staffer at the new yorker. he recently had this great piece called how the pentagon started taking ufos seriously and he s with us now. as your piece sort of illuminates, we re getting the u.s. military basically saying, yes, we have encounters with objects that we do not understand. what is that about? that s a great question. i mean, i think it s about a number of things. and i think one of the reasons why we have all this interest in this forthcoming report is because of a constellation of the maybe otherwise related constitueies interested in this. one is we need bureaucratic reform for ways to talk about things that don t fit other patterns. ancillary to that are people who care about it as a kind of pilot safety and pilot dignity issue that we let these guys fly $100 million planes and we should trust them when they tell us they see weird stuff in the sky. then part of it is concerns