61. The Truth About UFOs: Whistleblowers, Warplanes, and Worlds Unknown (Ep 4)

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1:39The truth is that when I came into office, I asked, right, I was like, all right, is there the lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens and spaceship? And, you know, they did a little bit of research and the answer was no. What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, well, there's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified.

2:12I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And that was President Barack Obama talking to James Corden on The Late Show in May of 2021 after President Obama had, of course, left office. And he is talking, Gordon, about UAPs slash UFOs. He's talking about unexplained sort of anomalies and aerial phenomena that even he, as the president of the United States, did not have the answer to. And so today we are finishing our deeply rigorous and scientific investigation into whether we are alone in the universe, looking at the history of UFOs through the, I'd say the rest is classified lens, Gordon, of secret government programs and the CIA's involvement in both trying to calm down public anxiety over UFOs while also simultaneously feeding the flames.

3:09We've talked about the Roswell incident. We've talked about balloons and their role in feeding UFO paranoia. And we ended last time, Gordon, on the cliffhanger of, well, there's going to be a resurgence, isn't there, in recent years of interest in UFOs. And I think that Barack Obama quote sums it up nicely, which is that there are these unexplained phenomena that even high-ranking government officials don't seem able to explain. And this is the final episode. We're going to answer all the questions. So it is interesting, isn't it? Because there has been this recent resurgence, which is in about the last 10 years, in the idea that there might be something unexplained out there.

3:53And that President Obama quote is a great example of it. A lot of that comes back, actually, to some reports in 2017 from the New York Times, that illustrious publication, because it came out with a couple of blockbuster stories on UFOs. And one was the existence of something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, AATIP, which had been basically designated to look for UFOs. and the idea that this program that existed but the second one which was linked to that was that one of the reasons that program had been created was that the US Navy had some videos of UFOs taken from some of its fast jets and these were actually leaked to the paper and published and so those videos which came from the kind of early 2000s had led to the creation of this Pentagon program which was in existence I think for five years or so from 2007 to 2012 but like everything else kept completely secret.

4:49It's kind of interesting, isn't it? Because one of the reasons it came to existence was it had a big backer who funded it with, I think,$22 million, which was Senator Harry Reid, who was a kind of influential Democrat senator, wasn't he? Which we should say, I mean,$22 million in the defense budget is sort of the equivalent of rummaging around your couch and digging up coins that are under the cushions, right? So it's not - Maybe in America, not in Britain. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's true. That's fair enough. But I mean, In the US defense context, I think finding$22 million in the Pentagon, it's not the most challenging thing, let's just say.

5:22But it does indicate high level interest. And that Harry Reid appropriated it. And when it later comes out, he writes a piece where he says, I've always been fascinated by things I don't understand. He kind of grew up in rural Nevada and used to kind of look up at the sky and wonder what it contained. And then he says, as a Democratic senator from Nevada, I visited Area 51. So he got there, the top secret Air Force testing site. He saw the bodies. Well, no, what I love is in this article, he says, what I saw fascinated me, though much of it remains classified. That's great. That's great. I don't think he's around anymore because otherwise we could have just had him on the pod.

5:56He would have been like the perfect guest bonus episode. So he's backing it. Another backer is John Podesta, being Clinton's chief of staff. So it's kind of interesting because you get a few powerful people in government who have a view that something is out there. And they're going to play a quite a big role in driving programs and driving funding to have this stuff properly investigated. But it is coming after some real interesting sightings by, I think, predominantly U.S. Navy pilots that have to be driving a lot of interest inside the Pentagon as well. I mean, it's worth digging into some of these sightings.

6:32November 14th, 2004, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group training about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. An advanced new radar has detected multiple anomalous aerial vehicles over the horizon, descending 80 ,000 feet in less than a second. Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich in a Super Hornet was out there in the air when something moving fast and erratically came into view. Dietrich's boss flew in for a closer look to check it out. There's a kind of white tic-tac object which begins mirroring his movements and then just disappears. And that's one of the videos, and you can see the video of it.

7:07It's a kind of grainy video, so it's not perfect to be able to see what's going on, but you can see all the kind of sensor stuff around it. But that's one of the ones that gets leaked in 2017 and causes a kind of big fuss. I have a friend who is a former US Navy fighter pilot and Top Gun instructor who flew Super Hornets. And he has a story. It hasn't been made public, but he's given this kind of debrief to this Pentagon task force. He had actually a very similar incident. He was doing a simulated dogfight with a wingman over the Gulf of America, Gordon, I should say. Well done. Yeah, over the Gulf of America.

7:51And he saw, I mean, he's kind of banking. He sees an object that is flying then kind of moving between him and his partner in this dogfight. That is a sphere. It's like a white sphere, almost like a golf ball without dimples. That's just a little bit smaller than his plane. So a a large object that is moving through the sky. And then he, he sights it and it kind of comes and moves behind him. And then his wingman says that he sees it quickly change direction and follow him for a little bit before they lose it. And, you know, he's a highly credible guy. So you do have these very interesting reports from a lot of Navy pilots in this time period, which I think it is really interesting because I asked him like, what do you think it was?

8:40And he's like, I don't know of anything that we have that moves that way with that kind of propulsion changing directions. Because the example he gave was, you know, as he's banking in a Super Hornet or something, as you're turning, you're doing kind of a wide arc to change directions when you're moving that fast. And this object is not obeying that same kind of expectation. It's just shifting directions super rapidly and keeping up with an F-18 Super Hornet. he would say he thought, well, maybe it's something that the Russians or the Chinese have developed that they're using in our airspace. So he's kind of open-minded.

9:20He doesn't know what it is, basically. Yeah, he doesn't. I mean, even now, it's like there's not an explanation for it. It's one of these small percentage of things that Barack Obama is talking about in that opening quote, where it defies our abilities as of now to explain what it is. And so there definitely have been a kind of rash of these sightings. You also get some people who call themselves whistleblowers. So there's a former Pentagon intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, comes out and talks about that there is a program and he's been part of it. And he's one of the people who reveals this kind of secret Pentagon program.

9:51And as you kind of referred to earlier, it's now called the UAP programs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. And that's partly because there was a stigma, it was thought, for pilots reporting UFOs. So UFOs are seen as people who wear tinfoil hats. Whereas a different classification makes it easier for people to talk about it. My friend said that very similar thing, that there was a big push inside the Navy to get pilots to actually fill out reports and to log these things. And I think changing the name and really trying to push in the Navy to kind of destigmatize it. Because you think, I mean, this is something we can't explain it.

10:26It would be great if we could, right? And if you have pilots who think they're going to be lumped in with the tinfoil hat brigade, you won't actually get a robust data set on all these incidents. I just remind you, you are currently wearing a tinfoil hat. I forgot, actually, as I was saying that. Yeah, I just want to remind you of that. I'm an honorary member of the brigade, Gordon. There's another one called David Grush. He's a decorated combat officer served in Afghanistan, works in different bits of the wider intelligence community and works on this. Now, he's at the kind of further end of stuff because he goes, the government has knowledge of UAPs, which were the product of, as he puts it, a non-human intelligence.

11:04So this becomes known as NHIs. And he says that for decades, there's been a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. And that also there's a kind of Cold War arms race between the US and its adversaries to kind of reverse engineer this technology to kind of get an advantage. Now, again, one of the kind of challenges with his testimony is that he hasn't seen any of these kind of crashed items from what I understand firsthand. Now, there's a very interesting statement about him from Marco Rubio back when Marco Rubio was a senator. So before he became secretary of state. And he says, right now, what I know is reliable people to tell us.

11:41And we've seen objects operating over restricted military and national security airspace. They claim it's not ours. They claim they don't know whose it is. that's like the definition of a national security threat we have a number of people including grush who have come forward both publicly and privately to make claims one of two things are true either a they're telling the truth or some version of the truth or b we have a bunch of people with high clearances and really important jobs in our government who are nuts both are a problem and i'm not accusing these people of being nuts that said that's something we'll look at and continue to look at seriously.

12:17It's a really kind of interesting statement because when you get to the kind of Grusher ideas, it's not just that there's something odd like your pilot seeing it. He's like, there's a crash retrieval program and we're reverse engineering it and it's being kept secret. And now that is either true or not true. That's not in the kind of mystery phase of things. But what feels maybe a little bit misleading about this logical choice that then Senator Rubio laid out, is that what is verifiably true is that there's a handful of these incidents, a small percentage, that do not have an explanation as of right now, and that the U.S.

12:55government at the highest levels is basically saying, look, these aren't ours. Whatever it is, it's not something we're doing. It's not a balloon. It's not a secret CIA platform. It's not next generation technology that the Air Force is actually testing or the Navy is testing. We don't know what it is, right? But what Grush is doing is he's then making the jump from that to aliens. Or non-human intelligence, we should say. Non-human intelligence. So that to me feels like - A leap. A leap. Where Marco Rubio's A and B are not actually quite true. It could be the fact that the people who Grush is talking to are in fact misleading him about this being aliens or some kind of reverse engineering thing, right?

13:41That to me feels like the sort of distinction. But as a result of this kind of new last few years interest in it, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence now kind of regularly does these reports on UAPs. So June 2021, they looked at the kind of previous 17 years, they found 144 reports, Some of these UAPs remain stationary in winds, moving against the wind, maneuver in strange ways, all the stuff we're talking about. It says most of them can be explained, and it breaks it down, I think, into basically five categories. One is airborne clutter. That's kind of birds, balloons, recreational drones, debris, plastic bags even, which kind of get in the way.

14:21Then there's natural atmospheric phenomena, ice crystals, moisture, which might kind of affect infrared and systems. The third one they do list is US government or industry developmental programs. So they say this, some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by US entities. We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected. I think that's kind of interesting answer. Then the next one they've got is foreign adversary systems. Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity.

14:56And then finally, there's another category called other. Ah, the other bucket. The other bucket, that one. Although most of the UAP described in our data set probably remain identified due to limited challenges, limited data, we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze, and characterize some of them. So they basically go, some we can't say. And the number of reports grows. So by 2022, they say they've got 510 reports. So the number of reports, it's that classic thing, a bit like the 50s, isn't it? The more you look, the more you see. So the number of reports are growing.

15:32A lot of them do look like they're drones. And some of them, it appears, may be back in the world of balloons. What else? And that's a good cliffhanger, Gordon, because in 2023, something will be seen floating above our great open American skies. and it's going to bring us right back to where this, hopefully, extraterrestrial journey started. So we'll see you after the break.

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18:01Well, welcome back. We are in rural Montana. It's the 1st of February, 2023. And, Gordon, people, as they have for millennia, are staring up at the sky, wondering, are we alone in this vast and unforgiving universe? A universe, Gordon, where the endlessness just expands and expands. These people in rural Montana, they're looking up at a starry American sky, and they see something in that sky. What is it, Gordon? They see something and some wonder, could it be a spaceship? Could it be the aliens? Is it Independence Day? Are they going to get abducted? But it quickly emerges that it's not. Sadly, spoiler, it was, as people may remember, a Chinese spy balloon.

18:59And that balloon had first entered the US airspace over Alaska on January 28th. It crosses north, comes back over mainland Alaska, over Canada. then comes back into US airspace over Northern Idaho on January 31st, then Montana on the February the 1st, spotted by people. Good old American citizens, Gordon, staring up at the sky. Spot it. Spot it. But it also seems to be on the path over Malmstrom Air Force Base, which I think is where Minuteman missiles are housed. So at this point, it blows up into a huge row once it becomes clear it's a Chinese spy balloon. Because the Chinese are saying it's just a weather balloon.

19:36Do you remember that argument from Roswell and everywhere else? It's just a weather balloon, as the general said. But it's clearly not a weather balloon. There's kind of uproaring Congress. They're like, how dare the Chinese be spying on us and sending balloons over our airspace? Secretary of State Antony Blinken postpones a trip to Beijing. At this point, US-China relations are not great. And this was a kind of big moment to try and kind of improve them with the Secretary of State going to Beijing. And they just cancel it. The impact of balloons on our society, I think, is one of the themes of this series, because not only have they fed conspiracies about aliens for the past 75 years, but they've also thrown a real wrench into US-China great power politics.

20:18So the humble balloon, Gordon. So it's being tracked across the country. They scramble some fighter jets from Nellis Air Force Base when they first spot it. But interesting enough, they don't want to shoot it down over land. That's interesting to me because I remember watching this and thinking, why are we letting this just soar over our country once we know it's there? It does seem a little odd that they didn't shoot it down right away. Well, the official reason, because I remember covering this as a journalist quite a lot of the time, it was like a big story, was that the debris could actually crash to the ground and kill someone.

20:51Because even though it's flying very high, it's flying at about 60 ,000 to 65 ,000 feet, so much higher than a regular airliner, higher than some fighter jets can go the u.s actually sends a u2 spy plane on the february the 3rd which can go over 70 000 feet to take a look at it and to see what it is there's an amazing image which gets kind of released where you can see the pilot in his suit looking down you can see the curvature of the earth pretty much and there is the kind of massive balloon and i guess also that tells you why they're nervous about shooting it down because it's not just the balloon but there's these two big kind of solar panels to the side of it and then a big box in the middle and so clearly there's a lot of stuff it's not just a kind of balloon and so i guess the point about shooting it down is if that does land on someone it's going to kill them and it's pretty it's pretty small chance of it but that's got to be a risk well and i guess also and this part of the story is not reported i think at the time and and i'm just speculating here but I would have to imagine that once it was sort of spotted, that the balloon's ability to communicate with the satellite that it was communicating with was probably jammed, hampered in some way.

22:06Right. Because I presume we wouldn't allow it to continue collecting as it just flies over the entire continental US. I'm sure they worked out what signal it's transmitting on and jammed it. So eventually it's shot down on February the 4th. Once it's gone over the ocean near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, they use an F-22 Raptor. using a Sidewinder missile designed for air-to-air combat. But it is the right thing to hit a slow-moving balloon, it turns out. And it's kind of interesting because they need to ensure that the warhead of the missile detonates on impact with the balloon rather than the missile just flying through the balloon without detonating or puncturing the balloon.

22:40And then it'll just limp along. So I just love that idea. And then they've got sailors assigned to Virginia-based Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 who recover the wreckage from the ocean. It's got a big parabolic dish, 1.2 metres in diameter, kind of unidentified sensors, mast antenna. And what they realise, it's got quite sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities. It's got a synthetic aperture radar, which can see at night, penetrate through clouds and topsoil and kind of thin material by sending pulses of microwaves to the Earth to create images. Some kind of video camera with the ability to zoom.

23:16And engineers are going to say from the National Space Intelligence Center that the solar panel on it could generate upward of 10 ,000 watts of solar power. So, you know, this is a kind of pretty sophisticated thing that we're talking about. Was it all jerry-rigged together with floral tape like the original Roswell crash? I think it's a bit better than that. But while I end up, there's some detail from these leaks that come out from some U.S. documents which show it was codenamed Killeen 23 by the U.S. military. now i mean this is bizarre a u.s official supposedly tells the washington post that the u.s naming convention for balloons is alphabetical from a to z or to z even if you want to be american about it and it looks like they're named after notorious criminals so i hadn't heard of donald killeen but turns out there's another one james whitey bulger i remember him and tony ocardo who sounds like something out of the sopranos i mean i knew they named hurricanes and they have a kind of naming convention.

24:14But it turns out the US military has a balloon naming convention and uses criminals. It's violent criminals. This is weird, isn't it? And so another balloon called Bulger 21 circumnavigates the globe from December 2021 until May 2022, while Ocado 21 carries also equipment as well as a foil-lined gimbal sensor. That's what I have keeping tabs on the temperature in my hat.

24:44yeah the name of like bulger 21 do we know if the naming convention is it the same group of criminals and they just get like there's bulger 22 and bulger 23 or is it i think it's the year so i think bulger 21 is okay found in 2021 that would make sense i'm guessing this and killing 23 so it's like covid 19 yeah exactly that's what i'm guessing but any anyone from the u.s military Chinese Balloon Threat Intelligence Center can happily kind of email in and tell us what they think. So suddenly we kind of learn at this point that there's this massive spy balloon program. And it turns out even the Chinese Foreign Ministry didn't know about it and large parts of their military.

25:23But they do have this kind of big Chinese program, which is out of Hainan Island in China. Afterwards, it suddenly turns out there have been ones in Japan, which had been confused with the UFO in 2020, India, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Latin America. And once we know about them, suddenly more reports make sense again about what they might be. So this was a question I had even when this balloon story was breaking, which is, I guess, in an era of really significant sort of density of spy satellite coverage and frankly, really advanced SIGINT platforms, or at least the potential for them, what purpose is this balloon program serving in the 21st century?

26:07I guess at first blush, it just seems like something out of another era. Yeah, a bit old school. And I kind of tried to find out about it when I was asking a lot about it when it was happening. And there were different theories. One was that they can linger over a target for longer than a satellite can. So that might mean they can get more pictures and they're a bit closer, so the resolution might be better. But I think the other theory, which I think is quite plausible, is that they were more used to collect signals intelligence, where it's more useful to be close to the ground to collect those signals.