Summary of UFO by Garrett M. Graff: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There

By Justin Reese

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of UFO by Garrett M. Graff: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There

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• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
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Garrett M. Graff's UFO is a comprehensive exploration of the US government's decades-long quest to solve the question of whether we are alone in the universe. The book tells the story of the national obsession with UFOs, which began in 1947 with two sightings of strange flying objects. The search by scientists, the US military, and the CIA for proof of alien life continues over the next half-century, involving an unexpected group of astronomers, military officials, civilian contactees, and true believers. Drawing from original archival research, declassified documents, and interviews with senior intelligence and military officials, UFO is a thrilling story of science, national security, the secrets of space, and the enduring mysteries of the universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223844853

Book preview

PROLOGUE

War of the Worlds

On October 30, 1938, CBS Radio broadcasted a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News about explosions of incandescent gas on Mars. The announcement was confirmed by Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory and Professor Pierson at the Princeton Observatory. The network then reported a Martian craft landing near Princeton, New Jersey, with the Martians emerging as tentacles. The Martians then red a heat ray, killing everyone nearby and spreading across the field.

At 8:18 p.m., news returned with burned bodies, mobilized militias and troops, and emergency care rushing to the scene. Captain Lansing from the Signal Corps declared that all cause for alarm was now entirely unjustified, and the creatures could hardly survive the military's heavy machine-gun fire. The radio studio itself was turned over to the state, and military operations began.

By 8:24 p.m., the voice announced that the strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands were the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. By 8:30 p.m., word came that the US Army in New Jersey had been defeated, with just 120 soldiers having survived the heat ray attack. Communication networks were down, and more Martian cylinders were reported to be hitting Earth. People were beginning to flee cities, and martial law had been declared.

The secretary of the interior addressed the unfolding national emergency, stating that the gravity of the situation confronted the country and the concern of the government in protecting the lives and property of its people. At around 8:40 p.m., normality returned as a station identification break made an even more stunning proclamation: You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells.

The most dramatic night of radio in American history had been a scripted performance, with no invasion, epic battle, or lives lost.

Orson Welles, a celebrated dramatist, collaborated with John Houseman to launch the Mercury Theatre in 1937. The show was a success in its first year and was picked up to air on the radio by CBS on July 11, 1938. Welles and Houseman realized a potential use for the Sunday night literary adaptations lineup for Halloween, and they decided to adapt H.G. Wells's science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, to the modern age of radio.

The team had only a week to translate the 1897 first-person novel about a Martian invasion of England into radio fodder and prepare for their roles. The hard work paid off, and the broadcast sounded like a real invasion. Newspaper headlines made it sound like America had nearly succumbed to anarchy, fueled by mass hysteria. Telephone switchboards were overwhelmed, and terrie families had emigrated into the streets.

Welles maintained that he hadn't meant for the program to run so long before announcing that the events being described were factual. The team had just been working so fast, and the changes and edits to the scripts had come so late and so quick, that no one had realized the standard station ID segment had been pushed back.

The War of the Worlds became a somewhat-inated legend of popular culture, cited as a prime example of the power of the media to spread disinformation and our population's susceptibility to panic, especially when it came to potential invasion and the subject of aliens.

UFOs, or extraterrestrial objects, have been a popular and controversial topic in popular culture for decades. The hunt for these objects has become confused due to the term becoming shorthand for alien spacecraft, which is actually the interplanetary theory or extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). However, UFOs, ETH, aliens, and space travel have dominated popular culture for decades, pushing boundaries of understanding and fueling human imagination. Many popular TV shows and movies feature space travel, aliens, and the paranormal.

Waves of sightings, known as aps, have unfolded regularly over the last 70 years, defining more than one generation's understanding of its place in the world and the universe at large. One of the biggest and most important unanswered questions of human existence is whether we are alone.

The universe began about 14 billion years ago with an explosion that filled all space from the beginning. The first three minutes of the universe's life saw temperatures cooling rapidly, leading to the formation of protons and neutrons, which would later become the building blocks of stars, dust, and us. Over time, worlds formed and life-like objects emerged, with our solar system being about 4.6 billion years old and containing our sun, eight major planets, nine dwarf planets, and over a million other items.

Our solar system is a tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains around 100 to 400 billion stars and at least that number of planets. It is about 2.5 million light-years from Andromeda, the next closest galaxy. Together, these two massive galaxies make up the Local Group, which is one corner of a larger cosmic structure known as a supercluster. In 2014, a team of astronomers led by Hawaii's R. Brent Tully realized we were more connected to our neighbors than anyone had realized. They dubbed the new supercluster Laniakea, Hawaiian for immense heaven, and now believe it encompasses about one hundred thousand other galaxies that astronomers denote as nearby. Laniakea is part of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, an enormous structure of about sixty superclusters that together stretch across a billion light-years. NASA now estimates there are about 200 billion galaxies stretching across 46 billion light-years.

Earth seems unique, but when set against the scale of the universe, there are likely many such possible planets. Recent estimates imagine that there are one sextillion—a thousand trillion—of habitable planets in the universe. There is good and growing reason to expect cosmic company, as the past hundred years have witnessed a slow but inexorable spring tide of discoveries that encourage the idea that Earth may have many, many analogues.

This book explores the intertwining of two threads from the past seventy years: the military's ongoing search for UFOs on Earth and the increasingly serious work conducted by scientists, astronomers, and eventually NASA to search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. Both stories are fundamentally stories of believing, with the human desire to understand the universe and find truth and meaning in a time when we are overwhelmed with astronomical data.

The book focuses on incidents, sightings, and reported encounters that changed the arc of the broader history of UFOs in America and the world beyond during the latter half of the twentieth and the first two decades of the twenty-first centuries. It is populated by some of the biggest figures of modern American history, such as Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, Enrico Fermi, Carl Sagan, and various strange and colorful characters.

Part of the challenge in putting it all together is that the government absolutely is covering up the full extent of its interest and investigation into UFOs. There have been revelations, declassified documents, and public reports proving an active, ongoing cover-up over decades. The US government routinely hides information important and meaningless on all manner of subjects, regardless of whether there are legitimate national security concerns involved.

The deeper the author gets into this subject, the more they realize that the government's UFO cover-up has primarily been a cover-up motivated not by knowledge but of ignorance. As Philip Morrison, one of the inventors of the SETI field, said, Either we're alone in the universe or we're not, and either possibility boggles the mind.

In the end, the story of the hunt for them is mostly actually a story about us.

PART 1

The Saucer Age

(1947–1960)

Flying Saucers

Colonel William Blanchard was initially skeptical of the sighting of a strange object in the sky, but later discovered that it was not an aircraft. The wreckage had been found by a local rancher named Mac Brazel, who had sent Brazel to the nearest air base to report the discovery. Two military intelligence officers, Major Jesse Marcel and an anonymous man, were sent back with him to investigate. Blanchard believed that the object was a'sapper', and he ordered Lieutenant Walter Haut to put out a press release announcing that the US Army Air Forces at Roswell had captured the first 'ying saucer.' This was not the first or only report of strange objects flying through American skies after World War II. Just two weeks prior, Kenneth Arnold had a similar experience in Washington State, setting off waves of sightings that would eventually lead to the modern UFO phenomenon.

Arnold, an experienced rescue pilot, had seen nine objects moving at tremendous speed through the air, stretching out over perhaps ve miles. He measured the speed of these objects, which were moving around 1,200 to 1,700 miles per hour, far faster than anything known at the time. Arnold watched the objects for about three minutes before telling his story to reporters at the East Oregonian. The story was widely spread, and Frank M. Brown, an army intelligence officer, determined that all statements made by Arnold regarding the distances involved, speed of the objects, course of the objects, and size of the objects could very possibly be facts.

The discovery of flying saucers in the sky led to a nationwide aerial fever, with reports of strange sightings overtaking baseball as the national pastime. Pilots reported circular objects in the air, while military and commercial pilots reported other anomalies. The military initially struggled to determine whether these bizarre flying entities were friendly or hostile. To investigate, they readied P-61 fighters and began using specially equipped camera patrols with telescopic lenses. Other military bases placed fighters on ground alert, and eight P-51 fighters and three A-26 bombers patrolled the Cascades and Pacific Northwest, finding nothing but empty sky.

At least thirty-nine reported anomalies within a matter of weeks. Some were easier to dismiss than others, such as decorative searchlights from a nearby circus or a misidentification of planes overhead as suspicious flying objects. The military eventually accepted that something had to be done and officially investigated the sightings.

United Airlines Flight 105 reported a fast-approaching light in the sky, but it was later determined that it was not a normal plane. The Roswell Daily Record reported that a flying saucer had been found and relocated to the 509th Bombardment Wing. Major Jesse Marcel inspected the recovered craft but had yet to release any details about its construction or appearance. Two locals, Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot, described the object as oval in shape like two inverted saucers or old type washbowls placed together in the same fashion.

The Associated Press reported on the discovery of Roswell, a space probe, and the Associated Press's statement that it was a ying disk was picked up by the San Francisco Examiner. Brigadier General Roger Ramey, the commander of the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas, refuted the reports of unidentified material, claiming that his base experts had examined the debris sent from Roswell and easily identified it as belonging to a lowly weather balloon. The military continued to double down on the assertion that nothing had happened out of the ordinary at Roswell, culminating in an appearance by Ramey himself that night on the local NBC station in Fort Worth. The national focus on ying saucers came at a critical moment in the postwar evolution of the US government, the US military, and aviation in general. The US emerged from World War