San Francisco Mensa Friends

Flying for the CIA's Air America, Pablo Escobar, and Jimmy Hoffa

In 1964, Captain Neil Graham Hansen embarked on a journey that would become the adventure of a lifetime. He hired on as a pilot for Air America — the CIA’s airline that operated during the Vietnam era and the “Secret War” in Laos and Cambodia — officially neutral countries, but the scene of countless U.S. covert operations. Even though he had already been a pilot for more than half his life, had worked as now-disappeared Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa’s private pilot, and later ran drugs for the Colombian cartels, flying for the CIA’s secret air service was the pinnacle of Hansen’s career — a dream come true that eventually turned his life into a nightmare.

Air America’s operations were unknown. Its schedules were irregular. Its pilots were shadow people, whose personnel, Hansen says, “cannot be filed neatly under anything resembling normal sanity.” It was the world of spooks, covert air ops and adventure!

Captain Hansen will take us directly into the cockpit, onto dirt mountaintop landing strips and into his most harrowing experiences: being shot down in Laos, flying the last plane out of Cambodia just hours before it fell to the Khmer Rouge and began a holocaust that would ultimately take the lives of 1.7 million people. We’ll accompany him down the road of self-destruction and beside him as he regains a foothold on the path to integrity.

For more information, see the Air America Historical Social Club’s Facebook page.

Captain Neil Hansen received a commercial pilot's license in high school before he even had a driver's license. He spent more than a decade in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era as a captain for Air America, accumulating more than 29,000 hours of flight time, 9,000 hours in a combat zone. He served as an advisor to the director of the 1990 movie “Air America” starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. Gibson’s character in the movie was patterned after Hansen’s “antics” reported in the Christopher Robbins book of the same name. Hansen’s book "FLIGHT: An Air America Pilot's Story of Adventure, Descent and Redemption" was published by History Publishing Company. His writing has also appeared in various other publications, and he has been a frequent guest on the interview and speaker circuit. He makes his home in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

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Unraveling Distant Worlds From Cotton Candy Planets to Ocean Worlds and the Search for Life Among the Planets

Dr. Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb

The discovery of exoplanets has revealed a cosmos teeming with strange and diverse worlds — some scorched by their stars, others light as cotton candy, shrouded in thick atmospheres, and a few that might resemble Earth. From molten lava planets to giant super-puffs and water-rich mini-Neptunes, exoplanets defy expectations at every turn.

Join us for a deep dive into the cutting-edge science of exoplanet exploration. How do we detect their atmospheres? Could they support life? And do they offer clues about Earth’s own formation? With new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and upcoming telescopes, we are beginning to piece together the story of planetary evolution — unlocking the chemistry of these distant worlds and rethinking the very definition of habitability.

Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb is an astrophysicist specializing in exoplanet characterization and atmospheric studies. Her research explores the diversity of distant worlds, from super-puffs—enigmatic low-density planets—to water-rich sub-Neptunes and temperate exo-Earths that challenge our understanding of planetary habitability. She has worked with cutting-edge space telescopes like JWST, TESS, and HST. Passionate about science communication, she founded an NPO, InitiaSciences, to open the doors of scientific research labs to high school students. Caroline is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, contributing to the next generation of exoplanet discoveries. She received her PhD in Physics (Astrophysics subject) from the University of Montreal, Canada.

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