Guest Info:

Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology, and national security, and is now recognized as one of the nation’s most prolific and wide-ranging journalists and historians. His award-winning work—including nine books on topics ranging from presidential campaigns, Watergate, 9/11, and cybersecurity, to D-Day and the U.S. government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, as well as dozens of magazine articles, essays, podcasts, and documentaries—uses history to explain the story of today, illuminating where we’ve been as a country and where we’re headed as a world.

Topics:

• How do you decide when to trust government claims about the UAP subject when they admit they’ve lied to the public about it in the past?

• What are the most plausible first-contact scenarios?

• Is it plausible that a reverse-engineering program could be hidden within the government for decades without detection until now?

• Is there a middle path between total skeptics and total believers in the UAP phenomenon?

Links:

• Garrett’s Website: https://www.garrettgraff.com/
• Follow Garrett on X: https://x.com/vermontgmg
• His book UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here–and Out There: https://shorturl.at/V8fUF

Guest Info:

- Doug is Deputy Chief Scientist of The Acquisition Innovation Research Center. Early in his career, he created the very first aerogel used by NASA. Doug is a member of SCU.

Topics:

- What tech systems do we need to do a better job sorting mundane UAP from genuinely anomalous ones?

- Doug walks us through the steps and tools used to definitively identify a UAP as a party balloon.

- He talks about his project of purchasing and studying anomalies at a piece of land near Skinwalker Ranch.

- We argue over whether studying UAP is like studying dark matter, and whether dark matter is even “real”. (pt 2)

Links:

- Doug Buettner’s publications on ResearchGate.

Christopher Mellon is without a doubt one of the most important figures in the modern history of this subject. As Deputy Assistant Director of National Security for Security and Information Operations, he had access to America's most sensitive secrets and intelligence, and from that vantage point he determined that the UAP subject wasn't being given the serious attention that it deserved as a national security issue. After long efforts to raise the issue within the government, he brought unclassified military footage of UAP to the New York Times, which published it on the front page in 2017, reigniting serious public interest in a subject that had received little attention for decades. We take the opportunity to ask Chris to help us understand the government's complicated and often fraught relation to the UAP subject.

Topics:

• Is there a disclosure scenario that doesn't inevitably lead to a global disinformation war between enemy nations?
• Do government have perverse incentives to portray UAP as enemy threats (say, in order to encourage social unity)?
• How can we know when to trust governments's statements about a subject that's so historically and politically fraught?
• What is the future of the UAP subject in the US and globally?
• In what ways is the UAP subject more than a national security issue?

Links:

• ⁠Follow Chris on X⁠
• ⁠Chris's SOL Foundation Talk "The Potential Consequences of UAP Disclosure"⁠
• ⁠Chris's Politico article, "If the Government Has UFO Crash Materials, It's Time to Reveal Them"⁠