UFO

Auteur

Garrett M. Graff?has spent two decades covering politics, technology, and national security. Today, he’s a columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes on leadership, serves as the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute, and hosts the history podcast, Long Shadow, which received a 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award. The former editor of POLITICO Magazine and a longtime contributor to WIRED and CNN, he’s written for publications like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Foreign Affairs, and authored nine books—including the #1 national bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, the FBI history?The Threat Matrix,?Raven Rock?(about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans), and the?New York Times?*bestsellers?*When the Sea Came Alive?(an oral history of D-Day) and Watergate: A New History, which **was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Texte du rabat

"One of the rare books on the topic that manages to be both entertaining and factually grounded." --The Wall Street Journal From the bestselling author of Raven Rock, The Only Plane in the Sky, and Watergate (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history) comes the first comprehensive and eye-opening exploration of our government's decades-long quest to solve one of humanity's greatest mysteries: Are we alone in the universe? For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. It's one of our culture's favorite conversations, and yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs--and the covert search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life--is told by bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff in a deeply reported and researched history. It begins in 1947, when two headline-making sightings of strange flying objects prompt the US Air Force's newly formed Department of Defense to create a series of secret programs to determine how unidentified phenomena may pose a threat to national security. Over the next half-century, as the atomic age gives way to the space race and the Cold War, the mission continues, bringing together an unexpected group of astronomers, military officials, civilian contactees, and true believers who bring us closer, then further, then closer again, to answering one of our most enduring questions: What exactly is out there? Drawing from original archival research, declassified documents, and interviews with senior intelligence and military officials, Graff brings readers a story that's "Loads of fun...[a] fascinating deep dive down the rabbit hole" (Publishers Weekly).

Échantillon de lecture
Prologue: War of the Worlds Prologue War of the Worlds
Just after 8 p.m. on the East Coast on Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of American families tuned into CBS Radio had heard just seventeen seconds of Ramón Raquello’s orchestra playing the tango “La Cumparsita,” live from the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel in New York, when a voice interrupted:

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.

After a note about spectroscope readings and a confirmation by a Professor Pierson at the Princeton Observatory that Farrell’s reports were indeed correct, Raquello’s orchestra returned to the air. A few minutes later, another news bulletin. “Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bulletin a moment ago, the Government Meteorological Bureau has requested the large observatories of the country to keep an astronomical watch on any further disturbances occurring on the planet Mars,” the announcer said, adding that the network was working to set up an interview with the nearby Princeton Observatory.

Again, the orchestra returned. Again, a bulletin provided an update.

And then, about eleven minutes into the broadcast, a breathless series of news reports and man-on-the-street interviews about a Martian craft landing near Princeton, New Jersey, started to play.

Sirens, crowd murmurs, and shouted orders from concerned police punctuated the audio delivered by the field correspondent and a Princeton astronomer who had rushed the eleven miles to the scene. The reporter, Carl Phillips, said breathlessly, “Well, I hardly know where to begin—to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern Arabian Nights.” Phillips was obviously confused and struggling to get his bearings while live on air. “I guess that’s it—yes, I guess that’s the thing, directly in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have struck on its way down. What I can see of the object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of.… What would you say, Professor Pierson?”

The Princeton astronomer was clearly trying to wrap his head around the scene, too. “What’s that?” he said, caught off guard by the question.

“What would you say—what is the diameter of this?”

“About thirty yards,” the professor said.

A cylinder, that is, nearly the length of a football field. Phillips moved on as the police began to push the crowd back and he located the farm’s owner, Mr. Wilmuth, who recounted the experience of the object crashing into the field. They edged closer to the object as Phillips tried to capture on his microphone a strange humming sound coming from inside. Pierson proclaimed the object, whatever it was, definitely extraterrestrial.

Then the top of the craft opened and the Martians emerged.

First came the tentacles.

“Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake,” Phillips declared from the farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. “Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it.”

Moments later, a police officer was reportedly approaching the craft with a white flag—“If those creatures know what that means,” Phillips wondered on air—when the Martians suddenly fired a heat ray, killing everyone nearby and spreading fire across the field from the extraterrestrial craft.

The transmission cut off. The music resumed.

At around eighteen minutes into the hour—8:18 p.m.—the news returned, with reports of burned bodies, mobilized militias and troops, and emergency care rushing to the scene. Another bulletin from Trenton stated that Carl Phillips had been found dead and charred. The radio studio itself, the new announcer explained, had been turned over to the state, as the military operations commenced. Eight battalions—seven thousand soldiers—had surrounded the pit in New Jersey, attempting to surround and isolate whatever the strange cre…