NASA Whistleblower: “We Systematically Suppress UFO Data!”

27:45My colleague, Matthew Shadalgas, has been working on studying debris from purported crashes. Really? Yeah, he has a new technique for detecting isotopes using neutron activation. So he's developed this technique, and he's been working on this furiously for the last couple months. Neutron activations, how is that different than mass spec? Mass spec, basically you, typically you dissolve the material in nitric acid and then you spray it into some electric plates that basically electrify it, ionize it. And then you shoot it into a magnetic field, that constant magnetic field, the thing will move in a circle.

28:29So, and the radius of the circle depends on the mass. So then it hits a screen depending on where the mass is, changes where it hits the screen. So you can measure the mass of the isotopes inside that spray. And to back up for the audience, isotope differences are neutron differences in various elements. Right. And if you were to find some isotope ratios in a material that don't occur naturally on Earth and don't pattern match to asteroids, that would be this really exciting possible smoking gun that the thing is actually a UFO. Right. Exactly. Well said. Thank you. Summarize that very nicely.

29:04Yeah, that's exactly it. And so Matthew's technique is different. He basically irradiates the material with neutrons, with a neutron source, and basically creates heavier isotopes with these extra neutrons. and then he watches them decay back into the states that they were in before. So he can tell what the isotopes he created were and then he can infer what they were originally from that. And it's non-destructive because they decay back to where they were pretty quickly and you're not doing it to most of the material. You're only, you know, rating thousands of these atoms rather than as compared to Avogadro's number for the whole cycle, right?

29:56So amazing. I mean, Gary Nolan is also doing this at Stanford. He's using mass spec. He uses mass spec, right. So it's cool to see that there's, you know, there are updates even on his work as far as this material analysis. The UFO Legacy Program has to be keeping tabs on what you guys are doing. That would be my guess, right? Right, right, right. Like they, you'd want some sort of like civilian, like the smartest, like. Yeah, no, I know there's, there's interest in Matthew's work. He's had contact with government people. Okay. I can't really talk about those details, but. Okay. Are the parts like arts parts?

30:28The parts that. Some of them were arts parts, but he's, he's had other ones too. He's had material from Ukraine and Israel and. Wow. All over. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Arts parts. It's this rumor that Art Bell, right. eventually ended up in possession of this material that I think was from the, was it from the Roswell? Some of it's from Roswell. Yeah. Yeah. And the material is in Art Bell, obviously famous coast to coast, you know, amazing, you know, radio show host that reached, you know, 10 to 15 million people every night, super into UFOs. And it's so interesting that he received these pieces because he, you know, he's so passionate about, about this stuff.

31:06I believe one of the pieces is magnesium bismuth. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Because that's what Nolan has as well. I find this really interesting because in the Byfield Brown effect with Townsend Brown, the anti-gravity stuff. And I don't have any. I have a little bit of evidence that Townsend Brown might have been involved in one UFO crash retrieval. But I don't have a ton. I mostly have evidence that he figured out an anti-gravity modality. But magnesium or bismuth rather is constantly talked about bismuth because bismuth is a high K dielectric. So it stores and discharges easily a lot of electromagnetism.

31:42And that in the Bifield-Brown effect, if you use that as the insulator between the negative and positive electrodes, that creates greater thrust. so i find it fascinating that you have ufo parts that in the only anti or in one of the few antigravity experiments that we know of it creates more thrust in that experiment that seems really significant to me right and the other interesting thing is it has nanolayers of the bismuth and magnesium and the and one of one of the two is paramagnetic and the other is diamagnetic so they're they have two very different magnetic properties which is interesting so a lot of the A lot of the modern work that we do in material science on like spintronics and this sort of thing basically is dealing with magnetic spins with diamagnetic and paramagnetic materials.

32:29So a lot of the new breakthroughs in material science is related to these types of materials as well. So this is interesting stuff. Super interesting. Yeah. Yeah, Gary was also, when I was at his lab, he showed me some of the pieces, and he mentioned that some of these materials might be able to micro-size waveguides for terahertz power. And do you think that that's true? Do you think these pieces are able to do that? I don't know if that's possible. That we haven't looked into. Okay. And I know what Matthew's done, but I don't think that he's looked into that at all. What is one scientific truth that you adamantly believe that conventional science disagrees with you vehemently on?

33:21Oh, that's a good question. I don't know if I have an answer immediately. You could dwell on it if you want for the movie if it comes up. Yeah, I might have to think about that. Interesting. Yeah, I don't know if there is one exactly. Yeah. At NASA, you mentioned the people there weren't really into UFOs. How do you square that with all this lore of them being interested in UFOs? I don't know, you have Diana Pasolka. Have you ever read her book, American Cosmic? So she has this NASA mission controller who I guess now is public, but his name is Tim Taylor. And he's going around taking them to UFO crash sites.

34:04Seems extremely read into any sort of UFO program that exists. There are individuals at NASA who are interested in that. And since I've gotten interested and been vocal about it, I've had some of them I knew when I was at NASA have come talk to me and said, oh, yeah, I was interested. Or I know something about this or that. Yeah. It's so strange because, yeah, you have Hal Pobbenmeyer, who was, I think he was both CIA and NASA, showing up at Chris Bledsoe's door when he starts to attract UFOs. very it's like yeah well people come kind of come out of the woodwork you find that you know i've now had a couple people from nasa i find out were interested in remote viewing like i wouldn't have thought that when i was back you know when i worked there but interesting is there a when were are they doing remote viewing in a professional capacity at nasa well Well, yeah.

35:00So, I don't know. I don't want to tell on anybody, but some of this is actually public, but nobody's noticed. So, one of the people at NASA has actually written a CIA training manual for remote viewing. Really? Yeah. But this is public? Yeah. Okay. Well, then, people are going to look it up. You can figure out who it is. Okay. All right. All right. Yeah. No, actually, I was, yeah, there was a, yeah, so, but. Well, if it's public, it's, you know, interesting. That's fascinating. And that person did it before they came to NASA, but are currently, or were NASA. They may be retired now. You know, they also have a patent, I believe in 2003, on a barrel-shaped asymmetric capacitor, and they say this is, we're talking about Thomas Townsend Brown.

35:49Oh, yeah, that works interesting, too, yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah, there are handfuls of people doing weird things here and there, right? And once I've gotten involved with this, I find that those people are all over the place and they're all studying things they're not supposed to be studying, which is fascinating. On that patent, that NASA patent, I believe Larry Smalley has his name there. He's a University of Alabama Huntsville. He was the physics chair. And under him was a woman named Ning Li. And she was studying, I think, like, superconductor based, you know, kind of weight reduction via kind of anti-gravity.

36:34I think she called it gravitons, gravity particles would cause this sort of effect. and, you know, obviously, you know, groundbreaking sort of controversial claim. And she speaks about this at some sort of MITRE Corporation event. And then she kind of, you know, goes dark, I think gets a security clearance. But her physics, she leaves and starts a company. I think it's called Anti-Gravity LLC or something. And then her physics chair, Larry Smalley, goes and joins her, which I think lends credence to the actual findings, right? If your physics chair leaves, I mean, you know academia. Yeah, it's kind of OK.

37:09Everybody's got to be high conviction at that point. Yeah. Yeah. You don't leave a tenured position. And then his name shows up on a patent around a barrel shaped asymmetric capacitor, which is town. And it's talking about Townsend Brown. And I'm like, OK, what's going on? That's interesting. Yeah. Wow. I find it fascinating. Yeah. But I mean, one question I have is you have all these names pop up. Right. And you have, you know, how put off is obviously like seems so at the center of so much UFO physics. but a lot of the names that pop up in UFO science quote unquote it's almost like there's some sort of like substructure of a lot of these like megastructures so like NASA I don't like it almost seems like what you're saying is there is no official knowledge of UFOs but it's like these people within NASA that are extremely interested in this stuff how do you square that with like you watch the age of disclosure and it's like we have a legacy program which you would that implies some sort of like you know it's like super well coordinated it's a different thing yeah so like what i always try to ask that i try to press on people here is it like is there a program or is it like this hermetic substructure where people come together via synchronicities just people doing things um i mean that's one thing i mean scientists tinker as well, right?

38:30And NASA isn't like that now, but when I worked there, which was the early 2000s, you still were able to do blue sky research. As long as, I mean, the requirement was you had to convince your area lead that this was in line with NASA's missions, basically, in some way. And so that's all you had to do. And so then you could go off and work on this project. And while I worked there, near the end of the time I worked there during the Bush administration, they started what they called full-cost accounting, where they have to account for all their costs. So now you have to account for the time you spend on things.

39:12And if you're doing that, then you can't do this blue-sky research on this. You can't do this little thing on the side. So, for example, one of the things that we tried to do on the side, so this was a – yeah, why not? We had, I was interested in the Roswell story, and I was struck by the fact that the picture, you know, Jesse Marcel says one thing about the material, and it sounds entirely believable. And then they get the picture in the newspaper with General Ramey with what clearly is aluminum foil and balsa wood in the picture, right? And you look at that picture and you think, there's no way anybody is going to mistake that for any kind of craft debris.

40:03So what was Jesse Marcel thinking? Or was it as they claimed that they switched the debris, right? And I think it's more likely they switched the debris. Well, Marcel claimed that the real UFO debris was off to the side, right outside of the frame of that photo. Right outside of the frame. Did he say that? I don't remember that. He also said he brought it home and that his son played with it. He had showed it with his son. Yeah. So I think he would know the difference. He would know the difference, right. So then there's the picture of General Ramey, and he's holding a memo that you can see in the photographs.

40:35And it's clearly a stamped top secret. And I thought, what does that memo say? And so me and one of my colleagues at NASA, because I was in the intelligence systems division, so our job was to develop machine learning systems to analyze data. And so we were doing a lot of work with imagery. I worked with Hubble imagery. And I thought, why don't we try cleaning up this memo and see what the memo says? So we actually wrote the algorithms to actually read this memo. and wrote them, got them running, and we're testing them. And we just didn't have the computer power at the time. It was a 300 megahertz machines we were working on, and we couldn't use the supercomputer for this.

41:23So we couldn't get away with that, right? We could get away with using the 300 megahertz computer on this, and it just didn't have the computing power and the computing time to do it. So we abandoned the project. But we had thought that we were going to, you know, our little dream was, all right, we're going to figure out what this memo says, and then we're going to publish it as a NASA publication. But it's going to be buried as an example. The publication will be on our methodology and our algorithm, and then we'll have several examples, and one of them will be the Roswell memo. And then we'll make it public and make it an official NASA publication, right?

42:00That was our little plan. I love it. Our sneaky plan. I love it. And it just didn't work out because we couldn't analyze that imagery. Right. But this is what's going on behind the scenes. And probably a lot of government labs people are doing stuff like this. You know, maybe not trying to publish it, but trying to figure out if they can get something to work or try something interesting. Over the last couple of months, we've been designing the new American Alchemy merch drop. And I'm excited to say that the 2025 winner drop is finally ready. We now have 30 uniquely designed pieces that really reflect what American Alchemy is all about.

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43:49Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. so it's like there is this ufo truth you have you know various crashes you have various maybe scientific frameworks that are not public and then you just have a bunch of vigilante efforts in little pockets and compartments like attempting things you got people smart people trying things and it's you know i think what you know john i think it was john stort said isn't it amazing what scientists can do when no one makes them stop. And I think that's all it is. No one's making them stop and they're discovering things.

44:25And some of them are useful, some aren't, and some are really interesting and some they feel they probably shouldn't talk about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that it's that simple in a lot of cases. Yeah. It's so fascinating. You have an interesting theory around water worlds and, you know, Do you want to explain that? Yeah, well, there's a few. Yeah, so it has two aspects. The first one is why, you know, I was at one point wondering why are there so many USOs, submerged, unidentified submerged craft? Why is that such a big thing? And when you think about living on a planet, living under an atmosphere is horrible.

45:18It's difficult. The weather is, the conditions change every day. They change daily, you know, hourly even. And I'm coming down here from Albany. I'm down here to Austin. You know, we had snowstorm this weekend in Albany or north of Albany. I drove through it from Montreal to Albany through a snowstorm. And now we're down here and it's, what, 60 degrees and sunny. And I hope to go to the botanical garden before I leave or something, right? So the atmospheres are very, are quite variable. And now you go from Earth to Venus, Venus's atmosphere has 100 times the air pressure on Earth, which would crush you.

45:57And it's about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And actually, I was at NASA Ames when the Magellan probe was doing radar mapping of Venus. And we were perplexed because the mountaintops would become radar reflective at times. And then it would fade, and then they would become reflective again and fade. And we were like, what's going on with these mountaintops? And realized they would become reflective when the temperature would drop. So the temperature would drop, the mountaintops would become radar reflective, and they realized what was happening is vaporized lead and bismuth was actually making snowflakes.

46:38And so it was actually snowing lead and bismuth snow on the mountaintops. I mean, imagine what that would, I can't imagine what that would look like to have metal snow. I want to go there and actually see that. But that's what they think, that's a cold day in hell, by the way, when you've got metal snow raining on the mountaintops. So that's what Venus's atmosphere is like, right? And then you go to Mars, and Mars has one one-hundredth the atmospheric pressure of Earth. So you need a spacesuit. And it's cold, you know, 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, something like that. Colder than Antarctica temperatures.

47:12So now comparing Venus to Mars, the temperature difference is a factor of 10 ,000. Different. It's huge. Now you consider a water world. Water is only liquid from zero degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, right? So you've got, as long as you have liquid water, you are in that temperature range. You're not going out of it. And so it's much more stable temperature-wise. The pressure varies with depth dramatically. I mean, atmospheric pressure varies with atmospheric height as well. But because water is so much more dense, it's much more dramatic. So you can control what pressure you like by controlling the depth.

47:59And water has such a high heat capacity, the temperature doesn't change that much. You don't have the temperature fluctuations of water temperature that you do in an air temperature. So it's a much more stable environment. You're protected from solar radiation. You're protected from ultraviolet rays. You're protected from cosmic rays. You're protected from, you know, small meteorites, at least. And it's a great place to hide. Electromagnetism, electromagnetic waves don't travel far in water. So you can't see far. You can't detect things with electromagnetism very well. And which is why we use sonar, right?

48:36And so it's a great place to hide. Yeah. So there's every reason to go to the water. It's fascinating. So if you were like a Kardashev three or four scale civilization and you wanted to colonize a bunch of other planets, water is the perfect hideout spot. It's evidence. Just go to the water. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing. So you only have a couple of choices, right? So if you're going to go colonize another star system, you've got to carry everything you need to do it with you. So getting already the traveling is hard. It's going to be hard for anybody. But bringing everything you need to build up a base or some kind of settlement is going to be extra difficult.

49:19So you really have a few options. And water worlds we now know are relatively common. We have several water worlds in our solar system. And most of them are frozen moons, icy surfaces. But there's oceans underneath, right? So you can either plan to colonize. You can either just plan to stay in your spaceships, right? We're just going to live in our spaceships. That's probably the easiest thing to do, right? Or to colonize airless worlds like the moon, which is no different than staying in your spaceship. But then the other option is to live on a planet. and if you want to live on a planet to access its resources, you're either going to go with an airless world and stay in your spaceship or the next most reasonable choice would be to go to water.

50:07Yeah. And so it's also evidence, as you said, of this kind of Goldilocks temperature zone. I think water is specifically unique as well because the way that hydrogen and oxygen bond in an H2O molecule is a perfect crystal lattice structure. And so it's unique in that the solid form of it is actually less dense than the liquid form of it. So you end up with these worlds that don't flood because you end up with a lot of ice. And so that's fascinating as well. And then I think that the final thing on the UFO front is you're talking about tons and tons of power. If you were to theoretically break hydrogen and oxygen bonds in H2O, you would get a ton of power.

50:49Yeah, you can use water for storing energy that way. Yeah, or for fuel. And then seas have dissolved minerals in them. So you could, I mean, it's not a fast process, but you could extract any kind of mineral you want. Any atom you want, you can probably pull out of seawater. Whether you can do it fast enough to get a substantial amount is really the question. But that would be easier than mining, right? Do you think there are UFO bases in our oceans? Tim Burchette recently said there are five oceanic hot spots across the world. We have a higher propensity of sightings around these five or six, I believe, deep water areas.

51:34And so to me, it just creates a question there. Do you think there are UFO bases? I think that's probably the best bet. Really? And you went to Catalina, right? I went to Catalina, yeah. Which is one of the, it's off the coast of Southern California, and a lot of people think it's this UFO hotspot. There's a great book, I think it's called Underwater or Undersea UFO Base by Preston Dennett. Right. And there's a ton of history in the region. And so what did you find when you went out there? Yeah, well, we spent five days on a rooftop in Laguna Beach and watching the skies. And it's all documented in the movie A Tear in the Sky.

52:20And the movie best documents basically how the mission progressed, right? And so it's one of the first university-supported UFO data collection missions that we know of has happened, right? So there's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of excitement in that movie. And that's real excitement, right? And we did see some interesting things that, and so here comes some spoilers. And so I'm going to spoil things twice. So at one point, there's a bright light that's seen from the team in Catalina Island, which was across the Catalina Channel. We had two teams. they spotted this bright light that was moving, and they said it's too bright to be a satellite, it's going in this direction, so we're looking for it as well.

53:17So we recorded this object, and then it just abruptly disappears, which is very strange. And the problem with documentaries is that, yes, it takes a long time to make a film, maybe a year to two years in some cases. is science takes a lot longer. We're a lot slower. And so the scientific study of what the data we collected took a lot longer, and that got published just last year. So our mission was what, in 2021? Tear in the Sky, I think, came out in 2023, something like that. And our scientific paper on the mission came out just this summer. Matthew Shadagas was the first author of that paper.

54:01and so we found that that bright light was the space station um why didn't we figure that out earlier the app we were using to track satellites didn't take into account daylight savings time a stupid mistake right that we shouldn't have made but this is your first time doing this and you make and i remember telling matthew on our space station looks weird by the way looks really weird looks like ufo yeah and i remember telling matthew on the airplane he We were both excited. Oh, this is going to be so much fun. Think, imagine what we can see. And I said, yeah, but the problem is we're just, what we're probably going to learn is what not to do.

54:40And that's really what happened that first mission. We learned how not to do it. But Matthew is the one who figured out it was the space station. And he put it all together, and he actually took the pixel size on the camera, and then, knowing the altitude of the space station, figured out how big the space station should be. And he was within one foot of the size of the space station. It's really a nice analysis he does. He put it in the appendix. And, yeah, something to be proud of. The fact that, yeah, we identified it to be the space station and actually proved it right. So that's cool. Another event that happened was one of the FLIR cameras was showing these objects dropping to the sea.

55:29And I was actually at the time looking through night vision goggles. This didn't end up in the movie and people were too excited about the FLIR camera to hear me shouting about the night. I was telling people, put on your night vision goggles and look over here. But I saw something actually drop and hit the water in infrared. Whoa. You got that on video? No, no. I was just looking through the goggles, watching for things. But it was through infrared. It was in infrared, yeah. And I think they tried to simulate this in the film, but it's not simulated properly. They showed this thing hovering and wasn't it just dropped.

56:04Wow. But the FLIR cameras recorded things dropping into the sea. So you think you saw a UFO? I don't know what I saw, actually, but I was excited because it happened about the same time the FLIR camera was showing things dropping. But then we figured out later that the FLIR camera was actually malfunctioning. And that's a failure mode of the FLIR cameras. We actually talked to the engineers who were not designing these things. Is seeing something drop. Yeah, these things falling down is actually a failure mode. Oh, so maybe it was an issue with the camera. So the FLIR camera recording we had was not something dropping into the sea.

56:38I don't know what I saw and probably will never know because it has to be reproducible, right? You have to be able to see it again and try different things. Is there a best sensor modality if you're trying to spot UFOs? I think as many sensors as you can. Say you had to pick one and you had to, you know, what would you pick? If I picked one I would try that's tough. I think I would go with, a FLIR camera is a good choice for a few reasons. One you get a visual record of the object. It's not a very good visual record because it's going to be blurry because it's infrared. I've heard people complain, oh, the Navy produces all these blurry photos of UFOs.

57:18Well, they're infrared images. What do you expect? I've heard scientists say this and you want to slap them upside the head and say, what did you think was going to happen? And so, you know, but the other benefit is with the FLIR cameras, you can measure the temperature of the object because you're picking up infrared emissions, right? So that black body infrared spectrum actually gives you the temperature of the object. Yeah, where white hot comes from. Yeah, so not only do you get a visual record of the object, but you get its temperature too, which is in you get extra pieces of information for that.

57:55So for that reason, I probably would choose a FLIRCAN. Is there a sighting or a crash that you rank as highest conviction as far as your analysis of it. That like you are convinced that this happened. Oh. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast.

58:36That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

58:47I would have to say the most convincing one is one of the most hard-to-believe ones. It's JAL 1628. It was a Japan Airlines cargo flight piloted by Captain Kenju Terauchi. This is the sketch Terauchi drew of what he says he saw out his window that night. And this Japanese television graphic is based on his description. This is just a small space ship. We can see a big frame. This one is the size of a carrier, so a mothership. And I remember that being on the nightly news. I remember watching, it was on NBC, Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung. I remember that being on the news and being, holy shit, there's giant aircraft carrier sized walnut shaped UFO followed that Japanese airlines for 45 minutes across Alaska.

59:45Wild. Give us the whole sequence. Yeah. So the Japanese airlines, it's not a passenger jet. It's a 747. They are transporting Boucherle Nouveau. Yep. They got wine in the back. Let the skeptics rejoice. No, the pilots were not drunk on Beaujolais Nouveau. It's just a silly thing. They're just transporting it. Yeah, they're just transporting it. And they're flying across Alaska. And first, I don't remember all the events. Several things happened. They actually saw several UFOs. First, these rectangular things show up in front of the ship and have these lights that go up and down, shining light into the cockpit.

1:00:28and the pilots could feel the heat from the light of these objects and they're like scanning or, you know, like that kind of behavior. And they follow in front of the plane for some time. And then this giant walnut-shaped object shows up that's something like four 747s in length. Right, so this thing's the size of an aircraft carrier. And the pilot said that when it was in front of the plane, He couldn't see anything but the craft. It's that big. So it's unmistakable. I mean, and he's screaming at air traffic control, you know, what do I do about this? And they're not picking it up on radar. And so it was later found that military height finding radar was picking it up.

1:01:19And so that radar actually, those radar records actually got collected. it. And so this walnut-shaped craft basically followed the 747 for about 45 minutes. It stayed about seven kilometers away, but it would go from one side of the plane to the other. It was bouncing around from one side to the other. And we analyzed its speed and acceleration just crudely based on the description of what it was doing. So at one point, it would be at like one o 'clock, and then the next sweep of the radar, which was about 12 seconds or so, would be at six o 'clock. And so we were using that information to estimate speeds and accelerations.

1:02:07Daniel Kumbay, another physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute, actually took the radar. I didn't know that we could get our hands on the radar measurements when we published that paper, But he actually got the radar data and he analyzed that. He was analyzing the jumps and he found that the object was accelerating at, took several jumps, different accelerations at different times. But there were three of them were, the accelerations were greater than 9 ,000 Gs. One of them was like 11 ,000 Gs. And the top speed he estimated to be 250 ,000 miles an hour. and at 250 ,000 miles an hour you can get to the moon in 54 minutes whoa that's that's not a joke so you've got something the size of an aircraft carrier that could get to the moon in less than an hour right that's basically what you've you're dealing with here so as and we have and we have the radar data from that we have the radar data you have the radar data that's amazing i didn't know that.

1:03:10That's amazing. Yeah. John Callahan, who was the FAA chief of accidents and investigations, actually reviewed the case. And then Reagan, President Reagan's scientific team and the CIA showed up and they wanted all the data. No way. And so they came to collect the data. Callahan copied it and put it in a box that he just put under his desk. and so he had a copy of it and he didn't turn that over so they got and that's public now and now that's public whoa he held on to it for like 20 years and then when he retired he made it public good for him yeah he's a hero right kind of yeah yeah but he said so when he was in the meeting with reagan's scientific team they were all excited they said we've never had 45 minutes of radar data from one of these things before wow and so um so that exists but But from that radar data, it's accelerating at 10 ,000 Gs, 250 ,000 miles an hour.

1:04:09And you can actually see the position of the plane on the radar. That is remarkable. And at the one point where the plane actually does a 360 to try to shake this thing, you can actually see that on the radar. So the radar is working. Are the pilots still alive? Yeah, I think so. I want to get in touch with them. Yeah, I'm sure. The one pilot was actually fired. Okay. For going public with it. He was fired and had his license taken away and then several years later was reinstated. That's horrible that he was fired for that. I mean, what are you supposed to, you experienced something that kind of traumatic and worldview shattering.

1:04:43What would lying about it be a better thing to do for flight safety? Yeah, right. That's really the question. Just ignore it. Yeah, that's crazy. Fascinating. You know, there's that audio recording of Steven Spielberg, I believe, talking about his trip to the White House. And they do a viewing of E.T. Right. I've heard this. Yes. And Reagan says, you know, a lot of you in this room know that everything on that screen there that you just watched is true. And he just stood up and he looked around the room, almost like it was doing a headcount. And he said, I want to thank you for bringing E.T. to the White House.

1:05:21We really enjoyed your movie. And then he looked around the room and he said, and there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true. And he said it without smiling. But he said that. And everybody laughed, by the way. The whole room laughed because he presented it like a joke, but he wasn't smiling as he said it. And so, yeah, it's pretty interesting, right? It's interesting, right? Yeah. Well, that's fascinating that people from his scientific team, I mean, it sounds like they were pretty aware of this. To say, oh, we've never had 45 minutes, but it's like, that implies, okay, you're sitting on maybe, you know, shorter clips of UFOs.

1:05:59Yeah, they've got something. They've got something, yeah. I mean, Alaska is a hotspot historically as well. I believe Nathan Twining, who was head of Air Material Command, responsible for all aircraft development of the Air Force, wrote the famous Twining memo in 1947 saying UFOs are not visionary nor fictitious. Right. he he uh i believe they had like an observation program going on in alaska and then just recently you had it was this weird sequence of events but in 2020 early 2023 you had the chinese spy balloon and then right after that you had this bizarre you know these things seem to show up and like jam you know the radars of these f-22s and one of them specifically was in alaska and crashed.

1:06:45And I've heard some very strange things around this specific craft. I've heard things like it reassembled itself and was seen in the air over Canada. Bizarre. I've heard something about deleted emails involving this specific craft on the National Military Command Center servers. So I don't know. It seems like there's something strange about this craft. And this was also in Alaska. Right. Who knows? That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing to know that, you know, his scientific, Reagan's scientific team had gotten that data. What did they do with it? What is, you know, what are, where are their reports?

1:07:25I would like to see that, you know, the, you know, disclose those. That would be interesting, you know, alone.

1:07:35The Kecksburg, Pennsylvania UFO crash. Yeah, 1965. 65. Yeah. And my dad's cousin, Donald Hornig, he was later the president of Brown University, was on – he was the scientific advisor to presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. What? Yeah. That was my dad's – my dad's cousin did that. In fact, he's the person who – he designed the electronic triggers for the plutonium bomb. Whoa. In the Manhattan Project. What was his name? Donald Hornig. Whoa. And the night before the first test in Trinity, he was, Oppenheimer gave him a sidearm and had him babysit the bomb up in the tower during a thunderstorm.

1:08:25What? And I was surprised that they didn't put that in the movie Oppenheimer because it's an awesome story. But the movie is about Oppenheimer and not about the Manhattan Project. But he was, yeah, so that was, and his wife was, but his wife was in the movie. Lily Hornig was in the movie. She was the woman who came from Harvard. And some of the things she actually said, she told us this at dinner once we visited her in Rhode Island when she was still alive. But she said when she got to Los Alamos and was being interviewed for a position, they asked her how fast she typed. And she goes, they don't teach typing at Harvard.

1:09:04And they used that line in the movie, which was great. Whoa. That is fascinating. So I mentioned that because Donald Hornig was the chief scientific advisor to President Johnson, who was president during the Kecksburg crash. And I had actually found a document about the Kecksburg UFO, and Donald Hornig was listed as being present. And I thought, oh, my God. And I never got to meet him. And I did ask his wife, Lily, about it, but she didn't know. What document? I don't know. Maybe I have to look for it. There was some kind of summary about the Kecksburg crash and something. It was some kind of government summary.

1:09:46Official government dog? It was official, yeah. But he was listed as being present, which he should have been. So I was like, well, this is all pretty authentic. But that's even absent the fact that he's your dad's cousin, which is a remarkable synchronicity. The fact that the presidential science advisor is on site at a UFO crash is amazing unto itself. Oh, that's true. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a really big deal. I think Eric Walker was supposedly present as well at the Kecksburg crash. He was the, I believe, president of Penn State, and he was kind of a material science guy. I don't know if you know anything about him.

1:10:22No, I don't know anything about him. He's an interesting guy who seems to imply to many researchers, UFO researchers, that he's very aware of the Majestic 12 and what they do. And, you know, who knows? Right. I don't know. Do you lend credence to any of those sorts of stories? The idea that there's sort of an elite military scientific. I can't I wouldn't be surprised if they were true. Yeah. I don't know if I would just jump on believing they're true without any evidence. But yeah. But, you know, if I was if I found out they were true, I wouldn't it wouldn't shock me at all. Well, it's like if the UFO issue is real and understood at the highest levels of government, of course they would have some sort of elite body.

1:11:05Of course there's some kind of group of, and if it's not a formal group, there's probably informal groups and all that sort of thing. Yeah. Do you think, you know, we've mentioned nuclear connection a bunch in this conversation. Do you think that not only UFOs are showing up around nuclear sites, but that the secrecy involved in the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy overlays UFO secrecy and that the program is somehow bound up in, you know, atomic stuff? That's a good question, too. It's not clear how...

1:11:44I mean, it looks like an SCU did a study of this, of UFOs monitoring nuclear sites. And so it looks like whoever's behind the whole UFO business, whoever these guys are, have been performing surveillance this whole time. They're surveilling us. And it's intelligent surveillance. They know what they're doing. And in fact, the SCU study showed that not only do you, so when they compared UFO sightings at nuclear sites compared to nearby military bases and nearby population centers. And the nuclear sites have more, you know, in the early 40s had more UFO sightings than any of the other places. Whoa.

1:12:31Nearby. So it shows that it's statistically significant that they're hanging out at nuclear sites. Yeah. Now, what's weird about it is that they are present at the nuclear sites before they were totally constructed. Yes. And before they had nuclear material there, radioactive material there. Yeah. So while some of these sites were being built, UFOs were present. That's definitely right. And so now you're like, wait a minute. How did they know that something important is going to be there, right? How do they know what they know? There's something about nuclear that they're really concerned with or interested in.

1:13:07I think in 1945, there was a pilot named Bud Clem, and he's flying over Hanford Plutonium Base. And it was like, yeah, before the thing was fully up. And he's seeing UFOs. And Robert Hastings has an interview with him. When we got down there, they told us that this boat, he was out there right over the Hanford Ordnance Works and directed Lieutenant Commander Brown to take off and challenge him. And I think I mentioned him in our paper. We published a paper this year on the scientific study of UAP. It basically goes through the history of how people have tried to study this. And I mentioned Bud Clem's sightings at Hanford there.

1:13:49Yeah, it's so fascinating. That connection is, and there are all these theories one can have. One is that they're sort of doing some sort of intelligence recon or something. And then another is that they're just protecting their resources. Somehow the earth maintaining itself in its current form is important, or maybe humans are a resource to them. And so they need to intervene and ensure things don't blow ourselves up or something. but it's really hard to say. I mean, I know like the Age of Disclosure, Lou Elizondo, you know, kind of crew, like they talk about it as far as like they're monitoring our ability to achieve energy breakthroughs.

1:14:32So that would be the tip of the spear of energy breakthroughs. Like high energy physics occurs in the national labs and your atomic sites and that sort of thing. And, you know, we could break out of our cage or something if we achieve some unlock. And so there are various theories. Well, humans are a hot mess, right? And so if they're present in the universe in our neighborhood, and then right now they don't have to deal with us directly. But if we go out there, they might have to deal with us. I think Stanton Friedman put it this way. It's kind of like you've got a neighborhood where you've got this one house on the block with crazy neighbors.

1:15:07There's always the police are always there. They're screaming and yelling and things breaking. And you can hear that going on in the house in the block. and then one day the neighbors come out of the out of the house and they're in the yard and now you have to deal with them right and so he was he was describing human the humanity this way and i thought that's pretty good pretty good description yeah no that that feels pretty pretty apt to me i want to talk because you're in a i think very unique vantage point as somebody who uh is at the intersection of kind of credible physics and then kind of very speculative ufo you know interest there are a couple of interesting objects of interest of late that kind of you know hit that intersection the first I want to talk about is actually this discovery of Beatrice Villareal at Stockholm University who you know I had the pleasure of interviewing her and she was looking at the Pelomer Observatory which was the most you know in use observatory you know in kind of mid-century in the U.S.

1:16:04It's in San Diego. And she found over 100 ,000 in an eight-year period what appeared to be UFOs, mirror-like objects, little transients, light flashes. And they seem to actually be correlated with nuclear sites, too. There's like a follow-up study that they're 68 % more likely to show up a day before or after a nuclear detonation. So this is just fascinating. study and and nobody in the credentialed conventional physics world has debunked it it's been peer-reviewed right and you have people like sabina hausenfelder and brian keating you know people you don't think of as like ufo nuts right like going on you know youtube and saying like this actually seems kind of intriguing so what do you make of it no it's i mean her that's the vasco project i mean it's an excellent idea for a project you've got all of these photographic plates from the 1940s that if you have something in orbit, you might be able to detect it in a photograph, right?

1:17:10So that's the premise. And she published a few early papers, which I found really interesting, the ones where you have several of them in a line or something like this. And I think that's fascinating. It's tough. The most recent papers with 100 ,000 And that's hard to believe. That's a little shocking. That makes me worry that you really have to double your efforts to look to make sure there's not an artifact issue that you haven't considered. Well, it was 100 ,000 between 1949 and 1957. The reason you'd ended in 1957 is because Sputnik goes up. So it's pre-satellites, which is, that's remarkable.

1:17:55And they're all in geostationary orbit, geo. So it's like the outer Earth's orbit. So I think it's pretty remarkable that does seem really high as well. I think she says there could be an error rate of up to 30 % or something. So that's a big margin. But what's remarkable is when she put this out, the main detraction, the main way people tried to kind of straw man or beat this thing was they said, you know, these have to be plate defects. These have to be sort of, you know, the astronomical plates, you know, have all sorts of weird, you know, chemical issues over long periods of time. And you end up with these sort of stains and issues.

1:18:36And then, you know, those could look like transients or UFOs. But then she followed up on the study and she said, is there a so obviously you have the sun, it's hitting the earth. And then you have the shadow of the earth. Right. You have a kind of a dark side of the earth. she said is um you know are these objects dropping off on the dark side of the earth when they shouldn't be being illuminated by the sun i think that's the idea that's right are they physical objects are they reflecting off the sun a and b if their plate defects plate defects would not play favorites between the earth's shadow and you know the the sun side of the earth right should have the plate defect right should be constant it would be completely proportional and constant.

1:19:19And so she found a, you know, a serious drop off. And so that seems like pretty significant. It's interesting. Yeah, certainly it's interesting. I think it's, it's one of the, I mean, the hallmark of science is reproducibility, right? So what you need to have is you need to have other, other labs look at those plates and actually do the study, try to replicate the study. And I think that's what needs to happen. And that's what she's beautiful about her kind of orientation towards this whole thing is she's now saying you can go look at the data for yourself. So the raw data, I think, is online now for people to.

1:19:56Oh, it's not online. Okay, it will be. It will be. We've tried to get it. Okay, you've tried to get it. Okay, okay. Yeah, no. Okay, then she says she's putting it online. She's working on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I think that the next Holy Grail would be you'd want it from another observatory and you'd want the actual transients to line up one-to-one ideally. Right, right, right. At least with some correlation. That would be really important. Yeah, if you're in multiple observatories, that would be ideal. Yeah, so, yeah, totally agree. There's work to be done there. But pretty intriguing, I think.

1:20:22Yeah, it is intriguing. It is, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a nice idea for a project. I mean, you've got all of these photographic records, and to go through them, I mean, just to look for transients in the first place. I mean, transients would be anything that you don't have a good explanation for. So there's potential for lots of discoveries there, not just things orbiting the Earth.

1:21:09Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Do you think UFOs come from space? Or do you think they are sort of, you know, going through wormholes, you know, or time travelers? Absolutely no idea. They are, I think that many of them that we see that are observed by people are actually coming from Earth presently. You know, Carl Sagan once quipped, I think it's extremely doubtful that somebody is arriving from interstellar space every other Tuesday. You know, he made something like that, you know, basically saying that. I don't think that—he didn't say interstellar travel was impossible.

1:21:52It wasn't going to happen every other Tuesday is basically what he was saying. It's not going to be common. And I think he's right. They're not coming in from another star system every other Tuesday. They're present here. Yeah. And that's why I think there's probably bases underwater. is your best bet. Yeah. Or maybe somewhere else in the solar system. But we know that they can't be more than, in many cases, they can't be more than a light day away because they showed up, so when you had the Fukushima disaster, they showed up the next day. So if they're coming from another star system, it would take years for any signal, any information about Fukushima to get out to that star system, and then years for them to come.

1:22:33Unless fast and light communications and travel is possible. or something like that, right? But yes, in general relativity, it would need to be... But they're probably coming from Earth in that case. Hmm. Interesting. Do you know of any interesting space-based encounters of UFOs, like NASA encounters? That's also a good question. So, I know a few of them. Well, there's several cosmonauts have reported seeing things in space, and that's important. And them, oh, I can't, I'm blanking on his name right now. Of course, it's a long Russian name that I'm not familiar with. It starts with an A. But they actually had a craft pull up alongside of them.

1:23:16Whoa. Half their orbit. And they took pictures. The cosmonaut drew a picture of the object. Whoa. Because the pictures all got confiscated by the Soviet government. Not Gagarin? Hmm? Not Gagarin? No, it's not Gagarin. Oh, check this out. Akhenashev? Okay. Akhenashev? And he drew a UFO. He drew a picture of what they took photographs of. Whoa. What mission was this? Do you know? I don't know. I think it was one when they were going to one of the beginning, early space stations. Wow. Yeah. Fascinating. This thing pulled up. It had windows. It had windows and pulled up and followed them for part of the orbit and then left.

1:23:53Whoa. Yeah, which is awesome. Yeah. I talked to Alan Bean. I met him and talked to him. He was from Apollo 12. and he said that when he went up to Skylab, they were on Skylab, I think it's 1977-ish, they actually photographed a red flashing light. What is Skylab? Skylab was one of our early space stations. Okay. And they actually saw a red flashing light that followed them for part of their orbit and then disappeared. Really? Yes, and they had photographs of that. What did he say happened to the photographs? Oh, they're actually public. Oh, they are? Okay, wow. We'll surface this. The big problem, you're photographing a light in the sky, and it's a handheld camera on a spaceship through a window.

1:24:42And yeah, it's bouncy and blurry and out of focus. Yeah, but it's a red light that seems to be falling. But it's a red flashing light in space. Nobody puts lights on satellites. First, you don't need them. And second, it's more weight. You know, every ounce is going to cost you a crazy amount of money. Also, satellites back then weren't doing proximity operations. They were just following predictable orbits. And they weren't changing orbits. They weren't changing orbits. They weren't moving around either. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's a big deal. So that whole thing is very strange. Yes. Yeah. And then you have the Gemini 11 mission where from the transcripts, the astronauts are working on, were working and something flew over their Houston assets.

1:25:26Did something just fly over you? And they say affirmative. Weird, weird, weird. And then there's something like six minutes of no transcript. Right. And but when the thing flew over, the object flew over them, it drained their, it drained one of their battery sets. Charlie Stack got drained. So Stack C got drained. So it's almost a classic UFO sighting. They see an object in space. It flies over their ship and then drains their batteries. Right. And so that's in the transcripts of Gemini 11. Wow. Wow. And that's public. That audio is public. That's public as well, yeah. And now, so the question I've had is why, when we had the NASA Commission, why was there no section on what astronauts have seen in space?

1:26:13I mean, Story Musgrave, a shuttle pilot, also talked about seeing things like snakes. Wow. Things writhing around in space. Really? Yeah. None of that mentioned in the NASA Commission's report. So bizarre. So you've got, and then you have, what is there, the mission, the Soviet mission to Phobos, where their craft got disabled. The last picture shows an object, like a fin in the, like a tail fin of a plane looks like in the picture. Whoa. That's the last picture it took. And then the whole thing was disabled. The whole thing was disabled. And Gemini 11 also looks like the audio, like there was some sort of power interference or something as well, right?

1:26:52Right, right. Like electromagnetic interference. They've got multiple events in space that weren't even mentioned in the NASA Commission report. Why? Shouldn't that be of interest? They all sign NDAs, right? Astronauts. Oh, I don't know what they do. I believe they do. Yeah. So do you think, I mean, you were at NASA. Do you think NASA is sort of systematically covering this stuff up? I would have no idea. Because the other interesting thing from Beatrice Villareal is she said she was in touch with a current NASA person who said that NASA tracks what they call uncorrelated targets all the time.

1:27:27So these are sort of noise. Well, they're not necessarily alien spaceships, right? But these are things that should be reported. Figure out what they are. If you don't know what they are and you've got a, if you're running a commission on unidentified aerial phenomenon and you've got a bunch of unidentified things, you should talk about them. Totally. But also, apparently, the uncorrelated targets are systematically tracked by Space Force. Right. And not by, according to this insider. Again, I don't know if this is true, but that's really interesting. All of our government documents on these things, even the recent ones, barely have any information in them.

1:28:08Meanwhile, the French in 1999 put out the Cometa Report, which was 100 pages or something, right? Yeah, that's just crazy. It was like 10 pages. The French have a UFO research group officially called Gaipan, which unlike Arrow doesn't gaslight the population. They admit that this stuff is real and are open about it. That's right. Yeah, Commetta Report's final analysis from 1999 was that, yeah, these things could be alien spacecraft. There might be a base somewhere in our solar system. And the U.S. is probably hiding information. So fascinating. And that's what they actually said. And the United States is probably covering up information.

1:28:46That was their official report. That's amazing. And I believe the head of their CIA, former head of their CIA, Elaine Juliet, was extremely interested in UFOs. And publicly to this day is like this big UFO proponent. So they have a long history. So Gemini 11, that was Pete Conrad was the astronaut? Yeah, Conrad and Gordon. And Gordon. And did they come back and say, we saw a UFO? Did they say anything? I don't think so. Okay. I mean, because that's the other, look, I've looked into all the moon landing stuff, and I just actually had Joe Rogan on the podcast, which was a big honor. He kind of was the first person to be in our spaceship set, which we just built, which is really cool.

1:29:37Yeah. And I just couldn't think of anybody better for that. And we talked about a lot of the moon landing weirdness, you know, in the presentation of the moon landing. And I think neither of us are suggesting that definitively like the U.S. didn't go to the moon. I think you can to, you know, the inverse of that, you can say definitively the presentation of whatever happened is weird. And it was sanitized and manicured and presented in a bizarre way. And there was definitely some, you know, managing of that that was going on. That's obvious. And so I wonder if, you know, maybe we did actually attempt or go and maybe we just saw UFOs along the way or maybe there's something very ontologically weird about the trip to space that's hard to come back with as far as a revelation to the public or something.

1:30:30I don't know. but um i mean edgar mitchell came back talking about having an epiphany of how we're all connected in the you know you know thinking about different way of thinking about the universe of humanity but then after that he was very very much um involved with ufos yeah he grew up in roswell grew up in roswell apollo 14 astronaut and he had gotten and so because he was an apollo astronaut he got to hear all sorts of things about roswell from people from at all levels he's very close with Wernher von Braun, who seemed really interested in UFOs as well. He's the father of our space program, essentially.

1:31:04Wernher von Braun's mentor was Herman Oberth, who gave a lecture in 1954 on UFOs. After so many witnesses have seen the so-called flying saucers, their existence cannot longer be denied. I believe that these flying objects come from another solar system. I have his notes and his lecture notes. And in there, he mentions that he has seen numerous radar measurements of their speeds up to 19 kilometers a second, which is about 40 ,000 miles an hour. He also says that the rocket program was helped. And he was basically the father of German rocketry. And he said that it was aided by these non-human beings.

1:31:54So that's great. Yeah. Yeah. But that so that's that's going back to 19. So 1954, we knew that these things traveled at spacecraft speeds. We already knew that in 1954. And and why are we playing catch up just now? Why did this why did this take a half a century to unfold is really crazy. Well, proof that NASA, you know, probably knows something, a thing or two internally about the UFO stuff. And I know this is something you've looked into. And I think my buddy Chris Ramsey might be doing an interesting follow up with you on all this stuff. Oh, yeah, Chris, right. There's the Simpkinson photo around Gemini 11, that place.

1:32:38And there's maybe the best UFO photo you could ever ask for. It's like a perfect UFO photo. In fact, I have the book right here. I'm going to take it. I'll go grab it. Sure. So we have this Simpkinson NASA UFO archive and this photo, which is like maybe the best UFO photo of all time. if it's real. And it comes from Gemini 11. And you figured out that this was a Gemini 11 photo, right? Well, Ed Wilson knew that. Oh, okay. Ed Wilson did. Okay. But it actually says on, it says strange object as seen by the astronauts of Gemini 11. I think that's what it says underneath on the lithograph. So what he found was a lithograph, which is a printed photograph.

1:33:28and they printed them um kind of like a lithographs kind of like a um comic book is printed with all the dots right which makes it horrible to analyze if you're trying to find stars in that picture you're you were so out of luck i mean several of us were trying to identify stars and things like this in that picture and you just can't do it is that a ufo um i actually i i so what i my best assessment of what that image shows is that it is probably a muck-up of what the astronauts claim to have seen and um why is that your assessment because um ed actually found the original photograph in the university of arizona archives that shows Earth with that cloud pattern in the background.

1:34:22And there's no UFO there. Now, of course, it's easy to claim, well, NASA erased the UFO from that picture. And it doesn't... Now, of course, doing an image analysis like that on a scanned negative, right, where you don't know what kind of process, And it's JPEG, which is a lossy encoding and all these types of image analysis problems. So it's not great for doing an image analysis on, but I found no evidence that anything was erased from that picture. And that picture actually is showing the end of the Tether experiment. So the Gemini project, Gemini meaning twins, was all about docking. Can we actually dock with another spacecraft in space?

1:35:16And so Gemini 11 was the last one of the series, and a unique one in that their goal was to go up, literally launch, and dock within one orbit. So what they were doing previously, they'd go and they'd get up into orbit and then they'd maneuver to dock. But the trick was, can we just go up and dock? And that's what they tried to do with Gemini 11, and they were successful. and after they docked they um then were tethered to the other craft and they did a tether experiment where they actually got the two crafts spinning like this i'm going to knock things over got the two crafts spinning on a tether and then um and did experiments to see how stable that is and what goes wrong and um so they had just finished that experiment and they had just released the other craft, the unmanned craft.

1:36:05And that's in the picture that the background of that lithograph is from. And there's no indication that the astronauts saw any UFO at that time in the transcripts. They were busy with the, you know, yeah, they're busy with the tether experiment. So when was the, because you just said earlier that. But then the UFO sighting, the weird thing that happened, happened an hour later, which put it in another orbit, right? Two-thirds of an orbit. So you did some forensic investigating and realized that the timing was off. The timing's off. For when they actually did see the UFO. So the big problems with that being a real picture are, first, we don't have a picture of the UFO.

1:36:48We don't have an actual photograph of the UFO. We don't just have the lithograph. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that photograph being tampered with. There was no indication that they saw a UFO at that time. And the UFO they did see happened an hour later. Yeah. So what's your best explanation as to how that photo surfaced at all with the UFO? What I suspect happened is it's, I think that what that photo is, is exactly what it says under the photo. It's printed there. Strange object as seen by Gemini 11 astronauts. I think it's a mock-up to show what the astronauts saw, but didn't photograph.

1:37:33Was that officially published in some NASA thing? No, it wasn't officially published anywhere, which made it interesting. It was found in Scott Simpkinson was a NASA engineer. Okay. He was actually the first engineer hired by NASA. Whoa. I think. And his nickname was Scotty. Everybody called him Scotty. And I can't help but think, is there any connection between Scott Simpson, Scotty, and Scotty in the Enterprise? I don't know. But he was very well known in the 50s and 60s, so there might be a connection there. That's fascinating. Well, it sounds like he's kind of as insider-y as it gets. And the fact that you find in his records— Yeah, he designed some of the spacecraft.

1:38:16He designed some of the spacecraft. So if there's some sort of—even if it's an artist's rendition where they're— So he had a collection of his NASA files. He and his secretary, Emily Erdl, had a collection of their NASA files. And then when he died and she died, they were made public and they were put to auction. And Ed Wilson bought them. Wow. That's how he got them. And he discovered the lithograph amongst them. Well, if there's a painting of a UFO in that photo and it's found in his records, that implies that there's almost institutional NASA knowledge of the fact that the Gemini 11 astronauts did see a UFO.

1:38:56They saw something. I think, well, and that's what's said in the transcript. So, yeah. Even if it's painted on, it's like this inside joke or way to commemorate this very real event. It's a way to record what happened as best they can, yeah. That's fascinating. That's so interesting. And why none of this is mentioned in the NASA Commission's report, I have no idea. Did they not? Maybe they didn't know. I mean, it's possible they didn't know. I don't know. Who knows? Speaking of NASA obstruction, 3i Atlas, you know, we have this Manhattan-sized object that is now come around, back around the sun, and it is headed towards Jupiter.

1:39:35It's going to pass the Earth December 19th, so this might be out by the time. um you know it's it's it's already sort of passed um so so what do you think's going on with this object you have like most of the astronomical community basically like ignoring it or saying it so you know it doesn't matter or whatever and then you have avi lobe going crazy going on literally every single podcast that exists saying you know 40 chance that this is an alien craft and And, you know, it could be it could be a harbinger of, you know, either the Messiah or, you know, it could be an invader or something. So what's going on?

1:40:12Yeah, that's I mean. And then NASA as is did this stupid gaslighting press conference where I was honestly a little skeptical of some of Avi's statements. I felt like he was like extrapolating and, you know, jumping to conclusions. But I ended up I wanted to side with Avi after watching this gaslighting NASA. NASA press conferences are the absolute worst. You want to geek out a little bit, Tom? You were geeking out so expertly looking to begin with. I was. I was. I was embracing the geek. That was fabulous. I mean, even when I was at NASA, you wait for this press conference. Oh, there's going to be some exciting news about something.

1:40:46And it's not very exciting. No. And part of the problem is that your expectation for excitement from NASA is way too high. Unreasonably high. So that's part of the problem. So I can't – not all the blame should go to NASA for that. But the press conferences are always quite – I mean, part of it also is science is kind of boring. And if you're – So if you're giving a press conference about science, that might be – that's often kind of boring. But you should expect a photo that's better resolution than what amateur astronomers are taking of 3i Atlas. It's like this fuzzy – Yeah, but it's hard if you've got a spacecraft in orbit around Mars designed to image the surface of Mars, and you're trying to use it to image something much further away, that's tough.

1:41:35Right, but then crowdsource. If you're the official government body and you get billions in funding every year, then find the amateur astronomer that can do it and do it and work with them. Contra, you have the money. That would be nice. That would be nice. Yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised that we can't get a good image of it. That's hard to do. I mean, 3-Eye Atlas is weird. And I don't know, I mean, why the astronomical society won't, or community won't recognize that is kind of strange. I mean, maybe are they kind of quieted by Avi being so loud about it being possibly an alien craft? That could be part of it.

1:42:18They don't want to get into this mess. But it's a weird thing. I mean, yeah, great, easy to say comet, but when it came back around from around the sun, if I'm remembering right, I mean, these are numbers that I'm not horribly invested in remembering, but it was only like 4 % water vapor as it came back around. That's hardly any, the things, comets are dirty snowballs. They're made of water. 4 % water? Well, now what is this thing? It's got iron? Or it's got nickel? but no iron. Iron and nickel come together. I mean, they're next to each other on the periodic table. To separate iron and nickel, you're going to need some weird, some difficult processes to separate these two.

1:43:04And meteorites, metal meteorites are always iron, nickel, meteorites. Iron and nickel come together. So now you've got something that's nickel and not iron. This is a weird thing. And it suggests some weird processes that went into its formation. has an anti-tail not just a tail it's got a tail and an anti-tail it's yeah there's a lot to worry about here and and I suspect I mean from a practical standpoint clearly this is something that we don't know much about yeah and so just claiming it's a comet and throwing up your hands and walking away is stupid just flat out stupid and ignorant it. To say it's an alien spacecraft, well, I mean, yeah, you don't have a lot of evidence for that either.

1:43:55So that's tough too. But it is something we ought to study. And I remember there were several people who were saying, well, it's not worth studying. No, this is an interstellar object that tells us what the conditions are like around another star system. Yeah, this is something you should study. If you're going to spend money to study another one of our asteroids over something from another star system, there's nothing reasonable about that. That's the problem with this whole conversation around UFOs is you have, on the one hand, most conventional astronomers not even looking at the data set often.

1:44:28Like, I see these guys, I think this Piers Morgan just had on this guy, I think David Kipping or something. He seems like a really good... Oh, I know David Kipping. You know David. Seems like a really, actually, I loved his episode on Rogan. He's an exoplanet guy. Yeah, exoplanet guy, really smart on that dimension. But, like, this data set that we're talking about with UFOs showing up around nuclear weapons, just totally ignorant of it. And he's talking about UFOs, but it's as if they have to be things that are traveling from space. And I don't even think he's probably familiar with a lot of the NASA cases, because these seem like anecdotal, small sample size, conspiratorial things.

1:45:04I would argue that the nuclear thing is a ubiquitous global pattern. It's a huge deal. That you have to contend with as a scientist. Right. So you end up with these people who, again, don't want to like knock him like super smart conventional guy but like is mired in kind of current astronomical data around ufos and just won't really look at it and it's all relying on you know it's all like well if the government has something they should release it or something but can't look at the open source stuff and then on the other side it's people who are sure that it's extraterrestrial they're here they're starseeds probably you know and we have all the it's like you're jumping super to conclusions you're not just following the evidence yeah yeah so it's those two it's there's no like middle path of like this is the evidence it's like dealing with a scientific it's like a scientific community with bipolar disorder yes it's like yes it's crazy yeah it's it's really difficult the um i mean the best the the quote that comes to mine is from Stanton Freeman, who said, if you're a scientist and a professional, you need to do your homework before you open your mouth.

1:46:14Period. That's it. If you haven't done your homework, if you haven't researched it, then you have nothing to say. You have nothing to share. And you can't go with the excuse that I hear time and time again. Well, I don't, that's mostly nonsense and I don't have time to read nonsense. Well, then why are you finding the time to talk about, to argue against nonsense. You can find the time to argue against nonsense without looking into the nonsense, but you can't find the time to research it. And then, and first, my first response to that, first, it's not nonsense. This is something that, this is a phenomenon that people have seen for centuries, centuries.

1:46:53I mean, you had Richard Dolan on, and he just put out a book on, on UFOs and water, underwater UFOs. And his case is going back to the 1800s these are the same things they they're coming back to columbus of light coming out of the water hovering next to the ship following the ship and then taking off into the clouds same things yes and for since the 1800s and this nobody in the 1800s is making this up to sound like what somebody reported last week no totally yeah and you have you have third world places now like in third world countries where it's like these people like virginia james fox just got back from Brazil.

1:47:32He keeps going back. And this whole town, uncorrelated, disparate sources, they all report this cigar-shaped Tic Tac-like object crashing and three beings coming out, one of which was captured and taken to a hospital. And everybody working at the hospital says that they saw the being. And one neuroscientist who's still alive to this day goes on record, says he's staring the being in the face for four minutes. And this guy's alive. And you have this whole time there's a saucer in the town dedicated ufos what they none of these people are making a penny some of them were offered briefcases of cash to shut up about this thing so so like what like explain to me why they would lie like it's ridiculous it's actually absurd i wish i could see a ufo so somebody could offer me shit to shut up yeah right yeah yeah i'll take it that's a good deal maybe that's what's happening with some of the scientists yeah well maybe maybe because i So somebody like a Neil deGrasse Tyson, he goes on these podcast tours and he's just, it's the same thing over and over again, which is like no high resolution imagery.

1:48:38And it's like, why aren't we drowning in imagery because we have all of cell phones or whatever? Are there any high resolution pictures of quasars? Right. I don't think so. But they exist. But they exist. I mean, we don't have high-resolution pictures of exoplanets either, yet David Kipping and I study them. I mean, come on. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, why is it— Or ask the average person to— Why is it a scientist, when they come to this topic, they throw their brains out the window and then open their mouths? It's maddening. Yeah, I think there's some sort of—well, I think unorthodox and independent thinking don't scale with IQ.

1:49:15And so there are a lot of people that can be shepherded into bad frameworks and not even looking at certain stigmatized topics because ideas are fashion statements and those are bad fashion or whatever, even though they can like do well on an SAT or something. And so I think that's a really, you know, not well understood thing. And so you think of this priestly citadel as like infallible when it comes to thinking about these things. But in fact, they can be shepherded into, you know, in some ways they can be shepherded even more easily because they think they're so smart. They think they can't be tricked or something.

1:49:52Right. Right. And it's just I don't know. I think it's sad because there are all these first principles argument. So you can you can you can go at, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson with around, you know, red shifts and blue shifts and, you know, gravitational perturbations that will like, you know, cause issues with general optical photography, you know. And, you know, it's like he wouldn't have anything to say after that. He would just say, well, it can't be. It can't be so. Like that ends the conversation with a person like that, you know. So it's like extremely frustrating. I'm sure you deal with it because you have to straddle academia and this sort of more, you know, crazy world of BFOs.

1:50:30I've been in numerous discussions where the academic person I've been talking to just throws their brain out the window and stops thinking. You know, if I talk about something else, another scientific topic, they're fine. But this, they just seem to stop thinking. It's very odd. You're in upstate New York. Do you think you're in the general vicinity of Stony Brook University. Do you think they have anything to do with UFOs? I don't know of anything going on at Stony Brook. At Stony Brook? Okay. Because, yeah, they have, I don't know, a bunch of interesting, they have like differential geometry stuff.

1:51:06going on and you know they have Jim Simons is like a big guy there. Yeah no Stony Brook has a great physics department but I don't think they do anything with UFOs. With UFO stuff okay. Because David Spurgle who's Jim Simons you know foundation guy so Jim Simons is like runs he just passed away. Ran the best performing hedge fund in the US over you know a 30 year period you know Renaissance Technologies the Medallion Fund and before that he was an NSA codebreaker and also like a brilliant physicist who's contributed a lot to fundamental physics and like yang mills and you know interesting stuff so um my former colleague eric weinstein has suspected that maybe he has something to do with the ufo question or something and that there may be the the renaissance technology is sort of printing money and then they're putting it towards you know the ufo the ufo question and i honestly i thought all of that was kind of conspiratorial and ridiculous until 2022 happened.

1:52:07There's a NASA UAP panel. And then David Spurgle, who's, you know, Jim Simon's top science advisor, runs the Science Foundation. Yeah, he wrote, he was the main author on the report. On the NASA UAP review panel. Right. So I'm like, what's going on? Is there some sort of connection there? That's a good question. I don't know. Because we were just talking about all the weird NASA data and that seems to be like, you know, it seems like it might be suppressed or something. So yeah, who knows? Well, this has been a pleasure, Kevin. I really love talking to you. And yeah, I wish you the best of luck with all of your interesting work at University of Albany.

1:52:42Oh, thank you. And is there anything you'd like to plug or anything the audience can help kind of promote or support that helps you out? Well, our work at UAlbany would be great to support. We just got a generous donation from Tony Gorman, who's a local businessman. And that has really given us a big boost. And we can always use a little more boost. So if anybody wants to donate tax-free to UAlbany for our work on UAPs, that'd be awesome. That's awesome. And yeah, one of the few academic institutions that is actually systematically looking into this question. So we're basically, Matthew Shadagas and I, and we were original members with UAPX, and now UAPX has been disbanded and moved to UAlbany, and it's now UAlbany Project X.

1:53:39And Matthew Shadagas and I and Professor Cecilia Levy has joined us as well. Awesome. And the gift we got has created an endowment which will fund us in perpetuity to some degree. So we are here to stay. Wow. Love it. It's exciting. Well, excited to see as you make breakthroughs on a go-forward basis. And we'd love to have you back and really appreciate you coming out here. Thank you so much for having me.

1:54:14Alchemist, did you enjoy that? If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video, with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten, and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video.

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