Helene Cooper

Not today, but right around this time in October and Halloween.

And a couple months later, that famous New York Times article broke by Leslie Keen, Helene Cooper, and Ralph Blumenthal saying, UFOs, glowing orbs, the black budget and the pentagons.

I forget the title, but it was that New York Times article that just was a watershed moment for ufology and not just ufology, but the unknown as well, because it just came through.

flooding back into the zeitgeist.

But beyond that, I th- I think there has been a change, and I can't figure out if it's a push-pull or a pull-push, or if there's a carrot stick component to it, if we're being led in a direction or pushed in a direction, if disclosure is something that we're working toward or we're being primed for, if that makes any sense.

Um, but, but as far as like h- why it's sort of exploding in more recent times, again, I do think a lot of it can be traced back to Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean, and Ralph Blumenthal's 2017 front page, uh, New York Times article called like Black Money and something, something.

I don't remember exactly what it was.

But it exposed this, this cover-up on kind of whistleblowers that, um, along, on the, um, uh, help put off from semi van, sort of brought them into the light and what they had been working on.

It's an interview recorded and initially broadcast back in 2009.

And I'm so honored to be speaking with Helene Cooper, White House correspondent for The New York Times, who spent a dozen years as a reporter and foreign correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

She was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and, uh, had an extraordinary experience there, which she shares in a gripping memoir called The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood.

And we talk with Helene Cooper about, uh, her amazing story and this remarkable memoir for the next few minutes.

The book is published by Simon & Schuster, now available in paperback.

Helene Cooper, we welcome you to The Morning Show.

Thanks so much.

much.I knew very little about the nation of Liberia, and I must confess to having not ever thought about where that beautiful name comes from.

And Project Meridian, an effort to study the future of warfare, led by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Helene Cooper and John Ismay report for The New York Times.

New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, D, yesterday said he received his security clearance, which allows him to participate in classified briefings about security threats and other emergencies impacting New York City.

Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for Mamdani, said the Trump administration provided the clearance at some point this week.

So I was really unable to speak about it until I got out of the government.

And we, of course, had the 2017 New York Times article that Leslie Kane and Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal broke.

on the government's UFO program, basically, as we all know.

And then I just started working with Avi Loeb on his Galileo project and just sort of built from there about me speaking out and doing research like you, interviewing people and gathering information.