After many futile hours of shoveling dirt under the scorching Australian sun, Sean Doody began to think that he had made an embarrassing mistake and was—quite literally—digging himself into a hole.  Doody is a herpetologist from the University of South Florida who has spent years studying Australia’s yellow-spotted goanna—a predatory monitor lizard with long claws, a whiplike tail, and a sinuous, muscular body that can reach five feet in length.

“Mr. Higginson,” an unpublished, reclusive 31-year-old poet wrote to an Atlantic contributor—a man she had never met—in 1862. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.” The letter, with its quaint phrases and handwriting that looked almost like bird tracks, was unsigned, and accompanied by a card nestled under a smaller envelope.

Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two men whose friendship of convenience—Mitchell served as an unofficial guide when Judo moved to his hometown, and vice versa—grew more intimate as they became embedded in each other’s lives.

Every Fast and Furious movie strains credulity, but F9 shatters it so completely, even the production’s own characters have noticed. In the ninth main installment of one of Universal’s most durable film franchises, Dominic Toretto (played by Vin Diesel) and his trusty band of drag-racing ex-cons are so indestructible that they ride out bullets, land mines, and the void of outer space. (I repeat: Outer. Space.

UFOs can be fun. See: the official sign on the road near Area 51, which dubs it the Extraterrestrial Highway. UFOs can be weird. See: E.T. phoning home with a MacGyvered communication device. But UFOs are also a national-security story, a government-contracting story, a conspiracy-culture story, and a technoscientific story. They are a human story.