780: Setting the Record Straight

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. I'm joined in the studio right now by my coworker, Tobin Low. Hey there, Tobin.

Tobin Low

Hi, Ira.

Ira Glass

And I'm just going to say that the story you're about to tell, you acknowledge the existence of sex, but that's really all that you acknowledge, that it exists. Tell me what happened.

Tobin Low

Yeah, OK. So this guy, Paul, this happened when he was in his early 20s. And he arranges this hookup with a guy he meets online. And I should say, the guy, his profile doesn't have that much info. It says he's closeted, that if they're going to meet up, it has to be very discreet.

Tobin Low

And so finally, he sees this guy standing on a corner, and the guy beckons for him to pull over.

Tobin Low

So Paul asks him, where are we going? And the guy starts to direct him to the hookup spot, like, make a left up there, turn right at this corner.

Tobin Low

And then he realizes--

Ira Glass

And so was he scared? Did he think this guy might rob him or hurt him in some way?

Tobin Low

He doesn't have time to be scared because he pretty immediately realizes exactly what's happened, why a guy would wave you down and get into your car.

Ira Glass

See, once you say that, it seems totally obvious.

Tobin Low

I know. You would think, right? But can I present to you Paul's defense of himself?

Ira Glass

Please.

Tobin Low

So first of all, this was 2013. So if you remember, that's early in rideshare culture. So the whole dance that happens where you wave down a driver, you get in, and people know what to say to each other--

Ira Glass

That just wasn't in his head in the same way back then.

Tobin Low

Exactly. The other thing is that the guy that he was supposed to meet up with, his hookup, the photo on the profile was kind of grainy, and he was wearing sunglasses in the photo. So Paul actually didn't have a clear picture in his mind of what the guy was supposed to look like.

Ira Glass

Oh, OK.

Tobin Low

Yeah. Though there is one more thing that's a little bit more of an obvious giveaway.

Tobin Low

So now Paul has to make a decision. Is he going to say something?

Tobin Low

Also, I should say by now, they've been driving in the car together for several minutes. So it's way past the threshold for a lighthearted oops, misunderstanding.

Ira Glass

[LAUGHTER] Yeah.

Tobin Low

And then Paul, he has this more alarming thought.

Tobin Low

And then Paul has this total perspective shift because now he's thinking about, how is this going to look from the backseat of the car?

Tobin Low

So the guy hangs up the phone. And it's at this point that Paul gets this gift from the gods.

Ira Glass

I can't believe he gets saved.

Tobin Low

I know. And for the rest of the drive, he commits to the part. He is Paul the Uber driver, which means he plays along as the guy in the back tries to make conversation.

Tobin Low

The lucky thing for Paul is that because he asked for directions when the guy first got in the car, the guy doesn't really notice that Paul doesn't have the app open or the GPS open. He's just comfortable giving him directions all the way to Glendale. So eventually, they do end up at his house.

Tobin Low

And then incredibly, the guy does invite him up.

Ira Glass

He does.

Tobin Low

He does. And actually, they are still together today.

Ira Glass

Really?

Tobin Low

No. Of course not. The guy just wishes him a good night and goes into his house.

[LAUGHTER]

That's it. And the next day, Paul got a message from his actual hookup, and it turns out, the guy just got scared and decided not to come. But to this day, Paul still stands by his decision.

Ira Glass

It's hard to decide to set the record straight. The world usually does not want to hear it. It is almost always an inconvenient truth. Today on our program, we have people who step up, tell the truth the rest of us have not heard and sometimes do not want to hear, and let the chips fall where they may. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, Home Test. So we begin today with a kid, 12 years old. He's trying to figure out the truth, to set things straight for himself. This boy, Ilya, his family had recently escaped from Mariupol in Ukraine. Mariupol was a city that you may remember, back in the spring, everybody was trying to get out of. It was under siege for months. Food was running out. The Russians bombed a maternity and children's hospital, then a theater that people were using as a bomb shelter. Soldiers and civilians made a long last stand at the steel plant. There were lots of failed attempts to set up a humanitarian corridor. Big parts of the city were destroyed.

Ilya and his family managed to escape all that. They made it to Poland. And then last month, incredibly, they decided they wanted to go back to Mariupol to see if their old home was a place that they could still live. Producer Valerie Kipnis talked to Ilya about what happened.

Valerie Kipnis

I met Ilya while I was volunteering at a refugee center in Warsaw this past spring.

[CHILDREN SHOUT]

One rainy day in June, I was showing a couple kids how to use a camera and interview one another when Ilya walked into the room. I could tell he was interested but too shy to say much. I asked if he wanted to join us. And one of the younger kids asked if they could interview him. They were eager to try with someone new. He shrugged and plopped himself in front of the camera.

You could tell that outside of war times, Ilya was a cool kid. It was something about the way he carried himself.

[CHILDREN SHOUTING IN UKRAINIAN AND LAUGHING]

I remember thinking about how dark the rings were under his eyes. I double-checked as he sat in front of the camera. You sure you want to do this? Why not, he said. Julia, who's seven, asks his name and how old he is.

Ilya replies--

Valerie Kipnis

--my name is Ilya, and I'm 12 years old. My city is Mariupol. I was born in Mariupol. I've lived there for a span of 12 years-- all of them, I lived there, until the orcs fell on us, that is. That's how I'm going to name such unpleasant characters.

The orcs are his way of saying Russian soldiers.

Then he tells the room--

Valerie Kipnis

--your second question is probably going to be about my feelings about the war.

And then he went on to answer his own question. He described watching Azovstal, the massive steel factory near his house that the Russians bombed for months, as it burned for days on end, about how he had hid in a basement while snipers fired at his home, right into their windows.

Ilya says the scariest feeling was when he finally made it to his grandma's house, a house he spent a lot of time in, and it was completely burned down. There were corpses of people laying outside all around. He didn't know if his grandma was alive or not.

Valerie Kipnis

We came to my grandma's, and we couldn't enter because the house was completely mined. It wasn't until hours later he found out his grandmother had survived. Here, Zhenya, the 11-year-old filming him, stopped recording. Ilya covered his face with his Angry Birds t-shirt.

It was remarkable to me that he had made it out of Mariupol. In all the time I was in Poland, I didn't meet anyone else from his city. Ilya and his family made it to one of Warsaw's nicer refugee centers, which offer them long-term housing. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and psychiatrists would come in to help on site. There was food and a playroom for kids. It was safe, well-run, orderly.

The day I met Ilya, he asked for my number right away. That's just the kind of kid he is, a little businessman. Sometimes in the mornings, if I was late to my shift, he would call me to make sure I was still coming and then confirm a time to be exact. He would then inform the others. When I would arrive at the shelter, he would be waiting for me outside.

But Ilya was also more reserved than the other kids. He couldn't always break out of his quiet. When he did, he would get into long conversations with me, using phrases like, listen here, Val, or you got to hear me out, Val.

Valerie Kipnis

After months of hanging out with Ilya and the other kids, I had to go back to the States. On my last night working at the shelter, as Ilya walked me to the tram stop, which had become our daily tradition, he chased me with a water gun and laughed. He seemed to be getting used to Poland.

[CHILDREN LAUGH AND SHOUT]

But a few weeks later, he called to say that his family-- him, his mom, dad, and sister-- were making plans to go back, back to Mariupol.

I hadn't heard of any families like Ilya's who'd managed to escape Mariupol and make it all the way to safety in Poland to then try and return. After all, the city was badly damaged and now under Russian control. And the shelter they were in, it was one of the better ones, the ones most wanted to get into. I called Ilya's mom.

Valerie Kipnis

She told me that last week, it was Ilya and his sister's birthdays. They didn't want birthday parties, she said. They didn't want anything, no presents. The only thing that they wanted for their birthday were tickets home. I asked her, have you been trying to prepare your children for the fact that things may be different?

Valerie Kipnis

She said, yeah. I tell them, look how beautiful Warsaw is. Look at everything we have here. When we come home, it's not going to be beautiful like this. She says she tells them that they're not going to have ice cream. And the kids say, we don't need any of this. We're ready to eat what we have. We just want to go home.

The truth is, Ilya's mom felt the same way as her kids. She told me she'd rather wake up in her own home than stay in Poland. They'd been on the run for months, stayed at so many temporary places, and she felt no relief or comfort. And also-- this was a big part of it-- she felt an obligation to her own parents, who she'd left behind. But she also worried about what it would be like for her kids to see the city so changed. They'll have to come to their own conclusions, she said.

I talked to Ilya for a while about it.

Valerie Kipnis

He said he wanted to go home because that's where his grandma is. He said, I'd rather be home where sure, conditions aren't great, but I can do as I like, than just be like a little cat here, not knowing my place. Prior to the war, Ilya had spent most of his time living at his grandparents' house because his parents work so much. When he and his parents fled Mariupol, it was the first time he had left his grandma in his entire life.

Valerie Kipnis

I'm worried about only one thing, Ilya said. I really don't want to go back to school. He said he wasn't worried about anything that might happen within the classroom. He was worried about actually getting there. He had heard that there were mines everywhere. He said it freaked him out.

Valerie Kipnis

He didn't like his parents leaving him to go to work at the factory for the same reason and told me he'd come up with a plan to start a business there so they could all work together, selling backpacks and knickknacks at the flea market or something.

Ilya actually expected home to be different. He was aware that Russia had fully occupied his city and saw in social media that now even the sign at the entrance that said Mariupol had been changed.

Valerie Kipnis

OK, now, now, look at the first photo. That's what they've changed it to. And now look at the second photo. It says Mariupol. And instead of a Ukrainian E, they added a Russian E. So they've already renamed it. Mariupol used to be Mariupol. Now, it's Mariupol.

Ilya told me he and his sister had been fighting about that. His sister thought that when they got home, they should just make peace with the fact that Mariupol as they knew it was now over, that the Russians had won, that this was their new life. Ilya refused to accept defeat. The Russians were the ones who destroyed the city. He figured Ukrainians would keep on fighting. All in all, he had mixed feelings about returning.

Valerie Kipnis

I want to go, and I don't want to go, he's saying, 50% one way, 50% the other.

Valerie Kipnis

This is the thing he was trying to set straight for himself. Was Mariupol still going to feel like home?

Two days later, mid-August, Ilya texted me from the road. By the way, he wrote, we're already en route home. I don't know when I'll be able to write to you again. And then radio silence. I couldn't get a hold of Ilya or his mother. I stayed up into the morning hours scrolling through Ukrainian Telegram channels made for this exact reason. Had there been a bombing, a missile strike that I had missed?

But then a couple days later, Ilya popped up on my screen. He wrote to me of bad news. The border guards hadn't let his mom and sister into Ukraine because of a document issue. So the family decided to split up. His mom and sister returned back to Warsaw while he and his dad continued to Mariupol. And then a few days later, another text message came through. Ilya had made it. He wrote me an update the way he always texted, in long, run-on sentences.

Their apartment had light and water, though the internet was spotty, and there was no gas, but they'd bought an electric stove yesterday. So no more of that. On the first day back, he made sure to see his grandmother. They hugged and drank tea together, just like old times. He walked around the neighborhood with his dad. He told me he was nervous about filming outside because the soldiers didn't like it when people did that. Even so, he insisted on sending me at least one video.

Valerie Kipnis

Ilya's hand is shaky, as if he's trying to keep his phone hidden. But I can still make out the image, a large collapsed building next to a bus stop, Ilya's his favorite supermarket. The only thing left of it? Its metal beams.

Valerie Kipnis

Later, we talked on the phone. He told me, I lived in the city for 11 years, and I got used to certain things. And now, nothing really works like it used to.

It's all broken down, he said. But there are new houses being built. I mean, you hear shots being fired from the distance. They're demining a lot right now. And then today at 8:00, we heard machine gun rounds being fired.

Where from? I asked.

Valerie Kipnis

Well, not from far away. Nearby. When he went to the cemetery with his dad to visit some family who had been killed during the war, he was shocked.

Valerie Kipnis

He told me, I went to the cemetery, and there were so many graves. I can't even describe it to you. You can't even count them. It was so many. And this is only at one cemetery.

Valerie Kipnis

Ilya and I talked a lot over the past few weeks, and as time went on, I began to notice something in our calls. The things that once bothered him, the soldiers, the mines, his sister's attitude about the war, he started to describe them differently, like yes, lots of the city was a mess. But it didn't feel as bad as it had looked on his phone from Poland. He had light and electricity.

And when I asked if he was still nervous about those mines on his walk to school, he said--

Valerie Kipnis

--no, I've already been walking, and there's nothing there. The Russian soldiers just told me where to walk and where not to walk, so I've been listening to them. Ilya was now taking advice from the soldiers that occupied his city. I asked Ilya, are there lots of Russian soldiers there?

Valerie Kipnis

Yeah, and then there's Chechens. And what, they just walk around the city? I asked. Yeah, they just walk around the city, to shops, to different places.

And how do they behave themselves?

Valerie Kipnis

Excellent. Polite. Honestly, when the Chechens are here and the kids come up to them, they give you money so you can buy candy. His mom told me the Chechens give him sodas and chips, anything the kids ask for.

When I asked Ilya if it was weird for him that there are Russian soldiers everywhere, he told me, I already got used to it. You think they'll stay there forever or for now?

Valerie Kipnis

Forever. Ilya told me he'd even made friends with some of the Russian and Chechen soldiers. It felt strange to hear him say that. He knows it was Russia that started all this. But they're the ones in charge now. And he told me people get killed for being pro-Ukraine.

There are all kinds of things that don't make sense in Ilya's life right now. There are parts of town that are destroyed and parts that are fine. School's in session, but there are mines along the way. When you're living through a war, there's only so much you can set straight. You have to hold a lot of contradictions in your head at once. Ilya is getting pretty good at it.

Ira Glass

Valerie Kipnis is one of the producers of our show. Ilya's mom and sister finally did make it to Mariupol and surprised the grandparents. Ilya was there to film it.

[KNOCKING]

[JOYOUS CRIES]

This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that made four regions of Ukraine into part of Russia officially, including where Ilya is right now. The United Nations Secretary General said the move went, quote, "against everything the international community is meant to stand for."

Ira Glass

Act 2, Oh, What a Hangled Web We Weave. Quick heads up before we start the story that it mentions part of the male anatomy. Take that under advisement, pro and con. Decide what you're going to do. It is not what the story is about. The story is about a creepy and dangerous creature that does all kinds of terrible things. It's also about somebody who takes issue with every word I just said about that creature. Lilly Sullivan met up with this person to hear her out.

Lilly Sullivan

This person is my friend, Kelsey Padgett. And if you run into her at a dinner party or a bar, maybe you happen to be standing behind her in the security line at the airport, she might ask you this.

Lilly Sullivan

And this is Kelsey's mission, to expose the lies about this spider being a wanton murderess, correct the record, and restore her good name. Kelsey used to work as a park ranger in New York, by the way. She also used to report science stories. And over the years, she's amassed an absurd amount of information about these spiders.

Lilly Sullivan

Kelsey says the female eating the male, OK, this has happened, but very rarely. And it's barely a noticeable trait if you look around at what the rest of the spiders are doing.

Lilly Sullivan

Meanwhile, the male spider, he's no Mr. Rogers. Check out what he does.

Lilly Sullivan

A lot of species of spiders do this bridal veil thing. One theory is the one Kelsey lays out, that the male is trapping the female. There's another newer one too, which is more accepted by scientists now, but it's more seduction than a trap. As a scientist put it when they explained it to me, it's bondage. Yep. Spiders do bondage.

Myth number two, that her bite is fatal.

Lilly Sullivan

Interestingly, most of the black widow bite victims back then seem to be male. In an older study, they were 80% male. Here's a theory as to why.

Lilly Sullivan

Hangles. Yep. That's what she said.

She thinks all these penis bites happening so regularly might be one of the reasons there were so many deaths back then.

Lilly Sullivan

Anyway, the point is, once more people had indoor plumbing along with improved access to medical care, the numbers, which weren't that high to begin with, they've gone way down. And in the last several decades, there's no record of anyone dying from a black widow spider-- no one.

In fact, the black widow is usually a pretty shy spider. Scientists have even done tests where they poke and prod her, trying to elicit a bite. And she turns to other defenses first, tries to run away, curls up into a little ball no bigger than a quarter. Sometimes she throws silk at the danger to try to escape. The bite is her last resort.

Lilly Sullivan

And Kelsey has a proposal to set the record straight-- just change the spider's name, easy. Get rid of the name that mires her in all this twisted lore she doesn't deserve.

Lilly Sullivan

The one she likes best, though--

So I decided to test out this new name on the people I thought were the best suited to judge.

Lilly Sullivan

I spoke with eight people who'd been bitten, talked to 11 others over email. Here are some of them.

Lilly Sullivan

Not everyone who's bit has a bad reaction like this. And again, bites are very rare. And a lot of the time, they're mild. But when it's bad, it's bad. So I ran Kelsey's idea by them. Do you think we should rename the black widow spider the shoe button spider? 13 people weighed in. No one was into it.

Lilly Sullivan

This is Jenna. She got bit eight years ago in a porta potty at Coachella.

Lilly Sullivan

Someone else who'd been bit told me, honestly, I think black widow is an excellent name. And were I a spider, I would feel really cool with a name like that.

Ira Glass

Lilly Sullivan is one of the producers of our show. Kelsey Padgett is hosting an upcoming podcast all about big rivalries in history and gossipy, petty feuds. It comes out next month. Keep your eyes out for that.

Coming up, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are doing such a great job coming to thoughtful, bipartisan solutions to our nation's problems. Let's see what they do with UFOs. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, setting the record straight, stories of people who feel very strongly that they have to clarify what's true and what's false about something very important to them. We have arrived at Act 3 of our program, Act 3, U-F-No.

So far today, we've heard a bunch of people setting the record straight on something. And now it is my pleasure to introduce our senior editor, David Kestenbaum, who's usually very measured. There's something he wants to get off his chest.

David Kestenbaum

The thing I'd like the record set straight on, UFOs are not real. They are not aliens from other planets come to visit us. Yes, I know, the Pentagon recently announced a new program to study weird stuff pilots are seeing. Yes, I know there was that super long New Yorker story. Or maybe you saw the 60 Minutes piece.

David Kestenbaum

It was pretty good TV.

David Kestenbaum

Unidentified does not mean alien spacecraft. It means unidentified. Or maybe you saw these videos the Navy released.

David Kestenbaum

And even, even this guy.

David Kestenbaum

--President Obama.

David Kestenbaum

Ugh. Particularly maddening are conversations I've had with people I know about this. And midway through, I realized, oh, I have to be polite because it's clear they think this is real. No more polite.

I have reasons for thinking all this is bullshit-- science reasons. For aliens to actually visit us, if they exist in the first place, they would either need to be insanely patient or be able to travel faster than the speed of light because the nearest stars are crazy far away.

I was a grad student in physics. I worked on one of those giant particle accelerators. And I can tell you, you can try to make those particles go as fast as you want. They get very close to the speed of light, but they do not go faster. We got to 99.999954% of the speed of light. You can double the amount of energy you're using, and it doesn't double the speed. It just gets you a tiny bit closer to the speed of light. The universe really does seem to have a speed limit. That's what the equations tell us. I mean, maybe there is some way around it, but it really, really does not seem like it.

And think about it for a second. In the '50s, it may be made sense that all the UFO photos were blurry and hard to decipher. But today, every single person with a smartphone has a super powerful camera in their pocket. That's billions of cameras. If alien spacecraft are here, shouldn't we have better pictures?

And the fact that basically no scientists seem interested in this at all and prefer to dwell on, say, detailed questions of how solar systems form, it tells you something. If any of these photos or radar blips or whatever really were alien craft, it would be the greatest discovery of all time. I can't think of a font big enough for the front page. But basically, every scientist in every university is sitting it out.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who runs the planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, put it, he was talking about the people who believe these things are spaceships, quote, "The fact that you don't know what it is is not evidence that you know what it is, OK? You know why science exists?" he says. "Because the human sensory system sucks."

Unfortunately, with scientists off doing, you know, science, there is almost no one left to try to set the record straight, no one to quote in those news stories saying, you know, I think that's just a weather balloon. If they do quote someone, it's often this guy, Mick West.

David Kestenbaum

Mick runs a website called Metabunk, where he and others try to really run these things down. Sometimes they figure out the object in the photo or video was a plane by finding the actual plane from maps and flight records.

Or one of my favorites, there was this photo of someone on a vacation took of these mysterious lights up in the sky over the water. Mick thought it looked like a reflection off the window. It was taken from inside. So he found the actual rental house based on the position of the mountains in the photo, called the homeowner, convinced her to take a photo from the same spot by the window, and confirmed, yes, a reflection of the living room lights.

David Kestenbaum

I called Mick up earlier this year because something exciting was about to happen. There was going to be a congressional hearing on UFOs, the first in 50 years, which meant finally, the experts were going to weigh in, on the record, in front of Congress. This stuff, unexplained things seen by pilots or on radar, is usually secret. But now, we were going to hear from the people actually looking into these things, presumably with the help of the smartest scientists. I wanted them to set the record straight.

And in these partisan times when red and blue America seem to violently disagree about everything under the sun, this is one issue neither side has a stake in. Come on, America. Maybe we can agree on something. I would like that. I really would.

The morning of the hearing, Mick West and I got on a Zoom together to watch it live. He's on the West Coast, so it was little before 6:00 AM his time. We were waiting for it to start.

David Kestenbaum

The feed of the hearing started.

David Kestenbaum

Big formal hearing room on Capitol Hill, a couple of large American flags in the back.

David Kestenbaum

That's the chair of this House Intelligence subcommittee, Congressman Andre Carson, Democrat from Indiana. It was kind of weird and also delightful to hear a discussion of UFOs wrapped up in the formalism of a congressional hearing. It turns out, the government sorts through the question of whether we have been visited by aliens the same way it does any other problem. There's a task force, this one set up last November.

David Kestenbaum

Yes. Bring it out of the shadows. There were two very high-ranking officials there to testify and answer questions from the lawmakers, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. Bray laid out what the new task force was doing. They now have a formalized system for, say, pilots to report things they see and currently, a database of 400 incidents. They're going through them, trying to figure out what they are, as I hoped, working with all kinds of smart people.

David Kestenbaum

UFOs, by the way, have now been rebranded UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, I think so pilots won't be embarrassed to report sightings. The military does have real concerns.

David Kestenbaum

Bray said there are several categories of what these things could be, airborne clutter, like a balloon, atmospheric phenomena, some weather thing. They could be something of ours, maybe a drone, something from one of our adversaries, which might pose a national security threat, or one final category, a bin he called other, which, quote, "allows for the possibility of surprise and scientific discovery." He did not seem to want to say aliens. Then things got interesting. Bray turned to a screen in the hearing room.

David Kestenbaum

This is a video that had been leaked a while ago but never explained. It's wild-looking. The footage is green because it's shot with night vision goggles. And what you see are these very clear triangles. They really appear to be some sort of triangular craft blinking. Mick was not impressed.

David Kestenbaum

A camera artifact. Mick claims they're not really triangle-shaped. He thinks it's a kind of optical illusion created by the camera itself. Next, Bray shows a still image with another mysterious green triangle, just like the ones in the video.

David Kestenbaum

Meaning drones or something like that. Bray says they're what the camera was seeing.

David Kestenbaum

One record set straight, one unidentified flying object identified. Scott Bray showed another video, which he said was more typical. This was one Mick hadn't seen. It was new. It hadn't been previously released.

David Kestenbaum

This one is from an F-18. It's shot out the window with what seems like someone's phone. And for the tiniest fraction of a second, something flits by. It's there, and then it's gone.

David Kestenbaum

Mick gets his wish.

David Kestenbaum

Congressman Adam Schiff, Democrat from California, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

David Kestenbaum

It turns out the technical capability of the US military has its limits. They have a real hard time stopping the video at the exact frame where this thing flashes by. They try for four minutes.

David Kestenbaum

Later session means the behind closed doors part, where they go over all the classified stuff. Translation, they have other data, radar or some advanced sensing, that who knows, maybe gives them a pretty good idea of what this is or what it isn't. But because it's classified, they can't talk about it.

David Kestenbaum

And then this happened. Mike Gallagher, Republican from Wisconsin, asked a bunch of questions of Bray and also Undersecretary Moultrie. And he seems to be in prosecutor mode, like he's trying to get something important on the record. Basically, do you know of any other programs currently looking into UAPs? Answer, no. Any ones from the past decades we don't know about? No. Then this.

David Kestenbaum

Now, there was something that needed explaining. A red orb? Nuclear ICBMs becoming inoperable? I figured there must be data on that-- cell phone video, radar, computer records. But Mick explained that there wouldn't be. This incident, it allegedly happened in the 1960s.

David Kestenbaum

Then it was over, the first UFO hearing in Congress in 50 years. Mick and I had different reactions to the hearing. He thought it went fine.

David Kestenbaum

I was pretty frustrated. I'd wanted someone to say, look, there is no reason to think any of these things are alien spacecraft. Or we do not have definitive evidence of anything that violates the laws of physics. Mick wanted that last one too, actually. We didn't get it.

David Kestenbaum

This is a horrible thought that I hadn't really grappled with. There will always be blurry photos of things in the sky, probably more now that everyone has a cell phone with them all the time. So there really is only one way the record will ever get set straight, that we will get an answer to whether aliens are here on Earth. And that's if we actually find them. In other words, the believers can win. My side can't. You can never prove aliens aren't here. But I'm telling you, they're not.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is our program's senior editor.

[MUSIC - "TELL THE TRUTH" BY JON BATISTE]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Chris Benderev. People who put together today's program include Sean Cole, Michal Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Chana Joffe-Walt, Tobin Low, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Ryan Rumery, Charlotte Sleeper, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Jackson Landers, Liz Hanes, Jill Cashen, Laura Spiri, Meg Freyermuth, Jenna Kagel, Katherine Perkins, and Dr. Catherine Scott, who is a scientist who helped us so much with the black widow story. If you want to read more about black widow behavior and misinformation, check out Dr. Scott's blog, spiderbytes.org. That's spiderB-Y-T-E-S.org.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. You can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to a program's cofounder Mr. Torey Malatia. Even though he's management, he decided he wanted to run for shop steward. Always wanted to be part of the union. Kind of a weird dream, but he says--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories for This American Life.

(SINGING) He said, tell it like it is. Da-da-da-da-da. Do it like [INAUDIBLE].

[VOCALIZING]

When you do what you do, do-do.