Chasing Aliens, with Jon Ronson and Daniel Lavelle (Part One)

Summary

Intelligence Squared – Chasing Aliens, with Jon Ronson and Daniel Lavelle (Part One)
Date: May 19, 2026
Host: Jon Ronson
Guest: Daniel Lavelle

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Episode Overview

This live episode centers on the allure and complexities of UFOs, American UFO culture, and our quest for meaning beyond Earth. Journalist Daniel Lavelle joins Jon Ronson to discuss his new book, Chasing Aliens, drawing from his journey through America's UFO heartlands, encounters with scientists, government insiders, and fringe believers. Together, they unpick the blurry line between fact and belief and explore the very human aspects driving our obsession with extraterrestrials.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Host and Guest Introductions

• Jon Ronson introduces Daniel Lavelle, highlighting his unconventional path from homelessness and care homes to award-winning journalism, and candidly shares his own near-miss with writing a UFO book alongside Robbie Williams.

  • Notable moment: Ronson’s anecdote on setting up a haunted house night for Robbie Williams, and the quick pivot from ghosts to aliens [03:03–07:03]

• Daniel Lavelle discusses his difficult upbringing, time in special schools, and eventual stumble into journalism after writing about his own experiences with homelessness.

  • “Being naughty enough to get expelled from a school for naughty kids is quite an achievement.” – Daniel Lavelle [07:10]

Connection Between Personal Experience and UFO Fascination

• Lavelle explains how writing about homelessness became emotionally taxing, leading him to seek a new, more joyful journalistic subject—aliens.
  • "It's almost like putting yourself in a petri dish and dissecting yourself. So I just had enough. And there's something about aliens that was quite joyful, I guess, and aspirational." – Daniel Lavelle [08:55]
• The conversation delves into the psychological effect of reporting on traumatic stories, highlighting the toll it can take on journalists’ own well-being.
  • “You don’t…People might not realize that as a journalist, if you are embedded in these sort of tragic stories, that it does affect you. You're Human. Especially if you’ve experienced some of the same stuff yourself.” – Daniel Lavelle [10:57]

The Modern UFO Craze and Its Origins

• Lavelle’s interest in UFOs was piqued by the 2017 New York Times exposé on the Pentagon’s mysterious UFO program (AATIP), fronted by the credible-sounding government whistleblower Luis Elizondo.
  • "He wasn’t just some rancher in the Midwest... He was a Pentagon spook saying he was ahead of a UFO program called AATIP.” – Daniel Lavelle [12:00]
• The story’s spread among politicians, scientists, and the public, leading to mainstream figures (Obama, Sam Harris) commenting seriously on UFO phenomena.
  • “Either there’s an alien invasion going on under all our noses or there’s some very confused people in US Intelligence. So either way, there was a story.” – Daniel Lavelle [13:35]

Famous UFO Videos and the Limits of Evidence

Analyzing Video Evidence

• Ronson and Lavelle play and discuss infamous military UFO videos (Go Fast, Gimbal, Tic Tac), with Lavelle providing both the mystery and the mundane scientific debunking:
  • Often, civilian and military eyewitnesses alike are subject to basic perceptual errors (parallax, glare, camera effects).
    • "They're really good at flying planes and shooting enemies. Not so good at geometry, it looks like." – Daniel Lavelle [16:43]
  • For the 'Go Fast' video, the object is probably a balloon; 'Gimbal' is probably an exhaust glare.

Pitfalls of Testimony and Memory

• Pilot and eyewitness accounts often diverge sharply, which is consistent with the well-known unreliability of witness testimony.
  • "You can have five witnesses viewing the same event and they’ll all give different accounts.” – Daniel Lavelle [23:13]

From Extraterrestrials to the Human Experience

• Lavelle reflects that reporting on UFOs became less about proving their reality and more about understanding the hopes, fears, and psychology of believers.
  • "It became a story about human beings rather than aliens, about human fallibility, like we talked about before, people’s hopes, their fears." – Daniel Lavelle [25:44]
• He discusses research showing that people claiming alien abduction exhibit real trauma responses, sometimes indistinguishable from PTSD, likely resulting from phenomena like sleep paralysis.
  • "Even if that’s the explanation, the trauma they experience is very real." – Daniel Lavelle [26:20]
  • “I realized that I left my empathy at the door... It was quite insensitive of me.” – Lavelle describing his approach to interviewing Whitley Strieber, famous for abduction claims [28:09]

Rethinking the Role of Skepticism

• Ronson shares his own journey from aggressive skepticism (Skeptics Society) to a more empathetic stance, noting the limits and even arrogance of traditional debunking culture.
  • "After a while I realized we were kind of dicks." – Jon Ronson [34:03]
• Lavelle agrees, emphasizing that the days of journalist superiority over “irrational” subjects are over; now, empathy and humility are required.
  • "I can't prove that they didn’t have an experience. It’s just that with every hypothesis you need evidence, physical evidence, to make it watertight.” – Lavelle [29:08]

Government Insiders, Conspiracy, and Skeptics

• They discuss Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge and the strange fate of William McCasland, an ex-government insider who disappeared, fueling conspiracy theories.
  • Lavelle explains that the “mysterious disappearances” match expected statistics for a group of 700,000 people with security clearance—debunking the idea of a government cover-up.
    • "700,000 people have top secret clearance." – Jon Ronson [31:42]
    • "The death rate is consistent with a group of 700,000 people." – Daniel Lavelle [31:44]
• Much of what’s reported about UFO programs in the government is misrepresented. For instance, AATIP was not actually a long-running UFO program; instead, it was a much stranger and more scattered initiative involving ghost hunting, odd research, and eccentric personalities.
  • "After his close encounter with the album cover [Tubular Bells], he somehow convinced the American government to give him and his mate...$22 million to chase ghosts, orbs, UFOs, and also a beaver dinosaur hybrid." – Daniel Lavelle [37:40]
  • Government insiders often have unusual, even fringe beliefs—e.g., “terrorizing” terrorists with psychic powers.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jon Ronson on skepticism’s journey:

  • "After a while, I realized we were kind of dicks." [34:03]

• Daniel Lavelle on the emotional toll of reporting trauma:

  • "It's almost like putting yourself in a petri dish and dissecting yourself. So I just had enough. And there's something about aliens that was quite joyful, I guess, and aspirational." [08:55]

• On the reliability of pilots:

  • "They're really good at flying planes and shooting enemies. Not so good at geometry." [16:43]

• Lavelle on empathy for abductees:

  • "I realized that I left my empathy at the door." [28:09]

• Ronson’s wry summary of ghost hosts:

  • "No wonder Robbie Williams and ghosts get on so well. They both only manifest themselves when it suits them." [03:03]

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• [03:03] – Ronson’s story about attempting a Robbie Williams ghost/alien book
• [07:08] – Lavelle’s unconventional background and start in journalism
• [08:55] – The toll of reporting on trauma and the pivot to UFOs
• [12:00] – How the 2017 Pentagon UFO story sparked Lavelle’s interest
• [15:01] – Military UFO sighting videos and their skeptical explanations
• [24:36] – Lavelle questions his own assumptions about approaching UFOs seriously
• [26:20] – Discussion of abduction trauma and sleep paralysis
• [28:09] – Interviewing Whitley Strieber and the need for empathetic journalism
• [31:06] – The William McCasland disappearance and statistical rationality
• [35:52] – Unraveling the true nature of the Pentagon’s “UFO program”
• [37:44] – Government insiders’ eccentric beliefs and paranormal research

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Tone and Style

• The tone is witty, wry, and conversational, mixing sharp skepticism with open-minded empathy for both believers and debunkers. Both speakers are self-aware, self-deprecating, and committed to honest, nuanced exploration of the UFO phenomenon.

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Summary

This episode uses the lens of UFOs and alien encounters to probe much larger questions about journalistic responsibility, belief, trauma, and the search for meaning. Part one ends having established that UFOs serve as a kind of Rorschach test for American—and human—hopes, anxieties, and the desire to find wonder in a world that too often feels joyless or cruel. Through anecdotes, debunkings, and reflections, Jon Ronson and Daniel Lavelle reveal that the story of chasing aliens is ultimately a story of chasing ourselves.

Transcript

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[Mia Sorrenti]

welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part One of our recent live event with All World Prize winning journalist Daniel Lovell. Lovell joined us at Conway hall to discuss America's obsession with UFOs, aliens and the search for meaning beyond earth. In conversation with journalist and podcaster Jon Ronson, Lovell drew on his new book Chasing Aliens to reflect on a journey through America's UFO heartlands, from fringe believers and mysterious R to leading scientists and government insiders. The images and video clips discussed here can be found linked in the episode description. Let's join our host Jon Ronson, now live at Conway Hall.

[Jon Ronson]

Hi, I'm Jon Ronson. I'm very excited to introduce Danny Lavelle, talking about his new book Chasing Aliens. Danny is great. He's an All World Prize winning journalist. His first book, down and out was published in 2022 and won a Royal Society of Literature award for nonfiction writing. And this is his new book. Before I bring Danny out, if you'll allow me. I nearly wrote a book about chasing aliens and it didn't work out and I rarely get the opportunity to talk about it. So can I quickly tell you about the book I nearly wrote? That was close. That was very similar to this. It began, I got a phone call from Caitlin Moran. That's how long ago it was when she still talked to me. She said, stay by your phone, Robbie Williams is going to phone. So I thought that's much too stressful. So I turned off my phone and went for dinner. And when I came back, there was an answer phone message from Robbie Williams saying that he wanted to spend a night in a haunted house and could I set one up for him. So I phoned up all of these ladies of the manor and said, like dear lady, blah. I read on the Internet that if the portrait in your drawing room is moved, a ghost appears. I have been contacted by the pop star Robbie Williams and I thought like, none of them would email me back. 100% replied and said that their house is definitely haunted and Robbie Williams is welcome to stay whenever they were like throwing their ghosts at Robbie Williams, that they were their debutante daughters. Anyway, then Robbie Williams changed his mind and said he didn't want to spend a night in a haunted house. And I thought, no wonder Robbie Williams and ghosts get on so well. They both only manifest themselves when it suits them. But then a year later, he said he was gonna hunt for aliens. He was gonna go on, he was gonna meet alien abductees. So I said, is this definitely happening? He said, definitely. So I flew to Los Angeles. I thought, I'm Going to write a book called Robbie Williams and John Journey to the Other side. I flew to Los Angeles. He'd hired a private plane for the day. We got to his private plane and there was a woman standing there and she said, Mr. Williams, Mr. Williams, friends, this is your plane for the day. She said, what I want to tell you is that Snoop Dogg uses this plane a lot. What I'm saying is you can do anything. And we all kind of looked at each other, all in our 40s by then. And Robbie's friend Brandon said, well, can we stand up as the plane lands? So we went to the deserts in Nevada and went to a UFO abductee convention in Laughlin, Nevada. And Robbie was very sweet. He met these abductees and he said he always felt like an abductee because when he was 16, he was taken from this planet to join. Take that. So also, that's why Robbie Williams was so interested in abductees. And I think there's an odd, unlikely parallel with Danny, so I am going to bring him out. Please welcome the brilliant Danny Lavelle. Yay. Hi, Danny. So, Danny, I wanted to start. You've got a kind of unconventional background as a journalist and as a alien hunter. Do you want to just, you know, talk a little bit about your background? You were homeless. Do you experience homelessness from. For some time?

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah. I didn't take the conventional route to a newsroom. I went to special schools when I was a kid. Go on, Si. Which I was expelled from as well. So I think I deserve another award for that. Actually. Being naughty enough to get expelled from a school for naughty kids is quite an achievement.

[Jon Ronson]

What was your transgression?

[Daniel Lovell]

Just, like a litany of things. Just you? Too much. And. Yeah, after that I went into the care system, children's homes, foster placement, stuff like that, and had no qualifications. Ended up homeless. Wrote an article about homelessness. I didn't even want to become a journalist. I was so enraged about an experience I had in a homeless workhouse thing that I just wanted to express myself and I just sort of fell into this. So.

[Jon Ronson]

So you, like, just like, wrote. You splurged it out, kind of just.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah.

[Jon Ronson]

Sent into the Guardian?

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, basically. And then, yeah, just rolled my luck, really.

[Jon Ronson]

Right. And you've said that there is a connection between that and wanting to write this book. And I. And you said that the connection is that writing about homelessness because you began to, like, specialize in those areas and it was miserable. You were spending your life with people who were leading really hard Lives. And it was rubbing off on you and you wanted to do something that was more kind of fun.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, well, I spent like a year writing a series for the Guardian called the Empty Doorway series with Simon Hattonstone, who sat in the front. Brilliant, Simon.

[Jon Ronson]

Yep.

[Daniel Lovell]

And we told the life stories of people who died across the uk. And I just saw myself in all these people because they all had similar backgrounds to me, they had similar pitfalls, dependency issues. And then when I wrote my first book, down and Out, I kind of. It's almost like putting yourself in a petri dish and like dissecting yourself. So I just had enough. And there's something about aliens that was quite joyful, I guess, and aspirational. They're quite fun. So I just thought, what's the funnest thing I can do? Aliens.

[Jon Ronson]

So, yeah, I totally get that. I had a bit of a sort of breakdown in 2019 and thought, what can I do that's fun? Porn.

[Daniel Lovell]

I made a. Oh, why didn't I think of that?

[Jon Ronson]

I became a porn star. I wondered if there was another parallel. I was really taken by what Robbie Williams had said about how the reason why he identified with abductees was because he felt like he'd been abducted from the world to join. Take that. Like he wasn't of this world. And I wondered whether, like, sleeping in a tent was your joining. Take that. That you kind of, you know, you end up sort of off this world, but not of this world, living separately. And maybe you were identifying with abductees for that reason.

[Daniel Lovell]

No, it's actually an insightful point. I wrote an article about this recently about social class and how I sort of fit in with everyone, but no one at the same time. I'm sort of working class, but middle class because my parents. My stepdad's a lawyer, my mom went to university, but then I ended up in care, lived on council estate. So, yeah, I don't feel like I fit in, but I don't know if that drew me towards little green men, though. I think it was more the breakdown. But, yeah, I'll take that one.

[Jon Ronson]

That is a real thing though, right? A journalist can spend too long telling dark stories and suddenly you realize that the darkness has sort of entered your and you have to pull yourself out of it by doing something more fun.

[Daniel Lovell]

Oh, yeah, Me and Si would have late night cry a thons. Yeah, just. Yeah, you don't. People might not realize that as a journalist, if you are embedded in these sort of tragic stories, that it does affect you. You're Human. Especially if you've experienced some of the same stuff yourself.

[Mia Sorrenti]

It's.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah.

[Daniel Lovell]

It's too much, you know, it really is.

[Jon Ronson]

Before I move on, let me just say my favorite Simon Hatton memory was. I hope you don't mind me saying, Simon interviewed Lou Reed and was so excited about interviewing Lou Reed, and Lou Reed was so mean. You burst into tears because of meeting Lou Reed. I always find that really funny when I. Okay, so you decided to write this book, and the very first thing you did was meet a man called Tom delong who has suddenly, in the oddest way, hit the news again. So do you want to just talk a little bit about. Because that was your sort of inciting incident, I suppose.

[Daniel Lovell]

Well, I never actually met Tom DeLonge, but I kind of discovered him after. The way I got hooked into this whole thing was. I mean, I had no interest in aliens and UFOs at all, apart from, like, Star Wars. Like, I used to imagine myself being Han Solo, like the Mancunian version. Fuck off, Luke Skywalker, you dickhead. It would have been a bit of a different film, but I got into aliens when an expose appeared in the New York Times. It was called Glowing Auras and Dark Inside the Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program. And that featured a whistleblower called Luis Elizondo. And he wasn't just some rancher in the Midwest telling this story. No offense to ranchers in the Midwest. He was a Pentagon spook saying he was ahead of a ufo program called AATIP. And UFOs were making incursions over American skies, over military bases, and behaving in ways that seemed to defy the laws of physics. So I just went, okay, well, this is different. Very different. So I kept one eye on it, and it sort of snowballed over the years. You had people going to Congress saying, not only is there a UFO program, but there's actually crashed spaceships and alien bodies. Obama said, yeah, there's stuff in the sky we can't explain. You had uber rationalists like Sam Harris, the neuroscientist, saying, we might have to apologize to people who've taken the piss out of. Yeah.

[Jon Ronson]

For a long time. All the people we've been mocking all of these years may have to apologize to them.

[Daniel Lovell]

So I thought, either there's an alien invasion going on under all our nose, or there's some very confused people in US Intelligence. So either way, there was a story.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, right. And in fact, we've got a couple of clips, and today is obviously a big day for UFO'S everyone must be very excited because Trump released a whole load of new things. In fact, we've got a couple of. So this was released today. That is. It looks a little bit like a BSG scar. Anybody's old enough to remember those? Or is it bcg? Right, that's on the moon. That's three. And this came out today, this photograph. So, Danny, what is it?

[Daniel Lovell]

Well, John, that's clearly an alien, obviously.

[Jon Ronson]

And then another photo that was released today is that one. That one is a bit more difficult to discern.

[Daniel Lovell]

It's clearly another alien.

[Jon Ronson]

But when all of this hit the news, in what, 20, what year did we find out that the AATIP existed?

[Daniel Lovell]

2017.

[Jon Ronson]

Okay. And there were two film clips in particular that really did seem.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, these clips are remarkable. One of them is called Gimbo and the other is Go Fast and you'll see them now.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, we've got a clip. So which is this one?

[Daniel Lovell]

Okay, that's Go Fast.

[Jon Ronson]

So who is filming this?

[Daniel Lovell]

This is being filmed on a Navy pilot's targeting camera pod.

[Jon Ronson]

Right. Okay. So they've captured it in their sight. Very excited. And also, as you say, these sightings were being made by military pilots. It wasn't just sort of people in a field in Arizona. And they really didn't seem, as you can tell, to be defying the laws of physics.

[Daniel Lovell]

Well, yeah, I mean, on that one, it looks like an object is zooming over the ocean surface at breaknet speeds without any clear means of propulsion. But I don't know if you want me to go into pouring cold water on it. Yeah. So if you just dig a little deeper into it, what's actually going on there is a parallax illusion. So it's difficult to explain parallax. But I don't know if you've ever. Well, everyone will have been on a train. Right. If you look at the train tracks as you're moving, it looks like you're going really fast. And then look out into the distance, it looks like you're going far slower. So that object is not actually going above the ocean surface. It's 13,000ft above the ocean. So it gives that appearance. And it's actually moving at wind speed. So it's probably a balloon.

[Jon Ronson]

So why in that case, were the pilots so excited about it?

[Daniel Lovell]

Well, this is the thing. They're not infallible. Right. So they're really good at flying planes and shooting enemies. Not so good at geometry, it looks like. So, yeah, that's kind of just human fallibility, I guess,

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[Jon Ronson]

There was also a sighting that was called Tic Tac. And again, Tic Tac seemed to be extraordinary. It was around half a mile away, and then in an inst. It accelerated so rapidly that it appeared to vanish from existence until radar picked it up again 60 miles away, less than a minute away. And it had no wings, cockpit, or landing gear yet. It was going to break next speed. And the ocean was like bubbling up as it was flying over the ocean. So what's that all about?

[Daniel Lovell]

That one is really mysterious. It's a great story. The people who witnessed it, Commander David Fravor and Commander Dietrich, they tell a very compelling story, but without any data, radar data, any evidence that backs it up, it just remains a story. And that's the problem with a lot of these things. They are just stories. So, yeah, we don't know what that is. It could be any number of things.

[Jon Ronson]

And then there was the other video was Gimbal, and I think we've got gimbal as well. So who's filming this and where is it?

[Daniel Lovell]

This is off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, and Navy pilots, again, are filming it on their targeting pod. It's actually occurred the same day as Go Fast did.

[Jon Ronson]

Oh, the same.

[Daniel Lovell]

The same day.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, but like a long way away.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah. And that looks like a flying saucer, to be fair.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, that looks pretty. That looks pretty open and shut to me.

[Daniel Lovell]

So what is it that, John, is glare. Probably from a heat source, maybe an exhaust of a fighter jet. It's rotating because the camera rotates. And I don't know, you could do this experiment when you get home, if you get your partner or your friend to put on their phone torch and you film it, if you turn your camera around, you'll notice that the glare from the torch light rotates, but everything else just stays the same. So that's what we think is going on here. Well, that's what people Like Mick west think. I don't know. It's fine saucer, isn't it?

[Jon Ronson]

There was also with some of these, like these particularly extraordinary videos, which are very convincing. They convinced Obama, they convinced everyone. There are some discrepancies in the accounts of the pilots, right? Sometimes, yeah.

[Daniel Lovell]

So, like in the TikTok one, I think Fravor said he saw it for like five minutes and Dietrich said it was a matter of seconds. Now, I don't know if that's just because people talking shorthand and. And people's sense of time can be really different, can't it? So I don't know. But, yeah, there are some discrepancies. And that's the big problem with all this stuff that you have these blurred timelines, different accounts. I'm sure lawyers, if there's any in the room, know all about this. With witness testimony, you can have five witnesses viewing the same event and they'll all give different accounts. Yeah.

[Jon Ronson]

So, yeah, I got to admit, I think you sort of solved this problem. But one of the reasons why I never did my Robbie Williams UFO hunting book was because I thought, well, one of the reasons is that Robbie said he didn't want to do it and he was going to rejoin. Take that instead. But the other reason was that I was thinking, these stories are all or nothing. You either prove that there's aliens among us or it's slightly disappointing. Now, you must have thought as you were setting off on this journey, what do I do in that situation? Like, if I don't. I mean. Well, did you set off thinking, I'm gonna prove this once and for all, or did you set up more skeptically or what? Yeah.

[Daniel Lovell]

When I originally set off, I maybe naively thought that something's very different about this. I think I fell for, like, an appeal to authority fallacy in a way. Like all these people were saying, it must be something to it.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah. I mean, these are people trained to spot things in the sky. This is why the whole glare, you know, stuff is a little. It's still a little odd because these are like highly trained military pilots who are, like, trained to know glare when they see it.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? You would, but apparently not. Yeah. Sorry, what was it? I can't remember the question again.

[Jon Ronson]

Well, you know, knowing as you set off on this journey. Yeah. That. Okay. So whenever I set off on a journey, my first thought is always, what are the pitfalls? Like, what's the worst version of this story? And then, you know, to avoid that, like Once you identify how this story could be bad, you know, to avoid it, and this was a big gamble, you set off on this great big, long journey to try and solve something that people have been trying to solve, like forever. And did all of these thought processes go through your mind?

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, of course. But I just think as I dug deeper into the world, it came a story about human beings rather than aliens, about human fallibility, like we talked about before, people's hopes, their fears.

[Jon Ronson]

And then it becomes also about mental health, about, you know, why are people so sure? One extraordinary thing that you found in your book was that when people did, like, kind of brain studies of, of people who said they'd been abducted and they were retelling their stories, their brains were like firing off as if they had ptsd.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah. The physiological response in an alleged abductee victim is exactly the same as a soldier who's experienced shell shock or something. It's the same response. So even if there are prosaic explanations for their experience, when it comes to abduction victims, it usually happens at night. They're usually in bed and it's usually shadows over them. And all of that is. It describes something called sleep paralysis. This condition where you wake up, your sort of subconsciousness is still bleeding into your waking reality and your body's still asleep, so you can't move. So if you're prone to dreaming about extraterrestrials visiting you, I'm guessing you might see that. So that, that's. But even if that's the explanation, the trauma they experience is very real. I wasn't that sensitive at the beginning. I interviewed Whitley Strieber for the book. He gave rise to the anal probing trope.

[Jon Ronson]

He. He said he'd been abducted.

[Daniel Lovell]

He said he'd been abducted and they inserted an object into his rectum to analyze him. And when I interviewed him, I hadn't read his book. I just thought I'd let him tell his story. And when I zoomed with him, he got really pissed off. He's like, oh, well, you haven't read my book. You're not taking this seriously. We shouldn't do this. And they hung up on me, right? And he sent me a shouty email. And I thought, oh, pompous git, you know?

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah. And when I first read that story, I thought the same thing. Like, so self aggrandizing, so narcissistic. It just goes to show that, you know, these believers are all, you know, they're narcissists. They want to be the center of attention. But then Both I as a reader and you as a writer came to a different conclusion.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, I realized that I left my empathy at the door. Like if I was speaking to someone who had a quote, unquote, genuine traumatic experience involving something as egregious as that, I would have taken pains to read their book very carefully. I would have been prepared. I probably would have had a pre discussion with them about, do you sure you want to touch on this and that? But I didn't do any of that. I just said, tell us your abduction story. So, yeah, it was quite insensitive of me. And I think that's the difficulty with this topic. It's knowing when to apply the appropriate amount of sincerity, seriousness, empathy. So I just decided since then it's better just to go with being a human being.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, but that is interesting because I think the days of somebody going into that kind of world in a kind of hierarchical way, to mock them with our superior rationalism is over. Like, no one wants that shit anymore.

[Daniel Lovell]

No, no. And I can't prove that they didn't have an experience. It's just that with every hypothesis you need evidence, physical evidence, to. To make it watertight. I fully believe that most of them believe it, that they had an experience. And I think, although I've speaking to many abductee victims, some of them wanted to remain anonymous. And that's even more convincing in a way because then they've got nothing to gain. They're not trying to spin a yarn. And they got very emotional about it. So for them it's very real.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, and a few things have happened since the book came out which make the book very timely. One is all the stuff that got released today. Another is, as I said briefly at the beginning, one of the main figures in this movement is this guy called Tom DeLonge who used to be in the band Blink 182. And he's now like a big figure in the UFO movement. And the book begins with Tom DeLonge. And in February, somebody who worked for Tom DeLong, a man called William McCasland, he'd once had top secret clearance at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base and really just explained the kind of importance of that base. It was where the, you know, in UFO law, it's where the Roswell aliens were taken. So he had top secret clearance of that base. Then he went to work for Tom DeLonge in his sort of UFO world. And in February he walked out of his house and vanished without trace. And he hasn't been seen again. And there's a big conspiracy theory about that because he's one of 11 scientists who have just vanished without trace in the last four years in America. And Trump has said, I don't know what's going on. This sounds really serious to me. So what do you think?

[Daniel Lovell]

Well, again with this, this conspiracy is really weird because it's not. It's like some conspiracies. You can see the dots and I see how they join these up. This one is completely mental because some of them were killed, some of them committed suicide, some of them died of natural causes. They were like old and they were like. The theory is that these scientists had special clearance, so they were dealing with classified research. But the 700,000 people in America who have access to that sort of research.

[Jon Ronson]

700,000 people have top secret clearance.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yes. And the death rate is consistent with a group of 700,000 people.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah. Somebody worked out that. No, way less than.

[Daniel Lovell]

Way less. It's actually less than you'd expect.

[Jon Ronson]

Apparently. 700,000 people. This sounds implausible, but this is apparently the statistical truth that somebody came up with 700,000 people, 4,000 of them will die over a four year period.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, that seemed like really high to me as well.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, it seemed high to me too. And the conspiracy theorists are working with like 11 mysterious.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, 11 people.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah. Also, William McCasland's wife released a statement saying that, yes, he did once have access to classified information, but he'd retired 13 years ago and quote, it seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him. So again, that one falls down. It's kind of a shame. Do you feel a little, you know.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, I feel like the UFO Grinch in a way. Just. I'm going in there, just. Well, no, it's not that. It's a glare just like ruining everyone's fun.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah. This is where I left the skeptics. I was in the Skeptics Society for a while. Yeah. And do you remember the skeptics in the pub and everything?

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, I do, yeah.

[Jon Ronson]

Does anybody here remember the skeptics? Yeah, yeah. I was part of it. And you know, at first we were like very excited about, you know, dispelling rumors about the Loch Ness monster and, and aliens and, you know, we wanted to be so, you know, our ambition was to become so necessary in the culture that a ghost hunting TV show wouldn't think to have ghost hunters running down a corridor without a skeptic running alongside them, ruining everything by saying it's probably infrasound emanating from a faulty air conditioning unit. Smart. And then after a while, I realized we were kind of dicks. Well, what happened was young female skeptics came in and said, we need to, like, broaden our areas of interest from, you know, to other irrational belief systems, like misogyny. And then the older male skeptics would like, say, no, we're already straying too far from our core. You know, proving the non existence of ghosts.

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jon Ronson]

And then I'll tell you that. Well, then for me, the nail in the coffin was that our leader was a man called James Randi, who became famous for debunking Uri Geller on the Johnny Carson show in the 70s.

[Daniel Lovell]

The spoon bender.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got some Uri Geller stories. Oh, can I quickly tell you my Uri Geller story? Okay. I went to Uri Geller's house one time in Sonning on Thames, and he was like, showing me around. He said, you know, John, here is my cutlery covered limousine. Here is my onyx toilet. And he said, here is a Jewish prayer shawl. He said, now, in my religion, the Jews believe. And I said, uri, Uri, you don't need to tell me. I know I'm Jewish. And Uri said, I knew it. He said, shippy, didn't I say the next person who walks through this door will be a Jew? And Shippy said, yes, you did, Uri. Yeah. Anyway, I went to a convention and James Randi turned up. And all of these skeptics got to their feet and applauded him with an intensity I found, to be honest, nuts. I thought skeptics shouldn't be this animated about anything. But that gets into a really interesting. Which gets to my second point, which is that it's not only random people across the world who see UFOs, there's a big contingent of believers within the government. And I think one of the most interesting areas that you go to in this book is about that. Like all the people who believe within the government. So will you talk a little bit about that?

[Daniel Lovell]

Yeah. When I originally set out, it was the New York Times article and Lou Elizondo was the head of aatip. There was a UFO program. He was a former spook. I just took those facts for granted because, you know, it was the newspaper of record that published them. But as soon as you dig in just below the surface, you'd realize that there was no UFO program called aatip. Lou Elizondo never ran it. The real program was called osap. And I'M going to try and remember what the acronym stands for. I think it's the Advanced all weapons domain something or other. Anyway, and it turns out the people who were running that, that whole thing got started because a man called James Lakatsky, who worked for the Department of Defense, he saw a ghost on Skinwalker Ranch. Like an apparition, it said. It took this tubular structure that looked like the album cover on Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells album. So after his close encounter with the album cover, he somehow convinced the American government to give him and his mate, billionaire Robert Bigelow, 22 million to chase ghosts, orbs, UFOs, and also a beaver dinosaur hybrid. That's a beaversaur dinosaur hybrid across Skinwalker Ranch. And that's what they were really up to. And that wasn't in the New York Times piece. If it was, this wouldn't exist. I don't think so. Yeah. And yeah, there's just so many believers in government.

[Jon Ronson]

There was the whole remote.

[Daniel Lovell]

Oh, the whole. Yeah. Lou Elizondo, it turned out, believes he's got psychic powers and that before he became the UFO guy, he was a terrorist terrorizer with his mind. He would visit terrorists in their cells and shake their beds.

[Jon Ronson]

Yeah. And this was. Do people know that?

[Daniel Lovell]

Just actually, that's in his book, like verbatim.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a [e-mail] membership. If you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program and buy tickets [e-mail] attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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