Can the U.S. Just Pull Out of the Middle East?

The answer is probably not. And that has to do with oil, the internet, and one of America’s most persistent foes, Iran.

ISIS comeback, CNN.com

Putin’s glaring mistake

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

If ISIS was indeed responsible for the attack Friday at a Moscow-area concert venue that killed at least 133 people, it would suggest that, unfortunately, the terror group is making something of a comeback.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack; a US official told CNN the US has no reason to doubt it.

Back in its heyday of 2014 and 2015, ISIS had controlled territory in Iraq and Syria around the size of the United Kingdom and a population of millions of people. During that period, the group also carried out a number of terrorist plots in Europe, including an attack in Paris that killed 130 people in 2015. ISIS had also inspired terrorists in the US, including the gunman who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 in what was then the most lethal terrorist attack in the US since 9/11.

But between 2017 and 2018, ISIS lost its so-called geographical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, and it has since devolved into a loosely allied group of ISIS affiliates in Africa and Asia with seemingly scant capabilities to carry out large-scale attacks elsewhere.

One of the most virulent affiliates is ISIS-K in Afghanistan, which killed 13 American service members and some 170 Afghan civilians at Kabul Airport as the Biden administration pulled all US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Yet, the understanding at the time was that ISIS affiliates in Afghanistan and certain African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Somalia were not capable of carrying out major international attacks. But then came a large-scale terrorist attack in Iran in January that killed 84 people at a memorial service commemorating General Qasem Soleimani, one of the most powerful military leaders in Iran who had been killed by a US drone strike in 2020. Through that attack, ISIS-K showed that the group, which is very anti-Shia, could target a hostile state like predominantly Shia Iran.

In March alone, a Russian state news agency said the country had thwarted multiple ISIS-related incidents, including a plan to attack a synagogue in Moscow.

The US embassy in Russia also said on March 7 that it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow,” including concerts. According to a US National Security Council spokesperson, “The US Government also shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy.” But Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed the US’ warning as “provocative,” saying, “These actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

Taken together, the fact that Russian authorities had detected a number of ISIS-related plots earlier this month and that US authorities were warning of an attack at the same time indicates that there was an active terrorist threat in Moscow from ISIS that was known not only to the US but also to the Russians.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin linked the suspects in Friday’s attack to Ukraine during a five-minute address on Saturday. State news agencies said that authorities arrested the four men suspected of attacking the Moscow-area concert venue while they were trying to cross the border into Ukraine, and that they “had relevant contacts on the Ukrainian side,” according to the FSB.

Ukraine has emphatically denied any role in the attack, and both Ukrainian and American officials expressed concerns that Putin’s comments may be used to justify an escalation in the ongoing war.

ISIS-K certainly has the capability and motive to attack Russia. When it comes to motive, the Russian support for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which helped him remain in power during the Syrian civil war, certainly comes to mind. For ISIS, Assad is a mortal enemy, both because he is a member of a Shia sect and because he has systematically killed Sunnis in Syria. Also, historically, Russia has brutally repressed Muslim minorities like the Chechens. As for capability, the ISIS-K attack in Iran earlier this year demonstrated that the group could carry out a large-scale attack outside of its home base in Afghanistan.

What we do know is that Putin made a glaring mistake by denouncing the US’ warning. And if ISIS-K did attack the concert hall, the Biden administration would have to ask itself some serious questions about whether the decision to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan allowed ISIS to regroup there with the capability to carry out large-scale attacks in other countries. If that were the case, that would be a blow for the Biden administration.

What world is Jared Kushner living in? CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Is Jared Kushner clueless?

Kushner’s newly disclosed musings last month that Gaza has a lot of “very valuable” waterfront property reminds one of Marie Antoinette’s purported observation, “Let them eat cake.”

The former Trump White House senior adviser talked up the possible worth of Gaza’s waterfront real estate at an event at Harvard in February when already more than half the buildings in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed, according to multiple news reports. And this week, the UN warned of impending famine in northern Gaza.

At the Harvard event, Kushner also suggested that the 1.4 million people sheltering in southern Gaza in Rafah might be moved into Egypt or to the Negev desert in southern Israel to shield them from a potential Israeli attack. Kushner’s thoughts appeared to be in sync with those of his old family friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who has approved a plan to invade Rafah.

Kushner’s notions are fantasies, of course, since the Egyptians are not going to accept substantial numbers of Palestinian refugees, let alone the more than one million sheltering in Rafah, something they have made clear repeatedly. Nor is Israel going to accommodate them.

The October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel were inexcusable, and Israel had every right to avenge them.

Still, Palestinian rage has been building for years, and Kushner, as then-President Donald Trump’s shadow secretary of state, helped contribute to this, something Kushner seems to be blissfully unaware of.

The pace of new West Bank settlements built by the Israelis accelerated during Kushner’s tour of duty as the self-appointed Middle East peace czar, according to analyses by The Associated Press, and the Trump administration publicly took the position that these new settlements were not illegal, reversing decades of US policy on the issue.

The Trump administration also moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something previous administrations had avoided doing because Palestinians also regard Jerusalem as their capital, and Muslims look upon it as a sacred city because the al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem is the third holiest site in Islam.

When the US embassy opened in Jerusalem, Kushner declared, “Peace is within reach.” Meanwhile, in a telling split screen, Israeli forces in Gaza were simultaneously killing dozens of Palestinians protesting the opening of the embassy.

Kushner’s “Abraham Accords” were supposed to bring peace to the region because, in Kushner’s fantasy, if some Arab states recognized Israel, they would invest in Gaza and the West Bank and help set the conditions for a two-state solution, which he characterized in the Wall Street Journal as a mere “real estate dispute.”

It appears that in Kushner’s mind, he is a modern-day President Jimmy Carter bringing peace to the Mideast as Carter did by brokering the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, mortal enemies that had fought four wars against each other, and a peace agreement that still holds nearly half a century later.

In his modestly titled memoir “Breaking History,” Kushner wrote: “Humbled by the complexity of the task, I orchestrated some of the most significant breakthroughs in diplomacy in the last fifty years.” Wow!

The Abraham Accords resulted in two small Gulf monarchies, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signing deals recognizing the state of Israel for the first time, and Kosovo, Morocco and Sudan following suit. The agreements had helped ease tensions and promote economic ties in the region before the Hamas attack on October 7, but they did nothing to resolve the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

As a corollary to the Abraham Accords, Kushner planned to drum up $50 billion for Palestinian projects, but this never happened because the Palestinians boycotted an investment conference that Kushner hosted in Bahrain in 2019.

At the conference, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed that investments in the West Bank and Gaza were “going to be like a hot I.P.O.,” the phrase for an initial public offering of stock, which may have been the dumbest thing that anyone in the Trump administration said publicly during their four years in office.

The “hot IPO” is now a smoking ruin that evokes Dresden after World War II. Yet, six months out of office Kushner kept failing upward with a nice investment from the Saudis of $2 billion for his investment fund, which had all the appearances of a reward for the work he did aiding the Saudis when he was the Middle East czar during the Trump administration.

Perhaps Kushner’s fund will lead the charge to build the first Trump Tower in Gaza with some really fantastic waterfront views, but somehow, I doubt it. Even Jared Kushner can’t be that clueless.

How Does the US Government Get Detained Americans Home?

Almost immediately after Hamas attacked Israel, the US began a well-coordinated, high-level, high-wire effort to free the Americans taken hostage. It wasn’t always like this. Until a few years ago, the US had no effective approach to securing the release of its citizens held overseas. After multiple Americans died in captivity while the government flailed, their loved ones set out on a campaign to force change. This episode’s guests are two of the top-ranking administration officials currently tasked with bringing Americans home and two women who, through their grief, got the US to do better.

A Friendly Warning for America from Rory Stewart

Episode 45: A Friendly Warning for America
Mar 12 2024
With November’s election approaching, it feels like the United States is at a crossroads — not just at home, but abroad too. Will the country continue to lead the global order, as it’s done so successfully since the end of WWII? Or will it retreat into isolationism? A distinguished foreign friend of America’s — the British soldier, diplomat, politician, and adventurer Rory Stewart — shares his views on what’s at stake, both for the world and for the U.S. itself.

Go to audible.com/news where you’ll find Peter Bergen’s recommendations for other news, journalism and nonfiction listening.

Show more
38 mins

Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990, New America online

[Online] Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990

DATE: May 2, 2024

TIME: 12:00-1:00 PM EST

In both Germany and Poland—primary locations of the Holocaust—the legacy of antisemitism remains a major obstacle to reconciliation with the past. In his new book Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990, Thomas Just examines how antisemitism has manifested in these countries in the post-Cold War era, and the strategies employed to counter it. Just also examines the effectiveness of various approaches, pointing to a deeper understanding of the disturbing influence of antisemitic hatred worldwide and the best practices to combat it.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Thomas Just, for a discussion of his new book Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland: Strategies Since 1990. Just is an Assistant Teaching Professor within the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University, and was previously the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow with the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. His research earned him the award of Young Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation from UNESCO. He holds a PhD from Florida International University. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #CombatingAntisemitism and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Thomas Just

Author, Combating Antisemitism in Germany and Poland

Assistant Teaching Professor, Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen

Vice President, New America

Co-Director, Future Security

Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

The Return of the Great Powers, New America online

[ONLINE] – The Return of the Great Powers
EVENT

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History.” Three decades later, the global order as we long have known it is now gone. Powerful nations are determined to assert dominance on the world stage. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a part of it, but in reality, this power struggle impacts every corner of our world—from Helsinki to Beijing, from Australia to the North Pole. In his new book The Return of the Great Powers, CNN Chief National Security Analyst Jim Sciutto, marshals globe-spanning, exclusive interviews with dozens of political, military, and intelligence leaders, defining our times as a return of great power conflict, “a definitive break between the post–Cold War era and an entirely new and uncertain one.”

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Jim Sciutto to discuss his new book The Return of the Great Powers. Sciutto is CNN’s chief national security analyst and anchor of CNN Newsroom on Max, airing Monday through Friday. He has reported from more than fifty countries across the globe, including dozens of assignments from inside Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Among the honors Sciutto’s work has earned are Emmy Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the George Polk Award, the Dupont-Columbia Award, and the White House Correspondent’s Association’s Merriman Smith Award for excellence in presidential coverage. Sciutto is also the bestselling author of The Shadow War.

The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #ReturnofGreatPowers and following @NewAmericaISP

Speaker:

Jim Sciutto
Author, The Return of the Great Powers
CNN Chief National Security Analyst

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies, New America, online

Why do some religious minorities provoke the ire of majoritarian groups and become targets of organized violence, even though they lack significant power and pose no political threat. In his new book Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies, Güneş Murat Tezcür examines this question within Muslim societies, arguing that these faith groups are stigmatized across generations, as they lack theological recognition and social acceptance from the dominant religious group. Tezcür provides a comparative-historical study of mass atrocities against religious minorities, focusing on two case studies—the Islamic State’s genocidal attacks against the Yezidis in northern Iraq in the 2010s and massacres of Alevis in Turkey in the 1970s and 1990s—while also addressing discrimination and violence against followers of the Bahá’í faith in Iran and Ahmadis in Pakistan and Indonesia. Analyzing a variety of original sources, including interviews with survivors and court documents, Tezcür reveals how religious stigmatization and political resentment motivate ordinary people to participate in mass atrocities.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Güneş Murat Tezcür for a discussion of his new book Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies. Tezcür is Director of the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. In his current research, he explores the dark side of humanity with a focus on mass violence. In addition to Liminal Minorities, he is the author of Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #LiminalMinorities and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speaker:

Güneş Murat Tezcür
Author, Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies
Director, School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Biden passed the commander in chief test CNN.com

Peter Bergen: Biden passed the commander in chief test

Not since President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union months after the 9/11 attacks has the commander in chief had so much at stake about national security issues while delivering the Super Bowl of political speeches.

The Russians are waging the largest land war in Europe since World War II, yet the US Congress’ support for the Ukrainians seems to be wavering; the war in Gaza rages on with little immediate prospect of a ceasefire in sight, and the conflict is destabilizing the Middle East more than any event since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war is also alienating a swath of President Joe Biden’s base. Meanwhile, at the border, a record number of immigrants are arriving, which is now the top issue for voters in the 2024 presidential election, according to Gallup.

In his State of the Union speech, Biden had to answer the mail on all of these. So, how’d he do?

Biden gave a very clear defense of his Ukraine policy, that the US should provide the aid and weapons to the Ukrainians to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion and he called out former President Donald Trump – without mentioning him by name – who has opposed sending tens of billions of dollars of additional aid to Ukraine.

Biden also weighed in on the crisis at the southern border noting that there was a bipartisan deal on the table in recent weeks in the US Senate that would have sped up rulings on asylum claims, beefed up law enforcement resources at the border and would have discouraged some migrants from coming to the country. Biden swiped at Trump for dissuading members of Congress from passing the deal to keep the political issue alive for him to use in the 2024 campaign.

And Biden made his clearest public stance so far on behalf of Gazans, saying “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of who are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.”

All in all, Biden gave a strong performative speech, and on the crucial national security issues he needed to address – Ukraine, Gaza and the border – he did a more than creditable job.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.

The actual hidden truth about UFOs, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen and Erik German
7 minute read
Updated 1:27 PM EST, Fri March 8, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. Erik German is the senior producer of “In the Room.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
A former Pentagon official — driven, he says, by his duty to the truth — goes public with an explosive allegation. Facing a scrum of TV cameras and members of Congress, this official claims that the US government has been keeping crashed alien spaceships under wraps for decades.

It sounds like a pitch for a Hollywood movie. But last year, Americans saw it happen on the news. The former Pentagon official, David Grusch, had been an Air Force intelligence officer. He told a congressional committee that he’d learned of a decades-long Pentagon program focused on “crash retrieval and reverse engineering” of UFOs from other planets. Grusch also said that remains found at the spacecraft crash sites were “non-human biologics.”

That’s right. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead extraterrestrials, right there in the Congressional Record. If it wasn’t the wildest thing ever broadcasted on C-SPAN, it must’ve been close. Someone should look into this, right?

It turns out that someone already had. In 2022, the Pentagon tapped a veteran scientist and intelligence officer named Sean Kirkpatrick to set up a new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. Named the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office by the US Department of Defense, Kirkpatrick told us his team dug into UFO cases and interviewed US service members who said they had knowledge about encounters with UFOs.

Kirkpatrick recently retired from his job at the Pentagon and spoke with us for the Audible podcast “In the Room.” Kirkpatrick and his team investigated every US government UFO sighting going back to Roswell in the 1940s, putting the findings in a report that the Pentagon released publicly on Friday. That report debunks multiple claims of alien visitations to Earth and of any purported cover up of those visits.

In the most extensive media interview he’s given, Kirkpatrick laid out a convincing case that the stories swirling for decades about the alleged government cover-up of alien-related UFOs may well have been fueled largely by true believers inside the US government or with close ties to it.

Since the term “flying saucer” was first coined, much of the conspiratorial thinking about UFOs has been spawned by people catching glimpses of highly secret US aircraft and wanting answers. And when the government doesn’t provide answers, the public imagination takes over.

But, in fact, Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the US government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the US or of benign civilian drones and balloons.

“There’s about two to five percent of all the (UFO reports that are)… what we would call truly anomalous,” says Kirkpatrick. And he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth.

The Roswell incident

This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That’s because, in 1947, a US military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico.

A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the US government had covered up the evidence.

Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret.

The U.S. Air Force released this photo June 24 of an aeroshell of a NASA Voyager Mars space probe prior to launch at Walker AFB, New Mexico (formerly Roswell AAF) as part of its report on the so called “Roswell Incident” of 1947. The Air Force reported June 24 that “space aliens” who supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert 50 years ago were only military dummies and that descriptions of research projects involving low altitude tethered objects such as this may have become part of the incident. The 231-page report is aimed at ending longstanding speculation over the incident and denies that the military had recovered bodies from damaged flying saucers in 1947 and had been covering up the incident ever since.

At the same time, the US military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.

Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft.

Kirkpatrick also lays out a convincing case that something similar is happening today. He says new technology taking flight now could help explain a lot of the modern era of UFO sightings from the early 2000s on. It’s not just secret government technology, either. Lots of observers get flummoxed when they catch sight of cutting-edge drones and even odd-looking balloons.

“What’s more likely?” asked Kirkpatrick. “The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that’s being commercialized down in Florida that you didn’t know about, or we have extraterrestrials?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them; here’s the company in Florida that builds exactly what you’ve described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, it’s gotta be extraterrestrials, and you’re covering it up.”

Nevertheless, UFOs remain a genuine national security concern mainly because they are flight hazards. As Kirkpatrick put it, “military pilots that are flying at greater than Mach 1; if they run into a balloon with a tether on it, it’s going to rip a wing off.”

Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the US military. Kirkpatrick says that’s the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the US government’s policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.

The true believers
So in the face of the actual evidence, why are people in and around government promoting the unsupported idea of alien invaders being covered up by the US government?

“True believers are not just outside of government; many of them are inside government,” Kirkpatrick told us, including the late US Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was Senate Majority leader. Another key player was Reid’s longtime friend Robert Bigelow, a Nevada billionaire and the owner of a company called Bigelow Aerospace, both of whom shared a long-running interest in UFOs. Kirkpatrick says, “Senator Harry Reid was a true believer and thought that ‘Hey, the government is hiding this from congressional oversight.’”

In 2007, Senator Reid got funding for a US Defense Intelligence Agency program that paid $22 million to his buddy Bigelow’s aerospace company — money the company spent on investigations into paranormal phenomena. Among other investigations, Bigelow’s team looked into sightings of UFOs by US military personnel and proposed setting up laboratories to study the purported physical remains of alien spacecraft. (On “60 Minutes” in May 2017, Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth.)

Reid told a reporter in Nevada in 2021 that even though this was a secret program to look into UFOs, Bigelow didn’t benefit from “some sweetheart deal … it was put out to bid.” Reid also told The New York Times, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going…I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service.”

Yet, Kirkpatrick points out, “none of that actually manifested in any evidence” of alien spacecraft. But stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who’d heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft.

And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people.

“It all goes back to the same core set of people,” Kirkpatrick said. This is both deeply weird and richly ironic. Because, for decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there’s a US government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government.

Sadly, for all the UFO lovers out there, that may be the biggest takeaway from Kirkpatrick’s report to Congress, which is expected to be published later this month. Plenty of outsiders have long speculated about whether the Pentagon’s alien-focused programs were coming up empty and perhaps were suspiciously self-perpetuating.

But now, highly credible people inside the Pentagon — with really high-level security clearances — are finally saying, we looked at every single piece of secret evidence about supposedly alien UFOs. And as far as we can tell, it’s humans all the way down.

Although Kirkpatrick concedes that for those who truly believe that there are alien visitations here on Earth, little will convince them otherwise: “There is absolutely nothing that I’m going to do, say, or produce evidentiary that is going to make the true believers convert … It is a religious belief that transcends critical thinking and rational thought.”

This article has been updated with the Pentagon’s release of a report on UFOs.