For a month now, drone sightings have grown in New Jersey and now spread to several other states. Is it a foreign actor, our own secretive government, or a mass hysteria? Charlie talks to dronemaker John Ferguson, whose theory of the case went viral online. Former CIA agent John Maguire makes the case for why Iranian involvement should be suspected.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, it's on the Charlie Kirk show. John Ferguson, chief executive officer of Saxon Aerospace joins us about the drone story and John McGuire as well, former CIA. We dive deep into the drone story here on the Charlie Kirk show. Become a member today. Members.charliekirk.com. That is members.charliekirk.com. Everybody, you have to come to America Fest. It's amfest.com.
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Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is noblegoldinvestments.com. It's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Joining us next is John Ferguson. John Ferguson is the CEO of Saxon Aerospace and Saxon Unmanned. He went very, very viral this weekend because Joe Rogan shared his clip. John, welcome to the program.
John, I'm going to play this clip that went very viral, and then we have time. I want you to just uninterruptedly and freely explain even deeper what happened here. Joe Rogan said this was the first clip about the drones that actually scared him. Play cut 25, please.
So I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago who was trying to raise an alarm to the highest levels of our government, which they had their ears closed, about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on. He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine. And he knew that that thing was headed towards the United States. OK, that is a very serious deal.
And everyone knows that the United States government, this administration is pushing to get into a war with Russia. We all know that. We all feel it. We all see it.
All right, John, what's going on here?
Well, thank you, Charlie. And by the way, I saw you and Tucker here in Wichita a few months ago. So I really enjoyed that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry to hear that Kansas State University didn't treat you very well. You know, I'm still paying Kate's son. So now, so, you know, I have, you know, a small political footprint and, you know, you and I know some similar people and, and yeah,
You know, as a manufacturer of unmanned systems, you know, some of the comments and other stories out there that have been done on me in the last couple of days are a little inaccurate. I'm not a government-backed organization or anything like that. But again, I wanted to make sure I made that very clear. But
These folks knew that I had ties or I knew people in elevated positions here in the country, and they wanted me to help them try to get awareness started over this nuclear munition or this nuclear payload that this guy physically was in an eastern – a small – country on the Eastern block of Europe.
He physically put his hands on this and he knew that that was supposed to be heading to the United States. This guy came back here to the States and he's like, he's like, Hey everybody, there's this stuff going on. You know, let's do something to, let's do something to raise awareness. Let's stop this thing. And he, he gained no traction. So he reached out to me and, in my network.
And then I, I tried, I made some phone calls and tried to get ahold of some people and, and it just didn't seem to go anywhere. And, and that was about probably eight months or so ago. And, and, and I thought, well, that's ridiculous. And so when I saw these drone videos and I saw the hysteria going on about these drones and wondering if they were nefarious or,
if they were iran's drones or anybody else's i i i just i just felt compelled to do my first my first ever tech talk video ever um and and this this happened but i just wanted to just tell people that you know these drones are here um they're there to do a job and and and that's it and the federal government's not going to tell you any of us ever what they're actually doing you know
And you're speculating that the drones are trying to sniff out radioactive material. And has that been proven to be a successful strategy to find radioactive material before?
It is. We have radioactive material sniffers on our unmanned aircraft. That's absolutely a capability of an unmanned aircraft. And if you look at what these drones are doing, they seem to be, there is some conflicting stories, but they seem to be trying to follow, you know, the FAA guidelines. They have nav lights on them.
You know, if they had a nefarious intent, then they wouldn't have nav lights on them. But they're concerned about obviously hitting other manned aircraft in such a busy airspace area. But it is a very successful operation or a very successful capability to be able to detect gases or other materials on the ground.
We have what we call methane detection systems where we mount them on our unmanned aircraft and we fly along pipelines and we can very accurately pick out pretty much almost 100% of every single gas leak. Now, these drones are flying at night because they seem to be flying undercover and they do not want their...
the shape of the drone to be well known because then you can track down what manufacturer is actually producing the aircraft. Right. So they seem to be following some rules. Uh, they're flying at night.
There's no reason really to be flying an unmanned aircraft at night, unless you're, unless you have a very specific purpose, because with a standard camera on a drone, you can't see anything at night unless you're using thermal optics or, you know, some form of sensor like that. Um, They're flying at night also because the winds are down. They're not as aggressive as they are during the day.
So, you know, you would get a much more accurate reading at night when you're trying to smell chemicals or some type of gas.
So I have so many questions. Based on what you are seeing from these videos, are you able to decipher that they are American-made, American-sourced and they're not foreign drones? Are there defining configuration characteristics or is it not clear based on the videos you've seen?
Most of the videos that I have seen are not – really very helpful in trying to determine who the very specific manufacturer is. There are some photographs and videos out there of drones flying that it's like, yeah, well, we know who that is, right? But I couldn't really give a definitive answer on who specifically is the manufacturer of that aircraft.
I just couldn't give you a very accurate assessment on that. But I do very firmly believe that these are absolutely not nefarious and from another country without us knowing the reason behind those aircraft. And there's a lot of them. It's an FAA monumental event for the FAA to give authorization to all of these.
How many drones approximately do you think have been in the airspace at one time?
The videos that I'm seeing, I'm seeing dozens. So that would be, again, a monumental event to authorize that many aircraft to fly over a populated area. That's just not something the FAA typically allows. Is it possible that most of these are manned aircraft? I do believe there's a mix. I believe that some folks are out there.
I've seen some thermal imaging where people have actually shot videos of –
aircraft that they thought were drones and they actually turned out with the heat signatures they actually turned out to be uh to man to be manned aircraft so there is a mix there's a mix of multi-copters which are the vertical takeoff type drones like you know quadcopters you get at best buy but only much larger and then there's also a mixture of fixed wing aircraft that i've that i've been able to see
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Join me and make the switch today. patriotmobile.com slash charlie. That is patriotmobile.com slash charlie or call 972-PATRIOT. So, John, let's go through some other hypotheticals. What else could it be? Let's try to challenge the assumption. What other explanations could it be here? And is there any chance that this is just people in hysterics just going bonkers over nothing?
No, I think that people are going absolutely crazy over this thing because of the huge unknown. And if you see in the video, I said this has the potential to be what it actually could be. I know that makes really doesn't make a lot of sense.
But, you know, the potential is if this is a worst case scenario, then I felt compelled, you know, to really just say, hey, look, wait, time out, everybody, time out. These are not nefarious. In my eyes, they're not nefarious. And I went over on the second and third video, I went over technically why they're not coming out of the water.
They're not coming off of a large vessel off the coast unless they're a certain type of drone. But I didn't want to spread fear and panic. I just wanted to give a technical expert's perspective you know, opinion on why they are not something that you really need to be concerned about as far as really nefarious intent.
It's actually what they're looking for that I think is what we should be concerned about. You know, so again, as I'd stated before, there's no reason for all of these drones to be flying in this pattern with this many aircraft out there
There's no real reason for that unless you're very specifically looking for something, and that something has to be so damned important that you're going to cause a nationwide or now a worldwide crisis. hysteria, you know, so I mean, I'm just doing the math. You know, we know that these nuclear warheads came up missing in the 80s. We know that. We know they're out there.
They're all over the world. We don't know where the hell they are, right? We know that they're here. We know that we have some here. That's been talked about for years. So I'm just doing the math. The drones have a very specific reason and it better be a very specific
good reason to cause all of this panic you know in the united states to be flying these drones out there so again what they're looking for i think has to be very important and i don't know if it's radioactive i can't say that you know specifically
Yeah, for a layman like myself and most of the audience, if someone were to have a dirty bomb or a remnant of that, does that leave a trail of radioactivity almost definitionally? Or is it a little bit murkier than that?
I am not an expert, but I've been on the phone with a lot of people here lately. And they had one really nice lady said that they probably have U-2 spy planes that were specifically designed – you know, to be searching for this stuff. But I don't know if they would leave some type of a radioactive snail trail.
I would say that they're very well contained because if they are leaving some type of a snail trail, then you're going to have a line of people that are going to have... you know, cancer from the whole entire duration of this, the journey of this particular asset. So I don't believe, but I'm not, again, I'm not a radioactive, I'm not a nuclear expert. I'm a drone expert. So yeah,
So I would have – if I were to guess, I would say that my hypothesis would be that they would not be leaving a snail trail, but you would have to be over the source in order to find it because it has to be contained. If it's not contained, then it's a whole new thing. It's a whole new scare.
How long has this been going on? Because I kind of rolled my eyes at first at the story because there's just so much of these stories that end up not manifesting to something worthy of attention. How long has this been going on, and is it ongoing as of last night?
Yeah, it's ongoing. I spoke to the guys last night, and I said, look, now that we have the spotlight, unfortunately or fortunately, whatever, we need to follow this through, and we need to get somebody's attention to say, hey, let's work together to go find – you know, what we believe to be is true. You know, that asset was on its way to this country. This guy knows about it.
He physically touched it. So, you know, let's work together. Let's find it. You know, it's a very true thing. And this stuff has been going on for decades. Everybody knows about it, you know, in D.C. that work on, you know, defense and national security.
I think that mystery guy needs to come forward. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, this is, again, I don't want people to panic. And if this has been going on for a couple weeks now, you have to wonder. It doesn't quite add up. It doesn't quite add up in my head. All right, John, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. Okay. Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
What do you think these drones are? Something is not adding up. I wish we trusted our government. Joining us now is John McGuire, senior SIS CIA case officer, retired. John, thank you for taking the time. John, the audience right now is very worried about what they are seeing over New Jersey, New York, spreading to other states.
What is your theory as to what is happening in the skies of America right now?
Well, Charlie, thank you for the opportunity to join you today. There's some fresh material that just came in through people that I know that that are in the foreign field and keeping track of this, that now that there's issues with drones on the southwestern side of San Diego and that area of Ventura County, as well as some issues that happened last night in Virginia Beach with drones as well.
It's a huge problem when you have the federal government speaking officially via the Secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Mayorkas, And they're in complete conflict with the state guidance that's given out by the governor of New Jersey. Regardless of what is said, the American public knows that the federal system and the state system are on different pages.
And that leads any thinking person to believe that someone is lying. Which side is lying is a question. anybody's guess, but there's a long history of the federal government misleading the public.
And to say that there is no danger, that there's nothing to worry about, and these are not a threat, and then have the guidance come out from the state that says, if you see a drone that has crashed or is in your immediate vicinity, call the bomb squad, the fire department, and the fire department will respond as it's a hazmat site, because you don't know what is on
the drone that may have dropped out of the sky. And there is confusion and growing concern and anger within the public. And this is part of the rupture of the public trust.
So do you think they are foreign in origination or domestic?
I think there's a mix of both. I think the United States has has operational platforms in the air. There are large drones that are operated by the U.S. government that carry sniffer technology and they look for things in the air that you might have in a post drone. incident or post-blast event that they would be able to find out what it is.
You wouldn't have to fly a manned aircraft through a cloud. You could just do it with a drone. But mixed in with that are a whole lot of other drones that no one is talking about from the federal level, like they don't exist, but they do exist. People can see them. And there is a large presence of Chinese operations people and Iranian operations people in Mexico.
The largest Iranian embassy in the world is Mexico City, which is a fundamentally Catholic country. And there are no mosques in Mexico. Yet the Iranians have their largest embassies presence there. in Mexico City. The Chinese have operational components up in the Mazatlan area, where they bring things in and out of the port of Mexico. There's a huge port at Mazatlan.
And those are all within immediate striking distance of the California border and Vandenberg Air Force Base, where we have a tremendous amount of national assets that are critical to the defense of the country and for early warning. It doesn't bode well for the foolishness that we see in explanations from senior executives for the U.S. federal government.
Yeah, and they're not being very clear about what they're doing in the sky. So if you were to speculate then, if they were Iranian in nature, what would they be doing over our skies just – hovering and why only at night?
At night, there is legislation that was passed quietly. I think it was last year where they passed legislation that you could start flying drones at night. For a long time, you could only fly them in the daytime, but they are air obstacles on their best day. We still have air travel all night long, especially in places like Southern California and the East Coast of the United States.
It's a 24-hour day busy. It's just a matter of time before we have some type of a mishap with aircraft and drones that are in an airspace, and they move so quickly they can move vertically, change altitude, and no one's really keeping track of or directing the lanes of traffic. But the fact that the Iranians are here, if you have Iranian drones operating and they're mixed in with other U.S.
platforms and the Chinese can operate platforms like that that are good-sized platforms, you have the ability to photograph, see, take visual observation. You can map things. You can have cell phone relays on there. There's a lot of material that goes on a drone. And they refined that test when they did the balloon operation.
The balloon operation that floated across the northern United States was, I think, a test operation. They wanted to see what the reaction would be. But the thing that disturbed me the most about that, when you have drones now over the system, is there were delivery racks slung in those balloon rigs that we witnessed the shoot down. When that material was recovered from the ocean,
You could see clearly the delivery racks, but they were empty. They wouldn't fly an empty rack, which is a heavy thing that is controlled by the balloon electronically for you to deliver things and drop things from the balloon. And we don't know what was in those racks, and no one seems curious about it in the federal government to find out or to release what was in those racks.
And if you drop things from those racks, it's a passive activity. They drop and they hit the ground. And a lot of them can go in the ground just from terminal velocity of falling from the sky. But they can be electronic collection devices, relays. Lots of things can be delivered by balloons. And you can deliver the same things from a drone. But you can arm a drone.
And if you have a camera on it and you can see, you can use it as a flyable platform that's accurate. and precise in its target.
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So the Iranians, we know they want to assassinate President Trump. Are you suggesting that these might be here on a nefarious mission to try to assassinate President Trump before certification day on January the 6th?
Charlie, that's the million dollar question because some of the things that people like me have, and it's nothing magical about me, it's the fact that there has been a transition between of trust and a loss of trust, not only within the U.S.
government system and the population of the U.S., but especially between foreign-friendly liaison services and other groups that operate overseas and the CIA at large. And our presence overseas is not robustly and aggressively pursuing human operations. But there are people all over the world that remember their own, the case officers that they met along the way and have reached out.
There are also people reaching out to people like me that are good officers with reputations within the system and because they trust us and they're inside the government now, our government, explaining what they've been asked to do and what is actually going on.
And there is, I believe, very solid intelligence that the Iranians have committed to people inside our system that they intend to ensure that President Trump is not there on the 20th of January. I look at Iran, there are a lot of people dismiss them. You know, they're just foreigners and they say all kinds of blustery things and everything.
Political assassination, the word assassin is a Persian word. They invented political assassination. They invented the car bomb as a political tool. They invented kidnapping and operational use of their people to change policies. They drove us out of Lebanon with car bombs, vehicular mounted IEDs, assassination, they kidnapped the chief of station and murdered him in a most horrific way.
And we left Lebanon back in the Iranian administration. They know how to do this. They assassinated Hariri and one of the most complicated operational things I've ever seen done that required two years of link analysis to unravel what they actually did to vector a truck bomb into an up-armored
Mercedes limo that was in a group of nine identical limos, yet they vectored the truck bomb against Hariri's car at the right time in the right place and killed the president of Lebanon in a massive explosion. But he was alive in the armored car. The armored car was not on its wheels anymore because of the blast. And President Hariri from Lebanon was
suffocated or burned to death or a combination of both because of the fire. The car kept itself intact, but the Iranians understand if you have a level nine limousine, you just need a bigger bomb. It's not to blow up the car, but if the car isn't on its wheels anymore, if it's upside down or on its side, you have essentially achieved your goal. You have frozen your target
on the X. And if you need to, you can come up with another bomb that comes in and goes off again, right next to it. They are determined and they hate President Trump because of what happened with Qasem Soleimani. To think that they're not going to try is just folly. They will try and they will keep trying until they succeed.
They're not going to withdraw the fatwa for the killing of Qasem Soleimani.
So just how serious is Iran about avenging the death of Soleimani? I mean, if they were to successfully, God forbid, assassinate one of our leaders, that would result in a ferocious response. Is Iran really ready for that kind of vertical escalation?
I'm not sure that they're concerned, overly concerned about it, because they can absorb an awful lot of punishment if that's what happens. But I'm not convinced, unless we have a different administration in place, that there would be an overwhelming response. There could be so much confusion in the air sown by the fact that you've got all these drones and there's multiple targets.
You've created a narrative that is confusing the public now. What you feed into that narrative, if you have the opportunity after in a post-event scenario, you can feed in more confusion, more facts, more blame. diversify the blame. There's a lot of avenues for how to do a deception program that the U.S. is sensitive, we're sensitized to that stuff.
And you can confuse the hell out of people on what actually happened. And do we want to take the step of bombing a country because we blame Iran. We may not be able to figure out who did it forensically. Yes. But the fact is, if it happens, then we're faced with a long series of how do we transition to an inauguration? What do we do? This is something we've never faced.
At the root of a lot of this is that we inherently do not trust our government or our intel services. What can President Trump do to rebuild the trust and the fidelity that we have to the intel community?
Charlie, that's an outstanding question because we have reached the level now where you have an entire generation of young people. My kids are grown, but they're in their 30s. And they said something to me a while ago that said, you know, Dad, we have never seen or experienced the America that you grew up in.
We have only seen turmoil, chaos, lying, corruption, and all kinds of mess come out of Washington. And what President Trump has managed to do by getting elected is He has just swept in an air, a fresh air blast into what is a very dark and horrible place in Washington, D.C., He is looked at, especially by the younger generation, as somebody that may be able to pull this thing around and fix it.
He can fix it. A lot of his conditions for success were set by his victory. But the way he's trying to populate his cabinet is one of the best things you can do. Bringing in people like Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon. Amaryllis Kennedy to be a high official in the agency. That's a generational shift.
And when you're inside the system and you're working for both of them, for Hegseth and for Amaryllis, when you are between 10 and 15 years when you leave, you are a journeyman level person. For both of them, they know what goes on, they know how to do their jobs, and they know the system that they operate in. They know what's wrong with it, and they know how to fix it.
You don't fix stuff from entrenched bureaucrats who have been around and are steeped and are owned by the corruption system. You fixed major bureaucracies with young people who are not corrupted, and they know how to do the job, and they know how to fix the system. And you don't have to be around for 40 years to figure that out. When you have 10 to 15, from your fifth year
You're an apprentice sort of when you get hired, trained, deployed, and functional. By five years, you've got your first tour under your belt and you've demonstrated that you can do the job. Then you do it for 10 more years and you do it well and you refine the craft. That's the same thing you have in the Pentagon that you have in the CIA.
And that's the kind of thing that President Trump is bringing into his
administration is young journeyman level people that know how to do what the work mission is the core mission and this whole thing about age and then the machinery can be unleashed against people like that to come up with all kinds of stories and lies and they throw all this dirt at them in hopes that they can get them pushed out of the way that's where we are with some of these young people
people that have been appointed to key positions. And that is something that they just need to shoulder through that, ignore it and do it because people will come out of the woodwork to come back to the agency. They'll come back in the Pentagon and they'll want to come back to work if they believe that a president has put someone in charge and is
completely behind change, not change for the sake of change or changing the wiring diagram, changing what we do overseas and domestically and restoring the public trust. We hide so much stuff from the public that should not be classified. When I sent a cable from the field to buy pencils, it was a classified mission cable. That's absurd. All of it's absurd.
Classifications are to protect sources and methods. That's why we have them. It's not to protect mistakes, corruption, waste, and foolishness that occurs inside the system. And you need someone to come in and really rattle the core bureaucratic lethargy that is set in across the government. And the government is too big to
His effort to cut stuff down has been reinforced by the research that was done during the COVID shutdown. That is the key. Sweep it out and bring new people in.
John, thank you so much. Appreciate it. We are out of time. John, thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.