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What does the 2021 UFO Pentagon Report signal?

The UAP question stopped being a late-night joke the moment the Pentagon put it in writing: these objects show up across multiple sensors, they’re intruding into restricted military airspace, and the stigma around reporting has to go. From there, the real mystery is not just what pilots are seeing, but what it would do to us if the best explanation really is nonhuman technology.

I’m joined by Professor Alexander Wendt, a leading scholar in international relations and the author of *The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty*.

If you’re curious about UFOs, UAP, Pentagon disclosures, national security, and what “not being alone” could mean for politics and everyday life, you’ll want to hear this one. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves a good mystery, and leave us a review so more listeners can find the show. What do you think UAP are, and what would responsible disclosure look like?

Have you had a UFO/UAP experience? Would love to hear about it. Contact me at bookclues.com

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Pyongyang wasn’t always a synonym for missiles and mass parades. Long before the Kim dynasty, it was called the Jerusalem of the East, packed with churches, schools, hospitals, and missionary energy that helped make Korea one of the most Christian places in the world. That single fact flips the usual “North Korea history” narrative on its head, and it’s where our conversation with Wall Street Journal journalist Jonathan Cheng begins.

Jonathan joins us to unpack his book The Korean Messiah: Kim Il-sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, tracing how Protestant Christianity spreads in northwest Korea, how Japanese colonial rule turns the church into a shelter for national identity, and how shattered political hopes push some Koreans toward Marxism-Leninism. We also dig into Kim Il-sung’s origin story as Kim Song-ju, a boy steeped in the Bible, church music, and Sunday school, and why that background matters when he later builds a regime that functions less like a normal state and more like a political religion.

We talk about what a cult of personality looks like when it becomes daily ritual: portraits in every home, badges worn over the heart, bowing at statues, weekly sessions that resemble confession, and information control that keeps alternative realities out. Jonathan also shares what he saw on visits to North Korea, plus the strange late-life moments when Kim Il-sung invites Billy Graham and opens tightly managed churches that offer a narrow “crack of light” without real religious freedom.

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The Mississippi looks familiar on a map, but it gets weird fast when you stop treating it like a single line and start treating it like a living system. I’m joined by writer and nature critic Boyce Upholt boyceupholt, author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, to ask a deceptively simple question: where does the Mississippi actually begin? The answer opens into “thinking like a watershed” and realizing that a million-plus square miles of rainfall, tributaries, and human choices all belong to the same river story.

If you enjoy natural history, American history, climate risk, and big landscape stories, subscribe, share this conversation, and leave a review so more listeners can find it.

Find Boyce Upholt's beautiful magazine Southlands

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