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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We haven't talked yet on this show about the Chinese spy balloon and subsequent shoot-downs of unidentified flying things over the last week, we've been more focused on things like the threat from crime and the threat from the police and attempts to ban a full teaching of American history here on the earth surface.

Much more tangible threats than whatever mischief anyone is trying to cause tens of thousands of feet up there somewhere, but presidents and generals and very serious-sounding intelligence experts seemed very concerned, concerned enough to interrupt the Super Bowl with an unscheduled briefing for reporters on Sunday night, not on tv, wouldn't have seen it watching the game but behind the scenes, some reporters had to scramble to interrupt their watching of the game if they were watching the game and get this briefing.

People who think about war for a living tend to be very into football. We're actually going to do a segment on that later in the show. If they're breaking away from that, I guess something worth paying attention to is going on. Maybe it's even aliens from outer space, right, White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre?

Karine Jean-Pierre: There is no, again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.

Brian Lehrer: It's probably not ET. Let's see what it is with Jeff Wise, a science journalist who tackles interesting questions for New York Magazine. Some of his recent articles are about whether the US needs a new population boom for its own good. The last two years saw the slowest population growth in a century here. Should we be concerned about that? Another one on whether freedom of speech should be redefined to include a right not to be lied to, an article that isn't even about George Santos, and his latest called Understanding the UFO War. Jeff, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Jeff Wise: Thanks very much, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Your article opens with a briefing phone call from the Pentagon to reporters during the first half of the Super Bowl. What was so important as to interrupt this national ritual tune out from the real world?

Jeff Wise: It's such an interesting moment that's happening where these unidentified objects are drifting over the continental United States. The Biden administration is being criticized for not being decisive enough for waiting until it gets past the East Coast to shoot it down. Then these other balloons appear, there's a lot of confusion, people don't know what it is, people are thinking about previous revelations by the military that, in fact, they are actually looking for reports of what they call UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenons. It sounds very much like the X-Files.

We've been so acculturated to this idea that the government knows about aliens and just isn't telling us that when the White House Press Secretary gets up and says, hey, guys, there aren't aliens, then that is proof that there definitely are aliens. This is happening in the middle of the Super Bowl second quarter and yet, it still has the power to bust through and go viral on Twitter that the military is refusing to rule out the possibility that what they're dealing with are extraterrestrials.

I think, in fact, there's a culture misalignment happening here where the military is very-- They like to get their communications absolutely solid, straight up and down so that if they don't know something, they're going to say, we don't know it. We can't say it for sure. Can you say 100% for sure that it's not aliens? No, of course, I can't. We haven't even seen it yet, we've just seen a radar reflection. When the mass culture like us hears something like that, they're not ruling it out. That sounds like ruling it in. Maybe the military's actually confirming that there's UFOs and it's like a game of telephone.

Brian Lehrer: I can't rule out that a stranger will walk up to me on the street and offer me a Valentine's Day gift of Super Bowl tickets for next year, but it doesn't mean I think there's a snowball's chance. Maybe it's like that. Before we get into the real stuff, have you been following social media memes about this business as possibly extraterrestrial? Does it look like a lot of people are taking that possibility seriously or plugging into conspiracy theories about the government covering up precisely that kind of event?

Jeff Wise: I don't know if it even really counts as conspiracy theory at this point because back in 2017, The New York Times ran this blockbuster article talking about the fact that the military actually did have a program to try to collect reports of unidentified flying objects. In subsequent years, the military actually started putting out regular reports saying these are all the sightings that we have. The military is not really saying that this is definitively and conclusively proof that there's no UFOs. The issue really has been left hanging. What normally would be labeled as a conspiracy theory has essentially been endorsed by officialdom.

Brian Lehrer: That's one way to look at it, I guess. All right. What this really is about though, according to your article, is potential adversaries taking advantage of changing technology to erode longstanding US military dominance. How can a spy balloon or these other non-balloon flying objects potentially do that?

Jeff Wise: The context is that we have this massive military-industrial complex, as you know, that spends trillions of dollars to defend the United States against perceived threats. For the most of the Cold War especially, and we really live in the after-effects of the Cold War, the focus was on building long-range, high-speed, high-altitude bombers, fighters. We have a radar network that stretches across the entire Arctic that's designed to detect and intercept high-speed big moving objects. Now we live in an age in which everyone has a little cell phone in their pocket, and there is drones that you can go down to Best Buy, and for $100 you can get a pretty capable little electronics package.

As we've seen in the war in Ukraine especially, Russia has this incredibly advanced aviation industry and fighters and bombers and things, and yet they're helpless to do anything against drones that are operating at treetop level and dropping hand grenades on [unintelligible 00:07:11] There's this whole new kind of threat environment that is very different from what we've spent all of this money and all this time developing.

Our attention has been turned in another direction for so long that it's really a massive cultural shift. We have to change our habits in terms of looking in different directions. At the same time, we've got this cultural predisposition to see strange things in the night and assume that they're aliens and extraterrestrials. There's this really swirling pattern of beliefs and attitudes that really has to be realigned.

Brian Lehrer: Can you just describe the three things the US has shot down these last three days in a row to the best of your knowledge so far? One was over Alaska, I see one over Northern Canada, and one over Lake Huron in the Great Lakes region near Michigan. Are they all the same size? Do they otherwise seem similar? What else would they look like if we saw them through a telescope?

Jeff Wise: One of the things that I think has made this also meme-worthy is that the military has been so vague as to what they're seeing. Again, I think it comes down to this culture of we're not going to say we know what it is unless we actually have the physical evidence in hand. They have detected these things on radar, and in some cases, shot them down without really having eyeballs on it. They don't really know. The language that they've used has made it sound very mysterious.

Here's what I think is really going on. I think that the Chinese really did send this surveillance balloon over the United States. The Americans finally saw, oh, this is happening. They woke up, they had to retune their radars which had been, as I said, for generations looking for really high, fast, big things and look for smaller, slower things. Now, the problem is when you look at low-speed things, a lot of things are low-speed. Birds are low-speed, drifting birthday balloons and things like this.

The New York Times had a great article this morning about all the thousands of balloons that get sent up into the upper atmosphere for things like research and weather observations and just obvious send-up balloons just for fun. All of a sudden, you're retuning your radar and you're looking at an environment that you've never really been in the habit of looking at before and you're seeing stuff that you just don't know what it is because you've never really done it before. I think probably the most recent three that they shot down were probably things like weather balloons or hobbyist balloons or who knows what, but now they're seeing everything and they're shooting it down without knowing what it is.

Brian Lehrer: To that New York Times article in 2017 that you mentioned and that you refer to in your article, since then you write, Pentagon has reported hundreds of unexplained sightings. Hundreds?

Jeff Wise: Yes, all the time. This is pretty unsurprising that people report they see Venus. They'll say there's this object hovering on the horizon and it's Venus. This happens all the time. People will see a contrail or a weather phenomenon. Most things are able to be explained pretty quickly, and then there's things you can't explain, you just don't know. Again, it comes down to if something mysterious happens, do we project meaning onto it, or do we just shrug and say, "Listen, we just don't have enough data?"

There's been hundreds of reports and the military has been trying to become more open about explaining them. It's interesting because why is the military doing this now? I think it comes down to the fact that the military itself is struggling to change its attitude towards these small, elusive phenomena that can be really hard to pin down and can be a threat. I don't know if you remember, Brian, but there was a minor hullabaloo back in late 2019 about these mysterious lights that were being seen in the evening in central Colorado, the Colorado drone swarms, and nobody could ever figure out what, if anything, was happening.

Brian Lehrer: We'll call it a hullaballoon.

Jeff Wise: Hullaballoon, thank you. It was interesting to me because nothing really ever came of it, but it was a demonstration that somebody could fly a fleet of drones over the Continental United States, over fairly populated area, and they're just so hard to track and identify that you can do it with impunity even though it all seems silly and very entertaining and very meme-worthy and rather silly frankly I think there is actually a really serious security issue going on here which is that the simple fact as we've seen demonstrated again in the Ukraine war is that a person who has a drone can operate it in such a way that it can be very difficult to counteract and very difficult even to detect so you can imagine a person with malevolent intent doing all kinds of harm.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe some of these things are Amazon testing their new no salary-to-pay delivery system. To the more serious concern here, one of the main points of your article and you were just getting at it is that our pentagon with its $850 billion annual budget is a lumbering old thing that's behind the times compared to a little nimble country like Ukraine, which is beating the Russians with 21st century little gizmos even if they ask us for some of our old technology big things. Is that authentic on that behind the times compared to Ukraine or other countries?

Jeff Wise: Well, you're exactly right, we've got this massive, massive organization, it's like turning around an oil tanker it takes time. The military seems monolithic from the outside but from the inside, in order for [unintelligible 00:13:34] to get affected, there has to be debate, disagreements. It's a struggle, and we've seen it historically over time.

When the airplane was invented, there was decades-long disagreement about how should we use these things and over time the opinion changed. I think a part of what we're seeing as we hear these sometimes baffling statements from the military is the after-effects of a discussion that's happening behind closed doors but which is manifesting outwardly in ways that we don't really fully understand.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions and observations welcome on the identified Chinese spy balloon and unidentified other stuff for New York Magazine science journalist Jeff Wise 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's take a call, right off the bat, Jeff in Brooklyn you're on WNYC. Hi, Jeff.

Jeff: Hi, Brian, just a point of clarity regarding these unidentified aerial phenomenon. As we noted, the military has sought to investigate. There were cases reported of phenomena that just didn't meet the profile of any known aircraft and those require serious investigation. There was a case in California, where a Navy training mission was encountering these strange objects, but none of the objects that were shot down fit that profile. They're all very conventional types of crafts even if they're not identified as such. We shouldn't make a joke about the fact that there needs to be an investigation of phenomenon that just don't match normal flight profile of any craft that we know of, but this doesn't fit that profile at all.

Brian Lehrer: This doesn't fit that profile, what does it fit to you with the experience that you set?

Jeff: Well, actually my experience is not aircraft-related it's dealing with the military and how they talk about things. I think just the public is missing the distinction between the very real need to investigate aircraft or aerial phenomenon that don't match the flight profile of balloons, airplanes, or even rockets, but that is a very different exploration than looking at aircraft that were moving at a very slow speed that didn't seem to be maneuverable.

All the things, a little bits of information we've been getting about these objects that have been shot down. Just to play sci-fi for a moment I can't believe that any civilization that was capable of interstellar travel that might be investigating our civilization would have an aircraft that could be shot down by an F-22, so let's put that reality in perspective as well.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Thank you, Jeff. Jeff wise, you describe the march of technology involved in these things in your article as you did a little bit a few minutes ago here in a way like once upon a time we had cold war era bulkiness of missiles and anti-missile systems compared to today's little smartphones in general, miniaturization of everything how does that relate to the military risk. Are you suggesting that these things could attack us not just spy on us?

Jeff Wise: Yes, I think the point I was trying to make was that like when you're talking about a stealth bomber, for instance, the stealth bomber is only necessary against an adversary with a sophisticated air defense system, and there's only a handful of countries that even have something you would even need it for namely Russia and China. For any other of the hundreds of countries on this planet, you don't need something like that there's no point.

Any country on the Earth right now can buy a drone or can you probably even build a drone from scratch as turkey did with its Bayraktars? Your potential adversary goes from countries that you can count on the fingers of one hand to all countries. All countries have many different motives, many different reasons why they might want to cause this harm, so it just becomes a much more confounding problem really.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call here is, let's see, Todd in Somerset, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Todd.

Todd: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I had a thought having been seen some 1950s science fiction movies and knowing a little bit about the military and feeling that listening to you here that if the military did not know what it was, really they probably couldn't have shot it down because it could be something benevolent. Let's say what if there was a civilization that was sending some aircraft that we just shot it down. It sounds like a 1950s movie. It seems like it could be a benevolent thing, and if they didn't know what it was, why would they shoot it down? They couldn't really logically do that. They would want to know what it was. It seems paranoid excessively paranoid to do that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's a really interesting question, Todd, thank you for that. If they have no idea what they are, why would they be shot down, couldn't there be a presumption of innocence like you would have for a person under the law and what are the risks of acting rather than not acting?

Jeff Wise: Do you want me to [unintelligible 00:19:32]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's for you because I don't know.

Jeff Wise: I thought it was just rhetorical. Look what happened, this balloon drifted over the United States for day after day and you had critics of the government in Congress saying you're weak, you're ineffective, you're a do-nothing guy, you're sleepy and so finally they shot it down. Now they're shooting everything they can find. I don't think it gets back to theoretical what might be the case and when we know the dynamic.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue on that point when we come back from a short break. I'm going to play a Mitch McConnell clip that I think exemplifies exactly what you're talking about, and I'm going to play a Kirsten Gillibrand clip, Democratic senator from New York, of course, who was also sounding really tough, and it brings in the China angle, in an interesting way. We'll do that and continue with Jeff Wise from New York Magazine and your calls and tweets, right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue our conversation about the identified Chinese spy balloon and the unidentified other stuff that the US is shooting down with Jeff Wise, who's written about this for New York Magazine. He's a science writer for New York Magazine. To the point, we were just discussing before the break, Jeff, about why they would take the extreme step of shooting down things that they don't even know what they are, listener tweets, "We took pictures before shooting down the Chinese balloon, but not the other objects, why?" Here's an example, perhaps of why, it's Mitch McConnell, suddenly the apostle of Open Government speaking this week.

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Mitch McConnell: President Biden owes the American people some answers. What are we shooting down? Where did they come from? Whether they are hostile or not? Is there coherent guidance about when to shoot them down?

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Maybe a Democratic Party example of something similar, senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand on WNYC's Morning Edition with Brigid Bergin this morning, raising the China angle.

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Kirsten Gillibrand: Unfortunately, China has grown to be an adversary over the last decade or two. She is a very authoritarian ruler, and he is bent on a world war. The investments he has made over the past 15 years have been designed solely to defeat America in a world war. I think this spy balloon was intentional. I think it was a test to see what the US would do. China doesn't do things accidentally.

They're very, very intentional about all their efforts. I think we have to have a priority on building up our allies across the globe so that we can show strength. Our goal would be to avoid a world war and to communicate to China in some positive way that not only will this not go well for you, but there are other ways you can lead your country for more prosperity, and that prosperity should be chosen over death, destruction, and war. War never helps anyone.

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Senator Gillibrand, interviewed by our Brigid Bergin that aired on Morning Edition this morning. Jeff, Senator Gillibrand, Democrat from New York, she is a member of the Armed Services Committee, but she's talking about the prospect of world war with China.

Jeff Wise: It's so interesting how American politicians deal with China, and it's kind of bipartisan, that China can be either like this great source of investment and a real partner in growth or it can be like the next Soviet empire, our main rival on the global stage. It's almost like you can see whatever you want to when you look at China, and what kind of hey do you want to make today? The idea that this balloon is something we get so riled up about that we should get ready to go to war, it seems to me a little bit of an over-exaggeration.

Brian Lehrer: China has said a few questionable things these last few days, right? One is that the balloon was just up there to gather weather information, and may have accidentally flown off course, I don't know anybody believes that. Another is that the US has sent its own spy balloons over Chinese airspace more than 10 times, which sounds like an attempt to change the subject a little whataboutism. I've also been wondering about our intelligence agency side of this.

We've got a bigger military-industrial espionage complex probably than China or anyone else on Earth, is the US government not using whatever its best technologies are even if they're 1980s commodore PCs, but that are as intrusive as they can be in pursuit of other countries, especially China's secrets?

Jeff Wise: Absolutely, obviously, of course. At the same time, we're constantly overflying each other's territory with spy satellites, I'm sure we have all kinds of human intelligence going on where people are spying in person. It's what we do. There's this kind of song and dance about, "Oh, we're innocent, you guys are guilty." Remember when he used to overfly the Soviet Union with U-2 spy planes, and then we would deny that it happened and it gets shot down, we'd say, "Oh, he was a hobbyist, of course, or something." It's like Kabuki. It's this kind of game that we play.

The reality is, yes, we are rivals. We are also deeply dependent on one another, we're economically so intertwined. Chinese owe billions and billions of dollars of US debt. We have billions and billions of dollars of investment in Chinese factories, and all the stuff that we use is Chinese. It's really hard to get our head around how we're supposed to feel about this country, which is so different from us in so many ways, and yet is our mirror in so many ways, too. Yes, it's hard to really come to a concise answer.

Brian Lehrer: China's latest charge, I call it their propaganda missile that I saw in the New York Times today is to say the US is overreacting to the spy balloon in a way that shows how broken our politics are. I think a lot of our listeners might agree with that. Like we don't have anything more important to be concerned about than which party is tougher on China, but Senator Gillibrand, whether we call it saber rattling or something else, is really reinforcing that narrative, or let's say countering that Chinese narrative by saying, "No, people, this is extremely serious."

Jeff Wise: Yes, I wonder to what extent these sentiments are really earnestly felt and to what extent they are to pardon an expression a trial balloon that people are sending up to see how are people going to react to this take. It seems to me that over the past week, there's been this urge to take this very seriously and treat it as the potential trigger to World War III on the one hand, and on the other to see it as a vaguely absurd dog and pony show that [unintelligible 00:27:22] over.

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Brian Lehrer: Right. I will say this conversation is lived right there. I've generated it that way. It's somewhere between, "Ha, this might be really threatening, and come on, really this?"

Jeff Wise: Yes, exactly. We live in a world that is so overrun with absurd gambits to get attention for attention's sake. It's just one circus after another. Frankly, it's hard, to me, to imagine this is going to have any kind of lasting political impact. I think it will be forgotten in a week, frankly.

Brian Lehrer: Can we even label good guys and bad guys here at all? Isn't this just spy versus spy, and the various big powers are out to steal as much knowledge as they can about the other guys?

Jeff Wise: Well, we just don't know at this point. I personally, I'm like an aviation journalist. I cover this stuff, and I find it interesting, and it's for its own sake. I intend in the weeks to come to try to figure out, what is this stuff going to turn out to be? Once everyone else has turned their attention away from it, what is it going to turn out that it actually was? Why did they actually do it? At this point, nobody has even really given a convincing explanation for why you would want to float a balloon over the United States. What can you do with a high-altitude balloon that you can't do with a satellite or some other means of [unintelligible 00:28:45]?

Brian Lehrer: What can it see? We don't have an answer to that question?

Jeff Wise: No, we can guess, we can have informed guesses, but this one, we don't know. We have heard no reports from military about what the debris that they've recovered off the coast had in it, what it was intended to do. I think people's attention probably will have moved on to other things by the time we actually even know what was really happening here.

Brian Lehrer: Marie in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Marie.

Marie: Hi, there. Good morning. This is going back to what Todd was saying before. I think what we talk about is most of the UFOs, or the outer space things that we talk about, are very often either little green men or the relationship is always adversarial. I think moving from politics to imagination, we need to think of the arrogance, and the colossal failure of imagination to realize that we are not the only intelligent life in this ever-expanding universe. I think of going back to C.S. Lewis or Octavia Butler, I haven't read a lot of science fiction. I think that the conversation has to have the imaginative side as your caller, Todd, mentioned, what else is there? That kind of investigation seems to be necessary as well as the military-industrial more like-

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Brian Lehrer: Complex conversation.

Marie: -politics-- Yes.

Brian Lehrer: I hear.

Marie: That's all.

Brian Lehrer: Marie. I hear. Thank you very much. We had to take one phone call like that, and she got much more explicit than the previous caller, Todd, in saying, and I'm sure you've heard this elsewhere, as we talked about a little bit at the beginning of the segment, Jeff, that it's a failure of imagination and it's hubris and human arrogance to think we might be the only such creatures in the universe. I would only say in response to that-- A very true statement. On the other hand, wouldn't all our technology have found evidence of something before it gets in little drones into our atmosphere?

Jeff Wise: Yes, I think that's a good point. It seems interest in Bigfoot in the Loch Ness monster has fallen off now that everyone has a phone in their pocket. Every single person who goes to Loch Ness, for instance, would probably-- At any time Loch Ness stuck its head above the water you would get a video posted to YouTube about it. The fact that that hasn't happened is a evidence collectively that there is no Loch Ness monster. I don't know if this is the point you're getting at, but there's so many sensors pointed in so many directions right now, so many security cams, so many people with phones that--

Brian Lehrer: Not just that, but really powerful telescopes that could see really deep into space. To have hundreds of drones, even a handful of drones that are from some far-away planet where we haven't been able to detect the life that exists there before, and suddenly they're in our atmosphere, I don't think so.

Jeff Wise: Listen, first of all, if you're going to posit a super advanced civilization that can cross the vast distances between stars, you can-- Technology has to be so advanced that they're essentially magic. They can be seen or not seen as they wish. Listen, it would be a fool's errand to try to convince people that there are no such thing as UFOs. People love believing in UFOs, people are going to believe in UFOs and that's fine.

I have no beef with people wanting to think about UFOs or believe that UFOs are here, et cetera. That can happen on a separate track from our dealing with the problems of low-cost drones and security ramifications that are implied, which is, I think, actually urgent. This thing that happened over the past week was benign. Nobody was hurt. There was no, I don't know, lasting damage to US defense.

I think that happened. The next time, and mark my words, it could be worse. There is a potential for mayhem. If you remember back in the '80s or something, somebody tampered with a Tylenol bottle and there was an extended and a couple-- Some people were poisoned. I don't even remember how many, but there was to this day, packaging reflects the panic that happened in the wake of that vulnerability that people became aware of very, very quickly. The worst thing that can happen is that we just go back to sleep and think, "Oh, yes, drones, whatever." Then something bad happens and we have this massive uncontrolled freakout.

Brian Lehrer: The Tylenol story is interesting. To prevent children from being able to open medicine bottles. They're now made so that old people who need the medicine can't open the bottles. That's another show. One more call for you, and it is, I think, in your wheelhouse, because it seems like a good call for an aerial affairs journalist. Richard in Westchester. You're on WNYC. Hello.

Richard: Hello, everyone. I was wondering if you have this giant gas-filled balloon with a load on it's the size of a couple of buses, why would you blow it out of the sky with a sidewinder missile that costs 400,000, I think, and rip the balloon wide open? If you just shot some holes in it, it could have had a graceful dissent and you could recover the technology without it smashing into the ocean in how many pieces. Was it a show of power to spite our faces, I wonder?

Jeff Wise: I think you're operating from the assumption that getting rid of a couple of half-million-dollar sidewinder missiles is a bad thing. The advantage of doing it that way is that you get to buy a couple more sidewinder missiles for a couple $100,000 each. That's a net positive if you're in the military-industrial complex. Seriously, I have heard some speculation that the balloon was actually above the operating altitude of the airplane that shot it down.

They had to lob a missile up beyond what the plane had itself achieved. I think there's also some issue about, if you shoot a bullet through a balloon, and I think this actually was a real issue back in 1917 when the Germans were flying zeppelins over London and dropping bombs. It's actually hard to shoot down this huge diffuse structure by putting bullets through it. I don't have a definitive answer for you.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, can we do a two or three-minute addendum on one of your other recent articles that I found interesting? Your article on The Right Not to Be Lied To. As I pointed out in the intro, it looks like you wrote this before the whole George Santos phenomenon. Who's saying that should be a right that competes with freedom of speech?

Jeff Wise: This is something that's much more common in Europe than it is here. Here we have a very absolutist idea centered around the First Amendment that you have the right to say whatever you want, and lies are actually protected as well. In Europe, they have a much more nuanced. They see various rights being balanced against other rights. If you need to be well-informed in order to exercise your right to self-determination, you need to decide what's best for you, and you can't do that if your ear is being filled with lies. That's the basic idea behind it.

Brian Lehrer: I guess, we do have the right not to lied to in certain cases of material fraud where something like the Trump organization causes financial harm to people. It gets convicted of that crime as just happened recently, but not George Santos lying his way into voters' hearts and the complicated free speech questions of which is worse. Facebook and Twitter allowing disinformation to get passed around everywhere and take hold in society or them acting as corporate sensors to pick and choose which statements to delete.

Jeff Wise: These are not easy questions to answer, but the argument I was trying to make in the piece was that we can talk about them. There's this almost a knee-jerk reaction in the United States that this is a terribly dangerous topic to even broach because we risk endangering our sacred inalienable right. I actually think that there's a very productive discussion to be had about it.

I think we should be more wary of granting certain rights, this sacred status. I see almost a parallel with a Second Amendment where on the conservative end, it's come to be seen as this right that's so sacred that it must not be impinged in any way right to the point where every toddler must be given the right to carry an assault rifle at all times with no permit. Once you start treating any given right as sacred, you can get into crazy territory.

Brian Lehrer: The answer to a bad six-year-old with a gun is a good six-year-old with a gun. All right, Jeff Wise, science writer for New York Magazine, his latest article, Understanding the UFO War. Jeff, thank you so much. Enjoyed this.

Jeff Wise: Thank you. It's been a great pleasure.

 

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