There aren’t many secrets that John Brennan doesn’t know. He spent 25 years in the CIA, became the White House homeland-security adviser, and then returned to the CIA as its director. If a question interested him, he could’ve commanded legions of analysts, officers, surveillance networks, and tools to find the answer. Yet in a December 2020 interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he was flummoxed by the wave of recent reporting about UFOs: “Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

This article has been adapted from Graff’s new book.

That roundabout and convoluted comment piqued my interest. Anything that puzzled Brennan was worth looking into. For the next two years, I dove into the history of the U.S. government’s involvement in UFOs as part of writing my new book, and along the way I’ve become convinced that a cover-up is real—it’s just not the one that you think. Plenty of revelations, declassified documents, and public reports suggest active, ongoing deception. Even today, the government is surely hiding information about its knowledge and working theories about what exists in the skies above.

But the cover-up that I believe exists is far more mundane than concealing intelligence that would forever alter our understanding of ourselves and our universe. There are some basic, obvious reasons why the government is withholding knowledge about what are now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs. Some public UAP reports are likely the government’s secret projects, technologies, or operations. According to the CIA, test and development flights of the U-2 and the Oxcart spy planes “accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s.” The military has more secret test flights, development projects, and special craft than most people realize. (The Pentagon’s new next-generation B-21 stealth bomber just had its first test flight this month.)

[Read: UFOs are officially mainstream]

Other reported UFO sightings are advanced technologies from foreign adversaries—such as Russia, China, and Iran—being tested against U.S. defenses. The government doesn’t want to give away what’s been detected and what hasn’t. Rare announcements from officials confirm this, such as when the Pentagon said at a congressional hearing in 2022 that what first appeared to be out-of-this-world, glowing, triangle-shaped crafts were actually just terrestrial drones photographed through night-vision lenses. Plenty of strange incidents, like a mysterious swarm of objects that harassed Navy ships off the coast of California in 2019, indicate that there’s a lot more to say about foreign programs being tested against U.S. defenses.

Perhaps certain agencies are silent on those programs because they don’t have enough information. The government is a maze of operations, classified efforts, and so-called Special Access Programs (SAPs) that make up the defense, homeland security, and intelligence world. No single entity or bureaucrat has a full understanding of what the others are doing, leading to repeated confusion about whether a UFO or UAP sighting is genuine. In 1947, after a civilian pilot reported a strange encounter in the Pacific Northwest that sparked a national fascination with “flying saucer” sightings, FBI executives became convinced that these peculiar crafts were a secret military program. A more tragic incident occurred the following year, when Air Force Captain Thomas Mantell was dispatched to pursue a UFO reported to the Kentucky State Police. He died racing after it, crashing on a farm along the Tennessee border. Military officials were perplexed: Did a UFO down a U.S. fighter pilot? The answer remained unknown until the 1950s, when the Air Force’s UFO-hunting unit, Project Blue Book, pieced together that the “UFO” Mantell chased was actually a secret Navy research balloon under development by a defense contractor—the cereal manufacturer General Mills.

However, I believe the UFO cover-up is about more than state secrets. The government routinely hides information important and meaningless on all manner of subjects, regardless of whether legitimate national-security concerns are involved. Its default position is to stonewall, especially to conceal embarrassing revelations. After reading thousands of pages of government reports, I believe that the government’s uneasiness over its sheer ignorance drives its secrecy. It just doesn’t know very much.

Officials are, at the end of the day, clueless about what a certain portion of UFOs and UAPs actually are, and they don’t like to say so. After all, “I don’t know” is a terribly uncomfortable response for a bureaucracy that spends more than $900 billion a year on homeland security and national defense.

Decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings. In internal documents written before the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966, officials, who had no sense that ordinary civilians would read their work, admit that they simply lacked credible explanations. In a then-classified 1947 letter that led to the Air Force’s original effort to study these “flying saucer” reports, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining seemed as baffled as anyone, writing that some of the reported craft “lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely.” Project Sign, as the effort became known, looked at 273 sightings. After a year, it issued a secret report. Although many UFO sightings were either “errors of the human mind and senses” or “conventional aerial objects,” it said, it couldn’t explain all of them. Some sightings were just too weird to rule on one way or another. “Proof of non-existence is equally impossible to obtain unless a reasonable and convincing explanation is determined for each incident,” the Project Sign team wrote.   

Subsequent attempts to “solve” the mystery have consistently come up short. In 1953, the CIA—with its director and the head of scientific intelligence both bewildered by ongoing UFO reports—convened the Robertson Panel, a secret research group chaired by the Caltech physicist Howard P. Robertson. After hearing from experts and examining sighting reports, the panel concluded that there was “no evidence” that UFOs posed a threat to national security. But it used a sleight of hand to arrive at that conclusion: The researchers looked closely at only a small number of sightings, decided they seemed mundane, and extrapolated that the rest probably weren’t very interesting either. The Robertson Panel couldn’t explain all UFO sightings in the end—it just reckoned that, whatever they were, they weren’t threatening.

Similar efforts to identify UFOs and UAPs for the past 80 years have stalled on a stubborn subset that appears truly mysterious. Usually examiners find that 5 to 20 percent of all sightings have no known explanation. Though some of that is surely a data problem—not all sightings contain enough information to solve one way or another—some really are mysteries.

[Read: NASA learns the ugly truth about UFOs]

Many people who study UFOs end up frustrated by the government’s ignorance rather than its secrets. J. Allen Hynek, a distinguished Ohio astronomer who was involved with Project Sign and Project Blue Book, came to believe that government agencies tried to dodge questions about UFOs not because they were hiding something but because they had no actual knowledge to hide. For decades, Hynek traveled to UFO sightings around the country. He became so professionally fascinated with them that he wrote several books on the topic, coining the phrase “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and playing a bit part in the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name. He was a constant presence in the government’s UFO work from the 1940s to the 1970s. Along the way, he was repeatedly frustrated by the poor answers military colleagues and higher-ups used to brush away sightings—explanations he doubted as a scientist and ones that didn’t square with witness testimonies. (Once Hynek was told by his Air Force superiors to publicly dismiss a series of high-profile UFO sightings in Michigan as “swamp gas.” The statement, which he delivered at a 1966 Detroit press conference, was widely mocked and so outraged the local congressman, a rising GOP star named Gerald Ford, that he pushed for the first congressional hearings on UFOs later that spring.)

After leaving government and founding the independent Center for UFO Studies, Hynek said he doubted that there was a grand government conspiracy. “There are two kinds of cover-ups,” he explained in 1977. “You can cover up knowledge and you can cover up ignorance. I think there was much more of the latter than of the former.”

After The New York Times and Politico revealed in 2017 that the Pentagon had a small-scale secret program studying UAP sightings and paranormal phenomena, and documenting bizarre encounters with seemingly unexplainable craft, Congress pressed the Department of Defense and the intelligence community to take the subject more seriously. The newly constituted All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office reported in 2022 that of 366 recent UAP sightings it had collected, a little more than half seemed normal—either drones, balloons, or trash in the sky it described as “clutter.” Still, that left 171 incidents unsolved.

The AARO has consistently said that it hasn’t found evidence of extraterrestrials. And the government believes that better data will show that most UAP sightings are “ordinary phenomena,” according to a comprehensive report released last month. On Halloween, AARO’s director, Sean Kirkpatrick, announced that his office had started a big push to collect better data from current military personnel who have UAP encounters and from former government employees or contractors who may have had experience with the subject in the past.

Many—perhaps most or nearly all—UAP sightings have conceivable explanations: classified projects, adversarial technology, sky trash. But there are almost certainly some world-changing revelations hidden among UAP reports, even if none of them turn out to be visiting aliens. Investigating them could lead to new discoveries in meteorology, astronomy, atmospheric science, and physics. Hynek’s words about the government’s cluelessness hint at a more intriguing truth: There is something—or, more likely, many things—out there, and none of us yet know what.

This article has been adapted from Garrett M. Graff’s book UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—And Out There.

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The former president, after years of espousing authoritarian beliefs, has fully embraced the language of fascism. But Americans—even those who have supported him—can still refuse to follow him deeper into darkness.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk’s disturbing ‘truth’ The non-end of George Santos Why you maybe shouldn’t write a memoir

The Decisive Outrage

Readers of the Daily know that I am something of a stubborn pedant about words and their meanings. When I was a college professor teaching political science and international relations, I tried to make my students think very hard about using words such as war and terrorism, which we often apply for their emotional impact without much thought—the “war” on poverty, the “war” on drugs, and, in a perfecta after 9/11, the “war on terrorism.”

And so, I dug in my heels when Donald Trump’s critics described him and his followers as fascists. Authoritarians? Yes, some. Illiberal? Definitely. But fascism, a term coined by Benito Mussolini and now commonly used to describe Italy, Germany, and other nations in the 1930s, has a distinct meaning, and denotes a form of government that is beyond undemocratic.

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

I argued that for most of Trump’s time as a public figure, he was not a fascist but rather a wannabe caudillo, the kind of Latin American strongman who cared little about what people believed so long as they feared him and left him in power. When he would make forays into the public square, his politics were insubstantial and mostly focused on exploiting reflexive resentment and racism, such as when he called for the death penalty for the Black youths wrongly accused in the infamous Central Park–jogger case. But Trump in those days was never able to square his desperate wish to be accepted in Manhattan society with his need to play the role of an outer-borough tough guy. He was an obnoxious and racist gadfly, perhaps, but he was still a long way from fascism.

As a candidate and as president, he had little in the way of a political program for the GOP beyond his exhausting narcissism. He had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats. Even now, his rants contain little political substance; when he veers off into actual issues, such as abortion and taxes, he does not seem to understand or care about them very much, and he will turn on a dime when he thinks it is to his advantage.

Trump had long wanted to be somebody in politics, but he is also rather indolent—again, not a characteristic of previous fascists—and he did not necessarily want to be saddled with any actual responsibilities. According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)

After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

The events of the past month, and especially Trump’s Veterans Day speech, confirm to me that the moment has arrived.

For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words. Trump seized on this strategic error by his opponents and used it as a kind of political cover. Over the years, he has become more extreme and more dangerous, and now he waves away any additional criticisms as indistinguishable from the over-the-top objections he faced when he entered politics, in 2015.

Today, the mistake of early overreaction and the subsequent complacency it engendered has aided Trump in his efforts to subvert American democracy. His presence in our public life has become normalized, and he continues to be treated as just another major-party candidate by a hesitant media, an inattentive public, and terrified GOP officials. This is the path to disaster: The original fascists and other right-wing dictators of Europe succeeded by allying with scared elites in the face of public disorder and then, once they had seized the levers of government, driving those elites from power (and in many cases from existence on this planet).

It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.

More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Post that “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

What?

Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence" instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.

Related:

Fear of fascism Donald Trump, the most unmanly president

Today’s News

Representative George Santos will not seek reelection in 2024 after the House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” that he “violated federal criminal laws.” Last night, the Senate passed a stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown and fund federal agencies into the new year. A new CNN poll shows that Nikki Haley has moved into second place, behind Donald Trump, among likely voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Don’t be fooled by the AI apocalypse, Matteo Wong argues. Here’s a guide to understanding which fears are real and which aren’t. Time-Travel Thursdays: The Atlantic’s archives chronicle nearly two centuries of change in America, Adrienne LaFrance writes. Our newest newsletter takes you on a journey through them. Work in Progress: The future of obesity drugs just got way more real, Yasmin Tayag writes. Wegovy is about to go mainstream.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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Culture Break

Listen. Streaming is about to change. Hanna Rosin discusses the poststrike future of Hollywood with staff writers David Sims and Shirley Li in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

Watch. Hulu’s Black Cake explores how marriage, migration, and motherhood can shift one’s sense of self.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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