American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - 'Immaculate Constellation' Groundbreaking Reveal (ft. Michael Shellenberger)

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Join Jesse Michels in an exclusive sit-down with Michael Shellenberger, recorded right after the UAP congressional hearings on November 13, 2024. Shellenberger delves into the hearings' revelations and his newly released Immaculate Constellation report. Support American Alchemy by Becoming a YouTube Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify DISCORD ➤ https://discord.gg/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Personal) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Show) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] Original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. #uap #congressionalhearing #congress #aliens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank. I don't believe that this is being kept secret from us simply to protect methods. I think it's being kept secret from us for deeper reasons. Intelligence community is treating us like children. It's time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it. Boys, quick photo. We are at Rayburn House Office building

where the oversight committee hearing is going to happen. The last one happened, July 26, 2023. They have let in 15 people from the public. Some big, big changes in public perception and even public interest. The topic seems to be a lot more in the zeitgeist. It seems to be people just have a general interest into the topic and just, I think, in the paranormal in general.

So yeah, let's get this thing out there now. You are just taking photos on your iPhone. It's incredible. So I'm just gonna tweet it, or whatever we call it now. Yeah, yeah. Maculaconsolation, report on the US government's secret UAPU of the program from Whistleblower and released today. You'd say, um, discussed by Congress in today's hearing,

full report here and then, yeah, yeah. Give it an RT right now. Yeah? Let's roll. Yeah. Yeah. Done. I just you better get that first retreat.

It feels like the main impetus is we all need to read. Michael just tweeted the Immaculate Constellation Report. You happy? Great. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Yeah. I love Bursette.

He was coming in hot. He comes in hot every time. And we punish them by giving them multi-million dollars more than they ask for every year. 13th time. 13th time. Yeah. Unbelievable. I've done energy, the environment, climate change, censorship.

Maybe you'll be in this chair one day. Oh, God. Michael. I'd be bored to tears. How did you get into this topic to begin? That's a great question. I mean, the first piece I did was on maybe the craziest of all the cases, which is the famous Brazil crass in Virginia.

And I did it in part because I lived in Brazil. I speak Portuguese. I thought the movie was incredibly interesting, and I ended up doing some original reporting to verify some of the claims that James Fox was making. I interviewed someone that actually had seen the photographs of the alleged creature, and I did a two-page spread for New York Post. And then the subject kind of went to sleep for me, and then I only came back to it after David Grush's testimony, and I just wanted to poke around and see if I could verify some of the claims, and I've done about, I guess, four or five stories. racist then. And we've both gotten to know David Grush for the last couple of years, and he's also a big, for me, source of confidence, because you can kind of feel the earnest, I mean, he has mild autism, you know, attention to detail, and focus on truth. And then he'll say a thing, and it just gets

corroborated continually in sort of your open source findings. Have you found that as well? Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, this is, so this is an issue that I would never, use even just two sources for. I feel like when you're in something that is so on the fringe, genuinely on the edge of what we understand that you need multiple sources and that you have to really check them out. And so I've been pretty cautious in my reporting. I also, you know, am careful to be like, this is what people are saying, this is what people in these positions to know are saying. I remain agnostic about the essential nature of the phenomena. I don't know what it is. You know, I think that the other motivation was that this came during a period of

time when we were reporting on other governmental abuses of power. The most famous one was censorship, but we've now done stories on entrapment by FBI. We've done stories on disinformation operations. And so I find myself getting certainly fascinated by the phenomenon like everybody else, but I think that my motivation has been like, this is bad that the government is behaving in these ways and that we need. And really, that's the sort of if you're going to kind of list top functions of journalism, kind of at the top of it would be governmental abuses of power. How do we make progress on the nature of the phenomenon itself? Because I thought you did a great job of towing that line and maintaining kind of epistemic humility around what this thing is.

Right. How do we get closer on that? I mean, it seems like we're getting closer. You know, there's a... Read, by the way, the report that Michael just tweeted, because maybe that'll get you a little bit closer. It goes in a lot of detail. Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's... people are gaining courage.

So, you know, certainly cowardice is courageous, but so too is courage. And so you start to see the whistleblowers becoming more comfortable. We've had whistleblowers who are anonymous that are, that were now on a different issue, wanting to attach their names to it. I think you're seeing more people come forward. As I always stress, I could never encourage whistleblowers to go get information because I can't encourage anybody to, you know, break the law. However, if people have information, I will promise to protect them.

And that's ultimately why, you know, someone came to me with the Immaculate Constellation stories. They just felt like they'd seen me getting grilled in front of Congress before about revealing my sources. And I think they trusted that I wouldn't betray them. Well, hopefully you get a deluge of interesting stories after this because I think you're doing amazing work with public. And you did a great job protecting your source in this case. You were questioned pretty intensely. Do you know those sources? I do.

Are they within the Department of Defense? I can't say. You can't say or you won't say? I won't say. Okay, why not? Because I protect my sources and I think the region. But you're not naming them. It's a big department.

Many of us on my side of they are would say it's far too big. So you're talking about the Department of Defense, sources from within the Department of Defense? I'm not willing to reduce the potential universe of where my sources might be. I will say that after I published, I was told that this program, that the USAP was actually managed by the Department of Defense but held at the White House. But that's a single source and I don't have multiple sources to verify that. Thank you, sir. I did my best to trick an answer out of you, but it was partially successful, Madam Chair, I'll.

Who was that? The Congressman. Congressman Higgins. Congressman Higgins was like, I tried to trick you. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, you have to remember not to reveal their, anything about them, their gender, their agency. I try to keep the universe pretty big, but also want to sort of say they're in a position to know. You can't be so vague that people

don't trust it. Yep. But I ultimately think that the report itself, which came out now, it's been, I guess, probably about a month since my article, or maybe a month in a week. And I think that the facts will speak for themselves. I didn't have, I didn't, I'm not going to say I verified every single part of it perfectly, but I did spend some time looking around just to make sure it didn't look like this was compiled from existing lore or existing cases. The accusation, of course, with the UAP issue is that this is a case of circular reporting. Yeah. Circular reporting is a real problem.

I mean, it's, you want to avoid, you know, somebody told somebody something, and then you're thinking that you're getting something from two sources, but it's actually just from one. So there's ways to prevent that, but it seems like pretty new information. And certainly the revelation that there exists. a very large strategic intelligence project to evaluate this information in a way that you would expect someone to evaluate it with a lot of still images, video images, human reports, combining them. You can see there's a very interesting section where the source goes through the different kinds of UAPs and the different psychological effects and biological effects. I think that's a really fascinating part of the report. That's so fascinating.

It's almost like this total information awareness where you have signals intelligence, you have human intelligence, You have these databases that we don't have access to. And presumably, this is, I think, a really important thing when it comes to the topic is people ask, you know, where is this program housed? Is it in NASA? Is it in the DOD? Is it in the DOE? The truth is, right, it's sort of all factions of all of those things. It touches on all of those things. And the departments themselves, in many cases, don't have proper oversight over these kind of factions. It's kind of this cargo cult of what was set up from the 15.

That's right. Yeah, I mean, the, the, this, my original, my sources said that it was a DOD program. After I published, a source said that it was, it's a, it's a USAP, a unacknowledged special access program controlled by the White House, but administered by the DOD. I think there's, there's definitely playing, they're playing, somebody's playing some games here to keep this stuff hard to track or, or easier to deny, for example. So, but I think like, you know, for the bottom line, for, for, the public and from members of Congress is that behind the scenes, the Pentagon and the intelligence community doesn't just have a bunch of blurry, fuzzy videos. I reported, and this is from a single source, but I reported it pretty carefully, a report of a very high-quality video shot from a helicopter of an orb coming out of the ocean, about 20 miles off the coast of Kuwait, being joined by another orb. and high definition, full color, you know, and I also point out that it was shot in a helicopter on,

you know, I'm assuming high quality cameras, but this is not some, you know, one of the concerns around maybe why they don't release this information as they don't want to reveal how the military collects this information. Well, I think everybody knows that we have helicopters and high definition cameras, so that can't be one of the reasons. And I think even in some of the other technologies,

you can also, you know, you can redact it, You can hide stuff. You can blur stuff. You know, I think it's, I don't believe that this is being kept secret from us simply to protect methods. I think it's being kept secret from us for deeper reasons. And some of them may just be ego, legacy, you know, psychology, politics, or maybe some criminality. There may be some ethics. I don't, I don't buy at all the excuse that if that they're high in all this stuff just because they don't,

and reveal how we capture this information. Lou Elizondo, a famous, amazing whistleblower when it comes to this topic, who was involved in A-Tip and Ossap, he was asked if he was read into Immaculate Constellation. He had a very interesting answer. He said, I can neither confirm nor deny. What do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, those kinds of statements are always curious because you would think that if it were not true, you could just deny it. At the same time, I think that if you, if you, you know, if people read the denial as revealing some information, then I could see why it would do that. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a very interesting moment.

There's always been speculation that Elizondo had more direct involvement in crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs. And, but again, it's another case of why he needs, we need to have the proper protections so that he can reveal what he knows. How do we get that? Because we had the Gallagher Amendment, but it doesn't. doesn't seem like we've had this, you know, what we, you would expect the floodgates to open after that, right? A lot of these people would come out. How do we get the proper protections? Because that seems just so key and essential. I remember, you know, we spoke and, you know, didn't say anything about the source, but you did say he was very scared. And so that seems to be

like, these people can't be extremely afraid of reprisals, right? They have to be able to come out and be in public, not just on public, right? Yeah, exactly. I think, I mean, There's a friend of mine who's a journalist who covers this very skeptically, says, you know, if there really was this proof and you really had people that were close to it and they wanted to come out, they would just do so without concern for reprisals. And I understand what he means in the sense that, you know, if you had, you know, photographs and film of alien bodies or craft or whatever, you could potentially get into a hearing like this and release it and you would have the public protection not to release it.

I think that most of the cases that I've seen of the whistleblowers is that they don't have that. They have a lot of the photographic evidence. And certainly there could be reprisals including criminal prosecutions. I mean, you know, I think progressives in particular forget that Barack Obama, you know, prosecuted more, you know, government leakers, whistleblowers than any private president, I think, then all presidents combined before that. So the federal government has certainly shown itself willing to prosecute and persecute and retaliate against whistleblowers. There are protections, but they're obviously inadequate because we're not able to get that.

So, I mean, I think it's, look, we've got a president-elect who, whatever else you think of them, has committed to a much greater set of transparency around everything from the JFK files to the Epstein to the UAPs to COVID origins to all sorts of government secrecy. It's accumulated over the last 50 years. We had our last big intelligence committee reform in 1975 with the transfer. Church Committee hearings, I think it's pretty clear that we need something like that again and that it needs to be and should be bipartisan. I don't see any reason why it should become an ideological issue. And you saw it, I mean, I think this issue is a beautiful issue to work on because it is so bipartisan and it's wonderful to see Democrats and Republicans both asking for the same thing. You're touching on possible Trump disclosure where, you know, it could be broad disclosure.

We could have reforms in all these different areas. Is there the existence of an alternative history where UFOs play a central role in a lot of pivotal events when it comes to American history. You hear rumors about JFK. RFK is in consideration for various posts in the Trump administration. Do you think things come out of that nature where it turns out, you know, you have E. Howard Hunt, for example, former CIA operative who claimed to be involved, you know, in some of the JFK stuff, saying, you know, he was killed over UFOs. He said that to his son. do you think any of that might kind of become transparent? I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to, I mean, you would think that the stuff that they're continuing to hide would have to be pretty bad if for them not to release it.

You know, Mike Pompeo was asked about the JFK file, said that there were people who were still alive who would be affected by it. So, like, it must have been pretty bad if that was the case. You know, obviously there's tons of, you know, rumors that and suspicions that the U.S. government was involved in some way. JFK's assassination. I personally, I don't know, but I find it extremely suspicious that they won't release the full JFK files. There's even some theories that it might have even involved the UAPs, you know, so. Pompeo, when he was interviewed by Judge Napolitano, very awkward kind of segue from, you know, is like, are you going to release the JFK files? He goes, oh, you know, we can't do that. Some of the people are still alive. And then he goes, you know, I've seen the UAP files as well or something. And so

that I found very curious as well. Yeah. Yeah. These don't hold the dark secrets that everybody wants to just hold up as the bogeyman. I saw the UFO files too. We've got bigger problems. Yeah, that he sort of, that he thought they were sort of connected in some way. Some sort of conflation, yeah. Yeah, it's hard to know. But it's, it is, it is suspicious.

And look, I think it's, I think the thing you always have to remember is that, you know, for people that say there's absolutely nothing there. And it was just one guy that killed JFK, great, well, then release the files. Like, you know, there's, you know, there's UAPs are nothing. It's just great. So then why not the transparency? I mean, that's the ultimate problem for the skeptics. If you're a skeptic, you should be the greatest advocate of transparency and disclosure because it would make all of your enemies look like fools.

And yet it's kind of suspicious that we don't see that. It's almost like what we're hearing is there's nothing there, and therefore the government shouldn't release the files. Not exactly a consistent position to hold. You mentioned John Greenwald in your testimony, who runs, blackball.com. He's constantly using the Freedom of Information Act to retrieve all sorts of, you know, formerly sensitive documents in the government. He's doing a great job with that. And I think he toes the line because certain people he's sort of skeptical of in UFO whistleblower

world. But he's also, it's very clear that he's just been stonewalled in all these cases. Like he tried to FOIA fast walkers and NORAD said this is, you know, actually just very sensitive material. Right. And that was actually mentioned fast-walled. Fast Walkers was mentioned in the WikiLeaks email between an aerospace contractor named Bob Fish and John Podesta. Podesta is mentioning Fast Walkers as these vehicles moving through our outer layer of defense, the defense support network running by the Air Force. Right. Fascinating stuff. Well, I think Greenwald is underappreciated.

And in part because I think he's a little bit like neither fish nor foul. He doesn't, he's not someone that endorses the NHI hypothesis. the same time he says it is a possibility. For me, I thought that his work needed to be highlighted a little bit here because he has established that the secrecy has been growing, not declining. There's one story in the UAP community that sort of says that we are in the midst of disclosure. He says, no, that's not the case at all, that we're actually having less disclosure than we have in the past. I think that is important because I think it undermines the idea that,

this is all, I mean, either hopeful or not hopeful, but it undermines the idea that we're sort of on our way. I think that Greenwald is also important for pointing out the inconsistencies in the claims made by the Pentagon and the military. There's a great quote from him, which is they'll say one thing on Monday and they say something else on Friday. So, you know, on the issue of the videos, there's some complexity to it. But basically, after some of these videos were released, the Pentagon said, yeah, there's no more our videos. those three videos. And then he was like, well, you know, really am in a different branch than said, well, there's other videos, but we're not going to release them. So he also has established that there's other videos that they won't release for national security reasons. I mean, the final thing

was important about Greenwald is he noticed that they are justifying secrecy under a law enforcement provision rather than just national security. And that is very suspicious because if it's true, then we should know what the law enforcement investigations are, at least members of Congress should, But if it's possible that they're also just abusing that, then we're just seeing, I mean, I held up, you know, at one moment, the redactions, because it's just so absurd that they're redacting how long they've been collecting reports, how many reports they have, and what UAPs could be, as though, like, there's not already a lot of speculation about what UAPs could be. It's really as though they don't want to admit for some reason that they are considering the more freaky hypotheses. Yes. Because they don't want to give it legitimacy, but that's just not how it works. people become, people don't become less suspicious when there's censorship.

They become more suspicious. So if you don't want conspiracy theorizing, then you should release more information. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the money.

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Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies, see Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Congressman Eric Burleson, speaking of people conspiratizing, he was looking into the issue of biologics. He also said, who can I talk to when it comes to the gatekeepers of this program? Chris Sharp just wrote an amazing article at the Liberation Times about the whole history of U.S. crash retrieval programs and he said that

guy at the CIA Glenn Gaffney was the gatekeeper for this program and he actually blocked the transfer of this craft that Lockheed had collected in the 50s and was trying to transfer to ASEP to Bigelow Aerospace to study. Do you think that

any of this is true? Does it comport with any of the conversations you've had with some of your sources? I can't I haven't verified it but I mean it sounds completely reasonable. Yeah. I mean these reports of crash retrievals and reverse engineering are decades old. It's not new. I mean, there's a guy named Stringfeld who did a huge, you know, a number of investigations into it. When you

really get into the crash stuff, you also get these really conflicting accounts, makes it like a hall of mirrors. And you get them from people that are really credible saying really different things. This is really dramatic on Roswell. There's a lot of interviews that have been done. So it's a tricky one. I very rarely find people, these witnesses, I, these witnesses, I, really, I don't think that any of them, very many of them, I should say, are deliberately trying to hoax anybody, which just makes the phenomenon more and more fascinating. Like, I mean, one of the things around the Roswell, the alleged Roswell crash is that it was, was it one UFO or two UFOs and taken down by radar? But how could it possibly be taken down by primitive radar if it's an advanced crash?

I mean, the whole thing is mysterious. I mean, the thing that everybody raises is if you've got advanced craft, how are they possibly crashing so much? other people say well that's you know no it makes sense and you know if we had chips going into other planets that could crash but yeah it's just um or it's a donation i know you've read jock belay and yeah yeah for sure yeah i mean after a while i mean i think part of my interest in the in the secrecy stuff is like the i just i sort of go you can spend so much time on the speculation and at the end of the day it's like just give us the freaking five yeah yeah just let us in and show it to us And even if you don't know it or understand it or it's not pleasant,

just I think maybe that's part of our own evolution is that we're, I mean, look at for, I mean, you look back now and you go, like, that's weird that anybody was upset that the, they discovered that the sun was revolving around the earth. Like, why would that bother you? And maybe that's how we'll look back on this. It's like, why was anybody upset that, you know, there was some, you know, something else going on than what we thought.

Do you have any sense of what these bio, biologics might be? No, I mean, I don't. I mean, that's also another, you know, mystery is, you know, I mean, you have this really strong testimony last year from Grush. You know, I think that, I thought Elizondo basically supported it today. Yeah, absolutely. There's a fair number of people that do that.

And, you know, and there's a way in which I kind of go, I mean, I think chairman, chairwoman Mace was like, you know, like we got to this, you know, we have to, you know, show some movement here. I mean, I kind of go, I'm not sure how much, you know, society and the Congress can do. It's really up to the executive branch. I mean, I worry, like, if Trump doesn't do it, then I don't know what the mechanism to get it done is. So, you know, I think I'm glad to see some advocacy organizations on this. You know, one possibility is just that there needs to be, I mean, I've looked at it and I thought maybe we need a much broad

movement, not just on UAP transparency, but also on all forms of government transparency. I mean, the church committee wasn't just on CIA. It was also on FBI. And that was 50 years ago. 50 years ago, I mean, it's definitely overdue. I mean, I sort of felt the same way about whistleblower protections. Like, you know, Birchett has a piece of legislation for UAP, whistleblower protections. Obviously, I support that, but it's like, FBI needs whistleblower protections for, you know,

when they expose entrapment, which they do quite a bit. and CIA needs it. So it does feel like something has shifted seismically. But yeah, I mean, I think if it doesn't have it in the next couple of years, I would start to be very pessimistic. My optimism would shift into pessimism if it doesn't happen the next couple of years. Well, you're a huge part in breaking the Twitter files, this idea that there's kind of this revolving door bureaucracy between three-letter agencies

and places like Twitter that are just involved and were involved pre-Elon purchase in systematic censorship. of users shadow banning all sorts of things like that. Does something like that happen with the Trump administration? Can we get you in there and can you be the official, you know, disseminator of some of this stuff? I mean, obviously as a competitive journalist, like I would love to be able to get in there to those files. You know, the truth is they should be released to everybody. Sure.

And I'll cover them with everybody else. Yep. I do think, you know, I think it's, you know, I think it's salutary. I mean, one of the lessons for me from the Twitter files is that it is possible to keep conspiracies secret. And that I think there's, this is a funny issue because people say, well, if they were really, you know, if the government were really covering it up, there'd be whistleblowers. And then you get the whistleblowers. Yeah. And it will go, well, how come the whistleblowers don't have more evidence?

Yeah. It's, you know, I mean. They're all counterintow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly. So, you know, I think what we saw with the Twitter files, a particular I covered the FBI and CIA information operation on 100 Biden's laptop. That was kept perfectly secret, you know, until the Twitter files should that it involved Aspen Institute, you know, no one knew. And that involved the media was being kind of programmed or, you know, pre-bunking, brainwashing beforehand. Nobody talked about that. And so these operations, I do not have a hard time believing that the U.S.

government is capable of carrying out and keeping secret covert operations. And you brought up a couple of very interesting names on Joe Rogan that were involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story that are also involved in the UFO story. Yes. Care to talk about that? Well, I mean, one of the, I mean, the big name is a gentleman named Garrett Graff. He's, he was involved in, you know, pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop in the summer of 2020 with the Aspen Institute, along with his supervisor Vivian Schiller, who was the head of NPR, the head of media at Twitter, New York Times executive. Credible career is a high-level media executive.

Now they're at Aspen. And Garrett Graf comes out with a book on. UFOs earlier this year called UFO and it's basically just a debunking of all these cases. You know, I mean, I haven't gone through it. I mean, you really need to go through each and every one of them. But one of the things you discover is when you get into some of these alleged debunkings is that they haven't actually debunked it. They'll often come up with something. Well, I think one really salient one is there's been this argument between Mark von,

I don't know, Remenstorf. The Reminsdorf, yeah. I think so. I'm going to say, sorry, Mark. Marge is awesome. Yeah, Mark has been having this argument around the gimbal UFO video with a gentleman named Mick West. Yes.

I think Mark has kind of won the argument that it's not lens glare or some sort of optical illusion. It's really, and I think X, formerly Twitter has been important to being able to do that kind of, to build a C, you can kind of like, you don't have to follow the whole thing, but you kind of see that Mick West runs out. out of responses and market is very persistent. So I mean, each of these cases, you know, the first thing you do, people do, I mean,

it's a hundred-bine laptop. They go, oh, no, no, it's been debunked. Or they did it with COVID origins. That's been debunked. And you know, 90, 95 percent of journalists and others go, oh, it's been debunked. I'm going to move on. They don't even look at it to kind of go, wait a second, it really wasn't debunked. You just, you just said some words.

Yes. You know, and you didn't actually prove it. I think there's a lot of that going on when it comes to UAPs. And it just requires. You know, it's part of the problem with the issue being marginalized, but you would normally have academics or others that had budgets and they were staff time and PhDs and whatever's in peer-reviewed journals that would kind of go through this in some way.

I mean, it's not to say that peer-review journals don't have a lot of misinformation or corrected information, but you'd at least have that sort of debate, but as it is now, it's sort of left to non-professionals. I mean, there's really everybody's non-professional. But yeah, I found it, I guess, the bottom line, is, isn't that a funny coincidence? The guy that was involved in a Hunter-Bying disinformation operation, it was also involved in the UAP information operation,

whether it's all disinformation I haven't evaluated, but I find them a suspicious character. No, and that book makes UFOs out to be some, like, novel curiosity that, you know, if you're a member of the real intelligentsia, you should laugh at it or whatever. It's like not serious. It's a little bit more subtle in a sense that, I mean, you have these kind of gradations of debunkers.

You have this gentleman named Stephen Greenstree, the New York Post who's just with Sean Kirkpatrick who are just dismissive and ridiculing, just old-fashioned UFO ridiculing, angry, this is terrible, we shouldn't even be talking about this, you have slightly more sophisticated with Mick West, and then you have Garrett Graff,

which is a bit more sophisticated. I mean, he does acknowledge that there are UAPs, and there are things that we can't explain. I think he even does the orbs. You know, the orbs are kind of the UFO of the moment, you know, like, if for the 70s, it was disks or 50s and 60s or it was like dis,

Orbs seem to be, you know, getting a lot of attention. And so he kind of acknowledges that they exist, but then says, I mean, one of the things he says that I think is very disingenuous is he says that the military and the intelligence community and the government just doesn't know what they are. I mean, I don't think he knows that. Like, I don't think he, I mean, if he does know that. That's another issue. And that's a problem. Because the members of Congress don't know that. We don't know that.

the only established position is agnosticism. One of the themes that keeps recurring with these hearings when it comes to UFOs is the inability to get firsthand sources of information in a skiff. You had the unique ability to speak to somebody in some compartmentalized setting. How can we allow them to speak to a firsthand witness? Is that possible? Well, my understanding is that members of Congress and their staffers have spoken to witnesses. I don't know the exact status of it, but, you know, they don't have the authorization or they don't have the permission to declassify.

You know, it's just, I mean, obviously members of Congress are frustrated about that. I mean, it's the same problem with the documents and with the rest of it. They're just clearly not being given the authorization to declassify or make these things public yet. Where do you think we go from here? What do you think? What comes next in this topic? Do you think we make progress? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's been a huge emphasis, understandably, from the UAP movement, so there is a movement, to try to persuade people that UAPs are real,

and then I think another part of it to persuade people that they're NHA. I think that the right focus is to persuade people, is to persuade the public and the government to have transparency and disclosure. And I think it helps to sort of, at least for people that are genuinely agnostic, to acknowledge that we're agnostic, I think that it's, you know, I think it actually makes the case stronger when you point out that, you know, look, if it's some peculiar form of mass psychosis or social contagion or Chinese balloons or whatever it is, we still need the disclosure and the transparency. Yes. I think it, I think you inspire a little bit more trust from the public on that issue. I think it focuses on the government secrecy rather than on the nature of UAPs. I think there's a separate sort of cultural movement phenomena that really is exploring what UAPs are.

It involves taking really detailed cases and testimony. And that's all to the good. And of course, that's great. But I do think at a kind of policy and political level, this sharp focus at going after the government secrecy, the cover-ups, the disinformation is absolutely essential. I think it's a chance to go from strength to strength. I mean, here you've got, like, one of the only bipartisan, nonpartisan movements I see. You saw every single member of Congress today on the committee. Both sides.

Recognizing that there's something real there. This is the 13th time I've testified before Congress. It's actually heartwarming, like literally heartwarming because it's so awkward when you testify normally, and the Republicans and Democrats are just attacking each other in the nastiest ways. It's, like, shocking to see them being kumbaya and one love of. up there. It gives me a lot of hope for this movement. And it's actually part of what inspires me to want to work on it. It's nice to work on something that actually brings people together. It's also a reminder because there's so much hostility, you know, in other parts

of the society, whether it's in the media or from the debunkers on social media or from friends and family, I don't like it. It's nice to see that when you have a group of lawmakers that have actually dug into this, that they're actually, they're clear there's something real here. Yeah. And that this is not, it's clearly no longer a French thing. there was no uncomfortable giggling, there's no uncomfortable ridiculing, there was no character assassination. I mean, so I kind of go, strength to strength. This could be one of the most important social movements of the 21st century. You're a traditional nuts and bolts journalist who's done amazing job on all sorts of things. You talk about the decline of San Francisco,

you talk about nuclear energy, you talk about big tech overreach. With this issue, it's very interesting because you can try to maintain some sort of impartiality. But if you say that there probably is some sort of non-human intelligence, then I think it's tough to say that it's a bridge too far that maybe they're actually somewhat involved in the disclosure process. You get into biologics. Somebody, you know, a congresswoman asked about hybrids. There are rumors that have come up to the hill of a secretive project within the Department of Defense involving the manipulation of human genetics with what is described as non-human genetic material potentially for the enhancement of human capabilities, hybrids.

Are any of you familiar with that? Yes or no? So how do you deal with that? How do you draw the line? And in the world where there is non-human intelligence, do you think that they are sort of, you know, involved in the process of disclosure? Yeah. Well, that's very interesting.

I don't know. I mean, Jacques Valet, who I think we, you know, you and I talk about a lot, we both respect him. I mean, I've read a lot of his books, maybe most of them or all of them. He believes there are NHI. He also thinks that there is three levels of deceptions. One is from the government. The second is by the people that have the experiences,

and he doesn't mean it as a criticism. He just thinks people don't completely often represent exactly what happened, often leaving out the freakier, high weirdness elements of it, high strangeness parts of it. And then there's, he says, the NHI themselves are, being deceptive. It's a very interesting argument because, you know, there's these really funny cases like, for example, there's this great case in France where a, you know, a very trusted, respected farmer discovers a spaceship on his land, and then he goes up to it, and then there's

supposedly an NHI there holding a tray full of soil samples and other vegetables, and he was like, oh, I didn't see you there, and I was just coming by with this. It seems absurd. Like, if you have some advanced civilization, like, why would they be caught off guard by a lot? farmer with soil samples. It almost feels as though something's, and I think he would sort of say it is creating, I think he kind of describes as a control mechanism that sort of creating

a particular perception, something that wants us to think that these are extraterrestrials and that they're investigating who we are and expressing concern about nuclear weapons and the environment. I always point out that you didn't need any non-human intelligence to point out that nuclear weapons were very scary or that we need to protect the

environment. We didn't need anybody to tell us that we knew that. starting right away after World War II. So that's a very interesting hypothesis. I mean, I think it's hard. I mean, I know for a close colleague of mine who is uncomfortable with the subject, doesn't like it, that it's certainly, I'm in a stronger place with that person

to talk about the need for disclosure and government openness and whatnot. It's also the case of a lot of people that are involved in this. The journalists, the people reporting it, they're involved in a lot of anomalous phenomena. And there's Skywalker, you know, there's Skywalker Ranch is a very freaky place and there's a lot of freaky stories that comes out of it. It's used by the debunkers to sort of discredit, you know, the broader sense of it.

Part of me goes, you know, I think we should be a little softer with each other, a little bit more tolerant of each other. There's so much mystery. I came back to my faith about six years ago. Really? Yeah. And it's, I'm a Christian. and I believe in God and I think we have souls and I think there's some part of us that's immortal

and it's a faith like I didn't come to it because you know I discovered some secret thing and I'm open about that and that's my faith and I think it's natural that people that that have a faith or that that believe in that see paranormal things would be more attracted to this I don't think it means that there's nothing there and there's also people that are genuine atheists

that are also interested in the phenomenon So, you know, I kind of go, I think it needs to be okay for people to ask the seemingly ridiculous question and to have those conversations and allow them. They shouldn't be censored. They shouldn't be stigmatized or demonized. They shouldn't be used to attack people's credibility. I think it is good to always, you know, as a journalist or as a attorney or whoever or somebody, an investigator, it's always good to say, here's what we can prove and here's the evidence. here's what we suspect but can't prove. And here's some various possibilities.

We get into a lot of trouble when people start to confuse their own theories with the things that they know. So that's a completely legitimate thing to be policing. But allowing some amount of conversation, speculation, imagination, and spirituality, I think humans need a sense, a transcendent moral purpose, a sense of transcendence. I think that when people think they don't need that, they end up creating, they often turn their politics into a religion, and that's taking them to some dangerous places. So much better to be, I think, transparent about what it is that we're talking about. And, you know, like, if you were asking me for proof of God, I wouldn't be able to provide it for you. But if you're going to ask me for proof that the Pentagon is hiding UIP programs, I think I have much better proof of that.

Well, you've provided amazing evidence. You're an American hero after what you did today, but also a lot of your own. other work and just grateful to be able to discuss this with you and on the note you ended on absolutely and on the note you ended on i was just with um colonel carl now head of army feet former head of army features command and diana pesulco is a catholic you know scholar and they were both talking about how uh the angel hierarchies of the past st thomas aquinas yamblicus all that stuff you know lines up with a lot of the non-human intelligence experiences that witnesses seem to have today. And so I wonder how that

lines up with Immaculate Constellation. Yeah. What a name, right? I mean, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, science came out of Christianity. It came out of the idea that we needed to understand God's creation. And it was never

you know, and you get to a point where then it starts to kind of problematize some older ideas. But I think if one of the reasons that the government is not revealing what it knows, because it worries about the impact on faith. I think that's overstated and, you know,

and that we just need to be true like grown-ups. I mean, I think if you're a person with real faith, you're, you know, and some non-human intelligence is telling us that we're wrong. I'm not sure why we would believe them any more than we would. Anybody else. Well, this was an honor. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Justice. It's a pleasure for me.

How can people find you? Schellenberger at X or the name of our substack is public. And if you have anything interesting to come out with, contact Michael. Thank you. Or me. I will protect all sources for sure. Absolutely and did an amazing job today. Thanks, very.

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