In fairness, if someone told me they saw a flying object with the letters "UFO" written on it, I'd also laugh derisively

I think we should all take a moment and acknowledge the costume designer who made a bird mascot's facial expression exude pure unfiltered derision. Art. What a time to be alive.

"You're thinking of religion" ok this one cracked me up

This is one of those John oliver episodes where I just have to stop to appreciate how well this show is written and made. Absolute gold, god damn :DDDD

6:34 the screams after “deep mouths” are killing me especially with how delighted John looks at them

" my snake looks like that but this is actually a different snake. Someone come get your snake" was a truly hilarious end to that bit

I am a retired cop. I have answered the phone inside a police station in the middle of the night and had somebody tell me they saw a UFO. My response was to ask if the UFO had committed a crime or if there was any obvious threat to public safety. The answer was invariably “no” which removed the incident from my area of responsibility. I literally had no way to take a report for a UFO sighting if I wanted to do so. That makes sense because police should not be wasting scarce resources dealing with non-police matters. It does leave me wondering how difficult it must be for somebody who sees a UFO to find a government employee who is willing to take them seriously.

The Boeing Joke was great! 😅

Getting vaporized wouldn’t be fun, but having it happen from an Alien labeled “Alien” and Death Ray labeled “Death Ray” would be one of the most hilarious ways to go ever

The "I know where my snake is" bit was such good comedic acting, those facial expressions were perfect. All around amazing segment, you can tell when the writers enjoy writing about things that are a little more lighthearted

20:38 It kind of blew my mind when I saw this was the pilot who made that video. Years ago PBS did a series on life aboard a Navy aircraft carrier. They filmed inside the USS Nimitz, and that pilot was in the show. He was still stationed on the Nimitz when he used his fighter jets targeting system to lock on and record what people call the Tic Tac, the UFO, in the Pacific somewhere off the coast of Mexico. I immediately recognized him from that show on PBS. He’s a real Navy pilot.

"That John C. Reilly character does make a good point" 🤣

Having John Oliver talk about something other than the depressing state of the world is a breath of much needed fresh air 😢

I now want the words "Believe, shmelieve, what the fuck is that?" on a canvas hanging in my living room. The words are a conversation starter.

I never thought I would see such a fair look at UFOs from John Oliver. Really good work!

It is fantastic to see John Oliver talk about this phenomenon! I was a Navy submariner, and I can't talk about the things I saw underwater, but I can talk about what I saw before I joined the Navy. I was crew on the tallship Argus out of Newport Beach CA. One cruise I was standing watch, about 0200 hours I saw a large object pass below the keel amidships while we were anchored in Cat Harbor, Catalina Island. We had three guys on watch, one on the bow, one amidships, and one on the stern. Cat Harbor is long and narrow, we had to make sure we weren't dragging anchor. This thing was big, maybe 30 feet wide. I saw a green glow from below the boat and looked down over the gunwhale. Saw something very wide and glowing green passing below the boat amidships. I called out to the other watchmen and the fellow from the bow came down to join me. This thing was huge, we thought it was a whale, and maybe it was glowing green from disturbing the plankton in the water. We decided to explain it that way and note it in our logs, but I don't really believe that - it was too big, and too bright green. The brightest green I have seen the ocean is when waves are breaking in plankton rich waters, this was brighter than that. I had no other frame of reference at the time, but now after hearing reports of USOs I think it may have been that. Super weird.

I'm glad John Oliver points out at the beginning the fact that the term "UFO" or "UAP" doesn't mean "extraterrestrial", it means we don't know what it is. It doesn't have to be from space for it to be potentially dangerous, and I'm happy that the government if finally starting to try and remove the stigma of reporting this stuff from our service men and women.

Nothing like waking up on Thursday and watching my favorite Brit talk about UFOs.

My grandfather was an intelligence officer for the air force during Korea. He once got called-in to debreif a group of pilots that had come back early from some routine flight. He said these were all pilots who'd seen airal combat - they aren't the type to be easily spooked. He talked to each one individually and they were all visibly shaken and all described the same experience of bright metallic objects whizzing around their fighter jets doing sharp turns and reversing mid-flight. no idea if it's aliens, but it's clearly something(s). Also this was early 50s so it can't be the "experimental aircraft" line - if anyone on earth had the tech to make something reverse mid-air and dance around a fighter jet 70 years ago we'd know about it by now.

In 1979 my mother and I were returning to Pensacola from a Florida Little Majors all-star game(Florida’s version of Little League Baseball) in Destin. We were turned back due to a natural gas leak on Hwy 98 and had to reroute north through Crestview, Fl to I-10. While driving westward we saw a blue-green light drop in the distance in front of us, it stopped above the treetops moved slowly left about a third of the windshield then right an equal distance and speed, then it shot up fast, super-fast out of sight diagonally toward the southwest. My Mom asked “Did you see that?” I replied “Yes.” We didn’t talk the rest of the way home. We never spoke of it. Granted we drove straight through Eglin Air Force Base Reserve, and I always figured the lights were from something getting tested there. 🛸

Come on, John. We can't even pass your Earth Geography exams, what prayer did we have identifying Venus?🤣

I wish John/HBO would air the whole show. John's point about refusing to meet bigots "in the middle" in the name of false bipartisanship deserves to be heard far and wide.

I’m a commercial pilot, and I fly around Mt.Rainer often. If you google “standing lenticular clouds” those are characteristically known for having a “flying saucer-like” appearance, and most often form around mountainous areas. I would bet that those get mistaken for UFO’s quite often, and I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned in this video.

Check out Jean-Pierre Petit PhD interview in Prague. He's a French plasma physicist that led a team of researchers to test plasma engines in supersonic wind tunnels. It turns out that plasma heating and magnetic flow control around a plane wing, sphere, cylinder or disc shaped airfoils can totally eliminate the sonic boom produced at multiple times the speed of sound. The designs look uncannily like the tic tac and flying saucers.

"1) Hypothesis 2) Horsewhip everybody who disagrees with you 3) Conclusion... ... you're thinking of ☝ *RELIGION* " I am LMAO😂😂😂

"I'm Mike Wallace, and this cigarette is Parliament." Love it

Did they get some new additions to the writing staff? The jokes on this segment were even more hilarious than they usually are, and all had a slightly different style than the typical ones. They all had a perfect set-up, perfect execution, and a perfect punchline.

I saw a ufo once and tried like hell to figure out an explanation for it. All I got from a high-clearance aerospace engineer was that we don't have the technology to create anything that moves like the craft I saw. It didn't seem to conform to physics as we know it. It shook me up and then thrilled me to know we have the chance to learn a great deal more about the universe if everyone, governments included, honestly shared their experiences.

15:50 that mascot bit was hilarious and the actor's physical comedy was impeccable

god, the art of making a mascot suit feel alive and full of character is so cool to me. you could just FEEL every emotion oozing out of that guy. they were only on screen for less than a minute, but they milked every second of it tbh, good for them

Eating cereal at 2 am, I nearly spit out my milk when he said "That John C Reilly character 😂😂😂

Glad to see this topic covered here. We don't know anything for sure, except for the fact that people are having these experiences. Deserves attention, and very open minds.

My Astronomy minor has never come in more handy than actually knowing that those two satellites were not Venus before his reveal.

Once you identify a UFO, it becomes an FO. Unless it lands, then it's just an O.

That Boeing joke was gold

I was in the military 14 years, and the lights in Arizona were not signal flares. I've done night retrieval, and those were not flares.

As an astrophysicist, for once I actually passed John's "that's not actually ____" test! XD Also, whenever someone asks me about UFOs, my go-to line is "Anything is a UFO if you're bad enough at identifying things."

One of my favourite John Oliver episodes!

see, *this* is the kind of coverage we need about UFOs. not conspiracy theories about a massive government coverup, nor people laughing at the prospect of UFOs; a genuine consideration and evaluation of what we do and don't know.

"you're thinking of religion" is such a hard bar. Rappers wish they could

Herpetologist here, loved the snake bit! Don't feel bad, colubrids are known escape artists and this has happened to the best of us. Pro tip, if you house your snake in an appropriate sized terrarium (preferably 4x2x2 ft) and used the appropriate locks, you'd drastically reduce the chance of your snake escaping. 😉🐍

Brilliant writer’s on John Oliver show. This was outstanding. Bravo.

Brilliant, thank you team for taking this approach to the UAP topic! I've been following it on and off since Danish national broadcaster DR started a podcast about it about four years ago. Getting similarly sober information in English, however, has been very difficult, with the vast majority, as you note, coming from those two camps. Although that DR podcast is inspired by these, they do things differently in ways that make the end results much more interesting and dare I say reliable.

The "That's not X, that's Y! This is X! Actually its not X, its Z!" Will never get old! I missed it so much!

6:36 The sheer shock and delight of this woman at the pelican joke has absolutely made my morning

Loved watching him trying not to break after the pelican joke and that one lady’s laugh 😂

What gets my attention is the reports from military pilots. Like a " ball of light" isn't the same as Navy pilots with thousands of flight hours in the most advance piece of technology on this earth and with advance understanding of physics and Aeronautics as well as studying every other known aircraft on this planet going "wtf is that?" When the world's most experienced pilots say "that flying objects aren't supposed to fly like that." That's when shit gets interesting.

For anyone wondering, I'm very sure the snake is a type of kingsnake. It's specifically a California kingsnake and is not venomous and will not hurt anyone.

I was taken aback when I saw John Chancellor starting to smile at 2:46 while relating the description of the UFO. When he broke into laughter, I could hardly believe my eyes. That was the era of the straight-as-a-ruler news anchor. It was a *BIG* deal when Walter Cronkite got emotional during the first moon landing.

Agreed we need boring. Saw one 14 years ago. The thing took off over the horizon at warp speed

Thank you for covering this

FYI, Jimmy Carter graduated from the US Naval Academy, and served in the US Navy as a naval officer.

Nothing like opening KZfaq on a thursday evening and watching a British accountant talk about UFOs and snakes..

Back in the 60s, scientist were doing test in the stratosphere with bombs of material which would reflect the sunlight. They would study how the material would move over time. When I was a teenager I saw one. It first looked like a ball low in the horizon. I called my parents out to see it. It eventually faded as the material dispersed. It would have been a mystery to me to this day if my mother hadn't seen an article in the newspaper a few days later about this test being done over New Jersey. Obviously other people had seen it. At that time I was living near Calais, Maine. One of these test could have been what Jimmy Carter had seen.

I love that snake bit tbh. I wanna know how they plopped it down in front of the desk, did someone scoot in off camera? Is there a snake-dispensing button? 🤣

The Boeing joke was perfection.👌🏻

I have a lot of UFOs (Un-Finished Objects) in my sewing trunk right now...

When my mom and I were in the Rural areas of the town I grew up in, so I was a child, we seen this craft with a lot of bright lights on it, come down from the sky. We didn’t see it in the sky, it just appeared while flying about 150 ft off the ground when we seen it, then we watched as it landed behind a group of trees. We drove over to the trees and got out of our car to go see if anyone needed help. We really thought it was a farmers craft he had built for flying over his livestock. When we got behind the trees, nothing was there! And we had seen the light of the craft shining through the trees. All we could think was it was an UFO. This was in the early 70’s and I would have been around 8-10 years old.

So I was in the neighborhood when a ton of people ran out and saw light triangles blinking and spinning at times. Look at Wesley Chapel UFO and I can say that is a real look at what we all saw. This is in Wesley Chapel Florida.

I'd forgotten that John Oliver is actually pretty funny when he's not covering the most depressive topics known to man, stay king ✊️

I was once travelling through the countryside of my country (Brazil), when we passed in front of a residential complex named: "Human Village". My sister and I still crack up about that years later. It is the most weirdly suspicious sign I've ever seen.

Really surprised there was no mention of the David Grusch hearing since it was only 9 months ago.

How am I just now finding this channel??😂 I love it

Jimmy Carter is a god damn national treasure

The cackle at "deep mouths" and the expression of processing that was glorious.

TBF, testing in the high atmosphere for Soviet nuke tests was kinda important in 1947. Building a 600' balloon to carry the instruments high enough was a major tech feat: don't be hatin'. You left my favorite detail out, btw: one part of the Roswell legend is how the package was wrapped in an alien language. Turned out to be Yiddish -- that part of the instruments was packaged with old NYC newspapers.

that "Marry Kill F**k... deep MOUTHS" joke mash meh up and the Mike Wallace footage n joke was the cherry 😂#Boeing joke was awesome 🤣🙌 this was hilarious, just what i needed 😁

To add to the bit about "Viking helmets didn't actually have horns", the mistake came from the fact that there were ancient Celtic helmets that *did* have horns, and they were found at so many sites of Viking battles that archaeologists just assumed that the Vikings wore them - it turns out, the mistake came from the fact that these ancient Celtic horned-helmet-wearers were simply fighting the Vikings so often that the site of any battle where the Vikings fought was liable to have these horned helmets there.

7:28 I have to salute john oliver for gaining enough maturity in order to resist making jokes about Mr « Keyhoe »’s name

I like how the guy describing how fast that object was going, was trying so hard not to say motion of the ocean.

I had multiple UFO sightings in my life. Saw a black triangle at age 6 in the Nevada desert humming and rotating and zipping away from jets when my mom and I went camping. Saw two orange orbs, foo fighters, in Missouri at 13 bouncing and swirling in circles on the sky over the woods for half an hour and blinking out. And at 21 years old saw 50 craft with my gf and a bunch of others at her apartment(she always laughed at me about liking UFO stuff til then). We saw two flying saucers, two orbs, about 40 triangles, a diamond, and I filmed a red cigar that I didn't see but only showed up on camera. Up until my last sighting in 2015, on Saint Patty's day(we were both sober and hadn't drank anything yet), 99% of me believed it was humans. After that, seeing all those types of craft in one place over an hour and a half, I believe we are being visited and observed. I'm at least glad that others are seeing military videos are now believing without having seen one themselves. I always kept quiet because people would make jokes. I'm sure there will be another Phoenix Lights type event. And now there's too many cameras(phones) and it won't be easy to cover up if a mile wide UFO flies over a city in broad daylight. Mark my words, next ten years something will happen.

How does an alien get a haircut? Eclipse it.

As someone who reads up on space I'm glad I finally knew his "this is it- no it isn't" joke

This is honestly the first time I have ever found John Oliver funny. Bravo on that first.

So it was going slower than they thought. Still curious why a volleyball shaped object is flying over the surface of the ocean with no discernible propulsion system. It either comes from far far away, or there is more in the depths of the ocean and near the center of the earth than we realize.

The Boeing joke was just perfect 👌🏻

The Boeing joke was on point. 😅

Thank you for putting this up. The Zeta Reticulans and the Pleidians also thank you.

Absolutely brilliant

I quietly whispered “yeah, Johnny boy’s back!” to myself at work and now I don’t know what to feel.

It's real nice of John to keep working his staff's fursuits into the shows budget

I had to replay the jokes following the pelican comment bc the visual totally distracted my brain and I never heard a word he said. Mr Oliver, you are brilliant, sir!

An example of the parallax effect can be observed when viewing objects while moving. If you are traveling in a car, the objects closer to you seem to pass by quickly, while objects in the distance appear to move slower. I don't think that explains it.

As someone who has a snake, i'm just really happy we got to see the cute little snake at the end :)

Aliens created Jack the Human but it was too on the nose so that’s how we got Hugh Jackman 😄

My dad used to be a cop and he said the drunk driver who drove into a pole, said that there was an invisible UFO lol

The AATIP footage is so fascinating. I grew up near a military base so heard and saw weird things all the time. UFOs were regular and we usually assumed they were just experimental aircraft or some scientific data collection thing. Still little eerie on occasion.

**Top secret aircraft accidentally leaves landing lights on** AZ governor: “I promise a full and open investigation.” DARPA: “You sure about that?”

Whatever was in the water of the writers room over there…this episode felt wildly fresh. I love this show. Have never not liked an episode, and yet multiple times this episode I felt like we were somehow seeing new life in something that has never felt anything less than pure excellence. And John’s delivery was funny AF on the random bits like the snake and the bird. Total fire.

what I like about here is the buildings themselves, and the way the city is a being of beings all on its own. When it's all lit up in the dark it's really pretty.

He’s so good at emphatically reading a teleprompter

"Someone please come get your snake" is wild as last words

😮❤ Today is my first day watching your video sir I don't know who you are but I learn who you are I love you thank you for your videos❤

I was taking pictures of a UAP moving quickly in a back and forth motion, blinking rapidly at night time; I set my camera to time exposure on a tripod and the UFO light painted a picture of a chicken along with other glyph like objects. ( I posed it to my channel no joke) I have regular encounters and documenting them is not hard - when I was just a kid, they visited regularly, no idea what they do but its gotten easier to tolerate them and not be deathly afraid. They are living beings and even though we differ tremendously in how we experience life and look; we are so different yet mentally - very much the same. I'm glad to be a part in their plan for earth, whatever that may be.

What it took for this team to put all this together and John Oliver to gracefully portray it is astonishing. Always a pleasure watching!

Happy tenth anniversary Last Week Tonight!🥫

I lived in Roswell for a year and a half and it was horrible, I truly related to the "come and get me" guy.

whether were alone or not in the vast universe, equally effin scary

This is probably the least depressing episode we've had in years

Watching this while getting ready for work is making me wanna call out and binge x-files