221 – They Are Already Here – with Sarah Scoles

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Author Sarah Scoles joins us to discuss her amazing book They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers.  It’s a terrific ride through UFO culture and the fallout from the 2017 New York Times front-page article about the US Government Program to examine unidentified objects in the sky.

Links/Additional Reading/Terms:

AATIP – the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – the pentagon program associated with Luis Elizondo. 

TTSA – To The Stars Academy – the entertainment/media company set up by BLINK-182 frontman Tom Delonge and storied paranormal researcher Harold Puthoff. 

UAP – Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon – the new terminology used by the military to discuss unknown flying objects while trying to avoid all the connotations of UFOs.

UFO – Unidentified Flying Objects – a perfectly reasonable term for unknown flying things in the sky (coined in 1953), except for the wacky cultural baggage it immediately picked up. Honestly, the term UFO attracts “wacky” like a piece of half-chewed bubble gum dropped in a dog bed attracts hairs.  

Robert Bigelow – Hotelier, sugar-daddy to weirdness, and also space entrepreneur. 

The New York Times story that broke the AATIP program publicly. 

The follow-up story from two of the authors (Kean & Blumenthal)

The incredibly long-running joke Paul Rudd has been doing on the Conan show