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"Massive Strike" In Belgorod Leaves 4 Hurt & Alleged Drone Strike Ignites Fire At Russian Oil Refinery; Study: 54% Of Teachers Think Being Armed Would Make Schools Less Safe; Pentagon: U.S. Tracking 800+ Potential UFO Cases. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired May 31, 2023 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[13:33:53]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: After more than a year of waging war in Ukraine, Russians are now experiencing some of the violence on their own soil.

In Belgorod, across the border from Ukraine, the region's governor said at least four people were injured after what they're describing as a" massive strike."

That follows a possible drone attack overnight on a Russian oil refinery. You see the pictures there. Local officials say a fire put out quickly and there were no casualties.

Still, the scope and frequency drawing attention.

CNN's Fred Pleitgen is in Kyiv.

Fred, we've seen a series of these attacks on both Russian-held territory in Ukraine but also crucially the territory of Russia. What are Ukrainian officials saying about this or are they keeping deliberately coy?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: First, I would say they are keeping deliberately coy but they are making suggestions that they might possibly have a certain role in all of this.

It was interesting that, early today, Jim, an advisor to Ukraine's presidency came out and said, look, we're not going to say we're behind all of this.

However, one of the things he did say is attacks like these are going to increase, that the war is increasingly going to come Russians, and going to come especially to those border areas in Russia.

[13:35:05]

You had, of course, that drone attack in Moscow, which the Ukrainians said they had no direct involvement in. Obviously, that's a coy statement in itself. But if you look at the Belgorod region, the one that you were talking

about, I think that is something that is really key when we look at that.

Because from there, we've been hearing about cross-border attacks for the past couple of weeks. Last week, you had that raid by anti-Putin Russian fighters, that went across the border there in Belgorod.

Today, you have the shelling, which the governor there said he's extremely concerned about. And I was looking at the area where that is. That's in a village which is right by the border. It's a small little village.

But it is very close to the actual town of Belgorod, which, of course, we know, Jim, is a major logistic hub not just for the Russian military itself but also for their invasion of Ukraine.

Certainly, this is having an unnerving effect on the Russian military and very much also on the people who live down there -- Jim?

SCIUTTO: Listen, I remember you standing on that border in Belgorod in the very first stages of this war watching those Russian tanks roll in.

Fred Pleitgen, in the capital of Kyiv, thanks so much.

Boris?

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Still ahead, new restrictions on transgender athletes in Alabama.

Plus, would arming teachers make kids safer? We'll hear directly from educators ahead on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

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[13:40:51]

SANCHEZ: You're watching CNN NEWS CENTRAL. Here's a look at some of the other headlines we've been following this hour.

Alabama's governor has just signed legislation banning transgender women from playing on female college sports teams. This follows other new rules considering trans athletes, which include locker room restrictions and the use of puberty blockers for minors.

A transgender rights group says the new ban is part of a, quote, "systemic attack" against LGBTQ people.

Plus, a widely used tool for submitting college applications is adopting a new feature. Colleges will be able to hide race and ethnicity on applications submitted through the common app.

This move is designed to make it easier for schools to adjust to any forthcoming legal changes as the Supreme Court nears a decision on affirmative action. In Florida, hundreds turning out for a school board meeting concerning

the fifth-grade teacher under investigation for showing a Disney movie featuring a gay character in her classroom.

Jenna Barbee gave a passionate plea in her own defense. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JENNA BARBEE, TEACHER: The system is broken. The earth is wailing. Let the students read and learn. Let the teachers teach. Everyone deserves to be represented. And that's what we need to preach.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Numerous parents, teachers and students attended the meeting voicing their opinions.

Brianna?

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: There have been 22 shootings in K-through-12 schools so far this year. So often after these shootings, this is the rallying cry that you hear from Republicans.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I want to arm teachers. I want to have secure schools.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE (R-KY): In those states and school districts where that's happened, where they have allowed qualified teachers and staff to carry, there hasn't been a single mass shooting in one of those schools.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES & PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: For about $12 million, we could fund armed security guards at the entrance of every school in America and also arm every willing teacher.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: But a new report shows more than half of the nation's teachers think that arming themselves would actually make students less safe. Still, nearly one in five teachers say they would carry a firearm at school if it was permitted.

Jennifer Mascia is a writer at "The Trace," which is a news organization dedication to covering gun violence.

Jennifer, thank you so much for being with us to talk about this.

Obviously, it's an incredibly controversial idea. It is actually in effect in some places.

Tell us what it looks like where they're doing this in schools. Are these teachers trained? How much are they trained? Are they actually carrying these weapons on their person? Are they locked up? Tell us how they're doing it.

JENNIFER MASCIA, WRITER, "THE TRACE": So 28 states have laws that permit staffers or designated school officials to have access to guns. And it really depends. State law can authorize this. But really it depends on district-by-district policies.

So the study's authors note that we need to look at this more because, to break down every district's policy, you may have 35 different practices.

So what happens, we actually, my colleagues at "The Trace" about five years ago, we looked at a middle school in western Ohio. And there were gun safes with handguns, nondescript black safes in undisclosed locations around the school. And only designated staffers knew exactly where they were.

So you have a situation where, if a shooting is isolated to a certain part of the school, is it possible for staffers to reach those guns in time?

Even when there are armed guards on school campuses, there's still casualties. Even law enforcement has a very hard time intercepting these shooters before they can kill.

KEILAR: So talk about the potential for accidents, right? What accidents are most likely to occur? What is the potential there?

MASCIA: So over the last five years, there have been at least 100 instances where teachers or armed guards have left guns in bathrooms or classrooms for children to find.

[13:45:01]

Sometimes during demonstrations, there have been incidences where students have grabbed officers' guns off of their holsters.

When you have guns accessible and visible, they tend to be more accessible and visible to students. And kids are into everything.

Even when armed guards are mishandling guns and there have been accidental discharges, how much better will teachers fare?

And in several states, training requirements are being relaxed. In Ohio, they required 700 hours of training for a teacher to be armed. A bill last year took that down to 24 hours.

We have a situation where more training would probably reduce those incidents but the trend is in the opposite direction.

KEILAR: We're also talking, especially when we're talking about mass shootings, which gets so much attention, we're talking in this case about handguns mostly, right?

Most school shooters are using A.R.-15-style semiautomatic rifles. In this case, considering that these school shooters usually seem to want to die, right, that seems to be the ending for so many of them. Not all of the teachers in this case would be armed. The ones who are

would be armed with lesser weapons. Would this really be a deterrent in those situations or does there need to be more research?

MASCIA: A handgun is really no match for an A.R.-15. What you said is correct, a lot of these shooters pick these very deadly weapons because they want to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.

So if somebody breaches a campus with an A.R.-15, even when there's an armed guard there, they're likely going to -- because of the power of that weaponry -- kill people before a teacher could access a safe and whip out a handgun.

Even if the handgun was accessible in a desk or in some kind of a biometric safe that students couldn't reach, that teacher is likely to be shot or killed before they can intervene. It's very tricky.

Again, this is something that, as we've seen law enforcement, has an issue with.

KEILAR: And we certainly do. We certainly do, even when they are heavily armed.

Jennifer Mascia, thank you very much for that.

Jim?

SCIUTTO: So what exactly is out there? And could it be stranger than science fiction? What NASA is finding as it studies UFOs. That's just ahead.

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[13:52:08]

SCIUTTO: Today, a Pentagon official said that the U.S. is tracking more than 800 of what they refer to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs.

Now to be clear, they're not saying that most or even any of them are E.T.s but they are working on this and trying to find ways to create a road map for how they are analyzed going forward.

As of now, the quality of the reports they are looking at is really wide ranging, from military aircraft sightings to citizen cell phone video.

This is one of them from a P-3 military aircraft. This in the western U.S. See those three dots? It appears, it turned out to be just an aircraft.

Here's another example of the kinds of reports that NASA gets almost daily.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEAN KIRKPATRICK, DIRECTOR, ALL-DOMAIN ANOMALY RESOLUTION OFFICE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: This is an example of one that I showed at the hearing recently. This is a spherical orb, metallic, in the Middle East, 2022 by an M.Q.-9.

We'll come back to the sensor question that David raised here in a moment.

This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of. We see these all over the world. And we see these in -- making very interesting apparent maneuvers.

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SCIUTTO: He's referring to an M.Q.-9 drone there.

Joining me now Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. He's also the principal investigator of NASA's first ever grant to look for signatures of advanced life on distant worlds.

Good to have you, Professor.

ADAM FRANK, ASTROPHYSICS PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER: Pleasure to be here.

SCIUTTO: First, let's start with the big picture question. When you look at these sightings, do you see anything that is credible evidence that some, not most of them, but perhaps some of them could be something extraterrestrial?

FRANK: The answer is no.

You know, my job as a scientist is going to be looking for life on other worlds and there's nothing that even comes close to the standards of evidence that we would need for ourselves to be able to claim that we found evidence for life on another world.

So right now, the data is just nowhere near what we need.

SCIUTTO: OK. So let's look, for instance, in that video, that testimony that was just played as they were showing video from a drone in the Middle East of an orb.

This is a kind of thing that we've seen more than once, often picked up by the sensitive instruments, as we're showing here on aircraft. And they tend to have these common qualities, kind of tick-tack shaped, right? You hear that description.

When you see examples like that, do you think it's an anomaly in the sensors or it could be, I don't know, Chinese-Russian new technology?

[13:54:57]

FRANK: Yes. There's a number of things that it could be. Balloons that float around. As we've seen, there's an amazing number of sightings that come down to being balloons in the air.

So really, in order to do science with these things, you need to know exactly what the instrument is. You need to know how the instrument was last serviced. You need to know about the software that was used in it.

The same kind of things we're going to need to do, if we ever get to the point of claiming we see life on other worlds, you got to be able to know exactly and explicitly how the data was collected, what instruments were used.

And only then can you actually go on and try to infer anything from the data.

SCIUTTO: Let me ask you this, then, because the Pentagon has dipped its toe, shall we say, into this space a number of times in recent years. And any time they do, it creates some big headlines. People are saying, wait a second, they're saying these could be UFOs, this could be real stuff.

Does the Pentagon have an angle in this? Are they trying to tamp down speculation or leave it open?

FRANK: No, I think what's happened now, when you look at the history of UFO reports in the government, clearly during the Cold War, the military had an agenda, you know, because we were dealing with the Russians and disinformation was great.

I think now what's happened is there's been a recognition that people are seeing these things. There may be defense-related issues here. There may be just air-traffic-safety-related things here.

And I think now, finally, I'm all for this, a true, open scientific investigation of what's happening. And then from there, we'll be in a position to judge whether there's anything that is more than terrestrial.

I don't think that's going to be the case but that's what we're after.

SCIUTTO: Understood. So when you find it, please let us know.

Professor Adam Frank, good to have you on.

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SCIUTTO: I'm sure it's not the last time we talk about it.

Professor, thanks so much.

Boris?

SANCHEZ: Still ahead, the race to get the votes is on. The House scrambling to pass a debt ceiling bill as the clock ticks ever closer to a potential default. We're going to take you there in just moments.

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