Something You Should Know
A Serious Look at UFOs & The Power of Grace in Today’s World
Thu, 07 Nov 2024
How do you decide when to throw food out? If you go by the date printed on the package, you could be wasting a lot of money. Listen as this episode begins with an understanding of what those dates mean and when you can ignore them. https://www.greenvillebusinessmag.com/2024/02/01/478977/sell-by-use-by-best-by-food-experts-decipher-the-meaning-of-expiration-dates The real fascination with UFOs began with one incident in 1947. Ever since then, there have been endless sightings of objects flying in the sky and people wondering what they are and could they be alien spacecraft? The U.S. government is also very interested in UFOs and is constantly looking skyward to try and find and figure them out. So, what are the facts? What are UFOs? What is Area 51? Are we alone? Here with some thoughtful answers to these questions is Garrett Graff. He is a former editor for Politico, a contributor to Wired and CNN, and as an author was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is titled UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There (https://amzn.to/3NNsmMd) Grace. It’s hard to define it in a person but you know when you see it. Generally, it is an admirable quality and most of us could probably use a bit more of it. Here to explain grace and tell some wonderful stories of grace in action is Julia s Baird. She is an Australian journalist, broadcaster, and author of the book Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything (https://amzn.to/4f54EqF). Do you know what to do – and not do if your dog gets into a fight with another dog? Dog owners often make matters worse because do the exact wrong thing. Listen as I reveal the best advice if you see your dog (or any dog) get into a dogfight. https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/pets/dog-behavior/how-break-dog-fight?page=all PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: Dell Technologies’ Early Holiday Savings event is live and if you’ve been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Tech enthusiasts love this sale because it’s all the newest hits plus all the greatest hits all on sale at once. Shop Now at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why are we throwing out food we don't need to?
Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. So when you throw out food... Food that's clearly rotten, bad, sitting at the bottom of the refrigerator for six months. Okay, you know to throw that away. But what about some of the other food, the questionable food? Most of us use the date on the food label to determine whether to keep it or toss it.
But experts say Americans throw out billions of pounds of perfectly good food every year because of those confusing labels. The sell-by date on a package is intended for the retailer, not for you, and it winds up misleading a lot of us. Many dates printed on the food we buy are actually meaningless when it comes to freshness or safety.
Even use-by dates or best-before dates are misleading and encourage us to throw away good food before it's time. One food scientist said you just cannot tie shelf life to a date. If the food looks rotten and it smells bad, sure, throw it away. But just because it's past the date on the package doesn't necessarily mean it's unsafe. And that is something you should know.
There sure are a lot of wacky conspiracy theories about UFOs flying around. And we know the U.S. government has and is investigating UFOs. But what is actually known? Is there any evidence that any UFO has contained beings from another planet? After all, you have to wonder, as many people have, if aliens were to come all that way from another planet or even another galaxy.
why would they land in a swamp somewhere where only two people get to see them and those people maybe take some grainy, out-of-focus picture? Why wouldn't the aliens land in the middle of Times Square? The fact is a UFO is an unidentified flying object, meaning nobody is sure what it is. And if, for argument's sake, we put aside the alien spacecraft idea, well then what else could it be?
And why is the government seemingly so interested yet so hush-hush about UFOs? Well, that's what Garrett Graff set out to investigate. Garrett is a former editor for Politico and contributor to Wired and CNN. He has written several books about politics, technology, and national security and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is titled UFO, The Inside Story of the U.S.
Government's Search for Alien Life Here and Out There. Hi, Garrett. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks so much for having me. So do we have any idea when people first started looking up and going, gee, I wonder if anybody else is out there or some other creature or, ooh, what's that over there? And when people first started getting interested in what you would call a UFO?
So I have to imagine that this is a question, you know, sort of this idea, are we alone, is one of the two or three most fundamental questions of human existence. You know, it's right up there with, you know, the questions of what happens after death and is there a God? You know, three questions altogether, by the way, that I think
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Chapter 2: What is the real story behind UFO sightings?
fast moving bright objects in the sky that he likens to flying saucers and he lands tells some buddies about it he gets picked up by the media and very quickly kicks off this summer of the flying saucer um and you know week by week summer of 47 There are now flying saucer sightings all over the United States. They're ultimately across that somewhere.
There are sightings in 34 states up and down North America, even up into Canada. And it hits at this very specific moment in our national anxiety. That summer of 47, the government is worried about these flying saucers, not because anyone thinks that they're aliens, but because they are afraid that these are secret Soviet spacecraft.
being built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists and that these flying saucer sightings might herald a new technology that could invade the United States in this early stage of the Cold War after the end of World War II.
When they're doing that, though, are they doing this in secret? Are they telling people, yeah, we got our eye on this, not to worry? Or are they saying, shh, yeah, Let's take a look at this.
Well, the summer of 47 is just this moment of huge upheaval for the US national security apparatus. That summer, literally within a couple of weeks of Kenneth Arnold sightings, even as these flying saucers dominate newspaper headlines across the United States, the US Congress passes what we now call the National Security Act of 1947. And it creates this modern national security apparatus.
It creates the Unified Department of Defense. It creates the position of the Secretary of Defense, it creates the National Security Council, it creates the CIA, creates the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it creates the Air Force as a standalone service branch. The Air Force up until then, of course, had been part of the Army.
So in that summer, sort of the Air Force's first crisis is to try to identify what these flying saucers are. And the Air Force simultaneously tries to poo-poo that they appear to be anything threatening. But also, there's some fascinating paperwork from that era that shows that even behind closed doors, that the Air Force didn't have any idea what any of this stuff actually was up in the sky.
And so you have the Air Force sort of racing to try to figure this out. They enlist J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for some help, then get into a classic bureaucratic tiff with the FBI. And the FBI basically says, we're getting out of the flying saucer business and leaves it all to the Air Force.
And the Air Force, through that fall of 47 and the beginning of 48, really struggles to figure out what any of this stuff actually is.
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Chapter 3: What is Area 51 and why is it significant?
One of the puzzles to me in looking at this is our government appears to be just as baffled as the ordinary public and far less interested in figuring out the answer to any of this mystery than I think it should be. To me, as a taxpayer, as a citizen, as a journalist, I want the government to be more interested in the subject of UFOs than it appears to be.
And that there's a fairly significant number of respectable, credible witnesses to UAP UFO phenomenon that have come forward that I want the government to try to do better to answer. There has been a lot of attention since 2017 to this series of sightings by Navy pilots, Navy aviators, who have come forward to describe encounters with
phenomenon in the sky that they believe represent technologies that are more advanced than anything that the US government has. Some of this has been backed up by instrument data, by infrared videos and things like that. And the thing that's just really striking to me is the government isn't more interested in figuring out what that mystery is.
And I hope that this new conversation that we're having about UFOs in the modern era helps spur more serious investigation of some of these credible sightings.
We are having a down-to-earth discussion about UFOs, and my guest is Garrett Graff. He is author of the book UFO, the inside story of the U.S. government's search for alien life here and out there.
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I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
We come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them. We're talking Parasite to Home Alone.
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Chapter 4: Does the government know more about UFOs than it reveals?
if the government ever managed to recover one but i think after looking into all of this and having covered national security for 20 years in washington i'm pretty dubious that the u.s government is capable of a sophisticated long-term cover-up of a crashed alien spacecraft you know it just seems as with all conspiracy theories
The reason not to believe that the government has aliens or has captured aliens or alien spacecraft and they're keeping them somewhere, that human nature is that people aren't very good at keeping secrets. People can't keep their mouth shut.
And that by now, if this would have leaked out, somebody would have taken a picture, like a real picture, or somebody would know something and it would get out.
Yes, and that, in fact, is just my sort of most basic reasoning for why you shouldn't believe the government conspiracies about secret UFOs or bases under Area 51 or bodies is the government is capable of keeping secrets, but the government is not really able to keep secrets that are really big, that are known by a large number of people for very long.
And so, you know, do I believe that the government could cover up a crashed alien spacecraft, you know, for a couple of hours, a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a month or two, maybe a year or two? Probably.
But the idea that there is some massive government program that has been ongoing for 80 years where no one has accidentally emailed a budget briefing to their roommate about the UFO program, I just don't really believe. And my challenge with
really any government conspiracy is that they presuppose a level of competence, foresight, planning and strategy that is just not on display in the day to day work that the government does.
And the day to day work the government does is to be out there looking for things or do they react to reports or are they scanning the skies or what?
little of all of the above, that you see the government really studying the skies on a daily basis. But what they're searching for are adversary technology, Russian satellites, Chinese spacecraft, you know, Iranian drones. You know, the government will react to some of these sightings if they come in in certain channels or appear to threaten national security.
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Chapter 5: What percentage of UFO sightings remain unexplained?
Chapter 6: How does popular culture influence our perception of UFOs?
It doesn't like talking about what's being tested there. We know that that is where the government It takes secret planes to be tested and evaluated, whether those are manned or unmanned systems. And I think a lot of people have imagined that that's where the government sort of would take a crashed spacecraft
if the government ever managed to recover one but i think after looking into all of this and having covered national security for 20 years in washington i'm pretty dubious that the u.s government is capable of a sophisticated long-term cover-up of a crashed alien spacecraft you know it just seems as with all conspiracy theories
The reason not to believe that the government has aliens or has captured aliens or alien spacecraft and they're keeping them somewhere, that human nature is that people aren't very good at keeping secrets. People can't keep their mouth shut.
And that by now, if this would have leaked out, somebody would have taken a picture, like a real picture, or somebody would know something and it would get out.
Yes, and that, in fact, is just my sort of most basic reasoning for why you shouldn't believe the government conspiracies about secret UFOs or bases under Area 51 or bodies is the government is capable of keeping secrets, but the government is not really able to keep secrets that are really big, that are known by a large number of people for very long.
And so, you know, do I believe that the government could cover up a crashed alien spacecraft, you know, for a couple of hours, a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a month or two, maybe a year or two? Probably.
But the idea that there is some massive government program that has been ongoing for 80 years where no one has accidentally emailed a budget briefing to their roommate about the UFO program, I just don't really believe. And my challenge with
really any government conspiracy is that they presuppose a level of competence, foresight, planning and strategy that is just not on display in the day to day work that the government does.
And the day to day work the government does is to be out there looking for things or do they react to reports or are they scanning the skies or what?
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of government secrecy regarding UFOs?
See if he gets some warm fuzzies. And hey, yeah, I know it could be at the start of a whole thing.
It seems like in a conversation about grace, that somewhere in there is forgiveness, that that's kind of what this is about. Yeah.
I've been growing up being taught and really believing that forgiveness is a very important and powerful thing. You give someone another chance. You allow them to be better the next time. And you free yourself from any of the tight and horrible feeling of resenting someone or holding on to something they did bad, some way in which they harmed you.
And I wanted to write about this book because I did find occasions in which forgiveness just was absolutely eye-wateringly present. I talked to a man who was almost murdered when he was 10 years old by someone who put like a pick through his head, who he later, decades down the road,
That man confessed and the little boy, then a man, chose to forgive him and was the only person visiting him in the final days of his life. I find stories like that incredible. And he says to me, well, I had to show my kids that there was another way, that we have to break this cycle.
If we don't break this cycle, then we're always hating and we've always got grudges and we will never get out beyond it. And there was something quite beautiful in him personally, actually. His name was Chris Carrier and he's one of these gentle souls, but forgiveness is hard won, hard fought for for him.
Well, anyone who looks at the world today would likely agree that the world and the people in it could use a little more grace. And this is a great and optimistic way to approach the topic. Julia Baird has been my guest. She's an Australian journalist and broadcaster, and she's author of a book called Bright Shining, How Grace Changes Everything. And there's a link to her book in the show notes.
Thank you, Julia.
Thanks so much, Mike.
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