Let's write about Adolf Hitler's proof of death

Hitler’s End book review- The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History, review written by Neal Ascherson
After the fall of Berlin, the Soviets concealed their discovery of Hitler’s remains, leaving the Western Allies scrambling for evidence that he died❗☠️

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.

Three years after the end of World War II and almost fifty years after William Hughes Mearns wrote those lines, a man who wasn’t there was offered a chair. In 1948, officials in Munich arranged for Adolf Hitler to face a denazification tribunal. The judges considered the empty chair’s responsibility for the murder of millions, declared its nonoccupant a “major offender,” and confiscated part of his property.

“I wish, I wish he’d go away,” continues the rhyme. 

But, tragically, he wouldn’t "go away". 

Because no death certificate had been issued for the Führer, his sister Paula could not receive items he had bequeathed her in his personal will. Beginning in 1953 a court in Berchtesgaden labored through bundles of testimony, and finally, on December 3, 1956, a death certificate issued by the exhausted magistrate became legally valid. “Eleven and a half years after the Second World War, the ‘mystery’ of Adolf Hitler’s fate appeared resolved,” writes Caroline Sharples in The Long Death of Adolf Hitler. But incredibly, it wasn’t. There was plenty more to the story.
What does it mean to be officially dead❓ This is what Sharples considers in her cleverly researched and sometimes unnerving book. She records the facts, uncertainties, deceptions, and on occasion shameless fictions that have attended efforts to resolve the question of how Hitler died and what happened to his remains. 

Sharples’s account of successive versions is roughly chronological. But it’s helpful to first set out a summary of what we think we know today. On April 29, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker. They then committed suicide: he shot himself in the head, and she took cyanide. Their bodies were carried upstairs to the Reich Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline, and set alight. Soviet forces found the remains a few days later and took them away for autopsy. Hitler’s jaw and teeth were removed and kept in Moscow. The other remains were dumped in a river near Magdeburg in 1970 by a KGB unit. Almost all these details have been challenged or are at least not irrevocably confirmed.

As Sharples suggests, the best proof of death is a corpse ❗—an identifiable body—and failing that, a body part, but on two conditions. First, it must be scientifically shown to have belonged to the presumed subject. Second—and this became relevant in the Hitler case—its removal from the body must have either caused death or been performed after death. Hitler’s ear would not have proved much. But his jawbone, complete with elaborate fillings and crowns matching his dental records, would be conclusive. And that Führer fragment, severed from the corpse dug up and forensically examined by SMERSH (Soviet military counterintelligence), was in Russian hands. Unfortunately for British and American researchers, the Russians refused even to admit that they had found a body. The jawbone, stored in an old cigar tin lined with red satin, was consigned to a secret Moscow archive.

As the Soviet troops approached the bunker, the world’s first question was: Where is Hitler? His death had been announced, without details, by his chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz. But was it true? It became apparent that the British and Americans were much more worried about the possibility that Hitler might have escaped than the Soviets were. In Berlin, Soviet intelligence officers at first gossiped to their Allied counterparts that they had found Hitler’s remains, only to go silent when they heard that Stalin had just told Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins and US ambassador Averell Harriman that no body had been found and that Hitler was probably at large somewhere in Germany.

The Western Allies were convinced that a Nazi revival was still possible and that the Führer might emerge from hiding to lead it. 

This worry was groundless, but it contrasted with the relaxed attitude of the Soviet authorities. No wonder—they had found the corpses of Hitler and Braun almost at once, fire-damaged but recognizable, in a shell crater grave. Witnesses to the cremation among the bunker staff had been arrested and locked up in Russia. As the cold war took shape, Moscow encouraged rumors that the British were hiding Hitler in a castle in their occupation zone or that the “imperialists” had helped him reach Latin America.

The Russians secretly held the direct physical evidence of Hitler’s death. The West, by contrast, soon possessed the bulk of indirect evidence in the form of witness statements. The British insisted that this uncertainty was intolerable and dangerous, and they asked the young historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to prepare a report.

On November 1, 1945, Sharples writes, the “bespectacled, thirty-one-year-old Oxford don stood before the assembled Allied press corps” and outlined the results of his inquiry. Hitler was dead, Trevor-Roper confirmed, having committed suicide by gunshot, and his body had been immediately incinerated in the Chancellery garden. He added more details in the next few months, but his 1945, report, later expanded into the best-selling book The Last Days of Hitler (1947), became the accepted account of Hitler’s end for many years. Its weaknesses, such as they were, became clear only slowly. Trevor-Roper did not know, of course, that the Soviet authorities had disinterred Hitler’s body and stored what was left of him. He broadly accepted the varying recollections of bunker survivors that the bodies of Hitler and Braun had been burned to unrecognizable remnants and ashes. It was not until 1956 that a former SS bunker guard, Harry Mengershausen, stated that the flames had left Hitler’s corpse recognizable and confirmed growing suspicions that the Soviet authorities had found and removed his remains. Trevor-Roper acknowledged that this was probably true.

The first witness statements were unreliable. Some of the SS staff who had watched the cremation disagreed about whether Hitler’s face had been uncovered or recognizable when he was laid on the pyre but conceded that some body parts and clothing were still visible after the flames had died down. These were not voluntary witnesses but Allied prisoners half expecting to be shot out of hand, so they may simply have been distancing themselves from any helpful knowledge. Bunker staff under interrogation at first said that Hitler had shot himself while Braun took poison. (A shot was heard, but no one else was in the room when the pair killed themselves.) Over time some of them began to change their stories: one or two asserted that Hitler, too, had swallowed cyanide. There was nothing to confirm this except rumors that glass splinters from a poison phial had been found in his mouth. But there was a motive. The Russians and their collaborators were determined to show the world that Hitler had died “a coward’s death” by poison instead of choosing a soldier’s final act of defiance.

In November 1945. a man detained by the British for giving a false identity had an extra stroke of bad luck. A corporal searching him had worked for the menswear brand Aquascutum in London before the war, and something about the prisoner’s bulky coat seemed wrong to him. He ripped it open and found a sheaf of papers. 

Among them was the original signed copy of Hitler’s will. There was a private will and a rabid political testament, which included these crucial words: “I have decided…to remain in Berlin and there of my own free will to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of the Führer and Chancellor itself can no longer be held.” Sharples recounts Trevor-Roper’s wild adventures as he drove about western Germany hunting down the remaining two copies of the will. But the Western occupation powers now had confirmation of his earlier research: “It was the first physical, albeit non-biological, proof of death they had been looking for.”

In 1954 Hitler’s dental technician, Fritz Echtmann, was released from Soviet captivity and told a startled West German court that he had handled the Führer’s lower jaw. Soviet intelligence had shown him the relic (still in a cigar tin) and asked him to identify the complex bridgework. Echtmann’s testimony confirmed data held by the Americans, who had captured Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s personal dentist, in 1945 and persuaded him to write down a minute description of all the fillings, crowns, and cavities he could remember. Nine years later Echtmann corroborated Blaschke’s memory.

Two things were now obvious. First, physical proof of Hitler’s death did exist. This mattered especially to the British, who worried about persistent gossip that it was his double who had died in Berlin, leaving the actual Führer to escape and plot his comeback. Unfortunately Sharples doesn’t examine the “doubles” mythology of the 1930s and 1940s. Every major leader from Churchill to the emperor of Japan was assumed to have a perfect impersonator who might take an assassin’s bullet or die in an air raid. Some certainly did use doubles on occasion. As a wartime child, I remember how every visiting statesman, friend or foe, was inspected by journalists to see if he was “real.”

The second conclusion from the disclosure of the Führer’s mandible was that the Soviet authorities had been sitting on that vital information for the previous nine years. It soon became known that there was quite a little museum in Moscow with the blood-spattered sofa covering and a number of enigmatic skull fragments apparently found in the shell crater grave during a later excavation. At that time the technique of using DNA to identify an individual’s remains was decades away, and ungloved handling of the Moscow relics had by then contaminated them so thoroughly that nothing significant could be learned from them.

Then, in 1956, the Soviets finally released the last German prisoners of war, who had survived up to twelve years in the gulag. Among these gaunt Heimkehrer were members of the bunker staff, including Mengershausen. Three of them were the only men still alive who had gone into Hitler’s study after the gunshot. They had seen the bodies and the bloodstained sofa on which he lay, and they described blood flowing from a wound in his temple. Five of them had helped to carry the two blanket-covered corpses upstairs and set them alight. There were minor contradictions in their stories about whether anyone had actually seen Hitler’s face at this point and how much gasoline was used.

In 1968, there were new revelations, accompanied by clouds of unreliable propaganda, with the publication of the Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski’s The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives. To the outrage of Western scholars, he repeated the claim that Hitler had taken poison and suggested that they had been part of an anti-Soviet plot to fake evidence of a gunshot. But the book also contained the first admission by the Soviets that they had found and removed Hitler’s charred body on May 5, 1945, and—sensationally—it included in gruesome detail the full autopsy reports on all the bodies found near the bunker. As Bezymenski gleefully recorded, the postmortem confirmed a rude soldiers’ song from the war: Hitler really had “only got one ball.”

I knew Bezymenski—tiny, exuberant, merrily unreliable—when we worked as foreign correspondents in Bonn. He had been in Soviet intelligence during the war, and apart from all the nonsense he made up to annoy West German officials, he still had a direct line to the highest levels in Moscow. They could use him to break genuine news before the established Soviet media did. The publication of the autopsies finally marked the end of the “long death” of Adolf Hitler as a serious mystery: Soviet silence had been broken, and the corpse’s authenticity had been established. And yet the saga of the bunker’s last days and the missing dictator is still simply too good a story for the media to drop.

There was also the matter of the skull. At the moment of victory in 1945, SMERSH and the NKVD security police (later the KGB, today the FSB) were in vicious rivalry. A year after SMERSH found the bodies, NKVD agents went to the site and found cranial fragments, one of which had a small hole the size of a bullet exit wound. But SMERSH refused to give its rival access to Hitler’s corpse, so to this day no one can prove that the skull pieces were Hitler’s. Today, Sharples writes, they “rest in the archives of…the Russian Federation…and the teeth are held by the FSB. Access to each location is restricted and subject to political and bureaucratic whims.” Two French scientists were briefly allowed to study the teeth. They detached minute particles of plaque, which revealed nothing that wasn’t already known: Hitler had been a vegetarian, and his jaw had been discolored by a fire.

Hitler’s last command, the final Führerbefehl, had been that his body should be completely destroyed, leaving nothing for a conqueror to gloat over. His order was bungled, leaving behind an undignified but identifiable scatter of debris. Sharples gives a fascinating account of Nazi state funerals: monumental, neopagan, and ugly. Hitler liked ordering them for Nazi “martyrs” such as Reinhard Heydrich. But his own peculiar narcissism, veering between a Napoleonic self-image and an affected “little man” simplicity, suggests that he would have chosen an “ordinary German soldier’s burial”—attended by a few million mourners. The muddy mess in the Chancellery garden, followed by decades of goggling speculation about which tooth fit where, was beyond his nightmares.

According to legend, the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is asleep under a mountain, awaiting the call to rise and save his nation. There is no such legend about Hitler. After the war, the sociologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich observed that the Germans had lost the capacity to mourn—not just the Führer but also his victims. 

Sharples is right to say that the endless squabbles over Hitler's  remains deprived postwar generations of a sense of closure. 

Those squabbles will persist as long as there are ambitious journalists and restricted archives. We will never know just what was said or done in those few minutes after Hitler and Braun closed the study door behind them and faced each other for the last time. But not long afterward, Russian soldiers in the street began to shout, “Gitler kaput!”—“Hitler’s dead❗”—and they are right.

Let's write about a special Veterans Museum in Vermont- Luke's Military Museum

 Published in The New York Times By Jasper Craven who reports on the military and veterans. He is the author of “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” Visuals by Amina Gingold

The 15-Year-Old Keeping War Memories Alive

On the edge of a goat farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom sits Luke’s Military Museum, an aluminum trailer that serves as a loving testament to the nation’s veterans.

The museum’s 15-year-old founder, Luke Morrison, has amassed an impressive collection of military artifacts and collected war stories through hundreds of conversations with veterans.

He is always on the lookout for new subjects to interview. The most obvious tell is a service cap, though Luke will often venture a guess. “If I’m in the grocery store and I see an old guy, I’ll be like, ‘Were you in the military?’ And usually it’ll be, ‘Yes,’” he said.
Exhibits include the uniform of Tim Bedor, an Iraq war veteran; the jump boots of Vinny Matteis, a Vietnam airman; and a Marine pin from Pete Racine, a dare-devilish World War II veteran who, at 92, was said to be the oldest man to stunt flip a car. The antique camper holding these artifacts was purchased by Luke’s great-granduncle, Dwight Cooley, a World War II veteran whose photo sits on a shelf.
Luke may be the youngest person keeping alive an age-old tradition: to process war through the memories and mementos of those who experienced it.

This work is invaluable, occasioned by two federal holidays — Veterans Day and Memorial Day — with additional reminders immortalized in monuments and etched on gravestones. Veterans’ memories inform how this country understands its past conflicts — and ought to influence whether we embark on new ones.
On a recent tour, Luke told me that before his death, a local Vietnam veteran, Harry Swett, donated shoulder patches to Luke’s museum. He also hosted Luke a few times in his living room, where, over hours of war stories, Mr. Swett shared the highs and lows of his military service.

“There’s nights that he’s sleeping in a foxhole that was full of water — I mean, completely submerged,” Luke told me. “And then there’s other times where he’s telling me about having fun with friends.”
Mr. Swett criticized draft dodgers, but after his son, Joseph, was born, he said he would shuttle him north to Canada to avoid the draft if another war broke out — only to lose him in a snowmobile accident at 19. Luke understood Mr. Swett’s wishes. While he relishes the noble stories of military bravery and camaraderie, he understands the perilous stakes for those who serve.
Military technology is promising to reduce human danger in warfare by sharply curtailing our participation in it. The Pentagon will become an “A.I. first” institution, integrating artificial intelligence wherever possible from “campaign planning to kill chain execution.” There is a clean logic to this technological drive, but also a danger of sanitizing conflict. (Makes killings and wars look too much like a "video game".)

War memories like the ones Luke’s museum is dedicated to preserving yield lessons, instincts and wisdom that cannot be computed by A.I.

World War II’s staggering human toll forever haunted Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. Days after returning to the United States, Mr. Eisenhower told a joint session of Congress that the best way to honor those killed in battle was to ensure “this will not happen again.” As president, Mr. Eisenhower staunchly supported diplomacy and the United Nations, ended combat in the Korean War and, in his famous farewell address, warned about the dangers of the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.”

Proponents of military technology argue that automation is simply the latest innovation in a long chain of advances that have moved combatants farther away from one another. While the saber required intimate violence, a plane can now deliver mass casualties from thousands of feet in the sky. But humans have always been solidly in charge, able to override a bad order, provide mercy or even defect entirely. It’s hard to picture A.I. doing any of these things.
During my visit to Luke’s museum, I was moved by the experiences of veterans like Mr. Swett, who was hard-working, patriotic and, according to Luke, very funny. His service in Vietnam was an expression of his belief in this country — and Luke loved him for it.
Mr. Swett died in October 2023, a few months before Luke’s museum opened. In the weeks that followed, Luke routinely called his widow, Claudette Swett, to check in, and invited her to his family’s log cabin for Christmas Eve. 

Luke was still in the process of renovating the trailer, so his bedroom served as a temporary exhibit, cramped with mannequins, uniforms and black-and-white war photos.

“He had a table just for Harry,” Mrs. Swett recalled. She was sad that her husband couldn’t see the fruits of Luke’s labor, but she knew how much Luke’s earnest curiosity about Harry’s service in Vietnam had nurtured him in his final days. It is remarkable, Mrs. Swett concluded, that someone of Luke’s age has worked so hard to imagine what it meant to be there.

Julie's P.S. my husband Richard wears one of his veterans hats to the grocery story. He is always stopped by at least one person who says, "Thank you for your service" or by another veteran who just wants to talk. Our local Hannaford grocery has special parking spots for veterans.

Let's Write about a UFOs Disclosure update: The "All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office"

 You cannot make this stuff up❗ Or can you❓

The Truth Is Still Out There: Why Americans remain convinced that the government is hiding an alien conspiracy: Published in The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch

Painting by Aryo Toh Bjojo

“There has been a threat to publicly release government material long shrouded in secrecy.” This sentence could have been intoned by a TV newscaster anytime in the past few years, about any number of real or alleged cover-ups—of Joe Biden’s mental decline, or the names in the Epstein files, or the origins of COVID‑19. In fact, it comes from the trailer that aired during the Super Bowl for Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new movie, opening June 12. For people who believe in aliens, or who would like to be able to believe in them, that title leaves no doubt about the kinds of secrets in question: Disclosure refers to the long-awaited moment when the U.S. government will admit what it really knows about visitors to our planet.

When Donald Trump promised, in a social-media post in February, “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life,” he implied that disclosure might be just around the corner. It wasn’t: This morning, the Pentagon released a tranche of historic images on a new website, war.gov/ufo, which feature plenty of black-and-white murk but nothing that looks even a little like an alien spacecraft. Still, if history is any guide, this disappointment won’t put an end to the belief that the government is hiding a spaceship or an alien corpse; according to one of the best-known UFO legends, both were retrieved from a crash site near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Or the proof could be something less tangible—a clear image of a nonhuman craft in flight, a radio signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. However it happens, disclosure will finally reveal the truth—not just about aliens, but about the authorities that have been deceiving us for so long.

This isn’t a new theme for science fiction, or for Spielberg. His career as a director took off in a post-Watergate climate when Hollywood was obsessed with official conspiracies and heroic whistleblowers—think of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Spielberg brought this suspicious, anti-establishment mood to his early blockbusters, starting in 1975, with Jaws, in which the mayor of a northeastern beach town tries to cover up a deadly shark attack.

But the perfect genre for a story about government lies was the UFO movie, as Spielberg showed with Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. “All I wanna do is know what’s going on,” says Roy Neary, the working-class hero played by Richard Dreyfuss, after a brush with a UFO. Unfortunately, powerful forces are determined to keep him from finding out. The term gaslighting wasn’t as popular then as it is today, but every military and government official in the movie is engaged in exactly that—trying to convince Neary, and other ordinary people like him, not to trust their own eyes.

“Now, there are all kinds of ideas that would be fun to believe in—mental telepathy, time travel, immortality, even Santa Claus,” a condescending government spokesman says to a group of UFO witnesses. At the film’s climax, the Army invents a story about a chemical-weapons spill as an excuse for evacuating a swath of Wyoming where the aliens are expected to land. If they hadn’t finally shown themselves at the end of the movie—in a sky-filling, strobe-lit mother ship too awe-inspiring to conceal—there’s no doubt the U.S. government would have gone on hiding the truth forever.

That’s just what it tries to do in Spielberg’s next alien movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, from 1982. When the government learns that Elliott, a young boy, is hiding an adorable alien, his entire house is sealed off in a plastic tarp—a quarantine that also serves as a perfect concealment. When the boy and the alien manage to break out, they are pursued by agents with guns, escaping with the aid of a bicycle and the power of imagination.

The lesson of these movies is clear: Trust yourself, not the government. It’s a message deeply in the American grain, and science fiction has been amplifying it for decades. In the long-running TV series The X-Files, the FBI agents Mulder and Scully battle the “Syndicate,” a conspiracy at the highest levels of power to sell out the human race to alien invaders. The Men in Black movies play the idea for laughs, imagining a world where law enforcement keeps tabs on aliens living among us in disguise. The titular agents use a “neuralyzer” device to wipe the memory of anyone who stumbles upon the secret.

Disclosure Day promises a new kind of UFO story, in which government secrecy is defeated and the world finally learns the truth. Spielberg may be a half century older than when he made Close Encounters, but he clearly hasn’t lost his power to read the mood of American culture. In the past decade, a profound shift has taken place in the way we talk and think about UFOs. To quote the title of a 2025, documentary on the subject, we are living in “The Age of Disclosure.”

The most important sign of this change is that aliens have become respectable. It used to be that only supermarket tabloids such as the National Enquirer reported on UFO sightings; now they are seriously discussed in mainstream media and congressional hearings. Even the term UFO has fallen out of favor, tainted by its long association with crankery. Government officials and true believers alike now prefer to talk about UAP. At first the acronym stood for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” but aerial was soon changed to anomalous, to include all kinds of “space, airborne, submerged, and transmedium objects.” That is how UAP are defined in the mission statement of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a government agency created in 2022 “to synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest.”

Our age of disclosure was born on December 16, 2017, when The New York Times published an article headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” The story revealed that, from 2007 to 2012, the Defense Department had allocated approximately $22 million to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a secret task force charged with investigating reports of flying objects that maneuver and accelerate in ways that ordinary aircraft cannot.

Such sightings aren’t new. Americans have been noticing inexplicable things in the sky since World War II, when pilots over Germany reported being followed by glowing balls that they nicknamed “foo fighters.” The term unidentified flying object was coined in the early 1950s to describe such phenomena in a neutral, noncommittal fashion. But of course, what made UFOs fascinating was the possibility that they could be extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In 1966, public concern about the issue prompted the Air Force to convene a panel of scientists to review UFO reports. The committee, headed by the physicist Edward Condon, bluntly concluded that such sightings were meaningless, blaming them on “inexperienced, inept, or unduly excited” observers who mistake ordinary sights like planets and balloons for flying saucers. “Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” the committee reported, and “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified.”

That verdict led the U.S. military to stop officially taking notice of sightings, even by its own pilots. But the 2017, revelations about AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat ID Program) seemed to prove what advocates of disclosure had always maintained: Though the Pentagon publicly denied that it had any evidence of aliens, it actually knew they were real. In fact, it possessed videos of encounters between UAP and American military aircraft. The Times and other news outlets published several of these videos online—low-resolution black-and-white footage of what looked like a small blob zooming over the ocean.

All of this respectful attention drove a transformation in public opinion. In 1996, a Newsweek poll found that 20 percent of Americans believed that UFOs were “probably alien ships or alien life forms.” When a YouGov poll asked the same question in 2022, that figure had increased to 34 percent. Even people who don’t think aliens have been here are now much more likely to believe that they will be here soon. In 1996, 69 percent of Americans thought that humanity would not contact aliens in the next half century; by 2022, only 39 percent did.

No wonder politicians who would once have scoffed at UFOs began to see them as a winning issue. Disclosure has never seemed closer than it did on July 26, 2023, when the House Oversight Committee held an open hearing on UAP as a national-security threat. Witnesses with apparently unimpeachable credentials testified under oath that the U.S. military has been hiding its knowledge of UFOs for decades. David Fravor, a retired Navy pilot, said that in 2004, his fighter squadron encountered a “white Tic Tac object” in the sky off the coast of San Diego. The craft had “no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings,” yet it was able to outrun fighter jets.

“There has been a threat to publicly release government material long shrouded in secrecy.” This sentence could have been intoned by a TV newscaster anytime in the past few years, about any number of real or alleged cover-ups—of Joe Biden’s mental decline, or the names in the Epstein files, or the origins of COVID‑19. In fact, it comes from the trailer that aired during the Super Bowl for Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new movie, opening June 12. For people who believe in aliens, or who would like to be able to believe in them, that title leaves no doubt about the kinds of secrets in question: Disclosure refers to the long-awaited moment when the U.S. government will admit what it really knows about visitors to our planet.

When Donald Trump promised, in a social-media post in February, “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life,” he implied that disclosure might be just around the corner. It wasn’t: This morning, the Pentagon released a tranche of historic images on a new website, war.gov/ufo, which feature plenty of black-and-white murk but nothing that looks even a little like an alien spacecraft. Still, if history is any guide, this disappointment won’t put an end to the belief that the government is hiding a spaceship or an alien corpse; according to one of the best-known UFO legends, both were retrieved from a crash site near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Or the proof could be something less tangible—a clear image of a nonhuman craft in flight, a radio signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. However it happens, disclosure will finally reveal the truth—not just about aliens, but about the authorities that have been deceiving us for so long.

This isn’t a new theme for science fiction, or for Spielberg. His career as a director took off in a post-Watergate climate when Hollywood was obsessed with official conspiracies and heroic whistleblowers—think of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Spielberg brought this suspicious, anti-establishment mood to his early blockbusters, starting in 1975 with Jaws, in which the mayor of a northeastern beach town tries to cover up a deadly shark attack.

But the perfect genre for a story about government lies was the UFO movie, as Spielberg showed with Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. “All I wanna do is know what’s going on,” says Roy Neary, the working-class hero played by Richard Dreyfuss, after a brush with a UFO. Unfortunately, powerful forces are determined to keep him from finding out. The term gaslighting wasn’t as popular then as it is today, but every military and government official in the movie is engaged in exactly that—trying to convince Neary, and other ordinary people like him, not to trust their own eyes.

“Now, there are all kinds of ideas that would be fun to believe in—mental telepathy, time travel, immortality, even Santa Claus,” a condescending government spokesman says to a group of UFO witnesses. At the film’s climax, the Army invents a story about a chemical-weapons spill as an excuse for evacuating a swath of Wyoming where the aliens are expected to land. If they hadn’t finally shown themselves at the end of the movie—in a sky-filling, strobe-lit mother ship too awe-inspiring to conceal—there’s no doubt the U.S. government would have gone on hiding the truth forever.

That’s just what it tries to do in Spielberg’s next alien movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, from 1982. When the government learns that Elliott, a young boy, is hiding an adorable alien, his entire house is sealed off in a plastic tarp—a quarantine that also serves as a perfect concealment. When the boy and the alien manage to break out, they are pursued by agents with guns, escaping with the aid of a bicycle and the power of imagination.

The lesson of these movies is clear: Trust yourself, not the government. It’s a message deeply in the American grain, and science fiction has been amplifying it for decades. In the long-running TV series The X-Files, the FBI agents Mulder and Scully battle the “Syndicate,” a conspiracy at the highest levels of power to sell out the human race to alien invaders. The Men in Black movies play the idea for laughs, imagining a world where law enforcement keeps tabs on aliens living among us in disguise. The titular agents use a “neuralyzer” device to wipe the memory of anyone who stumbles upon the secret.

Disclosure Day promises a new kind of UFO story, in which government secrecy is defeated and the world finally learns the truth. Spielberg may be a half century older than when he made Close Encounters, but he clearly hasn’t lost his power to read the mood of American culture. In the past decade, a profound shift has taken place in the way we talk and think about UFOs. To quote the title of a 2025 documentary on the subject, we are living in “The Age of Disclosure.”

The most important sign of this change is that aliens have become respectable. It used to be that only supermarket tabloids such as the National Enquirer reported on UFO sightings; now they are seriously discussed in mainstream media and congressional hearings. Even the term UFO has fallen out of favor, tainted by its long association with crankery. Government officials and true believers alike now prefer to talk about UAP. At first the acronym stood for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” but aerial was soon changed to anomalous, to include all kinds of “space, airborne, submerged, and transmedium objects.” That is how UAP are defined in the mission statement of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 😨😧😯😲a government agency created in 2022, “to synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest.”

Our age of disclosure was born on December 16, 2017, when The New York Times published an article headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” The story revealed that, from 2007 to 2012, the Defense Department had allocated approximately $22 million to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a secret task force charged with investigating reports of flying objects that maneuver and accelerate in ways that ordinary aircraft cannot.

Such sightings aren’t new. Americans have been noticing inexplicable things in the sky since World War II, when pilots over Germany reported being followed by glowing balls that they nicknamed “foo fighters.” The term unidentified flying object was coined in the early 1950s, to describe such phenomena in a neutral, noncommittal fashion. But of course, what made UFOs fascinating was the possibility that they could be extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In 1966, public concern about the issue prompted the Air Force to convene a panel of scientists to review UFO reports. The committee, headed by the physicist Edward Condon, bluntly concluded that such sightings were meaningless, blaming them on “inexperienced, inept, or unduly excited” observers who mistake ordinary sights like planets and balloons for flying saucers. “Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” the committee reported, and “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified.”

That verdict led the U.S. military to stop officially taking notice of sightings, even by its own pilots. But the 2017 revelations about AATIP seemed to prove what advocates of disclosure had always maintained: Though the Pentagon publicly denied that it had any evidence of aliens, it actually knew they were real. In fact, it possessed videos of encounters between UAP and American military aircraft. The Times and other news outlets published several of these videos online—low-resolution black-and-white footage of what looked like a small blob zooming over the ocean.

All of this respectful attention drove a transformation in public opinion. In 1996, a Newsweek poll found that 20 percent of Americans believed that UFOs were “probably alien ships or alien life forms.” When a YouGov poll asked the same question in 2022, that figure had increased to 34 percent. Even people who don’t think aliens have been here are now much more likely to believe that they will be here soon. In 1996, 69 percent of Americans thought that humanity would not contact aliens in the next half century; by 2022, only 39 percent did.

No wonder politicians who would once have scoffed at UFOs began to see them as a winning issue. Disclosure has never seemed closer than it did on July 26, 2023, when the House Oversight Committee held an open hearing on UAP as a national-security threat. Witnesses with apparently unimpeachable credentials testified under oath that the U.S. military has been hiding its knowledge of UFOs for decades. David Fravor, a retired Navy pilot, said that in 2004, his fighter squadron encountered a “white Tic Tac object” in the sky off the coast of San Diego. The craft had “no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings,” yet it was able to outrun fighter jets.

David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, made even more explosive claims. “I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP-crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” that operated in secret, “above congressional oversight,” Grusch testified. In interviews with journalists, he was more explicit, saying that the U.S. government possessed both intact spacecraft and extraterrestrial bodies.

Last year’s documentary The Age of Disclosure includes similar claims. Pilots talk about seeing objects with no wings or engines that seemed to defy the laws of physics, or at least the limits of human technology; Fravor mentions an oval-shaped object that could move at speeds of “32,000 miles an hour.” The narrator of the film, Luis Elizondo—a former Army intelligence officer who worked on AATIP—talks about a Defense Department effort he calls the “Legacy Program,” which has “been capturing, retrieving, and reverse engineering UAPs since at least 1947. On numerous occasions, these retrievals included the bodies of nonhumans.”

These are exactly the kinds of admissions that disclosure was supposed to bring, and though the more outlandish claims were denied by the government and treated skeptically by the mainstream media, they couldn’t be ignored—not when they were taken seriously by people such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom appear in The Age of Disclosure. Who could blame UFO believers for thinking that the world was about to change in profound and disconcerting ways? “This is Disclosure. This is it Right Now,” a Reddit user announced on r/UFOs, a forum with hundreds of thousands of weekly visitors, in the aftermath of the House hearings. “If you have loved ones, it may be a good idea to begin deciding how you will broach the subject, especially if they are dependents.”

In the Disclosure Day trailer, one character asks what would happen “if you found we weren’t alone. If someone showed you, proved it to you?” But showing and proving are exactly what Elizondo and other self-styled whistleblowers have never been able to do. For all the attention paid to UFOs over the past decade, we still have no evidence that they exist. The public may be more willing to listen to claims about downed spaceships and alien life forms, but we haven’t actually seen any. The murky Pentagon UFO videos have not been followed by clear pictures of alien spacecraft, which could theoretically be taken by anyone with an iPhone.

The most parsimonious explanation for this failure is that there is nothing to disclose. But UFO believers are compelled to reject this idea, because the U.S. government is better equipped than any entity on Earth to detect the arrival of extraterrestrials. If they have been here, some kind of cover-up is a logical necessity. At least one person is certain enough to bet on it: In February, the prediction market Kalshi recorded two wagers, totaling almost $300,000, that the U.S. government would announce the existence of aliens by the end of the year. Inevitably, the news prompted speculation that the bettor was a Trump-administration insider who knows that something big is coming.

Disclosure isn’t just about logic, however. It is awaited with an almost religious fervor because it will give UFO believers the same kind of affirmation that the coming of the Messiah will give religious believers. Faith, the New Testament says, is the evidence of things not seen. But at the end of days, when God finally becomes visible, faith will give way to knowledge: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” UFOs are not supposed to be supernatural; if they exist, they must obey the same laws of physics that reign here on Earth. But for now, they remain objects of faith because we have never been able to see one face-to-face. Disclosure will show that this faith was justified all along—that the believers were right and the skeptics wrong.

If this sounds a bit like a revenge fantasy, that’s understandable. UFO belief, like traditional religion, tends to attract the scorn of what the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called “cultured despisers,” people who consider themselves too sophisticated to fall for a popular error.

How sweet it will be when disclosure proves that the experts and elites were wrong—worse, that they were actively suppressing the This dynamic of condescension and vindication has become central to American life over the past decade. It drives all kinds of populist causes: vaccine skepticism, the MAHA movement, Roswell-level conspiracy theories such as QAnon and Pizzagate. Every kind of “truther” makes a demand for disclosure—to stop hiding the truth about why the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11, or where Barack Obama was born, or how Trump’s ear got bloodied in Butler, Pennsylvania. Truth that nonexperts always knew was out there.

It’s tempting to dismiss these as fantasies born of ignorance and nourished by paranoia. And the cultured despisers are right, most of the time. There is no convincing evidence that the Earth has been visited by aliens, just as there is no convincing evidence that vaccines cause autism. And yet, the Pentagon really was hiding videos of flying objects that could not be readily explained. Jeffrey Epstein really was friendly with royals and presidents. These things were disclosed only after years of public pressure from people who weren’t content with the official story.

And when people are convinced that they know a secret, world-shaking truth, they are willing to wait a long time for vindication. This is another way in which UFO disclosure resembles the coming of the Messiah: Both are constantly running behind schedule.

In 1950, Donald E. Keyhoe, a pilot and fiction writer, published a book called The Flying Saucers Are Real, in which he argued that the government’s apparent UFO denials were actually “part of an elaborate program to prepare the American people for a dramatic disclosure.” After all, the news that there are aliens among us would likely have devastating consequences. People would panic about a possible invasion of the planet and turn against institutions that had been hiding the truth. Nations would compete to benefit from the newcomers and their technology, and religious authorities would have to rethink the foundations of their faith.

It makes sense that the custodians of such knowledge would want to release it little by little, to help humanity prepare for the shock. In fact, UFO believers have long speculated that Hollywood stories about aliens play a role in this acclimatization process. Some online theorists are already arguing that Disclosure Day itself is part of such a campaign: “Is this all just coincidence + perfect marketing timing for the movie? Or has someone been dropping clues?” one Redditor asked after the first trailer appeared.

Keyhoe promised that “the official explanation may be imminent.” In 2024, Elizondo used virtually identical language in his book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, looking forward to “imminent government disclosure about nonhuman intelligence.” Three-quarters of a century is a long time for disclosure to remain imminent. But if it proves once and for all that humanity is not alone in the universe, isn’t it worth the wait? Religious believers have been waiting thousands of years for the apocalypse, the vision of the End Times described in the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. Apocalypse and disclosure are, in fact, Greek and Latin ways of saying the same thing: Both refer to uncovering, the removal of concealment. And as long as we’re convinced that some great, mysterious truth is being hidden, we don’t have to confront an even more unsettling possibility—that there’s nothing out there to believe in at all.

This article appears in the June 2026 print edition of The Atlantic, with the headline “Alien Nation.”

 

 

 

 

 

Let's write about driving Route 66 "The Mother Road"

No need to buy a camper to see Route 66, because this article seems to give a great tour without having to leave your home! Lots of great pictures accompany this article on USA Today if you go to the link here. By Sara D. Wire


Three generations, two cars, 2,000 miles on Route 66On Route 66’s 100th anniversary, a cross‑country road trip with my kids and parents became less about distance — and more about love, loss and time together.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, with my kids and my parents as part of US A TODAY's American Journeys series.
I was nervous about taking young kids on such a long trip, but everyone agreed that an article about the great American family road trip taken on the Mother Road's 100th anniversary had to include my family.

Then my father lost both of his siblings in eight months. The chance to deepen my relationship with my parents and theirs with their grandsons as we drove two-thirds of the country held new meaning.
I tried to prepare Robbie, 6, and Tommy, 4, by watching "Cars" and talking about how Radiator Springs (Disney's mythical town on Route 66) got left behind when the highway moved.

Planning began a year out. Balancing the interests, needs and attention spans of three generations took coordination. We'd each driven parts of the route, but always as a means to an end, not something to savor.

My husband, John, and I used to brag about measuring time in miles. One Christmas, when the kids were sick, we drove 17 hours straight from Washington, DC, to Kansas. Route 66 demands a different mindset.

Built in 1926, as “the shortest, best and most scenic route from Chicago through St. Louis to Los Angeles," according to the Route 66 Highway Association, the road is now about the trip, not the destination.Route 66 was a path to new opportunity during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. John Steinbeck called it "Mother Road" in his 1939 novel, “The Grapes of Wrath."

The Route's image as a place of freedom and "kicks" solidified after World War II, as American tourists had the money to explore their country. Meanwhile, President Dwight Eisenhower began pushing for the creation of high-speed interstates, a move that led to the Route's official demise.

Even though the federal government officially removed the road from the federal system in 1985, Americans moved to preserve and expand it.

Hundreds of thousands now travel Route 66 each year, including foreign travelers, honeymooners, retirees in RVs and families trying to connect. COVID-19 made Route 66 more attractive for domestic travelers, Rhys Martin, manager of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preserve Route 66 program, told me. So, also, did Disney/Pixar’s Cars in 2006.
"Be careful. It will get into your blood,” he warned.
I was just hoping to build memories.
The six of us had never been together this long.
My career pulled my husband and me thousands of miles from both sets of our parents. We fit in a few days or even a week a few times a year, just long enough to reconnect before separating again.
At two weeks out, my excitement competed with my anxiety. At night, I'd stare into the darkness; was it smart to put all of us through this trip?Chicago and the Land of Giants: Chicago-style pizza and a photo of our reflections in the bean sculpture "Cloud Gate" were necessary before we snagged a photo at Route 66’s most recent starting point.

Tommy would have lain on his belly all day and watched the arapaima ‒ a massive freshwater fish that can breathe air ‒ in the Shedd Aquarium's Amazon exhibit.

Robbie befriended the beluga whales, naming one “Friendly.”
Robbie was already asking how long until we flew home because he wanted to tell his friends about the Bowmouth Guitarfish we saw. It took a few more days before either boy grasped just how long the drive would be.

Early on, John and I pulled a trick from our own childhoods, asking Robbie to count cars on a passing train. After stopping at the Gemini Giant in Wilmington, Illinois ‒ one of dozens of the more than 18-feet-tall roadside attractions along the route ‒ we fell into a rhythm of hopping in and out of the car: more giants, preserved gas stations, a Route 66 Museum. We made it to Lincoln’s Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, five minutes before the cemetery gates closed and we nearly got locked inside.
We tried to put Robbie with the grandparents after lunch, but he didn’t want to be away from his brother.

The old road runs right along the modern replacement, grass and weeds gradually breaking it up. We pulled over to stand on it for a few minutes. The wind howled in our ears as we tried to picture the lives that passed over it.Missouri curves: Walking across the old Chain of Rocks Bridge gave everyone a chance to stretch their legs. It also gave us our first taste of the wind that would follow us across the state.

The boys started to settle into the reality of a road trip: reading, playing with stuffed animals and staring out the window. We introduced our favorite road trip game, yelling “cows” or “horses.”
As Route 66 followed hills and bluffs, we passed towns my Missouri-native husband didn’t know existed. The boys filled a bag with taffy from US 66 Outpost in Fanning, home to the world’s second-largest rocking chair.

At a diner in St. James, the boys split a strawberry milkshake. They fought over who got to sit next to Papa Bob. Both did.
From the next table, Debra Holbrook, 70, asked us for directions. Five days after learning Route 66 was on her husband’s bucket list, they left New Hampshire with their rescue dog, Blaze.
“My garden can’t go in till after Mother’s Day, so I figured, 'Hey, there’s this six-week window,'" she said. “I said, 'Let’s just do it.'”
Past bedtime, we raced to the hotel in Springfield and got our first glimpse of the Route’s legendary neon signs. Tommy plaintively asked, "Why are you driving everywhere?"Roadside kitsch: Pixar animators studying Route 66 for "Cars" based Tow Mater on a rusty truck with a tree growing out of it in Galena, which sits on Kansas' 13 miles of Route 66, said Renee Charles, owner of the Cars on the Route tourist attraction.

Down the street, Gearhead Curios owner Aaron Perry said he dreamed of owning a piece of Route 66 after driving it to visit family as a child. The old Texaco gas station he bought in 2018, had no roof. Trees grew through its bathroom. “I tell people Route 66 is the dreams, the what ifs, the what was, the what could be,” he said

At the Crosstar Flag and Tag attraction in Afton, Oklahoma, the owner allowed the boys to climb inside some of the cars. For the rest of the trip, Tommy tried to open every old car he saw.

Small town charms: We decided that if the boys wouldn’t switch cars, the adults would. Nana rode in the minivan with me as we left Tulsa. We got eyerolls when we sang "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain." It had been a long time since we sang together.
The kids finally asked to watch TV in the car. I conveniently forgot to mention the tablet as we passed a giant thumbtack and matchstick in Wellston, Oklahoma. In Arcadia, we stopped at the oldest attraction on the Route. Built in 1898 and painted red, the Round Barn smelled of bur oak wood and dried grass.
Robbie said he wished we hadn't gone on the trip. My heart sank. Five minutes later, he happily skipped his way into Pops 66 Soda Ranch for his first soda.

The road to see the longest bridge on the Route, the 1933, Pony Bridge near Bridgeport, was cracked and bumpy. Suddenly, the scenery changed from flat and brown to green and purple scrub brush-covered red dirt hills. The span was closed, so we got to watch the transition in reverse. 

Family on the road: Three museums in a day was ambitious. Papa Bob hopped into a training cockpit at the Stafford Air and Space Museum in Weatherford.

At the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum in Clinton, the boys read, touched and heard the story of the road, decade by decade.
The woman at the front desk of the Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Texas, was thrilled Bob Wire was visiting the barbed wire exhibits. She even checked his driver’s license.

We ended the day in Amarillo, which holds a piece of my heart. My granny lived there with my dad’s sister, Susie, and her husband, John, for the last decade of her life. I had put off telling Susie we might visit because I didn’t want to get her hopes up. John and Susie met Robbie at his first Christmas but had never seen Tommy. Susie died two months before my trip was approved.

Uncle John showed the boys his horse, Levi, and taught them how to feed him. It felt unfair that Susie wasn’t standing beside him and waving goodbye as we left. Cadillac Ranch as the sun rose: The clouds over Cadillac Ranch at sunrise will stay with me forever. Robbie, Papa Bob, John and I walked along the dirt path and applied our names and the year in a layer of light blue spray paint, permanently adding our journey to the art installation.
I begrudgingly shared bites of my cherry cobbler at the Midpoint Cafe and Gift Shop in Adrian, Texas.

Owner Brenda Hammit Bradley told me she plans to sell at the end of the year, “I love this place, but I'm 65 years old and I'm tired. I make a lot of pie and if I never saw another pie pan again, I would be a happy lady."

Much of New Mexico’s Route 66 is under the interstate or on dirt roads, which we woI joked over the walkie-talkie about camping beneath a jagged roadside monolith.

Tucumcari’s murals, neon signs and the Blue Swallow Motel were delightful. The scent of sagebrush wafted over it all. The fossils and bronze skeletons in the Mesalands Community College's Dinosaur Museum kept the boys entertained.

We had ice cream twice:  The dozens of creatures at Albuquerque’s Rattlesnake Museum lived up to Robbie's expectations, especially when one rattled its tail.

We passed Owl Rock and Dead Man’s Curve on Laguna Pueblo land. It was heartbreaking to see the mesa that was blasted through to build the four-lane Route 66, which eventually became Interstate 40. Dramatic pink mesas popular in cowboy movies dominated the skyline as far as we could see.

We stopped for an afternoon ice cream at Dairy Queen, a childhood tradition my dad continued with his three other grandsons, but hadn't yet done with my boys.

In Gallup, dinner came with free scoops of ice cream. We almost said no. But who knows, the day the kids got ice cream twice might be their favorite memory from the trip.

Hiking with Papa Bob:  Robbie declared Petrified Forest National Park's Painted Desert "a-maz-ing." John almost drove off the road at the sight of the blue mesa.

I tried not to get misty-eyed as the boys chattered at Papa Bob while hiking the Crystal Forest, another first.

We did the touristy thing and stood on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, and then scrambled to find a restaurant open on Easter while humming the Eagles' “Take It Easy.” At the La Posada Hotel restaurant, the boys embraced Nana's favorite grandkid game of "don’t wipe off my kisses." Every meal ends with a pile of crayon drawings for her refrigerator.

Grand Canyon:  The Grand Canyon is breathtaking and also terrifying with a 4-year-old along.

Taking it in for the first time, Tommy asked, "Is this the giant 'normous Canyon?" For the next few hours, he reassured me he would not jump in. Then he walked toward the edge.

Finally, my heart couldn’t take it. We took the shuttle back and drove the park ourselves. My newfound fear of heights quickly disappeared when Tommy napped.

Even in my mind's eye, the view still takes my breath away.

"It really gets to you," my dad said.

He last visited at age 18, thinking he could hike down and camp until a ranger asked for his permit.

Multiple people have told me about falling in love with Route 66 and driving it over and over. For me, it opened something wider. I want to explore what else I’ve missed. I hope this trip creates that restless feeling for my boys, too. What's over the next hill? What stories are waiting? I hope they take me along.

The sidewinder:  In Seligman, Arizona, you can see Route 66's legacy of dirt, brick and asphalt under the existing road. This is where Angel Delgadillo fought to save his hometown after I-40 bypassed it. He helped protect the highway nationwide. Seated in her father’s barber chair, Mirna Delgadillo, 62, said preserving Route 66 protects our history.

“Do we know where we’re going, if we don’t know where we came from?” she said.

The “sidewinder” is the kind of road you hope exists somewhere. It climbs 3,550 feet through the Black Mountains, twisting through blind hairpin turns.

In Oatman, an old gold mining town, donkeys followed tourists along the boardwalks and into stores. Just like the boys, Nana was as giddy to feed the donkeys grass pellets that sold for a dollar a bag. Tommy named them. Robbie found his souvenir for the day, a rattlesnake stuffie in a can. Thankfully, Papa Bob had a can opener, sparing us hours of hearing about it.

I joked over the walkie-talkie about camping beneath a jagged roadside monolith.

“You are your father’s daughter,” my mom replied. “He just said the same thing.”

California desert:  When Nana played her kisses game at breakfast, Robbie made sure she knew he didn’t wipe them. Tommy laughed, doing the opposite.

On the lonely stretch of road along the Mojave Desert, I was struck by how much of the country ‒ cities, ghost towns, small towns, mountains and prairies ‒ we had crossed in just two weeks.

Past Roy's Motel and Cafe in Amboy, the kids started to argue. So we rolled down the window and they both stuck a little hand out to ride the wind. The boys ran around the teepees at the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino. We hopped into the pool with Papa Bob, another first.

Dipping our toes in the Pacific:  In the Los Angeles area, the game of shouting out when we saw a cow or horse became shouting out whenever the boys saw a palm tree.

We grabbed pre-lunch ice cream at the Fair Oaks Pharmacy in South Pasadena and the boys played with whoopee cushions and Slinkys from my childhood. Nana bought shark and snake hand puppets as gifts for them.

The line at the Santa Monica Pier ending point moved quickly. We were all impatient to walk out to the waves. 66 to Cali operator Ian Bowen filled out our certificates of completion.

Dipping our toes in the Pacific Ocean turned into an hour of the boys playing in the waves fully dressed.

Tears goodbye:  To mark the end of our trip, Nana and Papa Bob splurged on a whale spotting tour, the same one they took with two other grandsons 15 years earlier.

Nana and the boys were leaning against the railing as a fin whale exhaled. Robbie yelled: "There, it's there!" Tommy and I peeked through the railing as it came up again.

Robbie spoke with the naturalist, who pulled bottles of krill and whale poop from his pockets. Then my want-to-be oceanographer declared himself a whale expert. Tommy cozied up between Nana and Papa Bob, munching from a tub of popcorn.

As our journey across Route 66 came to an end, I began to understand the emotional pull it has had on so many Americans.

You never want your kids to cry. You do want them to love. 

Robbie and Tommy hugged Nana and Papa Bob goodbye. As we walked away, Robbie ran back to them in tears for another hug.

I didn't know until that moment that a hug was what I was hoping for from the trip.

I was always the emotional kid who sobbed when we left my granny and Aunt Susie behind in Amarillo. My dad would say it was proof I loved them.

 I told Robbie the same.

Humans looking for space aliens? Who knew? Let's write about how aliens might see human beings!

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Give Us the Aliens

Echo essay published in The New York Times

Ever since childhood I’ve wanted to be abducted by aliens. 

Now, as a professional astrophysicist armed with the knowledge of the size, age and composition of the cosmos, I know that nothing prevents any of us from imagining a universe teeming with life.

So the impending release of U.S. government files on aliens and U.F.O.s is a good thing, even if it feels like a distraction from other important files we’ve all been waiting to be disclosed. I expect the alien files will be anticlimactic. After a parade of alien insiders and whistle-blowers testified under oath to Congress in 2023, 2024 and 2025, what’s left to learn?

Personally, I’d be delighted if the files were accompanied by an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive. Is that too much to ask for?

The whistle-blowers have already told us about the crashed flying saucers, extraterrestrial bodies and alien technology in our possession — hidden in undisclosed places. Not only that, but secret files have been declassified before. A 2017 headline in this newspaper was unambiguous: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” And who could forget the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which studied more than 12,000 U.F.O. sightings from 1952, until the project was terminated in 1969, with the goal of assessing threats to national security.

What’s clear, however, is that if an authentic alien walked out of the halls of Congress, nobody would ever again have to ask if you “believe” in aliens, just as nobody questions the existence of elephants. An alien of the alien files could become the literal elephant in the room.

Without good evidence of what actual aliens look like, we’re stuck imagining them. And imagine them we do. IMDb, an online database about entertainment, lists hundreds upon hundreds of films, TV shows, video games and documentaries about aliens — both friendly and evil. Mostly evil.

Disappointingly, in nearly all these portrayals, these aliens look a lot like us. They’re humanoid, with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a neck, shoulders, a torso, arms, fingers and legs. Remember that most life on Earth, with which we have DNA in common, looks nothing like us or any vertebrate animal. So we should expect aliens with no DNA in common — or no DNA at all — to look at least as different from humans as humans and other life-forms on Earth (like jellyfish or termites) look different from each other.

The only thing that would shock me about a living, declassified alien is if most Hollywood depictions ended up being right, violating everything we know about biodiversity on Earth and across the universe.

We care a lot about what aliens look like, but we don’t pay nearly enough attention to what we might look like to them. If an alien emissary landed in Los Angeles, for example, its first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. 🚗

Indeed, the congested city is heavily crisscrossed by major freeways, many of them 12 lanes wide. People line up in their cars on slow lines to obtain fast food handed through a window. They consume the food while still seated, never exiting their vehicles. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.

Assuming on arrival that the alien knew we were human, it would probably want to meet the person in charge. Who exactly would that be? The president? The prime minister? The pope? Or would it be a multibillionaire or captain of industry? Not knowing anything in advance about human civilization, but picking up clues from our cultural norms before arrival from leaked radio waves, an alien might instead expect to meet Ryan Gosling, Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey.

If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.

In the history of our species, there’s no shortage of technologically advanced cultures that commit rampant violence against less-advanced ones. Within what we call civilization, humans oppress — or kill — one another over which creator of the universe they worship, or who they sleep with, or what side of an arbitrary line on Earth’s land masses they’re born, or how absorptive their skin is to sunlight, or what set of sounds comes out of their mouths.

Upon bearing witness to our irrational ways, any visiting alien that might have accompanied the release of the alien files surely long ago escaped back home to report, “There’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth!”

Let's write about how oligarchs are consuming publishing companies just because they can

 Opinion Guest Essay published in The New York Times

French Literature Is in an Uproar May 6, 2026

By Olivier Guez, a French writer who published five books at Grasset. His most recent book in translation is “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele.”

If you have never picked up a book in French, you might not ever have even heard of Grasset, and what it might mean to have its longtime chief executive Olivier Nora effectively guillotined by the rapacious right-wing industrialist Vincent Bolloré. 

And yet, in France, the news of Mr. Nora’s sudden departure from his post quickly flew beyond the borders of Parisian publishing and cultural elite circles. In the aftermath, over 200 writers — myself included — walked away from Grasset❗

This is not just a story about the French publishing industry. The evident struggle between Mr. Bolloré and Mr. Nora is a microcosm of the battle for cultural control that is taking place globally between the wealthy new right and the cultural old guard. Think Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. The abrupt change in leadership at Grasset, too, is a case study in the way members of the increasingly powerful ultra wealthy treat those who don’t think or see the world as they do.

A publishing house is not meant to be a propaganda machine. It is a place where conflict, doubt and nuance can, and should, coexist. Publishing houses are a hallmark of free and open societies: the nurturing and production of literature that explores the follies and the potential of the human condition.

Under the leadership of Mr. Nora, Grasset was the best of this ideal. The works of unapologetic feminist writers were placed on the shelf next to old-guard chauvinists, pro-Palestinian authors next to Zionists, male priests next to women rabbis, up-and-comers next to baby boomers, powerful people next to anti-establishment protesters. Grasset’s authors rarely agreed on much, but as the letter of protest we signed said, we have had — and still have — a common enemy: authoritarianism.

Grasset was just a tiny corner of the Bolloré financial empire. Nevertheless, losing Mr. Nora’s leadership is a sign of disdain among the powerful for a world of the recent past, one in which the public still accepted and cultivated contradictions, political complications, even conflict. It was not necessarily an enormously profitable world, but one where political opposites respected those who did not think alike, where knowledge itself garnered respect.

Mr. Nora, like the institution he led, was open and attentive to other people’s ideas. His weakness, if there was one, was immutable: his pedigree, which made him an easy target for the far right. 

Indeed, Mr. Nora is almost a caricature of the Parisian intellectual elite — his father was a political adviser to several major figures in French politics, and his uncle, Pierre Nora, was a longtime editor at another publishing house, Gallimard. Under Mr. Nora, Grasset maintained a pluralistic editorial policy.

Mr. Bolloré, by contrast, is the owner of a vast industrial conglomerate that has interests ranging from oil pipelines and energy storage to electric buses. 

Over the past several years, Mr. Bolloré has also been building a cultural empire, buying newspapers, radio stations, television channels and publishing houses. He acquired Grasset three years ago. 

As he picked up these levers of cultural power, he became editor, producer and distributor all at once. He is also, not incidentally, an extremely conservative Catholic. He has not only repeatedly brought outlets he has bought to heel by pushing the departure of people in important positions, replacing them with leaders apparently more loyal to him and his values. He has also leveraged his outlets to propagate fear and disseminate conspiracy theories about a decayed and decadent West, a Europe under threat from foreigners and egocentric old elites.

But Mr. Bolloré is, above all, a businessman: His cultural crusade is a very efficient moneymaker. His 24-hour news channel CNews — a kind of French Fox News — is the most popular news channel in France. Over the last two years, Mr. Bolloré also transformed Fayard, another historic French publishing house, into a largely far-right propaganda machine. 

Some of the most prominent figures of the French far right are now published by Fayard, including Jordan Bardella, the leader of the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National. The party is leading the polls for next year’s presidential elections.

We are opening our eyes rather late in France to the efforts of the right to assume cultural control, to determine the words we consume, the discourse in which we partake. The message of authoritarians everywhere is the same: Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever won’t follow me will get the boot. The boss is always right, so he steamrolls his way through and imposes his worldview. He exerts his power. He demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates. The plutocrats have become oligarchs.

We are opening our eyes rather late in France to the efforts of the right to assume cultural control, to determine the words we consume, the discourse in which we partake. The message of authoritarians everywhere is the same: Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever won’t follow me will get the boot. The boss is always right, so he steamrolls his way through and imposes his worldview. He exerts his power. He demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates. The plutocrats have become oligarchs.

Mr. Nora’s departure was not enough. Mr. Bolloré also went on to smear the authors of Grasset who signed the letter. To do so he wrote an essay in his own newspaper — Le Journal du Dimanche — where he disdainfully referred to them as the “small caste that believes itself above everything and everyone, and that co-opts and supports itself.” He claimed to differ on the publication schedule for a book by the French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal set by Mr. Nora, and on the scale of the longtime C.E.O.’s salary. And then he fashioned himself, a billionaire, as the defender of the millions of French who struggle to make ends meet.

Most writers in France are barely eking out a living; people here spend less and less time reading, same as everywhere else. Few authors live off their writing income and, apart from rare exceptions, they do not belong to the global elite.

Not so very long ago, men like Mr. Bolloré paid to achieve a veneer of culture and cultivated a certain notion of beauty: The barons of the Gilded Age endowed America with incredible cultural institutions. Recently, business tycoons François Pinault and Bernard Arnault built in Paris magnificent art collections now open to the public.

Now these pretenses are all but obsolete: The wolf no longer has to disguise himself as the grandmother to get his way. Oligarchs are no longer staying hidden. They are flaunting their power, destroying, exploiting, intimidating and getting richer than any group of people in human history. They show utter disregard for the world, and complete impunity. They believe they are invincible.

The Grasset affair is a French story, and Mr. Nora is just one man. But it is a warning to us all, to the democratic peoples of every country. It shows the threats that are in motion in our societies. 

Although our democracies are still open, for now. But for how much longer❓🔹