic from the protest.
- I'm gonna miss my flight, yeah.
- What do you think about this?
It's wrong.
I hope the protesters are put in jail.
The cause maybe right.
there's two sides to every situation.
But it's not the way to do it.
They're not gaining any fans.
Okay. First, quick travel tip:
if you think
you're gonna miss your flight,
maybe try running to the gate
instead of talking to the press.
But I do get
that that is annoying.
Although, for the record, protest
is kind of meant to be disruptive,
it's a little bit the point.
As for "the cause is maybe right",
that is putting it mildly.
Because the situation in Gaza
is horrific.
At least 34,000 people
have been killed,
most of them
women and children.
Many Israelis are also protesting
their government's actions,
which have,
for all the bloodshed they've caused,
failed to secure the freedom
of the remaining hostages.
And yet, the U.S. continues
to supply Israel
with funding and arms for all this,
even as Gaza sinks into famine.
If that's not worth protesting,
I'm not sure what is.
And to be fair,
even some of those disrupted
passengers seemed to concede,
when pressed even slightly,
that the inconvenience wasn't that bad.
I think
Chicago Police Department failed.
They should've anticipated this,
they should've known about it.
What are they doing?
And what's going to happen
to you and your flight?
I'll just get another one.
Yeah. Yeah, it'll be fine.
That deescalated fast there.
I guess it was always going to,
because what kind of question is:
"What's going to happen
to you and your flight?"
What else is that man gonna say?
"Have you ever seen The Terminal?
Yeah, I have to live here now."
"But do you know what?
I'll just do it. It'll be fine".
I'm not saying every protest
has been universally well-executed.
But it is notable the degree to which
demonstrations concerning Palestine
tend to get shut down,
and how comfortable some have been
in advocating
violence against protestors.
This week, Senator Tom Cotton,
a man with, I think it's fair to say,
entirely too much neck,
called into Fox News to say this!
If this happened in Arkansas,
let's just say I think there'd be
a lot of very wet criminals
that have been tossed overboard.
I'd encourage most people,
anywhere,
if they get stuck
behind criminals like this,
who are trying to block traffic,
to take matters into their own hands.
It is the least important part of this,
but you don't say "overboard"
when you're talking about a bridge.
You're thinking of a boat, bitch.
If you're gonna advocate
for vigilante bridge murder,
at least get the terminology right.
And it's not just the protestors
feeling pressure.
Even Muslims who've expressed
no public views on Gaza
have come under attack.
And for a high-profile
example of that,
look no further than what's been
happening to Adeel Mangi,
one of Joe Biden's nominees
to the federal bench.
He's a Pakistani American
who'd be the first Muslim appointee
to the federal appellate courts,
it's one of those moments
that we refer to as a "historic first"
because it sounds a lot nicer
than "we didn't consider Muslims for
this job until shockingly recently".
Mangi is a respected attorney,
unanimously rated
as "well qualified" by the ABA.
His nomination's been supported
by all these organizations,
among over 100 others,
and he's done pro bono work in cases
involving Muslim and LGBTQ rights.
But in his confirmation hearing
last December,
Republicans didn't ask about
any of that, instead, they did this!
Do you believe
that Zionist settler colonialism
was a provocation that justified Hamas'
atrocity against Jews in Israel?
Does Israel have a right to exist?
My question is simple:
do you condemn this event
that was celebrating
Palestinian-Islamic jihad?
Yes or no?
Okay, that is a shocking display
of Islamophobia,
even for these three, some of the least
likable people in human history,
and, perhaps scientifically,
the ultimate nightmare blunt rotation.
I'm sure you can think
of other people to put into that list.
But who are you taking out?
That's my point.
I should explain what those questions
were based on because it is ridiculous.
Mangi was on an advisory board
for this center at Rutgers University.
And those senators were grandstanding
about some speakers
who'd been invited to its events,
including one
marking the anniversary of 9/11,
something that prompted
this extraordinary question.
Is this the way you celebrate 9/11?
- Have I said anything inaccurate?
- Yes, Senator.
Yes, you have.
You just asked a Muslim man
how he "celebrates 9/11".
Unless you are absolutely sure
that that is also his birthday,
that is completely
inappropriate.
The questioning
around that event was so relentless,
Mangi felt that he had
to make two compelling points.
Number one,
on 9/11, I was in New York,
I saw what happened.
It was my city that was attacked.
Number two, I've never heard
of this event prior to today.
It was never brought
to the advisory board,
which met once a year
to talk about academic issues.
That is a pretty solid answer.
And congratulations, by the way,
to those Republicans,
who've outed Mangi as two of the most
sympathetic things you can be:
a New Yorker
who was attacked on 9/11,
and a guy who signed up to do the bare
minimum at a college function.
"Yeah, I can't really
meet most weeks, or ever,
but if you need someone
to show up once a year
and nod off in an office chair,
I am your guy for that."
This hearing
was a total disgrace.
And it's not just me saying that,
even the Anti-Defamation League,
an organization not reticent about
leveling charges of anti-Semitism,
defended Mangi,
saying the senators' questions
"appear to have been motivated
by bias towards his religion"
and that it was
"profoundly wrong".
And yet, those Republicans
still refused to vote for him,
even as outside groups launched
bonkers attacks on him like this ad,
which aimed to pressure
Democratic senators to follow suit.
Tell Jon Tester to vote no
on giving antisemite Adeel Mangi
a lifetime position in our courts.
Between the gross fearmongering
and the actual footage of 9/11,
that ad feels like you told
an AI program
to make something that'd give
the average Fox News viewer
a heart attack, an erection,
or both of them.
Although there are also
some unforced errors in there,
like including the tweet
that they were referencing,
which clearly doesn't say anything
like what they just claimed it did,
and saying
"the most extreme judges he can find"
over pictures of these two.
And come on.
These are the faces of
two people whose hobbies are books.
These are two people whose
favorite vacation destination is books.
They look like, in high school,
they were voted most likely to books.
If you asked them if you could
bring anything to a potluck dinner,
They don't eat books.
They know you can't eat books.
But because Democrats
control the Senate,
the confirmation
should've been a non-issue.
Unfortunately,
not all Democrats are holding firm.
Because while they may not have
embraced the Islamophobic attacks,
some have gotten suckered in by
a different sort of racist dog-whistle.
Democrats against Mangi worry about
his ties to controversial organizations,
including the Alliance
of Families for Justice.
The New Jersey State
Patrolmen's Benevolent Association
says the group calls for, quote:
"cop killers to be freed from prison".
That is a concern of mine,
not only as a former prosecutor,
but as somebody
who's married to law enforcement.
I'm not sure why you're bringing up
who you are married to.
You could have been married
to Ronald McDonald
and it wouldn't be relevant
to the situation at hand.
It would raise other questions,
though, like:
"Why Ronald when Grimace
is unquestionably hotter?"
"How'd you end up with a clown
dressed like a traffic cone"
"instead of six feet
of pure purple sex?"
"When Ronald
is talking about fries or whatever,"
"does your mind drift"
"to this oblong stunner with an ass
that goes all the way out?"
But again, that is a distraction
from the key issue here.
That is that as with
the Islamophobic attacks on Mangi,
the evidence for claims that he's
"anti-police" are laughably thin.
It's yet more "six degrees
of separation" nonsense,
again focused on an advisory board
that he serves on
for this judicial advocacy group
that called for the release
of an 85-year-old man with dementia
who'd been convicted
of killing a police officer in 1973,
a decision I'm assuming Mangi
didn't even have anything to do with,
because the board, fun fact,
"has never even met".
Yet, not only is Cortez Masto refusing
to support Mangi over this accusation,
so is her fellow Nevada senator,
Jacky Rosen.
And on top of all of this,
Joe fucking Manchin
has decided he's probably
a "no" vote, too, saying:
"if my Democratic
colleagues and friends"
"can't get one Republican vote,
don't count on me".
"I'm not leaving this place
unless I can practice what I preach,"
"and I'm preaching
basically bipartisanship."
Which sounds benign, until you think
about what we're dealing with here.
At a moment when this man is being
targeted with a bigoted smear campaign,
you can't be offering
to meet those bigots in the middle.
Because when you do that,
guess what that makes you?
And while Biden and other Democrats
have stuck by Mangi's nomination,
Manchin's argument speaks
to what can be so dispiriting
about our current politics.
Because while there is nothing wrong
with civility and compromise,
it does depend
on who you're being civil to,
and what you're compromising with.
This is a moment when one
of the loudest voices in the Senate
campaign against Mangi
is also happily encouraging people
to "take things into their own hands"
when it comes
to those they don't agree with.
And it's pretty scary to think that
in the name of "building bridges",
some appear to be perfectly fine
finding a middle ground
with those willing
to throw protestors off them.
And now, this!
And Now: A Tribute to CNBC
on Its 35th Anniversary.
It's a momentous day for us at CNBC
as we mark our 35th anniversary.
A heartfelt and very large thank you
to all those who helped us get here,
and it does take a village.
How is a a phone that is an MP3 player
technologically innovative?
Is the housing crisis really a crisis,
or just a problem blown
out of proportion?
Could this be the future
of preventative medicine?
It's reasonable to compare you,
I usually don't do this, to Steve Jobs.
J.P. Morgan of this generation,
Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX.
I'm not saying
this is the generic type flu,
but maybe we'd be just better off
if we gave it to everybody
and then in a month, it would be over.
I see a new Boeing.
I see just straight-line growth.
I think that this is their year.
Buy the stock of Boeing.
If I call you a tosser,
what does that mean?
Are you allowed to say "putz?"
- I had no idea, I'm gonna Google it.
- You don't know what a putz is?
Is it so offensive we're not
supposed to say it on television?
ED is not an underlying
medical condition, is it?
- You have euros in Ireland?
- We have euros, yes.
- Why do you have euros in Ireland?
- Why wouldn't we have?
I'd use the pound.
I'm doing what maybe you should do,
be a reporter and talk to people.
Every single bit of advice you gave
would have lost people money, Rick.
You're doing a disservice
to the viewer,
because the viewers
need to understand it.
You are doing a disservice!
You are! You are!
Moving on.
Our main story tonight concerns UFOs.
They've brought us great album art,
classic movie moments,
and of course, Hugh Jackman.
I can't prove it yet.
But I'm close.
Lots of people
have reported seeing UFOs,
from Kesha, to Russell Crowe,
to even this guy.
I was gathered in a schoolyard
with about 20 other men,
and we saw a bright light
appear in the distant western skies,
and it got closer and closer,
and when it was 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.
Between the folksy, rambling
story and the goofball smile,
he kind of reminds you
of Joe Biden, doesn't he?
The only thing Biden
would've done different
was name each of the 20 men
he saw the UFO with.
"There was Corn Pop, Floppy Jeff,
Wet Doug, 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 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, because that's Titan,
one of Saturn's moons.
It doesn't look anything
like the real Venus,
which that also isn't,
that's Jupiter's moon IO.
I got you so good!
You thought you were safe,
'cause we were talking about space,
and you were wrong!
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 can 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 Madonna and Child
seems perfectly normal,
however, closer inspection
reveals a strange craft
hovering in the background
with an Earth-bound observer
witnessing the event.
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.
I'm guessing it would stay funny,
right up until that UFO opens up
and an alien labeled "alien" hits you
with a death ray labeled "death ray".
But in recent years,
you might've 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.
This mysterious black object
spotted off the coast of San Diego
by Navy fighter pilots in 2004.
I don't know
what's more surprising there,
the UFO, or the pilot
responding to it with "my gosh".
In that situation, I might have
gone with "holy living shit",
or "Jesus backflipping 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.
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.
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 prefer the term UAP
for unidentified anomalous 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.
The poster in Mulder's office shouldn't
have said: "I want to believe",
it should've said: "Believe, shmelieve,
what the fuck is that thing?"
And the fact is, UFO sightings
long predate any contemporary
associations with extraterrestrials.
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.
You're probably thinking,
that doesn't mean much.
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 confessional
age obsession in their early teens.
It's not news.
But our modern conception
of "flying saucers" took off in 1947,
when private pilot Kenneth Arnold
spotted nine oddly shaped objects
while flying past Mount Rainier
in Washington.
It wasn't until 1947
when a private pilot
reported seeing
a group of pie plate-like objects
flying near Mount Rainier
that the term "flying saucer"
entered the vocabulary
and fueled the imaginations
of movie producers.
That is almost right. Arnold
didn't describe seeing flying saucers,
though, what he actually said was,
the objects
"flew like they take a saucer
and throw it across the water".
But reporters shorthanded that to
"flying saucer" 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 a reflection of moonlight
off swamp gas that fooled Americans".
Skeptics have introduced 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, marry,
kill, and obviously, fuck.
Deep mouths.
We can't know for sure
what Arnold saw.
We know is that his account, and the
news that broke shortly afterward,
supposedly of a "flying saucer"
crashing in Roswell, New Mexico,
kicked off a public obsession
and hundreds of UFO sightings
began pouring in.
Just a month after Arnold's sighting,
a poll asked respondents
if they'd heard or read about
flying saucers, and 90% said yes.
It reached such a fever pitch,
the LA Times ran the headline:
"Flying 'Whatsits' Supplant Weather
As No. 1 Topic Anywhere People Meet".
Discussions of UFOs 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
Air Corps Major Donald Keyhoe
and his campaign
to prove that flying saucers exist.
My name is Mike Wallace.
The cigarette is Parliament.
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 Holt,
and the vape is bubblegum melon".
UFOs became
a pop culture phenomenon.
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 streetlights.
It even has the world's
only UFO themed McDonald's,
which somehow
has only 3,5 stars on Yelp,
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 shows,
a lot of people make the pilgrimage.
The town's two UFO museums have
I have been taken aboard spacecraft
by these two gentlemen.
The curious.
- You think they're like these guys?
- I think they'd be normal people.
The government
hides things from people.
Government distrust.
If they are real,
they're probably evil.
Religion.
There's got to be something to it.
All are part
of this all-American mystery.
Many a night I have looked up at the
sky and said, "Come and get me".
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's spent
"many a night" staring at the sky
and saying "Come and get me".
That is a man
who's run the numbers
and figured out abduction
is cheaper than divorce.
"Come and get me!
Or my wife!
Not both of us,
that is a deal breaker".
But it's worth addressing
something that woman said there,
"the government
hides things from people".
From the very beginning
of our modern obsession with UFOs,
there's been a belief that government
is keeping something from us.
And that mistrust
has been well earned.
The history of the U.S.
government's study of UFOs
is one ranging from the unsatisfying,
to the actively misleading.
And it began not long after
that first flying saucer 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 renamed Project Grudge,
which evaluated more sightings,
and concluded
they didn't threaten U.S. 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.
As you 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".
He doesn't seem like
the most objective analyst there.
The scientific method doesn't go
"One, hypothesis".
"Two, horsewhip
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 study of UFOs
probably cannot be justified".
And it's worth noting,
other scientists at the time,
including Carl Sagan, pushed back
on the tone of Condon's report.
But his attitude prevailed,
to the point that, by 1977,
a survey of over 1,000 scientists
found that a majority thought
UFOs were worthy of further study,
but only two were willing
to waive 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
that 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 a formerly top-secret
Army Air Force research project,
code name 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 feet,
and in 1947, nothing else
on Earth looked like this.
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 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 shit
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"
"were accounted
for by manned reconnaissance flights,"
which "led the Air Force to make
misleading 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
"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 not knowing something.
It's just as likely that the Air Force
is covering up not knowing anything.
Why would they do that?
Because they can't afford
to look incompetent.
They can't admit to the public
they don't know what these things are.
That John C. Reilly 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'd cause a panic,
even though there's no need for that,
because he's not venomous,
I assume.
The website I bought him
from wasn't in English,
but it's a moot point anyway
because, relax!
I definitely know
where my snake is!
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.
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.
I'm happy to report
we already are getting results.
We may all look upon
the guilty party.
Don't get him too close to me,
please.
What are you doing?
You can't introduce a mascot
any time 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 fucking puppet show from you.
They've come with real questions
and they deserve real answers.
Shit, I'm sorry! We cut this bit.
We cut it. Yeah. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry!
I said I'm sorry!
I said I'm sorry!
He's fine!
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 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,
I know where my snake is, so.
Later on, an official explanation
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,
and 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 AATIP,
which was described in news coverage
at the time like this.
That encounter
documented by AATIP,
the Advanced Aviation
Threat Identification Program,
a shadowy office in the Pentagon.
It examined so-called
anomalous aerial vehicles.
That is incredible.
You don't expect to hear about
a "shadowy Pentagon UFO program"
on primetime 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 AATIP's existence
had been made public with the help
of a Pentagon employee, Luis Elizondo,
who later said he'd resigned
from the program to protest
"excessive secrecy
and internal opposition".
And for many, it seemed like finally,
after years of dead-end,
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, while Elizondo
maintains that he led this program,
and has documents
that seem to support that claim,
the Pentagon insists that Elizondo "had
no assigned responsibilities for AATIP"
And even if you don't trust
the Pentagon,
which as a general rule,
I definitely do not,
reporters who've dug
into what AATIP actually did,
have often
found themselves underwhelmed.
It turns out, while they did collect
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 Bigelow,
a budget hotel mogul,
space entrepreneur,
and Ron DeSantis 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 AATIP took place.
Bigelow also once said that aliens
are already on Earth
"right under people's noses"
and founded the Bigelow Institute
for Consciousness Studies,
whose main goal is to determine
whether or not there is an 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 might
have been supporting Ron DeSantis.
As for what Bigelow's company
actually produced for AATIP,
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, antigravity,
and a never-carried out proposal
to tunnel a hole through
the moon using nuclear explosions."
They also composed
a paper on traversable wormholes
that includes this actual illustration
which, and this is crucial,
features a man
saying hello to a dinosaur.
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.
If that is the work that program
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've seen.
Naval pilots who saw an object
in one of those AATIP 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,
that they considered
not coming forward at all.
I think that, over beers,
we've sort of said
"Man, if I saw this solo,
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.
I've had some people tell me: "When
you say that, you can sound crazy".
"I'm not a UFO guy."
But from what I hear you guys saying,
there's something?"
- Yes.
I don't know who's building it,
who's got the technology,
but 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 Boeing.
"I've run the numbers, 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,
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."
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 got a lot of attention
when it was first released.
But in congressional testimony
last year,
a Navy official
offered a pretty banal reason for it.
The hypothesis
is that those are commercial drones
that, because of the use
of night-vision goggles,
appear like triangles,
is that the operating assessment?
Some type of drone, some type
of unmanned aerial system
and it is simply
that that light source resolves itself
through the night-vision goggles
onto the SLR camera as a triangle.
I would rather believe
that 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.
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 "GoFast",
moving extremely quickly.
The panel explained, at length,
as part of a 4-hour press conference,
how they figured out that the object
wasn't moving that fast at all.
Here is just a small sample.
So, knowing the jet's altitude
and the bearing to the target,
we can apply basic trigonometry
to figure out where that object is
in the altitude space.
So, it's the ocean
that looks like it's right behind it
is actually 4.2 miles away.
This is our first indication that some
or most of the motion that we observe,
the apparent motion of the object,
is in fact due to the rapid motion
of the sensing platform.
That was boring as fuck!
No one in their right mind
would want to go to a McDonald's
themed after that explanation.
At all!
But that is kind of the point here.
In that, again, four-hour video,
they set out what they know,
the object's 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, data-driven
scientific framework is essential.
And they are right.
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's 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 fucking 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?
'Cause 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.
Shit, there it is!
There it is! There's my snake!
I found him!
Wait a second!
That's not actually my snake.
That's a different snake.
My snake looks like that,
but that's a different snake.
This is someone else's snake.
Someone please
come get your snake!