Luis "Lue" Elizondo is the former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFOs, now referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). A veteran of the U.S. Army, he has worked in counterintelligence and counterterrorism worldwide. His new book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs," is available now. https://luiselizondo-official.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Luke, how are you? Hey, sir. I'm doing better than I deserve. Well, that's a good statement. You know, there's an old military saying, any day above ground is a good day.
There you go. So tell everybody what your official job was. Wow. I had a lot of official jobs. With the government in regards to, you know. You know.
You know, those things.
Sure. One of these things. That's allegedly, that's a replica of the one that Bob Lazar worked on, the sport model.
I've heard that before.
Designs by Perry. The E in Perry is a three, and he's a dude on Instagram that sent me that. Very cool. Pretty dope, right? Yeah. We have another one that looks just like it at the Mothership at the Comedy Club. When you walk in, you walk right through like a giant suspended UFO. Very cool. So obviously I have issues.
52.
I'm 57. You are?
Yeah. Man.
Well, I look 10 years older than you. I got a lot of hard miles on me, unfortunately. I do, too. Believe it or not. Well, you'll have to share with me your secret because, unfortunately, I tell people this is as good as it gets. I'm about as attractive as a cement truck.
So after the Army, I went into the Federal Service and had a lot of jobs, mostly in counterintelligence, which is looking basically what the bad guys know about us from an intelligence perspective. And in 2008, I changed my job. One of my jobs, I was working at the Director of National Intelligence, which for most people may or may not know, it's kind of outside of D.C.
And where I lived, I was on the other side of D.C., living on a little island in the Chesapeake Bay. And so my commute was terrible. I mean, it really, really frankly sucked.
Did you have to take a ferry every day?
No, but it was about a three-hour commute each way. Oh, God. Because you have to go right past Langley. Yeah, it was brutal. Why didn't you move closer? Why? Well, I wanted to give my kids a really good quality of life, and I did not want to work in the city and then kind of expose them to kind of the craziness, if that makes sense. Especially D.C. D.C. is crazy.
Especially with kids, right? Kind of nuts that they don't clean up the capital of the fucking country. It seems like it's kind of indicative of the rot the whole country is involved in.
It's such a disgrace because you bring in these foreign dignitaries, and the first thing they see is, is just the dereliction of it. And it's a very poor reflection on really what the American spirit is about. But that's for another conversation.
Yeah, it seems like they could fix that. Yeah. Especially in that place. Yeah, one would hope, right?
Yeah, I mean, Jesus Christ, it's the nation's capital. Yeah. So I was offered a job to go back to the Pentagon in 2008 for a little while and basically run the integration between national-level intelligence information and local and state and tribal law enforcement.
So after 9-11, the country realized that we had a significant problem getting national-level information down to the cops on the ground that could actually do something about it. Why? Because they didn't have security clearances. So they weren't allowed to be provided that information. So- One of my jobs was to try to help fix that. And shortly thereafter, I got there in 2008.
It was probably early 2009 is when I was approached by two individuals who came to me and they said, look, we'd like to consider you for a program that we're part of. It's a very nuanced program, very... secretive program. Now, when you're in the government, you hear that all the time. It's not, you know, people look and they say, oh, you have a secret clearance or a top secret clearance.
Millions of people have some sort of security clearance in the government. And a lot, a lot of people have a top secret clearance. So it's really not that uncommon. It's really not that sexy. So you didn't really know what you were getting involved in? I didn't at all. Not at all. In fact, so, yeah, great question. So, no, I didn't know what I was getting involved in.
And after several conversations, it occurred to me that their interest in me was some of my background I had. In my early career as a special agent in counterintelligence, I was protecting technologies, critical technologies, critical avionic technologies, for example, and some aerospace technologies.
So think of first stage solid rocket motor booster technology, Tomahawk cruise missiles, stuff like that, Apache Longbow. So, advanced avionics was something I was kind of already familiar with, and at the same time, I had the counterintelligence background.
So, I was asked to come in and run the counterintelligence and security aspect for a particular program, at which time I had no idea what the program even was. So, what does counterintelligence and security mean? It just simply means making sure that our adversaries like Russia and China can't penetrate our organization and steal our secrets. That's all it is.
It's kind of a fancy word for just saying security, information security and operational security. So, I remember I had a meeting. They brought me to go see their director. And it was in a... I would tell you the location, but I was told by the Pentagon not to say the specific location of this office. But it was somewhere in the D.C. area.
It was a facility that wasn't known publicly to be an intelligence, to have an intelligence office in there. So I can't say the specific location. But I went there and I went up to the top floor. I think it was the top floor, almost the top floor. And I met for the first time a gentleman named James Lukatsky, Dr. James Lukatsky, Ph.D. And this guy was the epitome of a rocket scientist.
And when I say the epitome, I mean he was probably – and there's no exaggeration – the number one rocket scientist in the U.S. government. Now – He's a humble guy, so he'll probably tell you he wasn't. But he really was an amazing human being and very smart. And after a very brief conversation, he looked at me and he said, I want to ask you a question. OK, sir.
And he said, what do you think about UFOs? I said, well, I answered truthfully. I said, I don't. And he said, well, what do you mean? You don't believe in them? And I said, no, that's not what I said. You asked me if I think, you know, what do I think about UFOs? And frankly, I don't think about UFOs. I really don't have the luxury to think about them.
I'm too busy, you know, working intelligence operations and whatnot. And I remember him looking over his glasses and saying, very seriously, staring me straight in the eye and says, well, don't let your personal bias get the best of you because what you may learn may surprise you and may challenge any preconceived notion of what you think something is or is not. And so...
Let me backtrack for a minute. I've never been a UFO guy. People come up, like, oh, you're that UFO guy. I'm really not. I was never really into science fiction as a kid. I wasn't into the Star Trek or the Star Wars like a lot of people were. So that was not my disposition. I grew up, I guess, playing G.I. Joe and stuff like that. So that wasn't my background. And certainly in college, I...
I studied microbiology and immunology with a focus on parasitology, not parapsychology, the study of parasites, parasitology. So the scientific method has always been something that has been near and dear to me.
And then, of course, later on as a special agent, you know, when you're conducting investigations, for me, I was always very fact-driven, kind of the old gumshoe, if you will, just the facts man sort of guy. So I was never really prone to any type of – if you will, affinity towards science fiction or even the UFO topic. I just, I just never really considered it.
Hmm. So he says this to you and then – so we're talking about like what, 16 years ago? 15, 16 years ago?
Yeah, do the math, right? So it's 2024, 2000, early 2009.
So this is the beginning of your journey towards this sort of bizarre subject of whatever these things are. So you don't have any real previous interest. He says this to you. And then what's the steps after that? Like how do you get introduced to this idea that these things are alien crafts?
Yeah. So great question. So for some people, there's kind of two ways people process this information, at least in my experience. And there may be others. This has just been my observation. Some people have this kind of revelatory moment, this epiphany where it's this aha moment where, oh, my gosh, this is real, right? For other people, it's kind of more of a slow, gradual realization.
And I think for me, I was probably in the second category, more of a slow, gradual realization that – This isn't a cover for something else. This is really about UFOs.
So how do you first get introduced to these things?
Well, so I didn't get introduced to these things. First of all, I was introduced to the reporting. So there was these official reports that we were getting from the field. There's official videos and whatnot that describe vehicles. doing things, maneuvering in ways that, frankly, outperform anything we have in our inventory. Now, keep in mind, my background was at some point in aerospace.
So I knew all the capabilities of an F-16 or, for example, an F-22 or the F-35. And at the end of the day, as advanced as they are, they're still conventional aircraft. You know, they still have the old, there's an adage they use for jet engines. It may seem a little awkward here, but it's suck, squeeze, bang, and blow. That's what a jet engine does. Forgive me. That's what it does.
It's a conventional type engine. Of course, you have a propeller, too, that can displace air and whatnot. These vehicles were different. These vehicles, for the most part, didn't have any type of associated characteristic that you or I or any normal person would associate with. with the plane, with an airplane, an aircraft, right? And yet it's flying. So how does an airplane work?
Well, let's say this cigar, for example, is an airplane and there's four fundamental forces. And so you have thrust, lift, drag, and weight. And if you understand those, you can create, you can build wings and you create lift and you can fly. And then you have to have an engine for that thrust and whatnot. The things that our military pilots were encountering didn't have that.
They didn't have wings. They didn't have rudders and ailerons and control surfaces. They didn't have cockpits. They didn't have engines. There were no obvious signs of propulsion. They were doing things and maneuvering in ways that, frankly, defied anything that we had in our inventory. And we were pretty certain the enemies didn't have either. Our adversary didn't have these technologies either.
And even more perplexing is that they were being encountered over controlled U.S. airspace and over sensitive military installations. So, you know, from that perspective, you've got a real national security concern on your hands. Yeah. So you said video.
Do you remember the first thing that you saw?
Boy, there's so many. I think part of the challenge is that most people here in this country, they're familiar with the three videos that have been famously released by the Pentagon. The Go Fast. Go Fast, Gimbal, FLIR, correct. But those are the least compelling of all the videos that the government has. Those were unclassified.
And so those were the ones, those were kind of the low-hanging fruit that could be released to the general public. There's stuff out there that's like 4K ultra high definition, right? So when you see something like that from a certain military platform or a certain military equity or an intelligence collection platform, you have to look at that and say, well, what – What is that?
What the hell is that? And more importantly, that data is being backed up by radar data, right? So you've got electro-optical data like gun camera footage or POD or FLIR video, and then you've got radar data that is actually confirming what the video is picking up. And then you've got eyewitnesses that are also watching it, right? So you've got...
trained observers, pilots that can recognize the silhouette between an SU-22 and a MiG-25 from 20 miles away and make a split-second decision, is it friend or foe, do I kill it or do I let it live? And they're reporting it. So you have now three separate, if you will, collection platforms, the human eye being one of them.
You've got gun camera footage and you've got radar footage, all describing the same event at the same place at the same time under the same circumstances, right? And so keep in mind with my background as a former special agent in counterintelligence, if this was in front of a jury – You know, as I've said before, I think we're well beyond reasonable doubt. That is something there.
I mean, that is real. That's not an atmospheric aberration. It's not an anomaly. That is something there. It's tangible.
So was there an aha moment for you? Like the first thing that you saw that you looked at and you go, what the fuck?
No, like I said, for me it was more slow and gradual.
What was the first thing that you saw that made you realize that there's something going on here that defies conventional wisdom or conventional understanding of propulsion systems?
I think for me one of the most compelling moments was when I attended – Boy, let me go back into memory banks. I attended a dinner with some individuals who were already associated with the larger umbrella program called OSAP. And I attended dinner at a Washington, D.C. hotel, and a Brazilian general attended this dinner. And the dinner was sponsored by a gentleman named Robert Bigelow.
The famous billionaire hotel. Yeah, I've met him. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, he's he's an American hero. He's a patriot. He's brilliant. He is brilliant. And he's and people don't realize that he funded self-funded a lot of this stuff on behalf of the U.S. government for by himself. Like he paid it to do it himself. He really is an American patriot, in my opinion.
But anyways, he flew in this guy named General Uchoa. General Uchoa was a Brazilian general, very, very senior in the Brazilian government, who led an investigation about an event that occurred over several days. Is this the Varginha incident? No, it's actually called Colares. Oh, another one. In Brazil, yeah. And the Colares incident. And they had... an overwhelming number of eyewitnesses.
And there was even some video and photographs that they had produced internally there to Brazil. And it was overwhelming, the evidence. And for me, it was more listening to him and explain the concern they had and some of the interactions the Brazilian government officials had with these UAP that really I left there that dinner scratching my head and really at that point beginning to absorb
the profoundness that we're dealing with something that is real. This is not a cover plan for some other technology we're trying to protect. Did he show you this video evidence? So I was sitting at kind of like a table like this. There was a whole lot of people at the table. He was sitting at the head. I was kind of way down over here.
And he brought a manila envelope and he was showing photographs to everybody. Right. And some reporting as well. I think he brought, if I recall correctly, his daughter to translate because I don't think English was his, you know, very good. It wasn't his language.
But for me, that was and I think for one of my colleagues, too, which I probably can't say his name right now because he hasn't come out publicly yet. But we both left that dinner. And I think scratching our heads and saying, wow, this is legit. This is real. The U.S. government is interested in this. And there is interest by our government.
After that dinner, attending more meetings and beginning to read the reports, the field reports and speaking to the scientists, it became evident to me that this was a very serious issue. We had near misses over some of our areas of operation. In some cases, literally these UAP splitting a combat formation. Now, if you know how planes fly, they fly very close in a combat situation.
These things were splitting the formation, right? That there were reports being provided through the Air Force, mostly through the Navy, about air safety issues, where pilots literally could run into these things, right? They were pervasive. It wasn't like a onesie and twosies.
Was there ever an instance where a pilot or a jet did run into something?
Not that I'm aware of what I can tell you that there has been incidents where there appears to be some sort of provocation where one of these things seems to be coming deliberately close to an aircraft, not necessarily trying to hit it, but maybe trying to demonstrate performance capabilities. There was one video in particular. I haven't been cleared by the Pentagon.
So let me see if I can speak about it in general terms. There's a pilot flying. And you can hear on the radio this chatter back and forth. Do you see it? Do you have eyes down on it? Pilot, nope. Negative, no eyes down. Okay, you should have it on radar. Yeah, I got something on radar, but no eyes. I can't see it. And then all of a sudden, a craft, a
An object goes whizzing right by the cockpit, and I mean probably like 15 feet away. And you can hear the pilot, the expletives of the pilot. I won't say it here on air, but you can imagine, right, what a pilot would say when they're very, very surprised. That was one. Can you describe what he saw? I think I can.
I want to be careful that I don't, because again, I haven't had a, what I, what I have approval to talk about. I've, I've spoken about, um, let me preface by saying I still have my security clearance. Uh, and on occasion I still will consult for the U S government. And so I want to be very mindful. I have no problem going up all the way to the line. Right. Understood.
But if I put up, you know, a pinky toe over that line there. Right, right, right. Um, but it was a wedge shaped craft wedge shaped wedge shaped, um, like triangular, but, um, Yeah, like a wedge. I don't know how else to describe it. I could draw it for you if you want. You want me to draw it?
Sure, you can. Yeah.
Give me a second.
So just like a wedge that you would split wood with? Like that kind of a wedge?
Yeah, but it was silver metallic and like a diamond maybe. That's a better way to describe it. Like a diamond almost.
and it looked kind of like it look look kind of like that really it's just uh just a little and that that kind of shape is something that's been reported multiple times um so that was the first time i ever saw something like that to me it was keep in mind i i never followed this topic so every time i'm seeing one of these videos i'm kind of seeing something for the very first time so lenticular whether it's a disc shaped craft or it's
It's a wedge-shaped craft or a diamond-shaped craft or a triangle-shaped craft, boomerang in some cases. These were all new to me. So it was very, very perplexing. And obviously, to our military pilots, it was very concerning. And I think when you look at some of the gold standard cases we had, like the Nimitz, for example, that case, you have this overwhelming number of sensors
Looking at the same thing going on that the pilots are reporting. And for me, that was most compelling. Like I said, more than eyewitness testimony is important. But at the end of the day, you know, grandma seeing some lights in her backyard doesn't really do it for me. You know, I'm a fact oriented kind of guy. I've got to see the data. Let the data.
provide us the information we need so then we can make a conclusion. If you start seeing UFOs in the sky everywhere, well, chances are they're probably not. It's a quadcopter, it's a balloon, it's an aircraft, it could be all sorts of things.
That's why I think from our perspective, having the fundamental categories, the observables we call them, was so important because they are so beyond what a normal aircraft, a traditional conventional aircraft can do. At that point, you realize you're dealing with some sort of beyond next generation technology. And that's when it gets compelling for guys like me, right?
When you're seeing performance capabilities that far exceed, far surpass anything we have. And I'm talking even the very, very best technology we have. We don't come close to that. and no visible means of propulsion? No, or obvious signs of lift, right? And not even a cockpit. You have to scratch your head and see what's going on. Interestingly, I'll share with you.
So no windows?
No windows. Well, in some cases, no windows. Other cases, people will report what they think are windows. They say, oh, I saw windows. But at the end of the day, we're looking at that in terms of what we think a window is, right? So you see a car, you see windows. Or a plane, those are windows.
I didn't see any information to suggest that there were actually windows, even though an eyewitness might describe a window, because we are describing something that we recognize. And so we say, oh, that might be a window or whatnot. But it might not be a window. And so I want to be very careful to say there were no windows. There could have been.
But the ones that I was privy to that I saw, I didn't see any obvious signs of like a windshield or a window. I didn't see anything like that. I saw vehicles that were doing things that were just left you scratching your head. And they were real, like I said, because you're backing it up with all this other sensor data.
And some of the best sophisticated sensor data, by the way, at the time on the planet... Right. Like the spy one radar and the E2 Hawkeye and and some of the other radar capabilities and technical capabilities that other intelligence agencies have that I can't discuss here. You know that this this is the stuff that that helps us put forgive the analogy here, but. warheads on foreheads.
When we're going to take a strike against a terrorist, these are the same sensor systems we use to prosecute that war, that act, both in combat and not in combat. So yeah, that for me was very compelling. And it's lots and lots of videos. People think that there's only three videos. Those don't even scratch the surface. There are hundreds and hundreds of videos that
the intelligence community and the Department of Defense have on these things. Has there ever been any discussion about releasing any of these? I don't want to speak on behalf of the government. Colleagues of mine like Chris Mellon, who have been very, very, very active in this topic and have actually been responsible for a lot of what we see now happening in Congress, has been championing that.
He is the one who says, look, we need more videos to come out so the American people can see for themselves what we've been dealing with. When I had Chris Mellon in the Pentagon, he saw those videos.
And up to that point, he had been, when he was a senior person at the Pentagon, like very senior, one of his jobs as the senior intelligence official, he asked, hey, do we have any UAP, UFO videos, investigations, anything like that? And they told him no. So when he came to the Pentagon and saw what we actually did have, You can imagine someone like Chris Mellon, right? He wasn't very happy.
He was actually pretty disappointed, saying, why was I told no? I can see these videos clearly. I see the reports. Clearly, this is something that we're interested in as a Department of Defense. And yet, when I was one of the senior guys, he got the Heisman, right? He was being told no. And so that was, I think, a point for him that really, that's probably the spark.
And I don't want to speak for my friend Chris, but I suspect that was probably the spark that got him to the point where he said, okay, we have to do something about this. This is BS.
Yeah, when I was talking to him, it seemed like that was his perspective, that this was something that really should be, at least in some way, shape, or form, released to the general public. Just to solidify the conversation, just to let people know, like, these are real. This is a real thing.
These are not just – have you seen the one that people were filming just a couple of days ago in Palmdale, California? Yeah.
Yeah, I think they said those were drones, though, if I'm not mistaken. I think the jury came out, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong, that it was somebody using drones with some LED lights.
You can do wild things with drones now.
You absolutely can.
100%.
Dragons and stuff with drones.
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we have to be careful as our own technology begins to advance. There's going to be pranksters out there. And that's one of the things that for me in AATIP, I always went into an investigation or a case assuming that it was manmade.
And until I saw the compelling data that said otherwise, we were always going to assume or presume that this was something that was conventional. It was probably misidentified. but it wasn't exotic. And then once the data suggests otherwise, then you kind of go into that other mode of, okay, now what are we dealing with?
Again, especially on the backdrop of the five performance observables, that's when you start to say, okay, yeah, this is not an F-16. This is not a Chinese aircraft. This is something different.
Right. What is the oldest video footage or film footage that you have ever seen or heard?
Civilian or military?
It doesn't matter. What is the oldest where it's like, okay, what the fuck is this? What's the oldest stuff that's compelling? The point is, what I'm trying to get at is a lot of people point to the possibility that there's some sort of a secret program, some sort of secret propulsion, gravity-based, whatever it is, that's completely different than conventional propulsion systems that the U.S.
government has and that they're operating these drones. And the problem with that is always the Kenneth Arnold sightings, the Roswell, the sightings from a time where that technology just wasn't available at all. Joe, I'm so glad you asked me that question.
It just so happens I brought you something. Oh. When the glasses come out, you know it's getting serious. No, it just means I'm old. Me too. Yeah. I'm going to provide you a document here. It's a short document, but the portions I think are highlighted that you're going to want to pay attention to. And let's see here. Okay.
So if this is just for you and if your audience is interested, it's this paragraph here you're going to want to read. And then it's the last one that's highlighted. And then take a look at the date and the subject line.
This is it right here. Jamie brought it up here.
Oh, great. Yeah. So paragraph six right now. So if you want to scroll down to paragraph six. OK.
This summary of observations of aerial phenomenon has been prepared for the purpose of reemphasizing and reiterating the fact that the phenomena have continuously occurred in the New Mexico skies during the past 18 months. and are continuing to occur, and secondly, that these phenomena are occurring in the vicinity of sensitive military and government installations.
And if you want to go back to like paragraph two, there you go. The highlighted part? Yeah, the observers of. The observers of those phenomenon include scientists, special agents of the Office of Special Investigations, the U.S.
Air Force, airline pilots, military pilots, Los Alamos security inspectors, military personnel, and many other persons of various occupations whose reliability is not questioned. And now scroll to the top of the very top of that document. It says that it was determined above that, the summary of observations of aerial phenomenon in the New Mexico area, December 1948 to May 1950.
And the date of that document, if you scroll a little bit higher, you are going to see the date of that memo.
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Oh, 1950.
Yes, sir. May 25th, 1950. Right. It says that the – it was determined that the frequency of unexplained area phenomena in the New Mexico area was such that an organized plan of reporting these observations should be undertaken.
Right.
So this is the beginning of Project Blue Book?
So this is the recognition that we have a serious problem over our sensitive military installations. This is nothing new. This is not – 1970s reverse engineered technology or some sort of special technology.
Right, 1950, they're talking about this.
We had just broken the sound barrier, and we had not yet entered into space. And we have these things that are performing in ways that, frankly, we can't replicate. I brought a few more of these later on to emphasize that point you just brought up at some point if you're interested. Yeah. But it highlights that these are official government documents through official government personnel. Right.
raising the alarm bells just like we did in OSAP and ATIPS. And so this is nothing new. Now, if you want to look at this from an adversarial perspective, our government has already said that's not ours, right? If you look at a 1950 Sabre jet, for example, it wasn't even supersonic. And yet these things that we are observing in some cases are doing about some more documents here.
multiples of of mock um at at at and doing velocities and doing things that we frankly could not do back then and frankly we still can't do in some cases but temporarily speaking the only two countries in the world may may have a chance of doing something like that would be russia and china and now in 1950 where was china was in the middle of a famine and at the time, and where was Russia?
Russia was trying to develop the atomic bomb and still was using horse-drawn carts for a lot of their military operations. So, temporally speaking, it doesn't make sense. This is the analogy I've used before, Joe, that it would be like the Carter going into King Tut's tomb for the very first time in the 1920s, discovering King Tut's tomb, And when he goes in, he finds a fully assembled 747 jet.
It doesn't make sense. Temporally speaking, they did not have that technology. So is it possible, and I'll be very careful what I say, that the U.S. government has some sort of exotic technology? Well, my answer is I sure hope so because, you know, we want to have an advantage over our adversaries. But in 1950, that wasn't the case.
Right, and do they have any film of these crafts from New Mexico?
There is film of many crafts, and not just New Mexico per se, but over many military installations. I've got another one for you I'll provide you. You don't want to have to waste your time reading it, but I think you'll appreciate this. Take a look at the date of this and who it's to and who it's from, and I think you'll find the subject line very interesting.
Okay, which one? What part am I reading here?
Just to highlight a portion so you can see the top of the document, who it's from, who it's to and the date, and what the subject line is.
Director of Special Investigate. What does it say? It's hard because it's all scratchy.
Yeah, it's an old reproduction of official government document. Bottom line, it's a document from J. Edgar Hoover.
Oh, I see. From the Director of the FBI. Department of the Air Force, the Pentagon. Yeah, J. Edgar Hoover. Director of Federal Bureau of Investigations.
And read the subject line of that memo.
Flying. God, it's hard to read because it's all screwy.
Flying disks, I should say. Flying disks over the savanna. There's a sensitive facility that we had where we were doing atomic development.
Yeah, flying disks reportedly seen in the vicinity of something, river plant?
Savannah River Plant. Yes, sir. Okay. That's correct.
Atomic Energy Commission.
Yeah, and the date of that being 1952, right? So this is verified? That was released by the government. Those are all official. All these are official U.S. government documentation that anybody can pull up anytime they want.
Did they let you see any of these ancient films, these films from the 1950s of these things?
So great question. Our focus was really more – modern time. It was more like taking a picture of where we are now.
But wouldn't you want to just, like, if you really think this thing is from somewhere else, the best example of it definitely not being ours is something from the 1950s.
Sure. And anecdotally, that's great. But keep in mind, on the backdrop of national security, when you go to a general... They should clean this up, by the way.
It's crazy. It's like half the things are blotted out and scratchy.
Yeah, that's Uncle Sam for you. You know, when you go to a general or- It makes me suspicious. No, you can find it.
I know, I know, I know.
But it was just like- Yeah, the government released that. I mean, they admit that.
What are they, a fucking shitty old 1920 fax machine? Look at that.
Well, remember, they were using typewriters back then too, right? And the ink smears. Blotchy. Yeah, blotchy. And I'm sure the original is probably much, much cleaner. But that's what the government put out online for people to review.
So when you're going back to answer your question, when you are going to a general or you're going to a military leader about this topic, if you go back to anecdotal stuff like, oh, this is something from 1950s, they're not interested. They're like, look, what is going on now? What is the threat now? I've got a carrier strike group out in the water.
I'm getting reports these things are coming in and interrogating the ship.
you know what i want to see that i want to see the videos i want to see the reporting i want to see the the deck logs and what the commander says and i want to know the pilots i want to talk to the pilots the radar operators right that's their focus they're not interested by the way we've tried a few times and the further back in time we go the less interested they were so it was really interesting yeah it was really the current information what's going on now i'm not interested in what happened they're just taking a pragmatic approach yeah yeah and it's you know it's understandable from a military perspective a national security perspective
The other stuff is interesting. And from the general public's perspective, you know, they're interested. But from a national security perspective, they're like, hey, man, that was three decades ago. Right. Makes sense. I need now. So it is understandable. A little frustrating because you want to demonstrate, look, boss, this is nothing new. This is a repeated pattern that we're seeing here.
But they're more interested in the here and now.
So do they have repeated footage? Because you're saying three decades, but obviously we're talking about 1950. Do they have stuff from the 1980s, stuff from the 1990s?
There was reporting, yeah. And again, I got to be careful because some of that stuff I haven't been cleared to talk about. But there are reports we call foreign intelligence, FI, foreign intelligence reports. I can't say where or who or anything like that. But on classified systems where we know without a shadow of a doubt UAPs were encountered in other countries, adversarial countries. Why?
Because we spy on them and we know. Again, I can't say how we know and whatnot because I can get in trouble, but just... So we know this is not a United States phenomenon. Precisely. It is not a U.S.-only phenomenon. And in fact, in other countries, whether it's in Latin America, South America, or in Europe or Russia, China, there is an extreme interest in this topic.
In fact, the Chinese, it was in the newspaper, I think it was the China Morning Sun, there's something called the Five Continents Initiative, where allegedly they were trying to
broker a deal with the united nations that would allow china to run all the ufo investigations for the united nations right so we also know that russia they've come out and said yeah we're interested in this topic there was some released old kgb footage that showed mig interactions with these uap and there's also in latin america you have the same thing if you go to latin america now they don't have the same level of stigma and taboo associated with this topic like we do
And so they talk freely about it. They have no problem talking. In fact, when I was in the Patagonia area of Argentina, there is a near town called Bariloche and Las Lajas. One of the chief of police was telling me that there's an area there called La Miranda. La Miranda means to see, to view places.
And they call it that, the town, because UAP are so frequent there that local law enforcement actually built an observatory, an observation post, to look at these things because they were so frequent. So this is not a new phenomenon. This is something that's been around for quite a long time. The problem is, in my opinion, and I could be wrong, but this is my assessment –
The reason why it's so difficult to have the conversation here is because our government had placed so much emphasis and interest trying to stigmatize this topic that it almost worked too well. Now we're at the point where we should be having this conversation and people still don't want to because they think it's crazy. You think of tinfoil hats and Elvis on the mothership.
But in reality, we're talking about a real national security issue. I mean, these things are here. You have, Joe, you have a former director of national intelligence, Ratcliffe, a former director of CIA. Yeah. Brennan, you have former presidents all coming out and saying, yeah, there's something to it. It's real. Right now, what it is, where it's from and all that stuff.
I'm not sure we're quite ready to go there yet. But the acknowledgement is, hey, man, yeah, this is real. It's not ours. And we probably should do something about it.
So if we go back to the history of the debunking of it, like the Project Blue Book stuff, J. Allen Hynek, after he had left Project Blue Book, he became a proponent of UFO disclosure.
During Project Blue Book, it was his job to essentially dismiss everything and to come up with some sort of a reason, swamp gas, mass hallucinations, whatever it was, to attribute all these sightings to something that was very easy to explain. Did they ever – is there any documentation or any discussion of why they did that, why they chose to debunk everything?
Yeah. My understanding is you have to look at where America was at the time they were doing these investigations. It was at the height of the Cold War, right? And despite what some people think, the Cold War wasn't very cold at all. It was pretty hot. And we had Russia and the United States engaging in these proxy wars.
Neither side wanted to let the other side know what we had and what we didn't know. Right. So if you have these UAP coming in and out, the last thing you want to do is tell the other side broadcast. This is what we've learned from it. And more importantly, this is what we don't know about it. Right. And so both sides were keeping this very quiet.
But there was an interesting agreement at the classified level, I believe, in the late 60s where. There was this relationship with the United States. We were putting up our northern tier radar system to detect then Soviet Union ICBMs. And they were doing the same thing, right, because none of us really trusted each other.
But we trusted each other enough to say, look, before you hit that button, if you see something coming over the horizon, before you hit that button and launch, give us a call because – It might be a UFO, right? And we don't want to start World War III because either side mistakes the UFO for an ICBM. And that's how serious they took the topic. I mean, that's real.
That's a real memo that existed between the United States and Russia. So that is an indicator how much both sides took this topic seriously.
Jesus. And so when Philip Corso was dismissing all these different things, did they have anything, any film footage, any stuff from that time from Project Blue Book that was like definitively not ours?
I'm aware of the fact that people say it does exist and people have been briefed on it. I wasn't privy to that. I was, again, more focused on the here and now. I was aware of people who had attended certain meetings, very senior level meetings where that was discussed, where they saw certain footage. But I'm hearing that secondhand. I did not see the old footage myself.
My focus was more on the current, what's going on now. But back to your point, why was this effort to try to create so much stigma and taboo? I think it was because of that. I think because you had Russia and U.S. at this weird stalemate where neither one wanted to tell the other side what we know and what we didn't know about UAP.
And really, I think the focus from a national security perspective, let's say you're a general and I'm a general. Look, we've got a real Cold War going on here right now. As long as these things aren't coming in and zapping my people, that's going to be my focus right now. That's a real potential threat that I have to deal with now.
I've got Russia pointing nukes at me and I'm pointing nukes at them at any time we could launch. Let's focus on that more so than the other stuff. And that has been my observation on why they didn't want to address the problem, the challenge openly with the general public back. And they also were worried.
There was several studies that suggested that most people would be very uncomfortable with that idea that there's something else in the cosmos potentially or even right here on Earth. And that it would create some sort of societal disruption. Right. They didn't want to cause panic. They were afraid that people would kind of like think of a run on Wall Street. Right.
When people get panic, they do kind of strange things sometimes. And I think the government was very worried about that. What's the most compelling modern thing that you've seen? Oh, my God. I can't talk about it, unfortunately. This is my frustration, Joe, because I know what I've seen. I know what my colleagues have seen, right?
And to this day, there's video that's coming in on a regular routine basis that is very, very compelling.
How do they hide this stuff from the general public?
Well, we have classified systems. We hide a lot of things.
Right, but how is it getting filmed? Is any of it getting filmed by the general public or is all this military stuff?
So let me backtrack a little bit. This, there's a general public that is filming stuff. But from a Department of Defense perspective, our focus, now Arrow is a different story, but when I was in the government, we had to be very, very careful of something we called intelligence oversight. Back in the 60s and 70s, the U.S. intelligence apparatus, particularly in the Department of Defense,
was kind of naughty. They were doing things they shouldn't do. They were spying on students and they were spying on American citizens. You don't say. Crazy. Say it isn't so. So Congress passed some laws and said, okay, you can no longer do this kind of stuff on American citizens. You can't conduct intelligence operations on American citizens. You can't do it. It's illegal, right?
So you have Executive Order 12333 and all these other rules and laws and DoD 5240.1 that all come out and say, no mas. So Department of Defense is supposed to focus on military. That's it. You don't bring in U.S. persons' information and ingest them into a Department of Defense database, especially a Department of Defense intelligence database. That's a super no-no. That's called U.S.
Persons Information, and it's pretty much verboten. So our focus was looking specifically at military-sourced information. I was not focusing at all on what the private citizens were seeing because at the end of the day, we couldn't use it. You can't do anything with the data.
And it seems like you got plenty of compelling footage from the military.
Overwhelming. Overwhelming. There's absolutely no doubt that we didn't have to look at civilian data because we had... better collection sensor systems from the military that was looking at stuff and giving us better insight if you can't tell us about can you give us some sort of an understanding of like what you're talking about yeah sure um without being specific yeah let me see um okay yeah um
There is a video, high resolution video of, I can't say what platform it was taken from. I can't say where it was taken from. But an object that, do you know how large an offshore oil derrick is? They're huge, right? They're almost like a small city, right? They're like one city block. They're huge. They're enormous things. There is a video that shows one of these objects underwater.
That goes by, the speed was calculated between 450 and 550 knots underwater, and it was bigger than the offshore derrick that it was passing, because you could see in the video the offshore derrick, and you could see this thing zip right by it. Jesus. Yeah.
So that's a lot of them, right? A lot of them are reported as being transmedium.
Right. So exactly. Why do we use the term UAP, right? Now it's unidentified anomalous phenomenon because it's all domain. Initially it was UFO, unidentified flying object. And for several reasons they changed the name. One of them not just because of stigma like people think. But because the word flying object means flight and you have to have wings to fly. That's flight.
And these things don't have wings. So that term we're not even sure is even accurate anymore because they're not necessarily flying. We see them underwater. We see them super high altitude. So the term was changed to unidentified aerial phenomenon. But again, that did not encompass flying. All the observations we were seeing.
So now the term UAP, I think the latest description of it is unidentified anomalous phenomenon to help describe this multi-domain or transmedium characteristic that we are beginning to see and record that these things can do. And that is – I'm going to – if I can digress for a second because that's super important, Joe.
Mm-hmm.
We have transmedium vehicles, right? We have things like seaplanes. And it's a plane and it can float on water. But let's face it, a seaplane is neither a really good plane or a really good boat because it's a compromise. It's a design compromise between an object that you want to perform in the air and in the sea. And that's why it's neither really good at both.
Same thing with, for example, a space shuttle. It goes out into space and it can glide down, but it's not a very good airplane. It comes down like a brick, you know, because there's design compromises and performance compromises. But what we are seeing doesn't have any of that attributable compromise. These objects aren't slowing down. They're not changing their performance capabilities.
They can do the same thing that we're seeing in the air now. and possibly in space and even underwater. So that is a fundamentally different type of technology than we are used to dealing with.
Is the assumption that they are doing something with space, time, and gravity around them rather than using something like a jet propulsion engine that blasts fire out the back and it makes it go fast forward? Right. That they're doing something that alters the gravity around them.
Yeah.
So that's why they can go through everything.
Yeah. So we had some of the best scientists on the team, folks like Dr. Hal Pudoff and some other folks. I'm not allowed to say their names. Dr. Davis and some others that were doing the calculations, mathematical calculations on how this is possible. And the consensus was by by the scientists, not me, because I'm not a I'm not a. I'm not a physics expert. I'm not an astrophysicist.
They were saying that – so let me back up here. Initially, the government for years was trying to identify the different exotic technologies that could explain the different performance characteristics. And it was during the ATIP years that the scientists had this consensus that if you had one type of technology, if you could do one thing, all these other observables now become possible.
Kind of think of like a unifying theory. And so if you had the ability to create this bubble around you in a localized area that insulated you from the effects of Earth's gravity. Now, what is gravity? People think that, you know, when I... Drop my glasses. That's gravity. That's not gravity. That's an effect of gravity. Gravity is the warping of space-time.
And that's important because people don't – you hear the term thrown around a lot. But they don't realize that space and time are actually connected. They are one and the same. They're opposite sides, if you will, of the same coin. And so you can't have one without the other. And so you have this ability to create a bubble around you that insulates you from the warping of space time.
Let's say in this case, Earth's gravity or something like that. then the way you experience time inside that bubble is perhaps fundamentally different than the way you might experience space-time outside that bubble because you're not subject to the effects of gravity, which would explain potentially why things don't need wings and why they don't need propulsion systems like that, right?
So it's a completely different way of looking at how we understand physics and how we, as humans, move about. Everything we do is fundamentally force equals mass times acceleration. F equals MA, right? Mass times acceleration and you force. This may be something a little bit different. This is not using a set, again, conventional thrust or if I put, you know, Newtonian, right?
If I push this way, I have an equal and opposite reaction that way, right?
That's how- Are there any theories as to how it's accomplishing this?
There is. Actually, Dr. Halpudoff about- Three years ago, gave a speech on this, a very interesting talk, lecture about this technology. And if you ever have the chance, you really should have him on because he's an incredible human being. He's also the one who helped start the government's remote viewing program and a bunch of other stuff for the government.
He's been involved in a lot of our nation's probably most classified efforts. But he was working with us on ATP as one of our scientists. And he gave a lecture about three years ago to some other scientists about the specifics on how this is possible. I am not a scientist, so I'm definitely not going to speak on behalf of Hal Pudov because I'm sure I will muck it up.
But I do recall a time when he came into our SCIF and gave us about a three-hour lecture on this unifying theory. And at that moment, it was very much for us the epiphany that a lot of us had been searching for. He's like, look, at the end of the day, this is how it's possible. And that was kind of this... Wow. So it's really not.
Can you give us a moron's view of how it's possible?
Yeah. Explain it to someone like me. Yeah. Well, I'm in that category, Joe. So we're speaking the same language. Yes, sir. Yeah. Single syllable grunts. Right. Yeah. So. You have an object like this cup on your table, and you want it to be insulated from the effects of Earth's gravity.
So you create this bubble artificially using a certain energetic source at a certain frequency, and it interacts with certain material, certain metamaterial. And again, I've got to be careful exactly what I say, but...
uh certain skin of the craft this aluminum via the cup here and all of a sudden you have this bubble around you where what you see on the outside is not necessarily what you see on the inside in fact may do it one more drawing for you okay forgive me i'm not an artist so i'm going to do this upside down for you and then i'm going to kind of scoot this just a little here all right let's do this so
Unfortunately, I know your audience can't see this, but actually it's probably good. That's okay.
Some people can. There's a video form of it. I'm sure this will get on. It'll be on YouTube as well.
It's probably good that they don't because I'm not an artist. But let's say this is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional space. Okay. And in essence...
So what you've done is essentially you've created a three-dimensional looking grid stacked. It looked like stacked boxes on top of each other.
Yeah, right. And so you have this – you have location A and location B. And let's say you go from Los Angeles to Baltimore. Okay. And it takes me five hours to fly at 500 miles an hour. Okay. That's a function of distance over time. And in essence, you can mark that linearly like this. So I fly. It takes me five hours. There I am. Okay.
If you had the ability to compress space-time, and not a lot, just a little bit, and you were able to allow these points to be a little closer together, now in essence... What took you, let's say, five hours and 500 miles an hour to do it, you can do it in one hour. And you can do it in much less time.
But to the observer outside, because we're still in the same universe, we would see something like that. We would see this incredible hopscotching ability to, if you will, take a shortcut through space-time. And so what would appear to be instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity, and other things, now becomes a reality. And so that is fundamentally what the scientists had discovered.
And so it seems like science fiction, but when you understand the mathematics and some of the theorem that they proposed, a lot of these other observables become possible.
So these are essentially just theoretical explanations of how these things are moving.
Yeah. And again, I'm not a scientist. I want to be very careful. I don't want to misrepresent anything. There's a whole lot of other stuff that if you can do that, all of a sudden now makes sense and may describe things. the observations that people are seeing and why they're kind of hard to see and they seem obscure.
And so I think from a governmental perspective that it was kind of a revelatory moment for the folks in our program.
So they realized one of the reasons why these things are weird looking is because they're literally creating... Do you want a light?
Do you mind? I'm sorry.
Thank you. So The back thing, the other side. Push that down. There you go. Bam. Thank you very much. No problem. So how much of this is theoretical and how much of this is observed from recovered vehicles?
I am not allowed to talk about what the government may or may not have in its possession, other than that I have, so I went through a very lengthy Pentagon review process. Recently, I wrote, I won't talk about it here, but I wrote something, and I had to go through Pentagon to have a review process, and it took almost a year.
In this thing I wrote, I talk about up to the part I can talk about, and they approved for me to talk about up to that point. When it comes to what the government may or may not have in its possession, all I can simply say is that there is very compelling evidence to suggest that the U.S. government is in absolute possession of exotic material that is not made by humans.
Now, beyond that, I can't really expound upon. I haven't been given permission to talk about it. But what I can say is what I've already said for the record, which has been approved by the Pentagon. won't get in trouble by saying it, is that there's very compelling data to suggest that we are in possession.
Why is the Pentagon teasing us? Why are they allowing you to say we are in possession of something that was not made by human beings but not allowed to elaborate, not allowed to show these very compelling videos that you're talking about that you've seen?
I don't, well, two reasons. I don't think they have a choice. I think with now the introduction of cell phones and ring cameras, the cat's out of the bag. It's the worst kept secret at this point. Two, there is a faction, unlike before in the Cold War, I believe there is a faction of people inside the government that do want this conversation to occur.
But equally, there's still a faction of people that are very mad with me. They do not want me having this conversation. And mark my words, just by me being on your show, It is going to cause an absolute storm inside the Pentagon, and I am sure the other shoe is going to drop. I promise you, you're going to hear all sorts of stuff.
People make stuff up about me trying to discredit this topic because as many people are in the government that want this topic to be discussed now, there's still some people that do not want this conversation.
Could you steel man their position? Say again. Steel man their position, meaning could you argue it from their perspective? Absolutely.
Sure.
What would be a good reason to keep this stuff quiet?
Sure. And I want to preface here. I'm not fear mongering.
No, I don't think you are.
Look, if I was a military person, right, I would look at this from the perspective of there's three options. They're good, they're neutral, or they're bad. So let's go down this road for a second. Let's say they're good, right? Well, we've got nothing to worry about. The problem is there's nothing to suggest that they truly are benevolent.
People say, well, you know, they're like – they don't want us to nuke ourselves. Well, you know, I discussed it in what I wrote that – There's no data to suggest that. They didn't stop us from dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and vaporizing 500,000 living souls. They didn't stop us when we started developing nuclear weapons from the atomic age.
They didn't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. They didn't stop the testing in the Nevada range of atomic and nuclear weapons. And now, how many countries have atomic weapons and nuclear weapons? A lot, right? They didn't stop... Chernobyl, they didn't stop Fukushima, they didn't stop Three Mile Island. So to say that they're here to help us, I'm not sure there's data.
People say, well, you know, in Minot and North Dakota and Montana, the UFOs came in and they interfered with our nuclear weapons and they brought the entire Echo flight offline. Which, by the way, I have the government report on that if you want it. But in Russia, a lot of people don't know, they turned them on. So that's equally scary.
They're interfering with our nuclear capability whether to attack or to defend ourselves. So when you say they turned them on in Russia, this is a Russian report? Yeah. So this is a – I don't know if you remember the – hearing, congressional hearing that occurred last year where the- With David Grush? Nope.
The other one with Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Ronald Moultrie, and some people from the Navy. And I think it was Congressman Gallagher that asked the very specific question. And he said, are you aware of UFOs interfering with our nuclear capabilities? And the response was something like, no, I'm not really familiar with it. Never heard of it.
And then the question was, I think, we asked specifically at these locations. And the government's response was, no, not familiar with it. Here's the actual report from the Department of Defense. This is the actual intelligence report that was released through FOIA. There's a gentleman out there who runs a site called the Black Vault. His name is John Greenwald.
He's probably the world authority on Freedom of Information Act. And he has a wealth of data that is out available to the public that he has received from the government. This is one of those documents. This is the document that our own government has no idea about. Apparently exists. I like how they write it in all caps. Yeah. Yeah. That's the old reporting.
So obviously there's some people that don't want this to be released. And obviously there's some people that think that the general public has a right to know.
I believe so. That's been my observations and my experience.
Well, that makes sense. I mean, like when everybody says the CIA does this, like, okay, who? Who in the CIA?
I didn't finish, though, the other parts, right? So if they're not here for friendly – if they're not friendly, that leaves them neutral like us. Right.
Or benevolent.
Benevolent. Now, from a military perspective, and I just want to caveat, I don't agree with this, but I can respect the understanding. You, sir, are a general, and I say – We cannot prove that they're not here to do something bad. But what we do know is that they can interfere. They're very interested in our military capabilities, and they have interfered with our nuclear capabilities, right?
From a military perspective, that looks an awful lot like something we call IPB, initial preparations of the battle space, or perhaps even ISR, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. Whenever we're going to go into a foreign country and invade, we do long range surveillance. We want to know how the enemy operates, how they react.
So even if there's a 2% chance, 5% chance that these things are here to do something wrong.
malevolent right then we probably should not tip our hands to the fact that we are aware of it publicly because what happens the moment that the bad guys in a foreign country find our surveillance team over the border we've got 12 hours we got we got to invade because the element of surprise is now over so some may feel in the government the mere fact of acknowledging this if there is some sort of malintent may push up artificially a clock
That exists somewhere for these things to say, oh, OK, the foolish humans are now the cats out of the bag. They know where we're here. We need to go in now for whatever reason they may have. So that is the military mindset potentially of some of these individuals who want to keep this secret.
So they're worried about an actual invasion.
Well, but they have to be. That is the role of our national security apparatus, right? Even if there's a 1% chance, they have to consider that in their planning and in the decision-making matrix. So, again, going back to what I said, I respect that. I don't agree with it, but I can respect that.
If that is the reason why, then I would say, okay, look, in your heart, you really do have the best interests of the American people. You are a patriot. I can accept that. Again, I don't think it's your decision to make. I think it needs to go to Congress. I think it needs to go to the president. Let the American people decide. I think America can handle the truth.
I think America deserves the truth. And let the American people decide if it's in their best interest to know more about this.
But I also could see it from their perspective. Like, they're probably insanely busy already. And the last thing they want to do is get involved in this thing where now they have a PR campaign where they're trying to let people know about this thing and not cause mass panic.
That's right. That's right. But you know what, though? I'm also very optimistic, Joe. You and I are having this conversation and people aren't making a run on Wall Street. People are still paying their mortgages and going to PTA meetings.
And after the 2017 New York Times report, which was probably one of the biggest moments in UFO disclosure. Because it was in the New York Times. And then you see something like that in the New York – especially the New York Times in 2017. People really respected it. It's like this is a real story.
Well, and this is apolitical. I mean how many topics can you go to Congress and have that's not polarizing? Right, right. This is one of the only ones where you can have – literally have – Congressman Burchette and Congresswoman AOC side by side agreeing that this is important. It's a very rare opportunity. And so, you know, my concern, I'm doing this because I believe it's the right thing to do.
And my concern is that we're at a point now where I've said before, you know, secrets aren't like a fine wine where the longer you keep a cork on it, the better it gets. I think secrets are perishable. I think they have a shelf life. I think they're like vegetables in your refrigerator.
And there comes a point where if you leave them there too long, they start to rot and they start to stink and it becomes a big mess to clean up. Right. And so that's my perspective. And what I'm trying to do is give the government an ability to work its way out of a corner that it's put itself into for the last several decades. And with no seeming way out, right? Right.
They look around like, well, how do we get ourselves out of this trip?
100%.
100%. So there's people that would be liable for not being straightforward with Congress.
And I know people want their pound of flesh. I know there's people out there, we've been lied to for decades. Right.
And then they make it a political issue. Right. And they go after someone for—
And I think that's the wrong approach. I think there was a time where we needed to keep this secret. And I think what you do is you give those guys awards. Give those guys and gals awards who did it. Don't make them enemies. Make them friends and say, okay, look, but those were different times. Now is the time to come clean. Talk to the members of Congress. Right.
Forgive all the past sins.
Yeah. Truth and reconciliation.
100%.
100%.
Now. All in the interest of the United States security. You talk about legal issues. The problem is there are the real legal issues. So let's say you have, again, these cups forgive my analogies. You have two aerospace companies. Company A, Company B. And let's say I am in the Department of Defense back in the 50s, 60s, and I come across this interesting technology.
I have no idea what the hell it is. It just came out of the sky. And I go to company A and I said, Tell me what you can figure out about that, right? 10 years later, company A becomes a multi-billion dollar aerospace company. Company B goes bankrupt. 200 people lose their jobs. And now people who have stock, investors in that company, lose their money, right? Unfair advantage.
Keep in mind, you're supposed to have fair competition in the U.S.
government.
So if you give an unfair advantage to company A... to be, you're talking a serious liability. There's SEC violations there. There's all sorts of concerns one has to pay attention to because someone somewhere gave an unfair advantage to one company over another. So there are legal liabilities that we have to recognize. It's not just clear cut, okay, forgive and forget.
There's going to have to be some additional protection and understanding for if that occurred, we need to figure out how we deal with that as well.
So that would be an impediment to release. That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. These are big companies, right, with deep pockets and a lot of lawyers.
Well, I mean, also, this is a discussion that we've had on here before. If you did find something, who would you bring it to? You bring it to the people that build your fucking jets. Like, hey, guys, what the hell is this? Like, you know, you make some sort of a top secret agreement. You bring it to them in some sort of undisclosed facility.
Best and brightest. Secured. Best and brightest.
Bring the guys in and go, what the fuck is this thing? Yeah. You kind of have to. Otherwise, what else would you do? I mean, how else do you find out how these things work? And if you were going to do it in a secretive manner, you would have to bring it to defense contractors because those are the only people that are capable of making things. They make your jets.
Right.
They make the, you know, every stealth bomber, whatever the fuck it is. They make all that shit.
Going back to, you know, a colleague of mine made the comparison. He said, look, Lou, imagine being during the days of Da Vinci and all of a sudden bringing Da Vinci a garage door opener. You have no idea what it's used for. Right. You've never seen plastic before. You don't even understand electromagnetic radiation, right? Right.
And infrared, you know, where do you start on the analysis and exploitation of a technology that the physics hasn't even been discovered yet? Right.
I mean, garage door openers seem like magic. Right. It really does.
I press a button and a door opens like magic. Wait, where's the horse? Where's the strings? Exactly.
Yeah. It's kind of bananas. You press a button on your car and all of a sudden your door opens. Right. And you drive in and you press another button and it closes. And it's all done through the air. Right. Which is bananas. Magic. But we're just accustomed to it.
That's right.
Yeah. So this kind of technology, I'm sure you're aware of the Bob Lazar story.
I'm aware. I don't know Bob. I've never met him.
You never got into that?
I did not.
How could you not with your line of work?
Because, you know, I always wanted to be insulated from prejudicing the jury. And I know it sounds kind of strange, but I didn't ever. Makes sense. You know, it's kind of something I impose on myself because I didn't want to have any preconceived notions of going in. Most people kind of, I suspect, would be tempted to say, well, I'm going to learn everything I can about UFO lore.
I wanted the opposite. You're a better man than me. I'll be fucking chasing that shit down. You know, I think I just wanted to be very, very careful to preserve the investigative integrity, right? And look, we're all humans. We're all biased. There's no way around it. We all have some degree of bias. Let's be honest and truthful here. It doesn't matter what type of bias it is.
We all have some sort of bias somewhere, whether it's food or the people you like to date or whatever. Mm-hmm. I wanted to avoid that as much as possible. And so I always kept it very, very focused on the here and now. And, you know, what can we see today? Right. You're aware of the story though, right?
The basic.
Tangentially. That he worked at a particular facility and at that facility he was exposed to some sort of UAP technology. That thing. Right. That thing.
That thing right there, the sport model, and that he was brought in as a propulsions expert to try to – they didn't know how it exactly worked, but they sort of just said, tell me what this is. Roger. And then along the way, he realized, oh, this isn't even ours.
Yeah, I'm aware of, again, the overarching story. I don't know any of the details, and I've never met him personally.
He's a very, very interesting guy. I had dinner with him with my friend Andrew Schultz and Jeremy Corbell. We went to dinner and, you know, informally talked and had a fascinating conversation. Jeremy's a great guy. He's a great guy. Yeah, he's really, you know, he's done a lot.
He said to say hi. Hi.
He's pumped that we're talking.
Yeah, he's done a lot for this concert.
He's a UFO nut. And he got me really way back in with his documentary of Bob Lazar, Flying Saucers, whatever the actual title of it is. But that documentary is fantastic. And it's essentially going over Bob Lazar's story from the 1980s to today.
Which he's told the exact same story, which is nuts that you have one giant lie your whole life like come on There's a lot of weirdness to the story obviously But like there is with everything there's a lot of people that want to discredit his His background and all sorts of other things but the reality of what he's saying is essentially what we're seeing in these crafts Which is very strange
So he described how these things worked and how they moved and how they would turn sideways and sort of like project this, whatever this, reactor that they have inside of them. And he talked about this element, element 115. They have a stable version of it that was essentially theoretical at the time in 1980.
No one really knew whether or not that thing actually even exists, 89 or whatever it was. And that it would douse this thing, project radiation upon it, and it would create this warp, this gravity warp, this thing that allowed this this craft to move in ways that defied our understanding of propulsion systems.
That's a hell of a lucky guess. Hell of a lucky guess.
Hell of a lucky guess in 1989.
Wow.
And he drew it. He has diagrams of what this thing looked like and how it worked. And it essentially looked exactly like that little model that's on the desk there and that he felt like the whole – it didn't make any sense. He said the whole thing, it didn't have any seams, which now we understand 3D printing, right? So now we know that we can actually – But only now, not back then, right?
Of course. Everything had rivets. Exactly. The skin of a craft was the skin of an aircraft. Exactly. It had rivets and it had nuts and bolts.
Exactly.
you know but now you know obviously now we have carbon fiber we have a bunch of different ways of constructing things but back then he didn't know what the that thing was he said it looked like it had all been melted like into place like that had been like almost like smooth like wax like melted wax and that it had no instrumentation inside of it and it was designed for very small things like something that was like three feet tall
And that all these things seem to operate through the being itself, had some sort of connection to the craft, some sort of strange way of interfacing with the craft that didn't have anything to do with pulling levers and moving things.
But, Joe, is that really that much of a stretch? Let's look at this. We've done experiments where we've had pilots be able to control aircraft thousands of miles away. with a helmet that interprets thought. Right. Right?
So it's, you know, again... How does the helmet... Is it similar to like a Neuralink setup? Have you seen the new video of the second Neuralink patient? I have not. There's a video of him playing Counter-Strike. Is it Counter-Strike or is it... Is that it? So Counter-Strike, which is a very popular online 3D game, and this guy who does not have use of his body has this Neuralink implant.
He's the second Neuralink patient. Right. And apparently with each iteration, it gets more and more sophisticated and better. So this is from this person's point of view. He's playing this video game entirely with his mind.
He's playing better than I can with my hands. Well, better than anybody can.
Because the first guy, the first Neuralink patient we had him on, and he said essentially it's like having an aim bot because you don't miss. You look at the thing you're trying to shoot at and instantaneously your crosshairs go there. Wow. Yeah. So he's well, this stuff is taking place entirely. This is all him doing this entirely with his mind.
But is that right? So if we can do that now. Right. Right. Is it really that far of a stretch to think that, you know, someone who's a little more advanced than us. Right. Our friends from out of town. Realize that's the way to do it. That's more efficient, right? The speed of the processing of the brain, the processes of the brain is much faster.
It takes us longer to then have to mechanically use our hands and manipulate and do things. This is almost, not quite, but almost instantaneous. You don't have that lag, right? Right, of course. And so that would certainly make sense. Modern warfare, not the game, but actual modern warfare.
is beginning to turn to that and we're using ai and all these other augmentation to enhance performance and so i i don't think that's out of the realm of of possibility no certainly not i mean just go from garage door openers to you know 500 600 years ago right to today and then cell phones the ability to send video across the world instantaneously all the sophisticated stuff that we just completely take for granted because it's become a normal part of our everyday life
You know, I used to give a briefing to some folks. I'm so glad you mentioned this because this goes back to the whole stigma and taboo issue. I used to have a slideshow, and I still have it somewhere, and I would discuss the word, the Latin word prefix of para, P-A-R-A, and it means above or beside.
And so what I would do is show up, I would say the word parachute, and I'd ask people, what do you think of when you hear the word parachute? And people would describe, obviously, something that deploys over your head, and hopefully you hit the ground with a thump and not a thud, right? But something that's normal, we use every day. And then I say, what about the word paramedic?
And then people would look at it and say, well, I think of a first responder, someone good, some sort of medical lifesaver that's going to be there for your benefit. And then I say the word, when I say the word paranormal, what do you think? And people stop for a second. Maybe they kind of give you a little sly smile and say, what do you mean? I said, what do you mean? I mean that, paranormal.
The only reason why you're reacting the way you are, because you've been conditioned that the word paranormal is cookie stuff. When in reality, in science, by definition, everything is paranormal until it becomes normal. The cell phone that I use every day 50 years ago, absolutely paranormal. And so I would go through this exercise of things that were once considered paranormal.
For example, when the Inca first saw the Spaniards, the conquistadores coming from the reconquering, They saw them on the shores of the beach and they saw these humans in armor riding on a horse. And they assumed, because they'd never seen a horse before, they assumed it was a single entity. It was a single monster. And that for them was paranormal.
They didn't understand it was actually a human riding on a horse with metal skin. Same thing with acupuncture. I remember a time when I was growing up as a kid, people thought Eastern medicine acupuncture was nonsense. Well, now at the Veterans Administration, the VA, for some of my guys in combat, they actually prescribe acupuncture as therapy. It's not paranormal, right?
And so there's all these examples. in history where we think something is kooky and weird when in reality it's not. It's just we don't understand it yet and we have done such a good job of stigmatizing this conversation that the moment you even say the word paranormal or you say the word UFO or anything like that, people are conditioned without even thinking about it.
It's reflexive to react a certain way. And we have to first deprogram ourselves first a little bit Before we can start moving forward, how do we destigmatize this conversation? Well, first of all, what's kooky? What do you think is kooky about something that's in our airspace that's performing in ways that we can't replicate? People say, well, wait a minute.
We spend millions if not billions of dollars. putting a probe on Mars to try to find microbial life. And by the way, it looks like that may happen. It looks like there actually may be some evidence to suggest that. We spend lots of money trying to find technosignatures of intelligent life, radio signatures, in our own Milky Way, right?
Well, is it possible within the four and a half billion years our planet's been here that maybe intelligent life maybe found us first? Is it possible? Could be. We have to stop putting these limitations.
Joe, when I was in the medical program, when I was learning to be microbiology and immunology in college, we learned from our professor that Homo sapiens sapiens, as a modern species, has been around roughly between 100,000 to 200,000 years. Now, I'm not an expert, but that's what they say.
It was only the Greeks 2,000 years ago that introduced the idea that there's only two types of life forms on this planet. And you are either A, a plant, or B, you're an animal. And it wasn't
The last 300 years, so if you look at a 24-hour clock, roughly the last five minutes in the 24 hours towards midnight, we discovered another form of life that is neither plant nor animal that's been here with us on this planet, and that is the world of fungus. During the Renaissance and the days of Newton, we discovered that there was this other life form we've been sharing all along.
And so we pat ourselves on the shoulder. And it wasn't the last 120 years. Think about it. The last 10 seconds of our existence on this planet, so to speak, in a 24-hour clock as a modern species. We actually discovered the true dominant life form on this planet. And in fact, if you take all the biomass of every plant,
And the biomass of every animal and the biomass of every fungus and add it all up together, it still will not equal the biomass of this hidden kingdom of life that's actually the dominant life form on this planet. And that wasn't until we were able to curve glass and look through a little steel tube and famously shout, little beasties, little beasties.
Did we discover the world of microorganisms that, yes, live inside of you, and yes, live on the skin of the ISS space station, and yes, live miles underneath the Arctic ice, right? That is the true dominant life form on this planet, and it always has been. And it wasn't until the last 120 years we discovered that. So is it possible that there is something else that is just as normal to this world?
Is it possible? Well, the answer is a resounding yes, of course it's possible because we're always discovering new ways life can exist. When I was growing up as a kid, I was told absolutely, as a matter of fact, all life form is derived from photosynthesis, ultimately, when you go all the way down. It turns out that's not true. It wasn't until we discovered in the deepest depths of our oceans that
or these things called black smokers, we discovered there are creatures that thrive with no light, and they thrive off of something called chemosynthesis, a completely different way to metabolize energy to sustain life, right? So every time we put Mother Nature in a little box, she always finds a way to wiggle her way out.
And I think that's important when having this conversation, because if there's one thing we know as human beings, we're usually wrong at first.
Well, we exist and we do send things to other planets. We do send things into space. It only makes sense that something far more intelligent than us that would be doing that. And if they did, they'd probably watch an emerging civilization, which is essentially what we are. Right. And like you said, 200,000 years, which is nothing. Right. the existence of homo sapiens.
They've gone from things that use stones and flint map to things that can fly things through the air. I mean, if you look at Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright when they flew the first airplane, you go from that to the Apollo 11 launch, that's only like, what, 50 years? That's right. Something crazy like that? That's right. That's nuts. And you just take that and everything moves exponentially.
You take that and you imagine a civilization that's been around 10,000 years longer than us, 100,000 years longer, a million years longer than us, something that doesn't exist.
How about 100 years? We have evolved more in the last 150 years than we have in the last 150,000 years. Sure. And then you have the other – For me, I find when people say, well, the space is so huge and, you know, is it possible that things are coming from outer space? My response has always been the same. Look, I don't know where they're from. I just know that they're here.
And could they be from outer space? Sure. They can be from inner space or even the space in between. And I say that because the universe is far more complex than we give it credit for. Every time there was a time we had Newtonian physics, we thought there was a solution.
Then all of a sudden Einstein comes along and we realize that weight, space and time are actually connected and then everything's relative. And all of a sudden now you have quantum mechanics, which is this spooky action at a distance, right? Where the whole universe is behaving in a way that it shouldn't. And yet that looks like the real way the universe works, right?
I often tell people we are, as humans, we have only five fundamental senses that we can base our reality upon. And if you can't touch it, taste it, hear it, smell it, et cetera, we can't interact with it. And so where I live in Wyoming, we have these beautiful night skies, kind of like you have here in your studio here, 300 days of unoccluded night skies.
And as beautiful as those night skies are, if you were to look at that same portion of the night sky through a radio telescope, you would see a whole different reality around you. You'd see nebula and you'd see things in different spectra that we can't pick up. You pick an ultraviolet, an infrared, so you would see a whole different reality. Just like our cell phones, right?
If you could see in cell phone vision and see in Wi-Fi and 5G and GPS, you would interact with your environment completely different because you would see reality. So we can only... interact with a very small sliver of the reality that we can perceive because we're humans. But most of reality is actually beyond that. And then, of course, you have scalability issues. The universe is immensely huge.
And what scientists are now saying, if you look in any direction, you can see roughly within the visible, let me emphasize, visible horizon of our universe is about 13.9 billion light years, plus or minus. So that means in any direction I can see 13.9 billion light years with the right equipment. What's a light year? Well, it's as fast as light can travel in a year.
Well, light travels pretty fast. In fact, it travels at 186,000 miles per second. So seven and a half times around our planet in one second. So imagine how far you can go in a year. Now, multiply that by 13.9 billion. And that, by scientists' estimation, so if the universe end-to-end of our visible, we're stuck in the middle, is roughly 27 billion light years.
Scientists are now saying that's only possibly only 10% of the known universe because the universe is so big and so vast and so far, light will never have time to reach Earth. So that's at a minimum 100 billion light years, right? And so we are this little speck in the middle.
And as crazy as that is to even try to conceive, if you compare one atom inside the hill, one hydrogen atom, Avogadro's number, right? One times 10 to the negative umpteen all the way down. it is roughly the same level of scale As we are to the universe, meaning that atom is the size of a human as we are the size of the universe as we are a human to the size of the universe.
So there is this and we as humans can only interact plus or minus with one order of magnitude up or down. Otherwise, the universe is simply too big or too small, meaning most of the universe and reality lies in those scales. We live in this little tiny, tiny sliver. And so you hurt my head.
But yeah, we live in a tiny sliver. And the idea that we're alone, I think, is preposterous. I really do. And I know people, they constantly chime in with this, where's the evidence? Elon's famously said, if the aliens are real, they're very subtle. I don't know why he says that, though.
I think he probably says that because he doesn't want to sound like a kook while he's working with NASA and SpaceX, you know? I'd probably say some stuff like that, too.
Well, let me ask you this. As human beings, right, how many times do we fly over the Serengeti in a helicopter, right? Let's say you want to monitor the health of a particular herd of elephants, right? And so what happens are wildebeests. We fly over. We pick one. We shoot it with a tranquilizer. It falls asleep. We go down. We do some tests, pull its blood.
Now think about it from the perspective of the wildebeest, right? It wakes up, kind of meanders over to the watering hole and says, Bill, you're not going to believe this, man, but… Right. Something out of the sky came down and all of a sudden they were touching me. And, you know, I woke up and my butt hurt. Right. What the hell was that? To this day, even in China, when we go into a zoo. Right.
And we have the panda bear exhibits. What do we do? We put. So we don't disrupt the pandas. We wear panda suits. Now, it sounds silly, but you can actually get online and see zookeepers wearing panda suits because they don't want to. They want to interfere as least as possible with a natural phenomenon. Flora and fauna, they're inside the exhibit, right?
Plants and animals. Was it reasonable to theorize that there's aliens amongst us?
When you say – well, two things. So I don't want to be evasive. But I also want to be very specific. When we say aliens and then we also – are we saying something from another planet or are we simply saying non-human?
Non-human intelligence that looks like us, moves around with us.
So is it possible? Well, we're doing it already with the panda bear. So it's not that we do it all the time.
Seems like a strategy that'd be very simple.
Sure. And especially if you have the technology. Now, as far as- The panda bear.
Yeah, there you go, right? Carrying little baby pandas. Exactly, right? Boy, those are shitty panda bear outfits too. They're fucking terrible looking.
They're pretty terrifying, aren't they, actually?
You put that in front of my dog, he's going to bark. If a dude in a dog costume, he'll be like, uh-uh, that ain't a fucking dog. That's a wild panda bear. No, that dude's not a panda bear. That's crazy.
He's a panda terrorist.
That looks like a fucking alien. If it was really dark out and that guy grabbed you and zapped you with a tranquilizer, you'd have an alien story.
But, yeah, my point is that we always use camouflage for obvious reasons. We do it in the military, right? Sure, sure. Camouflage uniform, stealth aircraft for camouflage. Sure, you do it when you go hunting. Absolutely, I do. Absolutely. So it's not a stretch of the imagination to suggest anything coming here that doesn't want to provoke us. Probably wants to blend in. Of course.
Do I have any type of empirical evidence to suggest that they are living among us? I don't. What I can say definitively that whatever it is, it's here. And by the way, you already have very senior people in our government that have said it's here, whatever it is. But these things could also be from under the water.
These things could be something that is as natural to Earth as the little beasties were, right, when we first discovered them. Maybe they've been here all along. Right.
So the ocean is largely undiscovered. One of the things that people need to understand is that most of the exploration of the ocean is really essentially around the outside edges. That's right. It's around the shores.
Less than 10 percent.
Which is nuts. 90 percent of the ocean. That's right. Like what?
We know more about the moon than the bottom of our own ocean. That's so crazy.
Yeah. That's fact. And these underwater crafts, like this enormous one that apparently was near this oil rig, how many of them have been – has there been more than one of those videos?
So let me tell you what I can say from open source. Yeah. Okay. And then I'll tell you about a conversation I had without attribution because I don't want to get in trouble. A lot of people are familiar with the Air Force's program called the Fast Walker program, which is a program that was started by the Air Force, among other things, was to detect UFOs. That's a fact.
Actually, that was part of their mission, to detect a lot of things, adversarial technology, but UFOs was one of them. It was called the Fast Walker program. There was some information that was released publicly about a similar program the Navy has. I can't talk about it because I don't have approval to talk about it. But obviously they're interested because they have equities underwater.
They're interested in if there's anything underwater that can perform beyond anything we have. And I remember speaking to one individual who pulled me aside very privately and he said, Lou – We were tracking this thing doing, and I won't say the exact speed, but hundreds and hundreds of knots underwater. And it was bigger than our own submarine. You know how big our submarines are, right?
They're huge.
And I asked him, naively, I just kind of came out, what do you do when you encounter that? And he just said, very honestly, he said, we go around. Just like that, we go around.
Have there been interactions with these things? No.
I would not at liberty discuss any details about that. That's not for me to discuss. You and I got to get drunk. I'm a lightweight. I got to get you drunk. Let's go have some whiskey.
Find out what the fuck is up. So this thing is bigger than the sub and they followed it for hundreds of miles.
Let me give you another great, great event that occurred. And I'll talk about this because it's not classified. The portions that might be, I don't know about, so it should be fine. There's an individual who I'm aware of who was a helo pilot, a helicopter pilot back in the late 90s in the Caribbean. And they were doing missile recovery.
So what happened is that the Navy would test fire missiles, and then they kind of run out of fuel. They hit the water, and they sink. At a predetermined time, they pop to the surface. We grab it with a helicopter, bring it back to shore, and we test it for telemetry and make sure that this cruise missile was doing what it was supposed to do.
So they're out there in the helicopter, frogmen hanging down the line. You've got the helo pilot, you've got the crew chief and the co-pilot looking all down at the bubble. And as they're about to grab this cruise missile out of the ocean, something huge and round and what was described to me as black as a devil starts to rise to the surface.
The water begins to churn very much like David Fravor's description of the Tic Tac incident and the roiling water.
the frogman is so freaked out he's literally trying to climb the line back up he's like total panic at the disco right yeah and the helicopter is like do we do it like an emergency ascent what the hell's going on here and right as this thing is about and by the way it's the size of a small island and round right as this thing is about to break the surface it sucks the missile down and disappears and that was yeah and uh dave fravor could probably tell you that story a
But when you compare that to other things, you've got to say, imagine being that guy hanging from that line. No. No, thank you. We call that bait. Yeah, but it didn't do anything to him. No. I would have loved that experience. Yeah. So that was one of the anecdotes that was revealed to us by one of the maybe helicopter pilots.
Who's that guy that was hanging from that?
The frogman? Was he a seal? I don't know. I don't even know the pilot.
Bro, come talk to me. Please, sir. I only know the pilot. We'll put you in a fucking panda outfit. We'll disguise your voice. Tell me what the fuck you saw. I want to hear that story. Oh, my God. Small island. Yep. Black as the devil in a small island and round.
Submarines look like this, right? They're not round. Right. So that was one of the anecdotes. That was shared with us. Obviously, Puerto Rico with the other – there's been some UAPs that have been recorded off there. Everybody knows about Aguadilla, the Aguadilla incident. I don't know about it. Oh, I'm sure you do. I do? Tell me. Wow. Trust me. So you can look it up online.
There's a video taken by a DHS helicopter of a very interesting object. First, it appears to be like a, perhaps a balloon, but then it does all sorts of weird stuff. And as you're tracking it, it enters the water without making a splash. You can track it underwater. Then it comes up and splits into two. And it's been analyzed over and over again by a lot of experts.
It's called the Aguadilla incident.
Maybe I have seen this. Is it kind of blurry looking night vision?
There we go.
That's it. Oh, wow.
And so keep watching that. And I'll tell you a little story about this. This is a Customs and Border Protection. Release this.
How fast is this thing going?
Well, so if you look here, they're looking at this through a form of night vision. I don't know the exact velocity. All that is available. But if you keep watching this, something interesting happens. So here it goes. You're going to see this thing enter the water here. There he goes underwater. And then it pops back up and splits into two. Keep their track in it. See, no waves, no wake.
And then it surfaces and then does something pretty interesting here. So keep watching.
So it's going high speed through the water.
Underwater. That's underwater. Then it breaks the surface of the water again. Keep watching. Boom. Underwater. Overwater. Boom. Underwater. Out of water. And then you'll see it split into two. I didn't see it split into two. Did you see it? If you watch the rest of the video, there it is. Oh, there it is. Yeah, the video is actually really long, but that's just one example.
You can see all these videos. They're prevalent everywhere. You see the aircraft on the bottom right? You see the UAP on top that's tracking it?
Yeah.
Yeah. No wings, no control surfaces, and it keeps up with the A-10 and does all sorts of interesting maneuvers, right? So that's an A-10 Warthog.
And this thing is just following it.
Yep, like it's nothing.
Do you think they're trying to let people see them? Like, have you had a guess?
You know, I don't know. I mean, could it be a demonstration of capabilities? We do that, right? Every time a Russian surveillance aircraft comes by, we launch two F-22s and we get real close to it and say, hey, you know, be careful.
But not even from a military perspective. Like if a civilization was trying to alert another civilization about its presence, wouldn't it like go towards whatever military vehicles it has and show itself and then –
I would imagine that if they understand human beings, they understand our psychology and they understand that some giant size of an island, black as the devil, circular craft that lands next to the Pentagon would fucking end the world. We would freak out. No one would know what to do. That would be stock market crash, mass chaos. No one would know what to do.
The way to introduce yourself, I would imagine, would be gradual over a long period of time to allow this civilization to accept the fact these things exist and then slowly but surely show versions of themselves.
Yeah, we call that sensitization. You sensitize a population or environment. Right. You know, the counter argument to that is that's a very human thing, right? We have – as humans, we always – it's almost innate. We look at everything through anthropomorphic eyes.
We look at, you know, our pet dogs and we give them human names and we do things like that because we assign human value to things because we have intentions and motivations. But most of nature isn't that way. Like, for example, when a shark – Bites a surfer. He's not wanting to hurt the surfer. He's just hungry. The shark's hungry. I don't care if you're a seal or whatever.
I'm not trying to inflict pain. I just want to feed my belly. Intent and motivation is a very human thing. And we have to – I don't want to say resist the urge because it's almost impossible to do it. But we have to recognize that there are – There are things that may exist that don't have human motivation, meaning maybe they don't care about sensitizing us. Maybe they do.
But maybe it's like a computer, right? Maybe it's binary. Maybe there's some sort of binary thought process, just information in and information out. So that's one of the aspects I've always been very careful with is to assign human traits to something that is –
Very likely not human right, but would you have to assign human traits to it? Or would you have if you you could look at it from the perspective of? These things are aware of our psychology. They're aware of how we function and they're aware of the fragility of our worldview No, good point.
You don't have to have human intention to have a strategy for doing the least amount of harm to this emerging civilization.
Touche. In fact, there's examples of that. Let me reinforce your point because there's examples of that, my background being science, in nature. You know, when lionesses stalk the zebras. You know, they get very low into the grass. They don't want to be seen, right? They're not motivated necessarily because they don't want to spook the herd, but they do it. It's almost instinctual, right?
It's part of their DNA, part of their wiring to have a low profile, low observability, and to get closer to their target, whether it's prey or anything else. So you're right. I mean, there are examples in nature that also can suggest that. So it's a very good point.
Yeah. I mean, it just makes sense that if it understands us, if it's absurd. Look, we understand the behavior characteristics of sloths. Right. Right. We study them. We know what they do. And it would just make sense that if they're studying us, they would understand our behavior characteristics.
I mean, the tiger recognizes the behavior characteristics of the zebra, doesn't it? Right. Exactly. It studies it. And so it knows what it has to do to get close to the zebra.
So, yeah, there's no way they would come here with ignorance. And I think also it's very likely that what we are exists in many, many places in the universe and that what we are is what they used to be. So they probably understand what we are.
Well, we do that in the Amazon, don't we? And African tribes, lost tribes that are remote, right? Separated by outside human contact. We study them. We study them from afar, but we do the same thing.
Yes. Yeah, no question. And obviously, if they are these super intelligent creatures, they evolve to become super intelligent creatures. So there's probably some sort of universal process that takes place amongst all intelligent, creative life. that has a lust for innovation.
They consistently make better and better versions of these flying crafts until they figure out how to make this warp drive thing that these things apparently have. Another thing that's odd is that you see the same kind of things that Kenneth Arnold saw in 1950. You see the same kind of things today. It's almost like
you know going somewhere in the 1950s and seeing a 55 chevy and then in 2024 seeing another 55 they're still driving around 55 chevys like what the well they do do that in cuba right but that's just because they don't have access to other cars they have a choice really good mechanics that's your people
It is. I'm really resisting the urge of continuing to smoke this thing right now. Okay.
I feel terrible. Don't feel terrible.
You feel terrible with cigars. My wife is going to give me hell for this.
I don't think there's anything wrong with cigars, man. Like I was saying before, I never heard of a single person dying from cigars. You don't inhale them. Take a little bit of smoke in your mouth. It's pleasurable. It's nice. I would just think that that's what they would do because that's what we would do. And I think that's what intelligent life would do.
We've recognized something that wasn't quite as intelligent as us. We don't rush into these, you know, remote tribes and vaccinate them. What do we do? We don't give them. But, you know, the thing is, like, they have done some things like they gave Starlink to this one tribe. And the kids all started watching porn. You hear about that? I heard. Yeah. It became a real problem. Yeah.
They're all lazy, hanging out on their phones all day, which makes sense. It's like, that's what we do. Yeah. But the tribal leaders are not happy.
You bring up another very interesting point. Is there a natural glide slope or a natural evolution to evolution? Meaning any species that reaches a certain point, is there a natural progression that of any intelligent species to progress to the point... All life is expansive. Life doesn't contract. Life expands, whether it's bacterial life, whether it's animal life or human life.
There are certain biological functions to procreate, multiply, and continue to expand. So is that a universal norm? Is that part of fractals in geometry throughout the universe? part of the blueprint of all life? Or is it only specific to life here on Earth?
And that's a great question because there's probably arguments to suggest that, yeah, there probably is a natural, there's a natural blueprint for physics in the universe. They're probably, since life has to abide by physics, probably a natural, potentially natural blueprint for the evolution of all life, whether, again, bacterial or animal or human or anything else, non-human.
It makes sense. It makes sense that everything moves into greater levels of complexity, from single-celled organisms to human beings that pilot drones. It just keeps going in the same general direction, observably here.
And if the universe is infinite, that means there's infinite versions of what we're seeing here with us that exists throughout the cosmos and probably in infinite steps along the way, right? A hundred years from now, a thousand years from now.
Well, not to make light of it, but I'll tell you recently. So I've learned over the years there's nothing more expensive than a cheap lawyer. So I've got a couple good lawyers that I work with on just contractual stuff. And one of them is named Ivan Hanel. I call him the bull. And I've learned to appreciate the shout out to Ivan, the infinite complexity of law and legal. Right. So right.
So if there is this natural progression as we're talking about life, I mean, we even see it in our own human interactions. Right. This this this intricate complexity of how things work and how even in the way we behave with each other socially.
Right.
You look at a when I was in the in the government, you could look at a terrorist link analysis and. And that link analysis still follows those fractal patterns that the patterns in our lungs, the patterns of lightning, the patterns of super medullonic clouds and galaxies, super clusters of galaxies all have that same pattern. And it's not just a physical pattern. It's a social pattern, right?
And so, again, not to make joke of it, but I'm learning that it's beyond these patterns or beyond just physical patterns. Even in something as silly but fundamental as law, there are these patterns that continue to spin off and whatnot. So, yeah, I can appreciate that. I think we're at a point now as a species where we probably should be having these conversations. And I'll also say this, Joe.
There are parts of this conversation I don't feel the government has any place. There is definitely a national security conversation here. But the conversation we're having, as you can tell, is far beyond national security, right?
We're talking philosophical, psychological, sociological, theological implications that I'm not sure I want my government necessarily dictating for me what I should think about this.
Well, the government is supposed to be working for us ultimately, and they are supposed to be us. And the problem is when you have access to information that's above and beyond the normal person's realm – that could affect everyone on this planet, this understanding that we are not alone. But not only that, we're probably not even alone here. It's not even that something is visiting us.
Something's probably here all the time. And this is the main thought about these underwater vehicles.
Well, life is abundant on this planet, isn't it? And it thrives in places that we thought life could never thrive before. It's everywhere. It almost seems like a natural function if you have certain situations and circumstances on a rock somewhere, then life pops up.
It seems like if we can actually find it on Mars, like you were saying before, they may have found some sort of an evidence of microbiological life. If we find it on Mars and we find it somewhere, they think maybe Europa underneath the surface.
That's right.
And Europa probably is powered by volcanic vents the same way the bottom of our ocean is. There might be some sort of life form there.
Chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis.
And this is just what we know about here. Imagine all the different potential realities in terms of what a planet's atmosphere could be like. You're dealing with larger planets that have more gravity. You're dealing with different kinds of temperature variations.
Look at Titan. It's methane. And by the way, that's organic chemistry. It's got methane clouds. So there are things that thrive in these types of environments.
Maybe they have cow farts up there too.
Maybe there are too many. But yeah, I mean, you're absolutely correct. I think we have, again, this goes back to the original point of every time we try to put Mother Nature in a box, she always finds a way to wiggle her way out of it and prove us wrong. If the one thing we're right about is that we're always wrong.
Right. How much, I don't know if you could talk about this, but how much of an effort is there to try to detect things under the surface of the ocean? Yeah.
I would defer that to the United States Navy and maybe NOAA, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric. Yeah, no, not the biblical NOAA. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, no, no. I mean NOAA meaning National Oceanographic and Atmospheric.
Speaking of going that far back, I mean, how much of – I got to think that when people are delving into this stuff, they look at ancient scriptures and ancient – these different depictions of things, whether it's the Vyamanas in the Hindu texts and whether it's in the Bhagavad Gita. There's all these different stories in Ezekiel and the Bible. There's things that seem to –
If I was a person living thousands of years ago and I encountered a flying saucer or encountered some spaceship from another planet, I would probably describe it in a way that they're describing it.
Yeah.
I mean – Just like sort of the Aztecs describe people on horses.
Today's magic is tomorrow's technology, right? Right. So I can tell you when I went to Italy, I spoke to one of the senior – I think it was one senior – one of the senior Vatican academics. And he said to me, he says, look – The Vatican doesn't have a problem with this topic.
This is something, in fact, up until the 1600s, it was heretical to presume or assume that mankind was the only, if you will, incarnation of God, representation of God. But in essence, you're putting limitations on the dominion of what God can and can't do.
And there are these scrolls, in fact, that are in the Vatican archives that discuss—it's a conversation between a Roman soldier and a Roman general— where they describe, there's something called eclipus. Eclipus in Latin means like sun, eclipse, right? It's the shape of the Roman shield.
And they talked about these flaming Roman shields in the sky that would follow them from battle space to battle space. And Mr. Jacques Vallée could probably expound much more upon that than I can, but this was just a brief conversation I had with someone there.
Jacques Vallée is very slippery.
Is he? Very slippery.
He don't commit to anything.
He looks at you sideways. Yeah. He did a lot of good stuff. Oh, yeah. And he's an incredibly smart guy. Great researcher of just phenomenal big brains.
Well, he's the reason that guy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's the inspiration for the French guy. I heard that. Yeah.
I never had the guts to ask him. I figure he probably gets tired of being heard. I'm sure.
When you're talking to him, you're like, oh, that's the guy.
But, you know, there's a lot of – and when you look at what the Vatican is, I mean, really, it's probably the world's oldest, most capable intelligence organization because they have priests around the world that people will report miracles to, right, and confessions to. And eventually that gets filtered up to the Vatican. So, you know – Talk about the world's first CIA and KGB.
It was Vatican, baby. Those guys had it going on. And so no wonder they have all this archival information. And some of it relates to UAP. Wow. Yeah.
Yeah, it only makes sense that these things, if they're here now, they've probably been visiting us since back when we were on horseback and probably quite a bit before then. And maybe that's the scariest thing for people. They might be responsible for us being humans in the first place.
Well, you remember the stories, right, of even Christopher Columbus coming over to the New World. There were some interesting accounts when they were on the water of potentially some sort of UAP interaction. I did not know that. Yeah, you can look it up online. This is all open source, but you can type it up and – There were some very interesting accounts and even old sailor accounts.
People say, well, old sailors also talked about big giant kraken and stuff like that. But there was always an element of truth to it. Now we realize there are giant squid of the Pacific.
Well, not only that, krakens they think likely did exist. Because octopus, when they rot, they don't leave anything. But they did find fossilized suction cups.
They still do. It's called the great squid of the Pacific. We find it.
Yeah, that for sure. But they think maybe perhaps even an enormous octopus that probably actually did go after boats.
You know, we called them sea monsters back then, but really, you know, we laugh about it now, but it turns out there are sea monsters. There's what's called great white sharks and blue whales.
Megalodons. That's a fucking sea monster.
Right. That was a real thing. A great white shark is now. Absolutely. Go swimming with a great white shark and tell me that's not a monster, right? Exactly. So, you know, we just realize, oh, it's just part of nature. It's part of our existing paradigm.
Tigers are monsters.
Right. Absolutely. You know, especially at night when you don't have a flashlight, that thing behind the bush, That's a monster. Right.
Did you find anything on the Columbus stuff?
The only thing I'm seeing is from my Ancient Aliens episode. Now that you know it's legit. I saw something crashed into the water, but I can't find it.
Yeah, there were some reports of some interesting lights that the crew had reported. And it was actually, he put it down in his logbook. Something about some interest. Now, some folks will come back and say, well, that's St. Elmo's fire, which absolutely could be.
What is St. Elmo's fire exactly?
St. Helens Fire is a static charge. It occurs on the wingtips of aircraft. Even the old sailors would report it. In certain environmental conditions, there is this weird greenish-blue plasma glow that will often sometimes be seen on the tips of wingtips on aircraft. There's some really good pictures of it online. And even on the old mariner ships up towards the sails and the masts.
And they believe it's... It has to do with static charge, and under certain environments, it creates this energized plasma, and you can see it.
Is that similar to, like, ball lightning?
Well, it could be. Here you go. And they call it St. Elmo's fire. Wow.
That's fucking badass.
Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. It's either around the cockpit of the aircraft. Whoa. And by the way, you see the patterns? It's fractal, right? Look at that ship. So very, very interesting how St. Elmo's fire, you know, can cause some people to, you know, perhaps see things and say it's... Well, also, they might be seeing that, yeah. They might, right?
But there are some accounts of ancient mariners who report strange, bizarre things.
Yeah. Yeah. Again, it makes sense. That was one of the more weird parts of Bob Lazar's story was that they've always been here and that they view us as containers. Containers. Interesting. Yeah. And he said there's a very thick document that relays to the. the implications that it has on religion and the way they talk about us.
Well, religion calls us vessels, right? Religious scripture and a lot of different religions refer to humans as vessels. I'm certainly not a religious expert, so I don't want to pontificate here and say something that's inaccurate, but that doesn't surprise me.
Well, I think the term was... I think they were saying vessels for souls. But if you imagine... that a being transcends its physical limitations of biological reality. So the biological evolution that led us to become Homo sapiens over the course of X amount of millions of years, that's a very slow process. But technological innovation and technological progress is very quick. Very quick.
Especially when you add in artificial intelligence.
Exponential.
That's right. So if something comes along that... is a life form that exists outside of biology, like something that we create, which it seems like we're doing right now.
Like AI, right? When does that become sentient? Now is that a life form? Not biological.
Maybe that thing, in order for it to ever occur, maybe that thing needs... a thing with a soul that has a creative desire, that has a lust for innovation and continues to make better and better things. And maybe that thing only exists in biology. And maybe the problem with artificial life is that it has no motivation. And that we have, especially if it's self-programmable, right?
So one of the very bizarre things that was recently discovered about artificial intelligence, they gave artificial intelligence a certain amount of time to code something, to figure something out. And when it didn't have enough time, it changed its code to give itself more time. Fascinating. Yeah, like what? What the fuck are you talking about? It's deciding that it doesn't like its limitations.
It won't have any of the biological motivation we have, right? It won't have ego. It won't have materialism. It won't have a desire for status. It won't have all the things that lead us to do some of the horrible things that human beings do.
I could not agree more.
And also some of the great things that human beings do. But maybe it also doesn't have any desire to create. And maybe the only way for its kind of life to exist is... is for a human being a biological thing that super intelligent in comparison to the rest the animals on this planet that innovates to the point where it creates this artificial life
I'm going to share something very, very personal with you. And I know when I say with you, I know it's with everybody else, but you know, part of my struggle is I can't, I can't urge the government to be transparent and I'm not transparent myself. Right. It's hypocritical. So let me share with you a very personal story because you bring something up that I think is fascinating. Um,
I'm a human being. But if for whatever reason I get into a car accident and I lose an arm, I'm still Lou Elizondo, right? In fact, if I lose my legs and all my arms, I'm still Lou. So my body doesn't define who I am. And my intellect, right? If I suffer a traumatic brain injury, let's say I'm in Afghanistan in a TBI accident. And my brain is compromised. I'm still Lou.
And so what makes Lou or what makes Joe, Joe? Well, it's not your physical self and probably not even your intellectual self. My mother... I was very close to my mother. My mother was an incredible human being. And I'll share this story with you and take away with it what you want. I was very young, maybe two, two and a half, three years old.
And I remember watching a show with my mother, one of my very first memories. And in this TV show, I don't remember what show it was, but I remember that a shark had eaten a dog. And I was shocked. My first understanding that what death was. And I looked at my mom, I said, mom, what just happened? And she said, well, son, the shark ate the dog. I said, what does that mean?
She said, well, the dog's not coming back. The dog died. I said, well, does everything die? She said, well, yes, son, everything dies. I said, well, mom, you're not going to die. You're a mom, right? You gave me life. She said, no, son, one day I'm going to die. And I remember spending, from that day forward, as God is my witness, I spent every single day of my life
knowing one day my mother was going to die. And it terrified me. I was very, very close with her. And one day, that day came. My mother was diagnosed with cancer. And she started, her body started failing. And despite the best efforts, we knew she wasn't going to make it. And when you love somebody sometimes, It doesn't sound right, but sometimes you deceive them.
They want to know they're in a bad state physically and mentally, and you say, am I going to make it? And you say, yeah, of course you're going to make it, right? Knowing full well that there's probably not a good chance you're going to make it. And so we're in the hospital, and my mother had at this point been in probably a state of coma for about a week.
And it was just me, my wife, and a couple members of the family. Very, very sad moment. my mother began this process of death called, you know when someone's gonna die, there's something called a death rattle. And it's when the mucus begins in the back of the throat to congeal. And it makes breathing—it can be very unnerving for the people who have to witness this. It's very, very common.
It's called a death rattle. It's the body beginning to shut down. And I knew something told me my mom was going to go very quickly, within the next 30 seconds to a minute. So long story short— My mother's body was, at that point, it was a husk, an empty husk. It was broken. Her brain had shut down. And yet, the very moment she passed away, within five seconds, I knew it.
It was just something weird. Something reached and said, this is it. She's going. And I reached over the bed and I looked at my mom. Her eyes all of a sudden opened up and she looked right at me. And even though her brain had been compromised and wasn't working, her body was nothing anymore. And she was a beautiful woman. She worked for Playboy. She was a beautiful lady, at one time a model.
Her body resembled nothing of what she did. She looked at me, and she passed. But we communicated. And I knew there was something else at that moment more to a human being, more than just a body, more than just a brain. There is something that is beyond the physical and even intellectual part of what it means to be human. And I felt it. And everybody in the room felt it. It was undeniable.
You can call it a soul, an id, a cheat, whatever. You can put a label on it. I don't know what it's called. I don't know what it is. But I do know that was the essence of my mother. And the moment she passed, it was this weird feeling because... As my mother laid there dead in the bed, it wasn't my mother anymore. That essence, whatever made my mother my mother...
And you could see the light in her eyes. It was like someone turning off the light switch. And I've been around death a lot. It's a terrible, horrible thing, especially in warfare. But this was something visceral. This was something far more intimate. This cut to my soul. And I could recognize it. And she recognized me and I recognized her, even though that the brain functions were gone.
So I guess my point is... I absolutely believe there's something more to the human experience than simply a tangible body and a brain. And I witnessed this firsthand. Now, people can say all sorts of stuff they want. I don't care. I've got enough haters out there anyways. If they want to think that I'm trying to – hope that my mother has a soul and she goes somewhere.
I'm just telling you what I experienced and other people experience too. And it was, it was proof for me at that moment that there's much more to, to us as, as, as human beings.
I had a very similar feeling when I went to my grandfather's funeral and I saw him in the casket because it was an open casket and I knew he's gone. I'm like, that's not him. That's right. It's just a shell. And you can sense it. You feel it. Yeah. It was a very strange feeling. Yeah. You know, and obviously he's wearing makeup because they've got him in a suit and the whole deal.
But I was like, that is not my grandfather. He's not there anymore.
And it's not like you're trying to override this acknowledgement that they're dead. You know they're dead. It's just that whatever made that person that person, it's not in the body anymore. It's gone.
There's a bizarre feeling that we have that you don't – I don't think there's words for it.
It's a feeling. It is. And, again, it's not an intellectual or even a physical thing. Yeah. Yeah.
The idea that we're containers for souls is just so goddamn creepy. This is a farm of souls.
I'm not familiar with that hypothesis, but it sounds interesting. Also scary, perhaps.
Well, it's scary for us. You've got to wonder why we are so different than every other creature in that we have this insane, insatiable desire to change our environment. Constantly build bigger skyscrapers to move the earth. We're constantly inventing new technology. I mean, it seems to be an instinct that's a part of us.
And if this gradual progression of life goes from intelligent biological life to super intelligent whatever it is, whatever kind of technology creates it. that life is not as simple as, this natural selection model that we have here that we think applies to life. This is a type of life, and then there's a life that this thing creates.
Well, you know, evolution isn't just a physical thing, is it? Evolution is the ability to change within one's environment over time. And that's a fascinating concept you bring up because some speculate – That it is inevitable that human beings will eventually evolve into something. We're just a link in a much longer chain. Right. And that all intelligent life potentially goes through this process.
And that this is a natural process where eventually we actually make ourselves extinct. Not in the way where we kill ourselves.
Right.
But we wind up creating a life form, whether it's AI or we start enhancing ourselves with more and more machine interface and technology. And life doesn't have to necessarily be organic, right? Silicon is very, very close to carbon in some cases. So is it possible that life, it is destiny for all life eventually to evolve itself out of existence and bring in or usher in a new type of life form?
Is it possible? I mean, certainly from a technological perspective, I mean, ask Elon Musk, it seems that we're You know, we're making a lot of advancements right now to augment the human experience. And given, as you said, how technology progresses exponentially, very quickly in the next 200 years, I mean, we might be there.
Is this sort of conversation being had in the government about what these things potentially are?
Not to my knowledge, and I sure hope not, because I don't think the government – this is a conversation. This is where I go back to. This is a conversation that involves a lot of people, whether it's your priest or your rabbi or your imam or it is your philosophy teacher at the university. I think we're getting into an area now that is beyond national security.
And honestly, Joe, I'm not comfortable – Right. Right.
It's also other human beings. The government is just human beings. That's right. Human beings shouldn't have this insane knowledge and keep it from other human beings.
Well, in fact, it's illegal, especially in our democracy. This type of stuff is supposed to be discussed with certain members of Congress and certain elements of the executive branch. And when somebody, I don't care if you're in the government or in a religion or anything like that, this goes to the fundamental pillar of something that agrees me, which is corruption.
Now, when I say corruption, let me backtrack a little bit. My father recently died this last Father's Day. Not this one, but the one before. And I had the privilege of knowing he was sick. And so we took a road trip down to Miami about a month and a half before he died. And he never told me he was sick. But I knew something wasn't right. I knew my father for a long time.
And something wasn't right. He started losing weight. And I could see he wasn't eating as much. And there were telltale signs. And he didn't want to tell me. And I asked my father almost flippantly, I said, Dad, I think we were probably somewhere by St. Louis, and I said, Dad, what is the greatest threat to humanity, to humans? What is the greatest threat?
Now, I say it flippantly because I'm thinking, you know, terrorism, right, and this and that. My father thought for a second. He looks at me and says, Son, it's corruption. And I said, What do you mean corruption? Like financial corruption? Governmental corruption? He says, No. Corruption at its heart is when you are willing to bypass your own moral code, your own ethics for something else.
And whether it's financial corruption, religious corruption, governmental corruption, or even moral corruption, when you start to compromise on your own values, it's a very quick downward spiral to utter chaos. And he know that firsthand because my father was in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was a political prisoner of Castro. He actually fought with Castro against Batista,
And then when Castro went communist, my father joined the folks here and the friendly folks at the CIA and was part of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs. He spent two years in Castro's prisons being tortured. So when he came to this country, this country offered us opportunities that no other country could or would. And the reason why Cuba failed was because of corruption.
And he said, look, corruption will be the end of all. And it's a very quick downward spiral with democracy that if democracy becomes corrupt, you now have tyranny, right? And so every time someone in the government is willing to compromise a little bit on the value of what it means to serve the American people and they forget that, they become corrupt.
And that actually erodes the very essence of what democracy is and what this country is about. And that is why it is so important that the individuals in our government that don't want to have this conversation and don't want to talk to Congress and are making the unilateral decision on your behalf and the American taxpayer and my behalf. That's wrong. They don't have the right to do that.
There is a process of rules and laws we have in this country that we've all agreed to are going to abide by. And that includes them. And they don't have the right to bypass that, even if they think they're doing it for the right reason. I disagree with that. I think I think. This democracy only works because we all agree it works, right?
And the moment you begin to compromise on that, all of democracy is at risk. And I mean that sincerely. It's not a slow downward spiral. It's quick. And you can hit rock bottom very, very quickly. And the only reason why this government works is because we all have faith. and a commitment to what we consider are the American values and serving the American people and for the people, by the people.
So I think it's very dangerous when elements in the government, and I don't want to villainize the whole government because the government's full of great people. They do great things. They keep us safe. So I'm talking about the minority few. Some of these people who have actually gone after me and will probably continue to come after me to try to discredit me and everything else, despite the
volumes of documentation that I have in my possession and others, because they don't want to have the conversation. And they are happy with the status quo. And to me, that is a greater threat than any UAP could ever have on humanity. The greatest threat is how we perceive
and what we are willing to do to keep this a secret in violation of the commitment and what we have done to... We've sworn in some cases to uphold the values of this country. And I think that's a concern for me. And that's why I don't want certain elements having this conversation of what this means, you know, the bigger macro level conversation because I don't think they're qualified.
I'm not qualified. I know that. I'm damn sure they're not qualified either. So... This is why I think this type of national level conversation is so important. At the end of the day, it's not up to me. People say, Lou, what do you think? You know what? Tell what I think. It doesn't matter what I think. What matters is what you think. Here's the information. Here's the data. You figure it out.
Don't ask me what this means because I'm not entitled to that. I didn't earn that privilege. And I would definitely never take it away because that is sacred. That's you. That's up to you to decide for yourself. And this is part of my frustration with this overall conversation because there are elements that don't want you to have this conversation.
Well said, Lou. Thank you very much, man. Thanks for being here. I really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed our conversation.
Joe, this has been fantastic and truly, truly an honor and privilege. You have one hell of a responsibility. Look, I got to tell you, I don't ever get nervous doing an interview. You were the first one and probably the only one I will ever have been nervous coming in just simply because, not because of me, because of you.
The responsibilities you have on your shoulders to have a communicate, you reach a global audience. People are listening. to this conversation right now. And by the way, they're part of this conversation very much so, right? That is an enormous responsibility. You have a voice in some cases that exceeds presidents.
The technology you now have available to your fingertips and this wonderful staff you have, you are influencing the world. And I can't imagine that type of responsibility. I mean, there are world leaders that don't have the voice you have. And so for me, it is a profound, profound honor and privilege to be with you here today and your wonderful audience.
You know, if I never see you again, I wish you the best of luck. You are amazing. You're doing America a great service. Be honest. Be candid. Speak your mind. That's all I can say as a little chicken here in the United States. You've got big shoulders, man. You've got a big weight and a lot of responsibility on your back, and I mean that sincerely.
You're freaking me out, man.
I'm telling you.
But thank you very much. Thanks again. I really appreciate everything you've said, and I appreciate everything you said about disclosure and how important it is. I couldn't agree more. Sure.
Joe, it's been my honor and privilege, sincerely. My honor, too.
Thank you very much. Yes, sir. All right. Bye, everybody. This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Call of Duty. You know, when a new Call of Duty drops, everyone's trying to find a way to squeeze in those extra hours of gameplay. I get it. Life is busy, but sometimes you just need it.
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