Jon Kosloski’s interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Yearbook 2025 Series

The Neil deGrasse Tyson interview of Jon Kosloski is exactly the kind of historical source that motivates me to make these yearbooks. First, it’s newsy because Kosloski and his DoD press handlers are using it to publicize AARO developments, which they have done every year. Second, it captures several of the nuanced psycho-social dynamics prevalent at this stage of UFO disclosure and acceptance, particularly on stigma. Third, it’s a podcast, one of this era’s most ubiquitous and ephemeral media products. By 2024/25 the podcast industry had switched to talkshow-style on-camera conversations. Tyson’s show Startalk puts out five or six episodes per month. His Kosloski episode is not the kind of thing that will get noticed by “official historians,” if it is even ever found in the deep digital morass of being churned out by our internet influencers. But in the brief moment it was relevant (it was released on Youtube August 12, 2025), the interview captured an essential truth that explains this moment to ourselves and to the future.

Both Tyson and Kosloski went into this interview with their own objectives. As he always does, Tyson positioned his arguments so as to contain UFO belief and vouch for the primacy of establishment scientists as the arbiters of truth in all things. The title of the episode is Breaking Down UAP Footage with the Head of The Pentagon’s UAP Taskforce, and Koloski came prepared to narrate three UAP videos, Go Fast, Mt. Etna, and Puerto Rico, which AARO has resolved as non-anomalous objects, likely balloons or airborne clutter moving with the wind.

Tyson reiterated his view that witness testimony alone is never valuable to the scientific process: “So there’s an assumption that a person’s pedigree makes their data better or their reactions better than someone else without pedigree. And my view on this is, are you human?, then you have susceptibilities. Period. I don’t care how many stars and bars you have on your uniform.” He shared what are some of his stock anecdotes of people misinterpreting common sky phenomenon, including a Brooklyn woman who wrote to him about an unusual light that had recently appeared in the sky just above Marty’s Deli (spoiler alert: it was Venus, and she only just noticed it because the taller building behind Marty’s Deli was torn down). Tyson also had the gall to advise Kosloski to his face what his job is and is not:

“You work for the Pentagon. So, I don’t care what the thing is that you don’t know what it is. I care about your assessment of whether or not you think it’s a threat. And so, where’s the line between this is just some sky phenomenon, even if we don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it, and this could be a threat, it could be an adversary foreign or domestic? And that’s your job, to protect us.”

In Tyson’s view, no one working for AARO is qualified to determine whether a UAP is truly anomalous, let alone extraterrestrial. He doesn’t call them bureaucrats or Army grunts, but he seems to think the only analytical judgements DoD personnel are capable of making is whether or not an object can kill people. This is a miserly view of the levels of expertise in the Pentagon. Kosloski has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and has experience working with quantum optics, and would be the first to admit that AARO relies on external partners in the scientific community and academia to guide its judgements on UAP cases. But this is another example of Tyson building containment walls around the UFO question. Only a very few people are able to weigh in on what UFOs really are, and it is people like him.

Kosloski’s motivations are much more interesting—and frankly surprising because they continue to showcase how Kosloski is approaching this topic differently than how DoD/IC leadership has in the recent past.

Consider that Kosloski’s predecessor Sean Kirkpatrick would have been right at home on Tyson’s show. He would have happily trotted out examples of military personnel and others misidentifying balloons as UFOs. He would have co-signed Tyson’s argument that if aliens really were here, there would be a ton of evidence for it, and that to suggest otherwise is dabbling in conspiracy theories. He would have co-signed Tyson’s notion that the scientific method does not include credible witnesses, even if they are trained military pilots. He might have even brought up recent Wall Street Journal reporting on prior attempts by the military to trick people into thinking UFOs are real. We know this because Kirkpatrick spent all of 2024 saying these things on other podcasts (see Yearbook 2024, chapter 1.3).

Kosloski is a very different sort of AARO director. Yes he came on the show in part to share three recent case resolution reports, which all point to conventional explanations. Yes he was polite, non-confrontational, and humble (“I’m just a lowly engineer”) in the face of Tyson’s barrage of giggles and editorializing. But at several key points Kosloski provided a counter-narrative to Tyson’s anti-UFO bias. He did so gently, matter-of-factly, confidently. Most tellingly, since Tyson has been using the same anti-UFO rhetoric for years, Kosloski had to know he would be in a position to respond to it. He could have come on the show and clapped along with Tyson’s choir, but instead he slipped in a slew of discordant notes.

Tyson’s most-mentioned logical proof that UFOs are not real has to do with cell phones. Since most people own a cell phone, if aliens were really visiting the Earth in UFOs someone would have snapped a high-quality picture or video, ergo UFOs are not real. He treats this bit of rhetoric as a slam dunk. So it was jarring when Kosloski—Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with experience in quantum optics, and a year under his belt pouring over UAP evidence for the DoD/IC—simply, quietly dismissed it out of hand.

Tyson: “More than a billion high resolution photos are uploaded to the internet every day that people obtain with their smartphones around the world. So it seems to me if there were aliens visiting us, it would be crowdsourced without your prompting. We’d have pictures of flying saucers and there wouldn’t be a fuzzy dot in an infrared camera in a restricted area. We would have been flooded with data.”

Kosloski: “…in regards to the data, you know, a cell phone’s an awfully small camera. And so if extraterrestrials were coming here, the chances that they’re going to be within 50 feet of that camera, pretty small.”

Tyson made no rejoinder. Maybe he was also trying to be polite. Or maybe he felt the comment mattered for little coming from a mere Pentagon bureaucrat whose only expertise is to identify weapons.

Embedded within this part of the conversation, Tyson asked, “do you have any insights or a sense of people’s urge to want to be visited by aliens?” This question preoccupies the minds of UFO skeptics. Since they do not accept that there is any evidence of UFOs, they wonder how it could be that people jump to the extreme conclusion about aliens. Sean Kirkpatrick’s answer is a litany of motivated reasoning: greed, fame, influence, mental illness, and where none of that applies, an irrational cult-like religious belief. Here is how Kosloski answered:

“I don’t have any brilliant insights. You know, I’m just a lowly engineer. I think that it’s an exciting prospect. It’s the possibility of the unknown. It’s the possibility that there could be something coming next that we don’t have access to now. You know, people want to look forward to something. Maybe that’s what it is.”

What is striking about this response is that it is neutral and devoid of judgement. It’s also not too far off the mark. As someone who has crossed the threshold from UFO disbelief to UFO acceptance, I can attest it is exciting, filled with possibility, and something to look forward to. I’m not sure that I would answer the question differently, except to add that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis fits the evidence better than any other explanation.

The Black Triangle

The most striking moment of the interview came when Kosloski told the story of the black triangle UAP.

Kosloski started by explaining AARO’s explanatory buckets. 40% of AARO’s UAP cases are conventional object that have been resolved and closed (“we understand what they are.”); 57% are unresolved and placed in active archive due to insufficient data (“we don’t have enough good data, scientific quality data to do a careful analysis. But they’re still open.”); 2% remain unexplained after careful analysis (“seem to be anomalous… continuing analysis… We’re never going to close it until we resolve it.”) Then he launched into the story of the black triangle.

Kosloski: “As an example of a couple of those cases that merit further analysis that are helping us refine our hypothesis, there are a few triangles that have been seen by local law enforcement. These are glowing triangles. In this case a very very black triangle, a triangular prism, so it looks like a pie slice hovering about the size of a Prius about 40 to 60 meters away. So, as the officer was driving up to investigate underneath a glowing orb, which I’ll get to those in a second… He slammed on his brakes, and this thing the size of a Prius, blacker than black, reared up 45° and then shot up into the sky faster than anything he’d ever seen. And as it was leaving his sight, it shot out red and blue fireworks, flares, so bright it lit up the inside of his vehicle. He didn’t see any propulsion, no wind, didn’t hear anything over the sound of his own vehicle.”

Tyson: “And you have more than one of these sightings?”

Kosloski: “We have a few others. One from local law enforcement, some from the [unintelligible] … No dash cam, unfortunately.”

Tyson: “Why didn’t the officer turn on their forward dash cam?”

Kosloski: “In this case, he slammed on his brakes. It happened almost instantaneously. And he was terrified. He didn’t know what was happening. ... In this case, I don’t think he was skeptical. He was terrified for his life. And so he was just getting back to a safe position. 100 miles an hour backwards while on the phone with his sergeant the whole time. …In that same region of the country, a couple law enforcement officers had seen glowing orbs. A few hundred feet above the ground, a few miles away.”

First some context. Kosloski first relayed part of this story during his first public Senate hearing as AARO director before the Senate Armed Services’ Emerging Threats subcommittee on November 19, 2024 (see Yearbook 2024, chapter 1.9). At that hearing, he described three UAP cases he considered “true anomalies.” Senator Gillibrand had been publicly pressuring AARO to come before the Senate not just with examples of resolved, conventional UAP but with unresolved, potentially anomalous UAP. So he did. As a historical matter, here is why this is a striking break in continuity with the past. All previous DoD/IC employees have conceded that around two to five percent of government-held UFO/UAP cases remain unresolved, but they hastened to add that this is only due to lack of data, and they never divulged any details about these cases (See Yearbook 2024, Table 1f). Kosloski is the first. That he would do so at the explicit behest of his Legislative Branch superiors is one thing. That he would do so unprompted, and in greater detail, on an internet show where it would not be well received (and it was not—see below) tells us something about how Kosloski views his job and AARO’s mission. One, Kosloski seems committed to AARO’s intended mission of isolating and understanding genuine anomalies (again, in contrast to Kirkpatrick who spent much of his time as AARO director and afterward explaining that AARO is only about domain awareness and foreign adversary technology). Two, Kosloski is personally fascinated by these unexplained cases, and thinks it is important to share them with the public.

His black triangle story contains all the elements that have long fascinated people about UFOs and pushed them toward the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (there are almost exactly similar stories—right down to the flashing lights illuminating the interior of the patrol car—in Blue Book files and other archives going back over a hundred years). Kosloski described common UFO morphologies of glowing orbs, black triangles, and extremely bright emissions. Without naming them as such, Kosloski ticked through examples of what Kosloski’s predecessors in AATIP/UAP Task Force codified as the five observables of UAP: apparent anti-gravity, instantaneous acceleration, and non-aerodynamic flight characteristics. Kosloski pointed out that there were multiple witnesses: the officer in the car, his sergeant on the phone with him during the event, and the two other officers who observed the orbs in the same area. Finally, the clincher, Kosloski described the witness’s state of mind during the sighting, the fact that he was afraid for his life and behaved accordingly. One aspect of witnesses testimony that serves as compelling evidence of UFOs’ anomalous nature is the description of an extreme human behavior that is a response to extreme stimuli. Something caused a trained police officer to throw his patrol car in reverse and flee for his life at one hundred miles an hour while shouting into his comm system. What was that something? Kosloski did not present an answer. But the fact that he is asking the question indicates he has an open mind. In the interview, he offered no indication that he doubted any part of the story, and gave no easy outs for what might explain it.

In other words, by telling this story Kosloski was patiently, dispassionately providing a counterargument to the skeptic’s strawman of a solitary individual seeing a spec of light in the sky, like the woman who saw Venus over Marty’s Deli.

There are still open questions about Kosloski’s reasoning and where this might be headed. He did not have to say these things. His job was to use a friendly venue to announce AARO’s new public reporting tool. Considering Congress’s past statements pressuring AARO to engage more with the public, the office probably has an annual quota of media appearances to fulfill. Its director could have checked off both requirements without saying anything remotely interesting. Kirkpatrick was good at this. Making UAP boring was a point of pride for him. So why is Kosloski not following that model? Is AARO becoming more open to the extreme possibilities that are suggested by its anomalous cases? How will AARO integrate this kind of evidence into its official work products? Will they release any official record of them rather than merely describing them in interviews? Or is he using these anecdotes as a kind of release valve for disclosure advocates, sharing juicy details about mysterious UFO stories but the only official conclusions the office releases are debunked UFO stories? What does Kosloski really think about witnesses like the officer who fled the black triangle? We don’t know yet.

Unfortunately, we know all too well what Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks about them.

Stigma? What stigma?

Kosloksi was sincere, open-minded, accepting while relaying the officer’s account of the black triangle. Tyson was incredulous, annoyed, amused.

When Tyson asked if the officer was able to get a picture and Kosloski said no, Tyson intoned with great sarcasm, “How unfortunate.” With all of the recording devices at a police officer’s finger tips, from chest cams to dash cams to cell phones, Tyson said, “I am so disappointed here.” Twice Tyson complained about the officer’s deficient reactivity, his lack of foresight to record video evidence, and twice Kosloski defended the officer. The patrol car came upon the triangle and it shot up into the sky “almost instantaneously,” and the officer was afraid for his life. Tyson was not buying this. He said, “I’m just saying he had enough time to think about it. Put on his brakes. If I see a triangle prism, I’m photographing it.”

Later in the interview, Tyson’s co-host asked Kosloski about UFO stigma, “Is that still an issue?” Tyson leapt to answer, launching the following exchange:

Tyson: “It shouldn’t be. It’s all in the news, mainstream media.”

Kosloski: “It shouldn’t be, but it is. We see it across different pockets. Some of our partners aren’t comfortable reporting, but it’s gotten a lot better.”

Tyson: “That’s stupid. No. No. You tell them Neil deGrasse Tyson said, you report. Okay. I’m just saying I’m watching people testify in Congress and they’re testifying that this is real, and well show us your evidence, and they’ll be like ‘No, ‘casue that could put me at risk.’ You’re already out there talking about it.

Cohost: “But it’s also the stigma of like people don’t want to report it because they think people are going to think that they’re nuts or crazy.”

Tyson: “You have congressional hearings on this! Okay. I got you [Kosloski] on this show. All right. If I thought it was crazy, you would have not walked through the front door.”

Tyson then shared another one of his stock debunked-UFO anecdotes that he “was told” by a source he did not disclose. This one was about a police officer in New Jersey who tracked a light darting back and forth across the sky, but the motion was due to parallax because he was driving on a curvy road.

Cohost: “Please tell me he’s not a cop anymore. This is what I mean in all seriousness. Going back to what we talked about getting data from—God bless people—like the average person, you’re going to have a hard job.”

Kosloski: “Yeah. A lot of analysis is required for these anomalies.”

Tyson: “That’s code for there are a lot of idiots out there.”

UFO stigma is not a complicated, abstruse concept. Tyson’s cohost, who is a comedian, defined it perfectly well. And yet, again and again we see this stance, particularly from members of the scientific community, where they affirm that the old stigma is dead, encourage people to report, yet continue to generate the selfsame stigma. The above exchange, like others we have seen (See Yearbook 2023, chapter 2.13 NASA’s Curious Solution for UFO Stigma), make it clear that these people do not understand what UFO stigma even is, its chief cause and impact.

Tyson and others who have expressed this bifurcated view of UFO stigma do seem to genuinely want everyone who sees a UFO to report it with as much hard evidence as possible. Their scientific training compels them to hoover up all available data. But at the same time they seem incapable of letting go of the social function that UFO stigma has always offered them: the ability to contain the idea that UFOs are real, and to police the people who spread that idea.

While Tyson uses recent media and congressional attention on UFOs to justify why someone should not feel UFO stigma, he is clearly disgruntled that media and congressional attention on UFOs has been allowed to happen. You get the sense that he would much prefer that there had been some sort of social shaming mechanism—i.e., a stigma—that would have made witnesses, news producers, and congresspeople think twice before spreading these claims. His reaction to Kosloski’s black triangle case and his own police officer anecdote is classic stigmatizing behavior. Tyson is arguing that if you are a police officer who sees something strange in the sky, you should feel no stigma in reporting it. But when you do, we’re going to laugh at you; we’re going to doubt your reasons for not having better evidence; we’re going to question your judgment and your courage; we’re going to suggest you should lose your job; we’re going to call you an idiot. But you should report anyway and take your licks in the name of science.

Again, this is a common stance of those UFO skeptics, reformed skeptics, and scientists who are trying to navigate the current climate where the U.S. Congress has directed government agencies to put an end to UFO stigma. It is not that they are too stupid to understand the contradiction in their position. It just indicates they still do not take this subject seriously at all. Fortunately, Jon Kosloski does.