Strange Arrivals is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.

In late February of 2020, I spoke with author Sarah Sculls.

She is a freelance science writer who is a contributing writer at Wired Science,

a contributing editor at Popular Science,

and the author of two books,

making contact, Jill Tartar in the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence,

and they are already here.

UFO culture and why we see saucers.

I talked to her just before the release of they are already here,

an engaging first-person anthropological look at the UFO community.

I'm Toby Ball and this is strange arrivals. Oh, My name is Sarah Sculls. I'm a science journalist, a contributor at Wired magazine in popular science Science and I write about space.

First of all, I love the book.

Your interest seems to be not so much with UFOs themselves,

but with the people who are interested in

UFOs and the culture that surrounds UFOs. Can you talk a little bit

about your interest and how that interest began?

Sure, I had really never paid attention to UFOs from most of my life until December 16th, 2017, and I read a story in the New York Times that was about this Pentagon program that had been dedicated to researching what they called

unidentified aerial phenomena and just starting with that story I tried to re-report for Wired magazine all the stuff that they had said

about this Pentagon program and just tried to prove it true or false with my own

reporting and since I was coming to UFO's totally fresh I didn't actually have any

knowledge of my own and so I started to try to seek out people who did have that and

...