American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - The Most Important UFO Investigator On The Planet (ft. James Fox)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm here with my documentarian hero, James Fox. They're a U.S. filmmaker James Fox. This message goes out to whoever's piloting UFOs, providing your presence is friendly, which it appears to be. Reveal yourself soon, so my friends and family will stop thinking I'm crazy for chasing the elusive UFOs. This is James Fox, signing out. Uh, who's made an incredible, I think, seven documentaries at this point? It's like six and a half or seven because I did a couple of versions of out of the blue. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 00:00:36 So I count that as almost two, but it's at least one and a half because I spent another two and a half years completely revamping it. So I did 50 years of denial. Then it was out of the blue, out of blue directors cut. I know what I saw, the phenomenon, moment of contact. Shoot, I guess this would. Well, six and a half. And the program, which is coming out, we just had this amazing screening last night with Hal put off of all people who's a star of the documentary. itself. Our detection platforms are so well advanced so we could see a lot more than it really is a zoo

Starting point is 00:01:10 of options and possibilities. And it's just incredible. And so I hope you're very proud of it. And I know this has been a long slog many decades for you. And I feel lucky to kind of ride the coattails, you know, kind of draft aerodynamically behind people like you. So I'm very grateful to you. And thank you for Oh, thank you. I love seeing younger people that new generation recognizing how significant the story is. It's, it's, you know, I used to often ask people when I was first started out, they'd go, you know, you don't actually believe in this shit. They literally would say that to me. And I'd say, well, let me ask you, if it were true, and I'm not telling you to believe that it's true, but if it were, how significant of a story would you give it? And everybody says, be the biggest story in history. I was like, well, I'm convinced it's happening. So it's not a story that's easily just dropped, right? Yeah. Kind of changes everything. Totally. From math, science, physics, to religion, to everything. And it's interesting. I was with Danny Sheehan, as you know,

Starting point is 00:02:16 your friends with him as well, just interviewed him. And he was talking about the root of the word religion is relegare, which means to relink. The Latin root of religion is religare. It's religare, which is like to relink. And so in some ways, I think what you're doing is relinking us to our true kind of epistemology, which is knowing that these other beings might exist. And maybe in the past we did know that and we've forgotten for a very long time. I don't know. What do you think? What do you think what's really exciting about it is that the phenomenon, I refer to, transcends politics, transcends religion. transcends borders.

Starting point is 00:03:00 It's one of the few topics that is really encouraging to see both Democrats and Republicans working together on. We're going to uncover the cover-up, and I hope this is just the beginning of many more hearings and more people coming forward about this. We should have disclosure today. We should have disclosure tomorrow. The time has come. And that really excites me because we're living such polarized times.

Starting point is 00:03:23 So to see that, and for people to recognize, like, this is bigger than all of us, right? Yeah. This is potentially, has something to do with the bigger picture of who we are and our place in the universe and our very existence. So it's very exciting. I mean, people ask me, like, do you think it's scary? I'm like, no, I don't think it's scary at all. Yeah, I think it trivializes our differences. Totally. And in many ways, I think people always worry about it sort of debunking or overthrowing religion. I think it reinforces religion. I think if you actually look at a lot of biblical stories, that stuff becomes a lot more. real and less mythical. And so I think in some ways it's reinforcing and this sort of Cold War era kind of low energy thinking of like, you know, we can't accept this truth might just not make sense. In fact, it might actually re-enchant us. I interviewed a theologian at Berkeley named Ted Peters way back from my first film, UFO's 50 years of denial because everyone was like,

Starting point is 00:04:21 well, it conflicts with religion. And he's like, no, doesn't. And he gave, of course, he's a theologian at Berkeley. And he's also like part of the science, you know, science and theology at Berkeley University. So he's like, there's room for both and there's room for all God's creation, you know? Yeah. We're just part of a much bigger picture. And I thought that was, because I thought that was an important aspect of accepting the phenomenon, not being afraid of it or assuming that it was demonic. Yeah. Or just because we can't explain it doesn't mean we shouldn't look into it or doesn't

Starting point is 00:04:56 mean that, you know, totally. It doesn't exist. And all religions there are beings between man and God in the consciousness chain, so to speak. Well, I mean, gosh, you can think about it. Imagine cavemen watched a flying saucer descend out of the sky. They probably think of them of gods, you know? Yeah. Or think about us landing in, you know, North Sentinel Island or French Polynesia back in the day.

Starting point is 00:05:19 You know, it's like, what are these things? What's going on? So, well, yeah, it's, I'm so excited to be here. I don't even know where to start. I mean, there's so many jumping off points. But how did you get into, I guess, UFOs to begin with? So I had a really good friend, this guy, Renee Harris, in high school. And we, when we graduated 18, we flew to Europe.

Starting point is 00:05:46 We bought an old beat-up Fiat 131 in London. And we painted the doors. We wanted to kind of spice it up a little bit, so we painted the doors red. and the rest of the body was white. And we're going to take this car, and we're going to drive it all the way down to Portugal. And I remember my aunt was thinking, oh, my God, these guys aren't going to make it

Starting point is 00:06:03 to the channel of the English Channel, right? And so we drove across Europe together in this old Fiat, 1-3-1, and just had a wonderful time. And it was like six weeks across Europe. And then he flew home a little early, and I stayed on, and we just kind of, you know, life-haired.

Starting point is 00:06:24 and we just kind of lost contact for a couple of years. And then I came back and we reconnected when I was like 23. And he was all into like UFOs and alien spaceships and Roswell. And I remember thinking to myself, God, what a bummer, man. I'm going to lose one of my best friends. I'm going to have to cut this guy loose because he's clearly lost his mind. I'm serious. What a bummer.

Starting point is 00:06:49 I was like, this is such a bummer. It was like one of my closest friends, you know? And so I was like, Lamenting about it at the work, I was a kind of a go for at a production facility in San Francisco, and there was a guy that was my boss, Richard Van Sickle. And I said, Richard, and I really looked up to him. He was very smart and really just educated, a really great guy. So Richard, I was just my buddy and, man, I'm going to have to cut him loose.

Starting point is 00:07:17 He's just all into like these UFOs he's talking about and he's talking about that an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell. And I was expecting to go, oh, my gosh, thank God, yeah, I've cut that. He goes, James, you haven't heard about that? You haven't heard about Roswell? I was like, how would I have heard? No, I haven't heard about Roswell. He goes, yeah, the U.S. government actually admitted that they recovered. I said, really?

Starting point is 00:07:38 So I started looking into it reluctantly, and I thought, wow, there's something going on. I want to know what's going on. Would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's really going on there? So many people ask me that question. I know. It sounds almost ridiculous, but it's actually. It sounds like an acute question, but it's actually, there are millions and millions of people that want to go there, that want to see it. I won't talk to you about what I know about it,

Starting point is 00:08:04 but it's very interesting. But Roswell's a very interesting place with a lot of people that would like to know what's going on. Yeah. So I... And that was it. I went to a few conferences. I met some military folks, and I thought, I think I'm going to make a documentary on UFOs. I remember my dad, it was a mainstream journalist, and he was like, son, you have lost your marbles. You've got to reconsider. He said it's a dead end street. It's not going anywhere. Don't waste your time.

Starting point is 00:08:35 And, of course, that drove me even further. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I stuck my teeth into it, and I made my first doc. It's interesting, too. It's like people on the outside looking at UFOs often just as soon. there's nothing there. But I think the second you like take it serious, it's like almost like a week into taking it a little more seriously, you start to gather probably enough data even in that week to make your like probability that there, you know, there's something there's something here

Starting point is 00:09:06 where the investigation, like it becomes very clear like pretty quickly actually once you kind of flip. It looks like that we have a problem here that needs further investigation. Yes. Okay. So I remember when I was 19, I was dating this girl, Rachel Miller, and she was a year old than me. And she goes, oh, my previous boyfriend was really into UFOs. And I remember immediately, like, just like going, why would she date a freak to the UFOs? Like, what, it really kind of affected my, thinking about her judgment and like who she was as a person. I was thinking to myself, gosh, but how was that sort of impregnated in me? Why was that, why did I have that knee jerk response?

Starting point is 00:09:47 You know what I mean? I was like, sort of thinking about, as I learned more, about the phenomenon and the relationship between the government and the phenomenon, you know, the Robertson Panel in 1953, absolutely. Adopted this policy of ridicule, and it was very effective campaign. And it stuck. The Robertson Panel was a scientific committee which met in January, 1953, headed by Howard P. Robertson.

Starting point is 00:10:10 The panel arose from a recommendation to the Intelligence Advisory Committee in December 1952, from a central intelligence agency review of the U.S. Air Force investigation, into unidentified flying objects. Project Blue Book. And that was a classified document. For anybody who thinks that was some sort of sciop or whatever, that was supposed to be classified and came out later.

Starting point is 00:10:31 And it was, let's systematically downplay UFOs through media, books, movies, everything. Because what's funny about a pilot claiming to see something that he can't explain? That's actually, should be of concern. Yes. Some of them appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly,

Starting point is 00:10:48 or move at considerable speed without discernible means of propulsion. that's pretty intriguing. I mean, you're picking up something on radar, you're seeing it visually, the tower's got it, and yet this policy of ridicule and laughter just really stuck. And it was a very effective, I have to hand it to him. It was very effective. It was a very effective campaign.

Starting point is 00:11:07 And it was kind of, in some ways, the Constitution for Blue Book. Like it became the mandate for them to, you know, swamp gas and, you know, the lights and what, you know, the easy ways to rationalize, explain away, you know, what was actually going on. And I think there's actually this 1971 document that came out of Australia from the Joint Intelligence Organization by their head of their nuclear division named Harry Turner. Between 1952 and 1963, the British government conducted nuclear tests in Australia, including the Montobello Islands, Maralinga, and Emu Field. During this period, young physicist Harry Turner observed and investigated mysterious phenomena that he believed were unidentified, anomalous phenomena,

Starting point is 00:11:51 His experiences led him to advocate for serious and thorough investigation of UFOs. And he's doing this whole retrospective on American inquiries into anti-gravity and UFOs. And he basically makes the case that there's this cleavage almost where the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence splits off and they're studying the real stuff. And then you have the Air Force and Blue Book and it's just this kind of fake sham, you know, understaffed job. Exactly. Yeah. So. I remember, uh,

Starting point is 00:12:20 Jacques talking about a document that he accidentally found in the files of Dr. Jalen Heinek, who was the scientific advisor to Project Blue Book. In my association with Project Blue Book, I know very well that it was not a scientific project. Also, I also know that they never, never would notify the media when an interesting case came up. They did everything they could to keep it down. So they definitely withheld information. And Jacques worked with Dr. Heineck. And I guess Heinek was asking him to help organize his files.

Starting point is 00:12:59 And he came, Jacques Valet came upon a file of a document that was classified that he shouldn't have seen that basically talked about this, a program that paralleled Project Blue Book, but it was way underground with way more funding, way better scientists, all these things. The document revealed an ultra-secret, highly-funded scientific investigation, working parallel to Blue Book, unknown to all but a select few. The letter was signed by H.C. Cross, director of exotic metallurgy at Patel National Laboratories. Which he ultimately got publicly released for, we featured it in the phenomenon. But it was a parallel effort. It had just gone underground. Do we know anybody involved in that effort? It's in the phenomenon, and I don't know if there's any particular names. There probably were.

Starting point is 00:13:54 I'd have to look back. It's been a few years since I've seen the document. But basically, the implication was there was a very well-funded panel of eminent scientists that were involved, and that Project Blue Book was just a dog and pony show. The phenomenon, by the way, is an incredible movie, and I want to say half my friends got converted into believing in UFOs from that movie. It's just so comprehensive and detail-oriented. And yeah, I remember that part of that movie.

Starting point is 00:14:27 And then I interviewed Jock. And I think I had forgotten that there was a deeper program than Blue Book. And he goes, you know, there was a deeper program that the Air Force had around this stuff. They had a real project going on that was secret. Is that true? And the Air Force did. Oh, I didn't know that. And in this Australian document, they do mention Freeman Dyson, Edward Teller, had, you know, Father the H-Bomb.

Starting point is 00:14:51 Robert Oppenheimer's mentioned, John Wheeler. So guys who are, you know, we just made a $130 million movie on Oppenheimer, it would be mind-blowing if he, you know, was part of any of the UFO stuff. And there's a book called by William Steinman called, you know, UFO crash about the Aztec crash retrieval. And they say Oppenheimer was part of the retrieval team. It wouldn't surprise me because if you, you know, if these accounts are true, and of course I believe they are, these crash retrieval accounts, you'd want the best minds. You would. You'd need the best minds. You'd need the best minds. Yeah. Of course you would. And you have these weird, you know, so Oppenheimer was facing this kangaroo court. It's documented in the Nolan movie. You know, supposedly the kangaroo court was around, you know, his sympathies for the, you know, communists or whatever, schmoozing with socialists in the 30s and 40s. whatever. But there's a theory out there that maybe it was actually around UFOs. And so the head of the kangaroo court was a guy named Gordon Gray, who, you know, who knows whether the MJ12, Majestic 12 stuff is real, you know, the dubious kind of origins, as you're very aware of. But if it

Starting point is 00:15:59 was, Gordon Gray was on the Majestic 12. MJ12 or Magic 12 or Majestic. This document is easily the most controversial in UFO circles. It is supposedly a briefing document prepared in 1952 for President Elect Dwight Eisenhower, explaining that a secret group of scientists and military men had been created by President Truman to study the UFO situation and to keep a lid on it. And so the guy who might have been on Truman's, you know, official UFO panel Eisenhower's official UFO, you know, advisory team is heading up the kangaroo court, basically stripping Oppenheimer of his cue clearance. And there's some very weird quotes in that transcript as well. It's online now. And you have Von Neumann defending Oppenheimer saying, you know, don't blame him

Starting point is 00:16:47 too much. It took him a while to accommodate to the new Buck Rogers universe that we're living in. So it's like weird stuff like that. Like, why are you referencing Buck Rogers? You know, space travel travel, you know, strange stuff like that. And then he's, and Oppenheimer keeps saying a lot happened between 45 and 49. He keeps saying that. Really? And when did all the crashes out? A lot of the crashes out, 45, 49. And if it were really about, you know, leakages in the Manhattan Project or socialist sympathies or whatever, that would be 41 through 45. It wouldn't have anything to do with it. So anyways. Well, you know, it's funny because people often ask me, because I've had a, I've been, I'm actually quite skeptical. A lot of the cases that I've reported on over the years, I didn't believe when I first

Starting point is 00:17:32 heard about them. I didn't believe Roswell. Why would I believe Roswell? If an alien spaceship crashed and live aliens were recovered, how do you cover something like that up with a level of involvement with all the different military folks? You know, that's, that was the skeptic in me going, this is impossible, right? One of the things I've learned over the years, over the decades, is to suspend judgment and at least listen to testimony and review the evidence because I have that knee-jerk reaction of, that's impossible. Yeah. But it's good. It's good you have that. Yeah. Because I think you wouldn't be where you are if you just, if your knee-jerk reaction was credulousness, you just believed everything. You know, I think it adds an element of trust for people when they watch your movies. I think of like, okay, well, that old expression, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You know, that's, that's legitimate. And that's understandable, right? But I think of it in the sense of, all right, if I'm going to report on a particular incident, Let's say it's a landing case, Australia, 1966, Westall.

Starting point is 00:18:39 I feel like my job as a filmmaker is to sway a jury. And I'm not trying to manipulate anybody or anything, but I want to put forth the right evidence to let the jury know beyond a reasonable doubt that something like this did occur, right? So I'm always thinking about my films as presented to a jury. Or let's say I got a skeptic in the crowd. I'm going to cater to that skeptic. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:01 That's what I'm thinking the whole time when I'm making a film. Like, if I'm going to report on a landing case, I better have a pretty compelling story. Yeah. Multiple eyewitness testimony, things of that nature. Then I started to report on not just landings, but people, you know, reporting beings associated

Starting point is 00:19:17 and connected to the craft. That's a slippery slope, right? Particularly when I, you know, I remember when I did the phenomenon, I got that really big break and I got an interview with Senator Reid, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. and he wouldn't sign off on the family. He wouldn't sign off on the movie

Starting point is 00:19:34 until after he could see it, right? Well, I had, excuse me, an alleged landing case in Rua Zimbabwe in 1994 where roughly, you know, there were 66 school children reported, but there were 100 school children in the playground when it happened. We saw this like a silver thing down there.

Starting point is 00:19:53 It was a silver oval thing that flew past really slowly. I saw the bigger one and a spaceship like, four, five of them. It was red, green, and yellow. There was this big ship. It had these lights, these patterns, and a flu.

Starting point is 00:20:07 And a lot of them reporting these little entities, and then there's telepathic communication with these little entities. Well, that's in the movie that Senator Reid is in. I'm like, he's going to take a look at this movie and go, take me out, right? Yeah, yeah. But I wanted to do it in a way where I had that skeptic in the crowd, or I'm presenting my case to a jury, and that's how I think about it when I'm editing films.

Starting point is 00:20:28 Yeah. I'm not catering to people. that already know about the phenomenon. Of course, I want them to enjoy it too, for obvious reasons. But I'm thinking about that skeptic. I'm thinking about the one that's constantly accusing the phenomenon is only having anecdotal evidence. Well, excuse me, there's so much more than anecdotal evidence. Beyond. So much more, yeah. I actually think the quote, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is massively overused when it comes to UFOs. Because I think we have extraordinary evidence. And I think the better thing is extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary investigation.

Starting point is 00:21:03 And there are a few people, yourself included, you know, I could name four others or something. It's like a very short list of people that are actually doing the extraordinary investigation. But we have, we're oversaturated in data. We have an abundance of evidence. It's really about people's, uh, epistemology in Bayesian reasoning where I just got hammered for so long on that. It was like I got so tired of hearing that. But people would say that to me all the time. And I'm like, photograph. traffic, radar, visual, all these, you call that anecdotal? That's not anecdotal. That's everything but having the crap in their possession. Yeah, no, you're, you are told as a kid or something, this can't be real, and you're putting it a priori in this bucket of not real. And that's it. And you have to admit that at a certain point. If you, if you actually sat down,

Starting point is 00:21:48 you were locked in a classroom and you were shown slides of these very real artifacts, all of which you've uncovered, you'd have to come out being like, okay, my base case is there's something real here. And then we have to investigate, figure out how to classify it. It's called the phenomena because it's hard to classify, but there's something going on. So, yeah, I'm with you. It's global. It's ubiquitous. It's like, people say to me like, well, what conclusions have you drawn from all the years? Because I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm probably not going to know what's really going on. I'm probably not going to ever get the full picture, right? Yeah. I mean, maybe, but I doubt it. You might. Maybe. Maybe you're taking on a craft and giving it.

Starting point is 00:22:30 and giving it download. But, but, you know, one of the summaries I would give that I feel quite comfortable, the conclusion that I have reached, is that the phenomenon is, has the ability to manifest itself, it's ubiquitous, and it can manifest itself in like a physical form, like technologically, like an engineered craft. Yeah. But also has a psychic ability as well. I remember interviewing this guy who was a former.

Starting point is 00:23:00 I think he was a Northwest Airlines. Anyway, he's just, he's actually in Arizona. And he, just a real, honest, sincere, salt of the earth character that was a pilot and had an incredible experience. And he goes, he goes, oh, there's something else. And I said, well, what is it? And he goes, I don't know, I can't, I can't tell you. And I could tell he was like, he knew how ridiculous what he was about to say sounded, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:37 because he's a very pragmatic guy and just a grounded pilot, you know, for a commercial pilot. And I said, no, give it to me, you know, tell me, you go, ah, you know, and then he finally goes, hey, talk to me. Yeah, he was a, it was a Northwest Airlines. I'm sorry, I'm trying to remember the name. But yeah, he said that. And that was like kind of the first time where I really started learning about the psychic nature. A lot of people have seen craft and had that communication, you know, pretty instant communication or beans, you know.

Starting point is 00:24:14 It was like in the world, all the trees will just go down and there will be no ear and people will be dying. And those thoughts came to you. Had you had those thoughts before this experience? No. No. And how did those thoughts come to you? Do they come to you from the craft or from... From the man.

Starting point is 00:24:40 The man. Which sounds crazy to a lot of people that aren't familiar with the phenomenon, but there are a lot of close encounters of the... And I remind people, because I deal with one in the program, right? Yes. There's nothing new. There's been reports of close encounters of the third kind dating back to the early 1940s and probably millennia, right? Yeah. But at least modern day versions of that. And I remind people, it's like, okay, I know this sounds a little crazy. However, let me remind you that the very person who documented or researched UFO cases for the United States government, Dr. Heineck, from 47 to 69 or 70, he's the one that coined the phrase, close and

Starting point is 00:25:25 counter of the first kind, close-in-count of the second kind, and close-in-counter of the third kind. So that's been going on for decades. For decades. Yeah, very credible reports. Can we get into the story you tell in the program of a face-to-face interaction? U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant Jason Sands was stationed at the nearby Nellis Air Base with the 67th Intelligence Group at the time. This previous week, the UFO came on the range, flew right by what we called the schoolhouse, because that's where we did the training. And it went down into the valley and continued on. So they have actual video of it.

Starting point is 00:26:03 And that's what you see out there in the public. This Nellus Range UFO. G1 control doesn't know what time aircraft it is either. That's his truth. Yeah. We have the names of the other on-duty military personnel. Yes. We have a location and we have a date.

Starting point is 00:26:19 Yes. I opted to report on it, even though I can't prove that it happened. Yeah. But I think it's a pretty compelling account. What's the location? It was, excuse me. Nellis testing range in Nevada. 1994.

Starting point is 00:26:39 It was August. It's pretty wild. It's pretty wild. I mean, you've heard, but it doesn't not pattern match to other stories. Like, I don't know if you ever heard of Colonel Charles Hall. I was given a clearance to allow me to go anywhere, anywhere in Dreamland, as long as I was alone, I discovered that up there at the north end of Indian Springs Valley, which you can see on the map in the state of Nevada here in America, that there was a base which the U.S.

Starting point is 00:27:07 Air Force maintained for a group of extraterrestrials who were tall and white. Yes. Similar sort of story, you know, and I guess in his case it was more of these kind of tall white Nordic-looking aliens, but it was in Area 51, so, you know, probably not too far. and I don't know. I mean, but that's amazing. Holman. Yeah, Holman.

Starting point is 00:27:29 I saw footage of three dish-shaped crafts. One of the craft landed and two and went away. Why did it land? It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods. A sliding door open, a ramp was extended, and out came three aliens. I did not believe that case. A landing at Holamon and the beans come out and interact with base command.

Starting point is 00:27:54 I was like, please. And these were Nordic beings, right? Well, they were described as like, because I actually talked to a guy, Alan Sandler, who saw the footage, believe it or not. I mean, that's amazing. Like, and I found that out after at least a year of knowing the guy that came out.

Starting point is 00:28:10 And he said that they looked like Egyptian headware, big noses. I think he said that his, the, the eyes were vertical like a cat. Wow. Yeah. And, um, I'm trying to remember what he was. described the skin of them, but they had like a device, but they didn't have much of a chin or a mouth,

Starting point is 00:28:30 and they had a, one of them had a device that looked like what he was interpreted as a communication device of sorts. He didn't know, but that's what he said it looked like. But he goes, you know, a lot of times when I, if you want me to go into the story, I will. Yeah. Okay. So the reason why I'll tell you this is that I did not believe what I'm about to tell you guys. And I'm sure a lot of your audience have heard about this case. it was probably in the early 1960s, maybe 64, 65, was it 64? Yeah, I don't know the exact date. And there was a landing case that I was investigating at Secor, New Mexico that happened

Starting point is 00:29:11 April 24, 1964. And in the process of investigating, that was one of the cases that caused Dr. Heineck to do a complete 180 on close-in-counts of the third kind. And I'll go back a little bit. Jacques Valet had just met with Dr. Heineck at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio in 1964. And he was telling Heinek, look, you've got to look into these cases that are classified in Project Blue Book files as psychological, because those are reports of witnesses claiming to see

Starting point is 00:29:44 beings connected to the craft. And I guess they're just putting them down as psychological because they're just assuming that the witnesses have lost their marvels. Excuse me. And so he was like, you've got to look into these cases. And I was like, okay, you know, and he's given some examples in France that in the 50s. And like literally like a week later, he gets the phone call about the landing in Sikour, New Mexico, that involved the police officer by the name of Lonnie Zamora.

Starting point is 00:30:08 So anyway, I'm really sticking my teeth into that case. I'm getting to know his family, his wife. I go to the National Archives with the guy who wrote the book on it, Ray Stanford, Squirrel Sasser in a Pentagon pantry. And I come across these arms. articles in the UFO bulletin by a woman named Corral Lorenzen, excuse me if I don't pronounce her name correctly, but she was writing articles about a landing that happened at Holloman

Starting point is 00:30:33 right around the same time. Very credible reporter. She was thought in the UFO community be very credible. Like if she put something out there, it was thoroughly researched, and there was substance to it. So I read one article, and she had, I think, some military officials that were, interviewing, they might have been anonymous,

Starting point is 00:30:54 and then another one was a pilot, so it's two separate articles about this landing, Holman. So that was pretty much the first credible time I'd really heard about it, right? Because I'd just quickly dismissed it in the past. Well, I'm going, all right, well, I'm investigating a case,

Starting point is 00:31:07 the landing case in Socorro. Hallam, it's just a stone's throw away from Zocoro, where the crow flies. I believe that the creatures, you know, that Socorro happened. It was the case that turned around Heineck, why not have cameras rolling and have it happen just, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:26 in White Sands or Hall of an Air Force base, which is really close by. So I was open to it. Then I watched, I'll give you the truncated version. I watched the documentary UFO's past president future by Eminager and Alan Sandler. And that talks about an event that may have happened or may, or that could happen, may have already happened, or maybe it, you know, or it could happen. And that was about the landing and in Holman Air Force Base and that the beings got out and interacted with the base commanders. So I was like, huh, it's interesting.

Starting point is 00:32:00 When you say may have happened or could happen. That's the way they phrased it in the film. Okay, so they're being a little like, you know, truth and fiction. Yeah. It was like, you know, this might have happened already. Yeah, yeah. Or maybe it will happen. A little plausible deniability.

Starting point is 00:32:11 Yeah, you know. And everything else was so carefully choreographed in the movie. They had unprecedented cooperation with active and retired. military personnel, going on to Air Force bases, like these guys, something was up with that movie during that time. And they had unprecedented access. So anyway, so then I get in touch with the filmmakers, Eminegger. I interview him.

Starting point is 00:32:33 And he's like, yeah, that, you know, that event really happened. We were going to get the video and feature it in the film. And then the last minute, they pulled it, whatever. And so then I'm talking to Alan Sandler about it. And this is going on over a couple of year period. And Alan's like, well, I saw the film. Excuse me? You what?

Starting point is 00:32:54 He goes, I saw the film. I said, the one at Vanderberg Air Force Base with the, no, the Lane at Holloman. I said, you saw the film when I was driving my car. And what I do a lot of times is I like to close my eyes and listen to words and have those words recreate the imagery in my brain. It's almost like I'm reliving the experience through them, right? So I pull the car over. I said, Alan, what did you see? I need every detail.

Starting point is 00:33:21 Like, what did it look like? He goes, well, he goes, it might have been a training video. I don't know, but it was a real flying saucer. And there were three flying saucers that came in over the base. It was, I don't know what time of day, but it was daylight. And the film, there was film of three discs at a relatively high altitude coming in over the base. And then two, peel away. And they were escorted by Millie.

Starting point is 00:33:49 military jets. And then one comes down. He said it was like a, like a leaf almost. He thought it was in trouble the way it was flying. But I've heard that description from a lot of people that it kind of flutters like floats down like that, right? So that he described it. He said it was kind of floating. And he's like, well, it looked like it might have been in trouble. And I'm thinking to myself, I've heard that before the way it's coming down. So it comes down. He goes, it, it landed. And he goes, you know, James, it was just like a sci-fi movie. You know those doors just open and there's no seam or anything, he said, that's what it looked like. It opened and dropped. And then two individuals, beings, aliens, whatever you want to call them, this is according to

Starting point is 00:34:32 Alan Sandler, he told me this. They came out and they flanked the stairs on either side and then the main guy got out. And he had like a Egyptian, he described it as Egyptian. The description in the film is very similar. And being with big eyes and, you know, he was. And being with big eyes and vertical slits tall, Egyptian hair or head gear, I don't know, vertical eyes, vertical slits, big eyes, big nose, mouth almost non-existent, little slit, very small chins, and came out and he said he had a device that he thought was an interpreter, you know, interpreter, you know, to help communicate and that they met with military officers and that they got into a jeep and then they went off and then the film just ended with the discs just sitting there on the on on on on on on on

Starting point is 00:35:28 on on on on and the base and paul shardle at norton air force base showed it to him because paul got a call from a guy named colonel um colonel coleman who was a guy interviewed who was uh public relations at the panagon in the 70s i interviewed coleman about it and um Yeah, his story, his recollection. But anyway, he had called, I guess, the debate, hey, these guys are doing a documentary on UFOs, cooperate, you know, give them access, whatever, not realizing that Paul Shardle had just processed some film

Starting point is 00:36:00 of this laying in Holoman. So Paul happens to show it to Allen, and Bob wasn't there that day at Norton Air Force Base, and men in suits either later that day or the very next morning showed up, confiscated the footage, and said, don't ever talk about it. Do you know who the men in suits worked for? No idea.

Starting point is 00:36:22 I'm just saying what he told me. And Paul Schardle, a few years later, was involved with a head-on collision with him and his wife. He was dead. Oh, Jesus. And so he's gone. Paul Schardle did go on a TV show. You can Google it with Bob Eminegger talking about it. Are you conspiratorial at all about the head-on collision?

Starting point is 00:36:39 I mean, it's a bummer. Definitely a bummer. Yeah. And then Alan didn't tell Bob Emineger. And then I, when Alan told me, I've actually got video footage of it somewhere. I did a, Bob's dead now, Bob Eminegger's dead, but I did an extended interview with Bob Emperinger. This craft came in.

Starting point is 00:36:58 There were three of them. One of them wobbled down to the ground and landed. And apparently the base was alerted to it and went out to meet it. And this craft door opened and three normal looking. weren't normal looking, but short, five foot high people came out with sort of a blue-gray complexion, and they had some sort of a headgear on. And he's describing this to us. So, Alan, so I got on the phone, I was in, I think I was I in Florida? Anyway, I got him on the phone and I said, Bob, did you know that your partner, the guy you did

Starting point is 00:37:39 the movie with saw the landing footage at Allman Air Force Base? And he didn't know. And Alan never told. He's like, well, you know, you never told, anyway, I got the two of them talking on the phone about it. But Alan swears up and down that he saw that footage. What did you see on the film? I think about if I could, could I sway a jury at this point? I don't know. But I, based on the research that I've done on the Holloman Landing case, I kind of believe it happened. Yeah, you know, and so that I hear this other story that I'm reporting on in the program now, yeah, to those skeptics out. there, I can't prove that it happened. I certainly can't. But we have a date, we have a location,

Starting point is 00:38:40 and we have three other active at the time on duty military personnel. You know, let's dig into it further. For sure. Yes. It's too significant. If it happened, it's too important to just dismiss because of a lack of evidence. Well, it's hard to look into something if you don't know about it. Of course. Yeah, no. And I think widening the surface area on something and saying, I think it's true. Yeah. But But we also need to look more into it. It's a very valid form of... Right. I mean, it's like, yeah, it's like just like Virginia.

Starting point is 00:39:12 You know, I'm hoping additional witnesses will come forward, and they have. Yeah. Well, that you have an overwhelming amount of... Yeah, but it didn't start off like that. Sure. Yeah, well, let's... I want to talk about that. I mean, that's an amazing...

Starting point is 00:39:25 It was 1996. Is that right? In 1996. In 1996, Virginia, Brazil became the center of a UFO incident when residents reported sightings of strange creatures and a UFO crash. Claims followed that extraterrestrials were taken to a hospital, with military and government personnel seen in the area. 1996, Virginia, which is in between

Starting point is 00:39:49 Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro, and you go down there and you make this moment of contact movie, which I find just fascinating. The abundance of people in this town who believe something happened here, and then the witnesses that you interview first, firsthand and some of the crazy stuff like the, you know, the guy dying from being exposed to the being, tell me about that process. It's just crazy because, so a little known fact, I was doing out of the blue in the late 90s.

Starting point is 00:40:27 In this case, it just happened a couple years earlier. And I had a partner, this guy Tim Coleman, who was a former BBC correspondent, super smart guy, walking encyclopedia, massive respect for this guy. And we were, like, mapping out out of the blue. And we were putting ideas on the wall. And he's like, oh, bloody hell, mate, we ought to go to Virginia, Brazil, and investigate this UFO crash. And I was like, oh, God.

Starting point is 00:40:49 I think I picked the wrong partner. You're telling me that live aliens are walking around the town of a UFO crash? Like, I looked at him like, oh, God, please. And not only did I not look into it, but I refuse to look into it for, I think, 10 years, maybe. So when I made the documentary, he called me up and he goes, bloody hell, man, you wouldn't even look into it back in the dance. I said, you're right, I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:41:15 He goes, I was the first person to tell you by that case. You didn't bloody well believe me. And I said, I didn't, Tim. I'm sorry, I tell you what, I'm going to give you a special thanks credit in the movie. So I gave him, even though he had nothing to do with it, the fact that he planted the seat in the 90s. And I remind your audience, like, I'm making a documentary on UFOs, my second one. And I heard about that story, and I refused to look into it because it's like, how is a UFO going to crash? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:41 Live aliens in broad daylight, walking around the town, cowering, hiding, suffering. Like, come on, man. Really? And the whole world's not going to know about that? That's, I was like, please. Like, that's impossible. But you know what? I started looking into it.

Starting point is 00:42:03 I traveled there five times over a 12-year period. and I walked away going, oh my God, that case happened. Today, we remember the principal occur of the case of extraterrestrial most famous of Brazil and one of most important of the world. And I remember when I was sticking my teeth into it, I don't know if I should use their names or not,

Starting point is 00:42:21 but a couple of very prominent researchers in the field that I have tremendous respect for were telling me, don't do this. You're going to tarnish your reputation. You're working with all these Intel folks and people, you've got a great level of access, You're going to burn, you're going to just destroy all that by reporting on this. Well, I think you proved them wrong.

Starting point is 00:42:39 You did an amazing job. And you show, you know, like this guy Carlos DeSuzza and this Sharazy character who, was he, he was a military officer, right? Who's handling the being. Yes. Did more than handling. He just manhandling. Grabbed it.

Starting point is 00:42:55 Can you imagine? No. Total cowboy just gets out of the car and grabs it. And then that basically ends up killing him as a result of the side effects. sort of occurred. He had this oily, greasy stuff on his body. And apparently, according to friends and family, he was rubbing himself down with rubbing alcohol, trying to get it off of him, the smell and the... We were talking about this last night with Howell put off. Chase Brandon wrote a book called Cryptos Conundrum. Chase Brandon is this, I think it's a pseudonym for a CIA guy.

Starting point is 00:43:25 Yeah, because you said he disappeared on you. Yes. So yeah, so I think Chase Brandon is a pseudonym. And I think he's this Hollywood liaison. And he writes this book under a CIA guy. student in him, but he writes about Roswell, and I know it's a bit of a detour, but it relates because he talks about Hill Encoder, you know, one of the first CIA directors who dealt with Roswell. And the readout on Roswell was this being, and it was emitting this sort of sulfuric, you know, thing. And the women that you interview around Virginia also say, I think it might have been sulfur. Like, there was, it's just admitting this strong odor. And in its presence, it's almost like, you know, this like radioactive substance is like coming on.

Starting point is 00:44:04 off of it. A day later they could still smell it. And also it smelled. It was a smell that was there as soon as you entered the room. Yes, it was, and that's what struck me as unusual. Why, that this smelly junk would be piled on the general's carpet. That was one of the few recollections that I have that didn't make sense. I mean, the hospital where the beans were reported, reportedly, this, they were done x-rays.

Starting point is 00:44:32 They had to close that wing in the hospital for like, weeks? Because the smell was so intense. That's so insane. And all these people, they have nothing really to gain by saying this. In fact, many of them feel kind of traumatized. And people knew the lengths that I went to to get people to go on camera. Yeah. Like, people think that they're just out there trying to sell, no.

Starting point is 00:45:19 It took years. We would find witnesses and they were like, I am not coming forward. Periods not going to happen. What's in it for me? Yeah. I was already threatened. My family was threatened. I have nothing to gain by testifying on camera.

Starting point is 00:45:33 Why would I do that? And the highest ranking military guy that you interviewed had to do an anonymous anonymized version of it. He was like all the money in the world is not going to happen. Yeah. I will not go on camera. Period.

Starting point is 00:45:46 Not going to happen. How'd you get it? Well, I was like, put me in the room with him, right? Yeah. Okay, so we are sitting here with military ex who clearly doesn't want his identity revealed, which we're not going to do. and he's going to provide enough detail, not too much,

Starting point is 00:46:06 but enough detail on operations that he was involved with with the Virginia case. I look into people's eyes and I just like look into their souls and just say, this story is so much bigger than any one of us that future generations have a right to know, like, what is it going to take? What will it take to get you to, you know what I mean? I'm ready to tell you everything. Yeah, yeah. Right now.

Starting point is 00:46:32 I do. I look deep in the rise because I communicate on a more spiritual level with people. It's like, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember when I arrived in Australia, some of the researchers, and I'm not tooting my own horn. I'm just, I mean, I'm really bad at a lot of things, but some things I'm not bad at. And the researchers when I arrived, when I was investigating this landing case happened in the 60s, they were like, you know, we've been going at it for 50 years. And these particular witnesses are never.

Starting point is 00:47:01 gonna talk, period. And they just get me in the room with them. I got two of them to talk after 50 years. So I looked this guy in the eyes. It was so sketchy, man. We drove up into the depths of Brazil, like four hours into the night north of Virginia. Wow. And maybe five hours, it was a thunderstorm.

Starting point is 00:47:20 And it was lightning. It was raining. And we get up there. And there's just like bar that kind of spills out into a dirt parking lot. and they were, it just felt looked. I stood out so heavily, you know, when I got there. And two guys walk over to our car, they look inside, then they get in the back and let's go, you know, like, all right,

Starting point is 00:47:42 so they're taking this somewhere else. I don't know where they're taking me. You know, I'm driving. I'm thinking, God, I hope this isn't a setup. Right. You know, and then they drive me to some other location, and then we go to this bar, and it's outside as well. And we all talking, he's just as paranoid as I am.

Starting point is 00:47:56 We were both paranoid. Yeah. You know, and he's looking at me like, are you an agent? Yeah. Are you a secret U.S. government agent? I'm like, no, you can look me up. I've got a reputation. I've been doing this for 30 years.

Starting point is 00:48:07 Like, go ahead and Google me, you know. One of the reasons he might have been paranoid is because he mentions to you that the body goes from hospital to hospital, but it ends up probably going in the United States. Yes. Commentaries of the era that would have been to the United States, that we don't have conditions of really

Starting point is 00:48:30 to get with a creature here. Yeah, so they're not just like

Starting point is 00:48:35 threatened. So we meet with him, that window opens. People, because people go,

Starting point is 00:48:40 oh, yeah, people are just trying to sell a crazy story. I'm like,

Starting point is 00:48:42 you have no idea what it took to get every single witness on camera.

Starting point is 00:48:45 It took years of begging and pleading, you know, and there are still people that

Starting point is 00:48:51 we identified, people that have the footage, people that don't even have any physical evidence

Starting point is 00:48:56 are So there are people that have the footage of the... No question, no question in my mind. I've talked to people that have seen it. How do we get that? Well, so if I was there at the time for an extra six weeks, I'm quite confident I would have come home with it. How would you have done that?

Starting point is 00:49:12 Because I was in touch with the people that had it, right? So the problem was, like, for instance, give me an example. Why would they not? Would they were freaked out? Oh, my God. People were freaked out without any evidence. The people with the evidence, they were terrified. How did you even know I had it?

Starting point is 00:49:28 You know what I mean? Kind of thing? Like, we were about one day away from my buddy Marco going with Military X to this individual's house. I was going to go. He was going to, Marco, my counterpart was going to go to show the footage. Apparently it was like it goes from as a military base into the town of Virginia and all the way back again. So they filmed the excursion going out, the alien, and then coming back again. Now, I don't know when that particular footage of the alien was alive or not,

Starting point is 00:49:57 but there's other footage of the alien that was in the hospital. That's gnarly. That does have footage that I talked to the doctors that saw it. And I knew the doctor that shot it. He had just died of a heart attack, so we went to his wife's out. Like, he just like so many leads, the chief of police in the area. He had a photograph. And one was alive, one was dead.

Starting point is 00:50:15 And there wasn't one person in the town who said this was a hoax or fabricated. No, no. I mean, a lot of people were like, oh, yeah, I've heard about it. You know, some people were like, oh, yeah, no, I believe it happened. But nobody in and around. Not one person said it didn't happen as a hoax. Not one person, sorry. So I, you know, just as this was happening, you know, you're investigating something for that long

Starting point is 00:50:39 and you're getting this close to getting, I mean, all the people that we got to come forward, the doctors, the X-ray technicians. It was made as revelations. And in this moment, I don't see any movies of films and nothing. You know, the town mayor, like... The mayor of Virginia, does he believe that this case happened as the witnesses are reporting it to have happened?

Starting point is 00:51:06 I mean, the women that came within 10 feet of the creature alive. My name is Liliana Silva. In 1996, I saw a creature, strange. Valchira Silva, in 1996, I've a little bit of a creature strange there. My name is Katzschevier. In 1996,

Starting point is 00:51:31 I saw a creature strange there. You know, the driver... Yeah, those women, when you see them interview, it's just like, they're not lying. No way. They seem kind of shy and afraid to speak to you. No way.

Starting point is 00:51:41 No way. And anyway, then, you know, we're getting close to this footage. I mean, it was pretty intense. Like, I mean, it's... You feel like you're stepping on... feel like you're poking around where you shouldn't be poking around, that there are extreme measures taken to keep the lid on this story, right?

Starting point is 00:52:07 So you could feel it. When you're poking around out there, you feel like you're being kind of what, you know, you sound paranoid, but I'll tell you, I got spooked. I could just feel it, right? The military base calls the guy that we had just met with on camera, calls them up. Hey, this is so-and-so as a military base. There's an American filmmaker poking around. You, they can't contact you at all.

Starting point is 00:52:36 Did you meet with him? Are you still living at this address? How's the family? Oh, wow. I swear to God. They got calls like that. So then he got the call. The guy that we were going to meet.

Starting point is 00:52:48 And now, I just put him on camera. They called him the next day. No way. Yes. So how do they try? track that. So. That's crazy.

Starting point is 00:52:56 Well, granted, we met with... Who do you think it is in the US? You think they say it's like the CIA's opposite global access? The guy with the footage that was going to show it to my partner Marco. Yeah. They summoned him into the base. And I don't know how far as a military base was, but it had to be at least four hours from there.

Starting point is 00:53:13 They summoned that guy in. So my guy, the guy that we just put on camera who drove the alien around was like, you need to get out of here, just leave us, like disappear. Do you know what happened after you got summoned? No, I don't. No, no, no, because we left. He's like, you need to leave. This is getting really heated.

Starting point is 00:53:49 And I had just confronted. And I had just confronted Eric Lóerickie and I had just confronted Eric Lopez. right, Eric Lopes. And he was the alleged driver during the second capture of one of the alive creatures where his buddy, Marco Cherisi, jumped out of the car,

Starting point is 00:54:03 who was in the passenger seat and grabbed the thing. According to all the researchers that I talked to, the military didn't say, hey, there's a UFO crash and aliens running around. They were like,

Starting point is 00:54:12 there's some unusual creature and be on the lookout. It's being cited, and it's in this area. So Eric Lopes just called his buddy. was off duty. They were both military police, but he called him up, hey, you want to join me? I got this weird thing I'm doing tonight. And he jumps in the car and off they go. And then they see it cowering coming across the road. Stop the car. It was pissing rain. I believe it was pissing

Starting point is 00:54:36 rain when it happened. What's his name? Marco Cherisi gets out and grabs this thing, doesn't think twice about it. Just man handles it, puts in the car, off they go. They go to a clinic. And the doctor comes out and was like, I don't know what the hell that thing is. Get it out of So then they go to Humanitas Hospital, and that's apparently where it ended up Humanitas Hospital, and then the military came in. Crazy. But this is a side note, and if I'm going on a tangent, stop me.

Starting point is 00:55:06 In 2013, UFO researcher Lear, Roger Lear, he was in Los Angeles. I was shooting in Los Angeles, and at the time, even though I was covering Virginia, and I was covering the landing case in Australia, I had a specific focus that week on the witnesses from Rua Zimbabwe. So I made arrangements to, I mean, it was like the stars aligned somehow, and they all just agreed for the first time ever to get back together after 20 years of the case, the Leni case from Rua Zimbabwe.

Starting point is 00:55:39 Yeah. And during this time, aerial school. Aerial school, yeah, aerial school, 1994. I think it was September, but I'd have to look into that. In any case, so I'm really focused on that and making that all happen. and people are flying in from all different corners of the world. And I remember my financial guy at the time is like, you mean to tell me that a UFO landed and the alien got out?

Starting point is 00:55:58 I was like, please. I said, no, I know. Trust me on this one because it was really expensive to fly everybody. So I'm focused on that. And Roger Leer is like, I heard you're doing a document or part, you're covering the Virginius case because I was going to just, I was going to include it in the phenomenon as just one segment, right? Like I did with Rua, like I did with other cases,

Starting point is 00:56:18 Socorro and things of that nature. And he goes, I got to talk to you about the Virginia case. You know, what he didn't tell me was that he was dying of cancer and that he had critical things to share with me. And I kicked myself because I kept trying to make it for him to come in and he got upset with me. Roger, finally was like, you know, hey man, like, you know, you keep saying you're going to get me on camera.

Starting point is 00:56:38 What the hell? And I said, Roger, I'm so sorry. I'm really busy and this is out of the blue. You approached me. And I'm doing like 15-hour shoots every day, 16-hour shoots. I'm exhausted, but you don't have it, you know, So he said, well, if you're not going to meet with you, and I was like, it's not that I'm not going to meet with you.

Starting point is 00:56:52 I want to meet with you. He goes, well, at least take my tapes. I went there and I wrote the book on the case. And so he gives me these tapes. And then I kind of forgot about it. And then I digitized them, and then I sent them back to him. And then he died. And I don't remember exactly what year that was.

Starting point is 00:57:10 Because I, it was, all the whole thing went down. So then I'm shooting the film in 2021. 21, 22, something like that, Monontocontaghton. Yeah. And record time, you know, we've done a lot of research prior to that. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, I've got those Roger Lear tapes. So I take those tapes out. I mean, I had them digitized and I go through him.

Starting point is 00:57:33 I'm like, whoa, he got this person. Oh, he did that. Oh, this is amazing. And so I'm going through him and I was like, wait a minute, he wrote a book too. So I buy the book. I read the book. And I'm like, gosh, the book is basically a transcription of, of the tapes.

Starting point is 00:57:49 Yeah. Right? And I met with this person, met with that person. And then not part of the tapes in his book. He describes a meeting

Starting point is 00:58:00 with these two doctors at a hospital that worked on the alien that was a lie. And I'm thinking, oh boy, this is pretty crazy this story. Like, really?

Starting point is 00:58:14 They had telepathic communication. Like there's some smoke started to fill the room and there was like a telepathic communication. This is according to him in his book, right? And I'm thinking, my God, there was communication face to face with the aliens by the doctors and everything else in the book is totally accurate because I have the tapes. Then he just goes off on a tangent about communication with these aliens in the hospital building.

Starting point is 00:58:36 So I find out who is he with. Yeah. He was with Uber de Jada Rodriguez, who was a very prominent UFO researcher that happened to do, like at one point he was the biggest advocate that this happened. There's no question. We have all these witnesses to. He's about a daughter. To nothing happened.

Starting point is 00:58:54 And it was all just a big, you know, blah, blah, blah. So he did, at one point he did a 180s. So now the guy won't even meet with me. He's one. Roger Lear, he's deceased. And then he was with another doctor where I got a hold of that guy and he had just died. So now, dang it, I can't verify the claims. I don't know who the doctors are, right?

Starting point is 00:59:13 but according now had I met with Roger he would have told me who those doctors were on camera and I could have looked into it. Do you know what I'm saying? So it's like, but those doctors are still alive. So I'm going to go back. You should go back. I'm going back because I've got two forensic pathologists

Starting point is 00:59:32 that are coming, that just came forward. So I'm going to go interview them. Apparently they have some physical evidence left over from the case. They talk about the bacteria that was on all those trees, body. that they believe killed him. The bacteria

Starting point is 00:59:47 of the Baceresme was a bacteria of extreme virulence, extreme gravity. He made a completely inesperated. Did they say anything

Starting point is 01:00:05 about the bacteria? You know, in my limited scientific knowledge, no, I have not gone and met with them physically, but they had communicated some things in Portuguese. to my buddy and I haven't had anything.

Starting point is 01:00:15 So I need to go there and there's other people I'm going to go meet with and I'm going to re-release, kind of like what I did with out of the blue. Yeah, sure. Just revamp it, bring it up to date. So anyway, I get it off on a tangent, but my point is, is that it is extremely difficult getting people to come forward. It's not like you just go there and everyone's like, hey, I want to sell my story. No.

Starting point is 01:00:36 No, it's exactly the opposite. Yeah. And that's usually the better the case, the better the evidence, the harder it is to get the people, the witnesses to come forward. And that's just the way it is. What do you think about this moment in UFO disclosure? Obviously, the program is coming out soon, which is very exciting. You also have Lou Elizondo just came out with the book. I think it was released yesterday. It's called Imminent. Are you hopeful for this year? You have, you know, put the possibility that Schumer, you know, the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, actually passes in, you know,

Starting point is 01:01:09 a more robust form than it got kind of diluted last year. Do you think that this year we actually make some progress? Well, it's funny because, so with the program, again, I'm talking about crash retrieval. My previous film was all about a specific case of crash retrieval and the American involvement. But again, I'm sitting there in the courtroom with a jury, a skeptical jury, and I'm thinking to myself, how am I going to present this in a way that's going to make it palatable to mainstream, right? because this is pretty crazy. Let's call a spade here.

Starting point is 01:01:43 You want to start talking about we have a super secret crash retrieval program that's been going on since at least World War II, right? I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. That's, you know, people are going to go, this is impossible. So I was thinking about that when I put together to the program was like, okay, I've got that skeptic in the audience. I've got, you know, the panel, the jury to sway. And again, I'm not talking about manipulating anybody. I'm just talking about putting the evidence forward

Starting point is 01:02:19 in a way that makes it digestible to make the same. And I really think that we have created a very compelling case with the program that a very program like a crash reviewer probably does exist, right? So that, that I think we accomplished. Yeah. I feel, I feel like you did an amazing job and did accomplish that. I mean, it's maybe a little hard for me to say because I'm already bought in. Right.

Starting point is 01:02:49 But when, like, when I have a really good friend of mine, he's a very smart guy, he's a former teacher at Berkeley University, and he watched some of it. And he's like, ah, the stuff that's being said, I wouldn't even consider believing it. But it's coming out of the mouths of rounds and Schumer and, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, our most, our highest government. And then I'm looking at all this data and these reports and, boy, this is really hard to dismiss, you know. Yeah, it's incredible. You really got me thinking. And that's all, like, one can do.

Starting point is 01:03:17 I want the program to come out and get people to do more work on it. Dig deeper. Ask the right questions, you know. Hold their feet to the fire. Like, you know, let's look at it, because you've got a lot of noise, right? And it's like, you got pushback from the intelligence communities. There's really nothing in it for them for the stuff to come out. But they ain't put the genie back in the ball.

Starting point is 01:03:36 I'll tell you that much. Yeah. It's coming. I think there's a fight within the intel community. Of course. Some people want it out. Other people don't want it out. I get it.

Starting point is 01:03:42 You know, it's going to... If an airline pilot has a siding that when he makes that report to the FAA, that it would come to Congress. But I was told that the intelligence community did not like that. And the bill was, the amendment was not even heard in committee. I think it's time for this country to take back our country. We need to tell the folks at the Pentagon, they work for us. Godgummit, we don't work for them.

Starting point is 01:04:05 It's a little scary. I'm sure they have a lot of answers and I'm sure they have a lot of things that they can't answer because they possibly don't know or like... You know what? The status quo is scary though. You just like, you know, move forward

Starting point is 01:04:17 on our current geopolitical trajectory and it's not good. And so if you have some sort of Hail Mary in the form of like some big paradigm shift as a result of like a higher life form, just throw the Hail Mary now. I think it's going to unite us. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:33 I think it'll unite humanity. Yeah. I really believe that. Do you think we'll, well, in our lifetime, because all of these contact events are somewhat ephemeral. It's always like, like you have all these examples. We were talking about it at the bar the other day. You have all these examples of like these near misses where like you have, in the program, so frustrating. You have, you have. I landed every now and again. You do. Well, you do. I mean, in the program, you show like an incredible photo out of Scotland. I don't want to ruin it so people should watch. If we were, you know, sitting here and it was like Stanton Friedman and Leonard

Starting point is 01:05:05 Stringfield or something. Yes. They probably would have said like, we hope in our lifetime things shift on this. Thank you, Stanton Friedman, by the way, love you, brother. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we're standing on the shoulders of giants, you know. I cried when he died. He's a, genius. Also here in Washington is Stanton Friedman, a physicist who's been involved in nuclear space and research for such companies as General Electric, Westinghouse, and General Motors. He has studied and lectured on UFOs for almost 30 years. Such a genius. Sorry, no. No, no. I'm just, I'm just saying so, so, you know, actually, like, Peter Thiel went on Joe Rogan. Rogan kept bringing up aliens. It's like half of, half of Rogan shows are

Starting point is 01:05:48 like fully about alien. Yeah, yeah. He keeps bringing him up and up. And I think at one point, Peter goes, you know, you probably don't want to spend your whole life on this stuff because if you had started doing that in the 60s, and, you know, nothing would have dramatically shifted or whatever. And you could easily push back and say the last six or seven years post-2017 and the revelation of at a tip, which you highlighted the beginning of the program. My name is Leslie Kane, and I'm an investigative reporter, and I was one of three journalists who broke the story in December of 2017 about the Department of Defense secret program, studying UFOs, and that story was kind of a catalyst for a lot of things that have happened since.

Starting point is 01:06:32 It's really shifted this stuff. Absolutely. Super important. But do things shift in a more dramatic way from here? Because I go back and forth, there's some intuitive sense I have that in the next five to ten years, we get a big shift on this. And then there's some other sense that maybe it just keeps kind of muddling along. What do you think? Okay. I wouldn't have said this five Excuse me, I wouldn't have said this five years ago. Yeah. But I believe the momentum is, there's a tidal wave at this point. And yes, there's pushback.

Starting point is 01:07:05 And I remember people feeling discouraged after David Grush came forward and testified under oath to a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Wow. I sat there and I just, I watched that from my phone. It was like one of the only times my son was like, hey, daddy, let's go play outside. Let's go, you know. And you're like, no. Son, I need to watch this. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 01:07:25 I'm watching this live. I promise, just give me, I need an hour and a half and I'll do whatever you want to do. And I was glued. Funny enough, I watched it from my phone live. And I sat there and I remember I had tears just coming down my face because I've received so much ridicule and laughter for so long. Like my whole adult life, you know, getting laughed at and make fun of. I remember going to cocktail parties and just saying, we do me a favor? Please don't tell people what I do because I'm going to spend the whole night just defending it.

Starting point is 01:07:53 And I don't want to do that. Yeah, that's tough, right? because you bring it up. It's funny when people ask what I do. At this point, I spent so much time interviewing people about the UFO thing. But at this point, like when people ask about you, like, oh, I'm an investor or whatever, which I do that is a big part of my life. But it's so much easier.

Starting point is 01:08:11 It's just like neutral, like vanilla thing. Maybe they ask one more question. Go tech, startups, you know, whatever. Right. But it's a UFO thing. It's like you're signing up for like an immediate, like, polarizing reaction. It's probably going to be like at 30 minutes to an hour tops. you having to talk about it.

Starting point is 01:08:27 You have to give this canned thing as to why you think it's true. And a little less these days. Yeah. Like I remember when, you know, 2017, you know, New York Times article, some of the evidence, that I remember had some family members go, maybe James wasn't so crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like people that are really close family members that are total intellectuals and they just were like. But at other times you don't want to talk about it too, because in either direction, it's either they're fanatic or. Or they're, you know.

Starting point is 01:08:56 Here's the way I feel about it now. I feel like people will say like, you know, they look at me sideways, whatever, and I just say, you know what? You're a believer. And I say, well, no, it's not that. It's you either know about it or you don't. Yeah. Because it's not a question of believing or not believing. I mean, it's a reality.

Starting point is 01:09:16 It's happening. No, we don't have an explanation for it or certainly I don't have a prosaic explanation for it. I, you know, but it's happening. It's happening. You know, and there's no question. There's an intelligence behind it. Yeah. And it might be a myriad of different explanations.

Starting point is 01:09:36 I don't know. You know, I don't know. I'm open to it. Yeah. But it's real, and there's a non-human intelligence behind it, and I'm convinced I put my life on it. Yeah. You know, behind that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:09:46 Everything else is there, in my opinion, is speculation. But I know, because I've talked to certain people that, according to them, that seem to be a position to know, there are probably a handful of people on this planet that have the bigger picture. But again, that's... Do you think that all of those people are hardcore intel, or do you think some of these people exist outside of any sort of, you know, government, military classification, but they just have an expanded aperture? Well, I go back and forth because I, I don't know if I would, but I, but I, but I, I know cases that I go, I go to locations, I meet with witnesses. Yeah. That's kind of like what I do,

Starting point is 01:10:22 right? Yeah. And I don't just believe David Grush. Like when he was testifying in those open hearings. Yeah. It was like tears rolling, streaming down my face. Like, so I didn't believe it just because he's under oath and he's a high level intelligence officer.

Starting point is 01:10:39 Of course, he's incredibly credible. And he's an amazing human being. I believed it because what he was saying aligned with my 30 years of research. Yeah, absolutely. And all the different locations that I've gone to, particularly Virginia. but I've investigated Roswell Zoo. I mean, I've been out there. I went to the 50th anniversary of Roswell.

Starting point is 01:10:56 Yeah. And the advantage I had back then was there was a lot of momentum, a lot of talk, a lot of things happening. There were at least, at least, 20 people that were in Roswell at the time that I got to meet with when I was there. And they were all... Oh, talking about the threats. They'll be picking your bones out of the desert. I had guys tell me, this is what was said at the time. not only would they be picking your bones out of the desert,

Starting point is 01:11:24 but your family's bones out of the desert. They told me that. Lots of different people told me. I was just with the founder of a very prominent multi-billion dollar, you know, Fortune 500 company, like beyond reproach. This guy's not a liar. He's legit. Yeah, and he's also super humble and like out of the limelight, actually, as a founder.

Starting point is 01:11:44 He's like 20 years old. No, I'm kidding. Yeah. Well, won't give any more. More detail. But I'm with them. We're talking and, you know, it turns out he watches the show. And I'm like, what, you what?

Starting point is 01:11:58 Like, you know, why? You don't have time to watch, you know, aliens. He goes, well, let me tell you, you know, at the end of his life, my grandfather was in, you know, the 509th atomic bomber squadron. He was stationed at Roswell in 47. And he goes, he wasn't there when the crash happened, but he came back to base. and he came back and he said that everybody was beyond spooked. Beyond a weather balloon landing, beyond some test dummy.

Starting point is 01:12:29 You know, the Air Force keeps changing their story. It's all BS or whatever. But like people were pale in the face and psychologically really messed up. And so when I hear a story like that from him, and he said his grandpa, he was like an old school guy who would barely talk. And he really started to come out, like, towards his death. And so you hear thing and thing, you know, thing after thing. like that. You're like, something happened there.

Starting point is 01:12:51 Whole flock of microphones there. They wanted me to, they wanted some comments from me, but I wasn't able to do that. So all I could do is keep a mouth shook. Something really profound. When I was making out of the blue, and it's funny, like some of the things

Starting point is 01:13:07 that never even make into any of my documentaries are the things that propel me more than anything else, any other bit of evidence or a bit of testimony that's on camera, I was making out of the blue, and the woman who owned the building where we were editing the film. When I wasn't editing at my house,

Starting point is 01:13:22 we were going back and forth. She was 88, and she told, when she found out what we were doing, she told my partner, Boris, who I've made, he's been partners with me, Boris Zubov on all the films I've ever made

Starting point is 01:13:37 since I was in my early 20s. And Boris goes, yeah, the lady owns a building wants to meet with you. I said, really? Why? He goes, I don't know. You found out what you're doing and wants to have, tea. I said, oh, okay. He goes, I suggest go have tea with her. So I said, fine. Biggest regret that I didn't

Starting point is 01:13:56 put it on camera. But anyway, so we meet. And she's like, I heard you were doing this documentary on UFOs. And I said, yeah, and she's pouring me tea. And she's like, I just want you to know, I've never told anybody this. But my, it was either husband or almost husband, boyfriend at the time in the early 50s told her, he was a very prominent scientist, that a spaceship crashed in New Mexico, and that there were bodies, aliens, recovered. She said, I was told, he told me that in the 50s. And she, I'll never forget it. And when he says that's what happened, by golly, that's what happened.

Starting point is 01:14:38 She says, I couldn't talk about it with anybody, but I wanted you to know that. I said, thank you. that really resonated with me. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, why would she do that? Why would she do that? And we were just talking. Why would she do that?

Starting point is 01:14:52 We were driving over here and you were telling me about Buzz Aldrin's, the second man to walk on the movie. Yes, yes, yes. His sister, what did she say? I'll let you repeat it. So, well, getting back to Roswell for a brief moment, transition after her. No, because it actually relates,

Starting point is 01:15:09 this story also relates to this as well. So Mickey Rooney, I was working on a movie set. called The Legend of Obie Taggart in New Mexico. And I was working on my first film, and I was an extra, I was a prison guard. And I get to go, whoa, so what else do you like to do, Sonny? You know, and I was like, oh, here we go. You know, and I told Mickey Rooney and his wife, Jan Rooney,

Starting point is 01:15:33 and whoever else was there, oh, I'm doing this documentary of UFOs. And, oh, and then Jan Rooney goes, my dad was a general in Roswell, in, in 47. And he told me that if what really, if the truth about Roswell came out, it would have a devastating impact on organized religion. She said that's what her dad told.

Starting point is 01:15:58 She's probably still alive. So anyway, they both knew Buzz Aldrin. And they're like, we can connect you with Buzz Aldrin because I remember been out in the balcony. We've been friends with him for decades. And we'd be out on the balcony hanging out and he would tell us he's crazy UFO stories. Really? Buzz Alden, and landed on the moon with Neil Armstrong.

Starting point is 01:16:17 Yes. We'll get you an interview. Well, while that was happening, and I was working on my first film, that I ultimately sold the Discovery Channel, a buddy of mine was working as, he was working as a bartender at an art gallery. They had a particular opening, and he met a woman named Fay Ann Potter, and Fayette Potter was Buzz Alden's sister. So now I meet with Fayette-N-Potter at a restaurant in Larkspur called The Left

Starting point is 01:16:44 bank, we meet. She's like, my brother told me about a UFO encounter that he had while piloting a jet, a military jet. I can't remember if she said it happened in the 50s or if it happened in the 60s, but she said he was rattled to the core, that he chased a disc as high as his plane would go or to the point where it was going to be dangerous if he went anymore, but he was really rattled. It was a disc, according to her. Then she said, the other thing that he had told her was that they were followed by something to the moon. She did not say anything about an encounter on the moon. Nothing in that, but that there was something that they encountered that followed them to the moon that did not appear, that was, that freaked him out.

Starting point is 01:17:31 I saw this illumination that was moving with respect to the stars. We were smart enough to not say Houston. There's a light out there that's following us. So that's what she told me. She's like, I think I can get you an interview with Buzz. And I don't know how much more of the story you want to tell you. Try you tell you the way up. Okay.

Starting point is 01:17:50 Yeah. So now I've got Mickey Rooney and his sister. Sorry, Mickey Rooney and Faye Ann Potter, Mickey Rooney knows Buzz Aldrin. Fah Ann Potter, Buzz Alden's sister, both going at Buzz Alder and saying, you need to meet with James Fox. So he agrees, Buzz Alder. And he says, well, I'm on book tour right now. and but I'll meet you if you want to if you want to come to Monte Carlo I'll meet you in

Starting point is 01:18:16 Monte Carlo and I'm thinking myself hell yeah so I borrow the money um excuse me I borrow the money I get the camera gear get my buddy Tim Coleman my partner at the time my girlfriend at the time Samara and we go to the south of France actually we flew to Paris and we took a high speed train down to Monte Carlo and I was like when I got there I was like oh my god this place is so expensive the cheapest hotel I could find was like 400 euros a night yeah sounds about Oh my gosh, I was like, I'm going to be broke in a couple of days. Yeah. I was like, and Buzz kept like, you know, oh, I have the meeting on Tuesday.

Starting point is 01:18:52 You know, I was like Monday. It was like, Tuesday comes out. Oh, I got some Wednesday, you know. And then I got to Thursday. And I was like, with all due respects, sir, I traveled all the way here just to meet with you. Got the cameras going. I'm all ready to go. And I can't really afford to stay here forever, you know.

Starting point is 01:19:09 He goes, okay, okay, okay. Well, meet me. And let's just say it was a Friday. Meet me tomorrow in my hotel lobby. No cameras rolling. He said to me, no camera, don't have a camera's rolling. I said, I won't have any cameras rolling.

Starting point is 01:19:19 I'll meet you in the lobby. So I show up a little early. Tim Coleman, I have photographs of this somewhere. Tim probably still does. And I go from the time, Samara, sitting down at a cafe, and we're having like a croissant, some coffee. And the concierge comes over.

Starting point is 01:19:35 And he says, Mr. Fux, you have a phone call? I actually speak, friend, one of my few college accomplishments I learned French. To be a French. Yes, I talk like to... Pappar Savo. That's good.

Starting point is 01:19:48 It's true. A chasse on sache... A chasse on chasse... ...sohn's sache... ...so he goes over and he says, Mr. Fox is a telephone call for you, Mr. Aldrin. And I said, oh, okay.

Starting point is 01:20:05 I was assuming he was going to be like, hey, I'll be right down. I was like, yes, go pick up the phone. I'm not doing the interview. I said, what, what do you mean you're not doing? It was like, I can't do it. He's Paul Allen just invested in SETI, and he got labeled a UFO freak or something,

Starting point is 01:20:26 and I can't jeopardize my initiative. I'm working with Congress right now. I'm trying to get money to develop a rocket that's going to help put civilians into space. I can't do it. He's implying that he has something to say about UFOs, but if he did, it would hurt his reputation. Then he said,

Starting point is 01:20:42 and how's my story going to change anything anyway? And I said, well, with all due respect, sir, people of your caliber coming forward really helps elevate this topic. Your testimony would be paramount to do that. And remember, this was in the 90s, right? Yeah, it was probably late 90s. I talked to ask Tim, but yeah, it was a while ago.

Starting point is 01:21:04 And so he's like, well, I can't, I'm sorry, it's not going to happen. So I was devastated, like, devastated. Come on. Right? Yeah, I mean, that's... And then... That would have been an earth-shattering. It was devastated. It took me a year to get over that one, right?

Starting point is 01:21:23 Yeah. So then... Well, you know astronauts signed NDAs, too. Mm-hmm. So check this out. I had, fast forward, probably 10 years. And again, I have to remember exactly when... I have to talk to my buddy, Tim, but it was late 90s. I'm almost positive. Anyway, I break this story of the governor of Arizona Five Simonton. Well, I saw a huge craft just kind of come right over a squaw peak that was just breathtaking.

Starting point is 01:21:57 The fact that he saw the massive UFO that he said had to be otherworldly because it was over a mile from wingtip to wind tip. This is the famous Phoenix Lights of 1997, March 13th. In 1997, thousands of people in Phoenix, Arizona witnessed a massive V-shaped formation of lights moving silently across the sky. Known as the Phoenix lights, the phenomenon sparked widespread speculation about UFOs. While some officials claimed the lights were military flares, many witnesses remain convinced they saw something otherworldly. So I broke that story. I interviewed the governor of Arizona, Five-Sampton, we're becoming friends, and that catapulted me into, I mean, I got invitations onto every talk show. I mean, it was unbelievable.

Starting point is 01:22:54 And Fife actually said, James is the one that broke the story with me. He's the one that approached me. He should get credit. We're going on together. Whatever we do, we're doing together. Real quick, that's such an amazing story, by the way. Because he's a governor, he's a former Air Force guy. Yes.

Starting point is 01:23:09 And in the beginning, he sort of downplays the thing. Absolutely. One of it in a press conference. And then he comes out later, thanks to you, saying, no, not only do I think it was real and do I believe all the witnesses, but I saw it with my own eyes, which is just so profound. You have a governor of Arizona and McCain was asking for information on all this stuff. And he's friends with McCain, too. That's so wild.

Starting point is 01:23:31 I mean, that's another case where it's just like, how much evidence do you need? Kurt Russell, you know. So he could have landed his airplane on it, right? Yeah, exactly. He was flying around and he saw it. And so we're going into Phoenix and we're, I think it was Sky Harbor. And there's these bank of lights, six lights in the shape of a triangle going back right over the airport. There's a lot there.

Starting point is 01:23:54 Yeah. Huge. So anyway, so I break this story and the relevance of this will come in a second. I break this story and we're getting invited on there. Jay Leno. You name it, man. We were getting invited. I mean, all these shows.

Starting point is 01:24:05 So we picked Larry King, among other things. And I'm going on, Larry King, with Fythe Simonton. And guess who's in the green room? Buzz Aldrin. Two distinguished gentlemen, an astronaut, a governor, different views from what you've seen. Well, I'm not sure. I didn't see what he saw. I'm not sure.

Starting point is 01:24:25 But you say you're waiting for people to come forward. People have come forward. High-ranking military officials have come forward and talked about the validity. Wow. Yeah, the last contact I'd have with Bob. Buzz Alden was roughly 10 years earlier when he stood me up in South of France. Is that a coincidence? I don't know.

Starting point is 01:24:39 He was a day, invited him on. Yeah, coincidence. Weird. So I'm going on live, Larry King Live with Buzz Aldrin and Fy Sigmundon. What, Buzz was going to be on with you? Yes, live. Larry's just like space. Like you have a, like what?

Starting point is 01:24:57 I don't know. I didn't organize it, you know. But I'm looking, I got a picture of him in the group, The woman goes, no pictures, sir, what are you doing? What? Click. I shot a picture of Buzz getting his makeup put on. Yeah, right?

Starting point is 01:25:09 And he kind of looks over at me. I'll be, click. I got that somewhere. So, anyway, so I said to Fife. I said, Fife, oh, man, oh, man, I'm going to like this. And I told him a little bit of the story what happened. And I was like, God, he stood me up, and I sent all this money and all this effort. I flew to the south.

Starting point is 01:25:30 And he goes, James, this is an icon. figure of like this guy is i mean you cannot disrespect him and you need to like so i was like you know you're right he was right and i was like i'm going to be respectful but i sat there knowing what i knew and i watched him lie on television and it was really frustrating and i did try to call him out a little bit and then i talked to fay ann potter right afterwards because of course he saw it you should have called them out you should have been like hey dude i kind of did a little bit you're going to do an interview and And you were going to talk about UFOs. And I didn't know if he was going to, if she was going to be okay with me putting out her name on national TV.

Starting point is 01:26:10 No, you didn't. The weather was going to be cool. You did the right thing. You know, but I was really frustrated. Look in his eyes and like he was like, so I was like, I did bring it up. And actually there was a guy who did a film on it. Who covered in space film, Darcy Weir. And he kind of, he found the clip on Larry Kay.

Starting point is 01:26:32 and interviewed me about it. It was like, you know, that was kind of frustrating. But anyway, so I talked to Fayette Potter. I actually went to her 80th birthday, and she said, somebody's gotten to him. I said, what do you mean? She goes, somebody got to him. She goes, he wouldn't even talk to me about it anymore.

Starting point is 01:26:49 That's what she told me. I swear that happened. Yeah, no, I believe it. So anyway, so, yeah, there's, again, a classic example of how difficult it is every single interview is difficult to get the bed of the witness, the better the case, the more unlikely they're ever going to want to talk. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:10 And the more prestige the person has, the more they have to lose by going on record. It's not a career-enhancing move for... Often not. Often not. Things are changing a little bit. I think they are changing. You had Neil Armstrong. I think he was winning the Congressional Medal of Honor or something in the 80s, and he goes...

Starting point is 01:27:30 There are great ideas. undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief. And then he comes back, obviously, from the mission itself, and he just looks so spooked. He looks like a different. When he was in that, what's that chamber they put everybody in to, remember that for several days, they had to be in that chamber? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:59 Well, he didn't speak to anybody for three. weeks. The look in his eyes. The look in his eyes is like they'd seen God or a ghost or God. Yeah, 100%. Really intense. I really got me thinking too, you know. Yeah. I mean, I know. When Edgar Mitchell, who your old friend, had a conversion experience on the way back from Apollo 14. Yes. And the way he describes it is so amazing. It's like he's looking at Earth and he's like, you just see how small, like trivial, like the infighting and the tribalism and how petty it all is. And It's almost like his consciousness gets elevated and he realizes just how much of a bottleneck or chokehold, you know, earthly consciousness is, you know, we're in this like holding pattern. And it gets like extremely frustrated about that.

Starting point is 01:28:46 And then he comes back and he dedicates the rest of his life to consciousness research. For 40 years, I've been studying the properties of consciousness. And it goes throughout all of nature and matter. and it begins with the quantum property that when particles were in a process together and they go apart from each other, they maintained their correlation regardless of where they go.

Starting point is 01:29:09 Which is just so fast. Well, any... I had something really weird happen to me during the making of out of the blue. Well, that's here. So we were in the building that I was telling you about, the woman who owned the building

Starting point is 01:29:24 whose husband or boyfriend at the time, I wish I remember exactly, told her that he was a very prominent scientist that they'd recovered this, that a flying saucer, UFO and aliens were recovered and told her that in early 50s. I'm in that building, I'm editing out of the blue. It's probably late 90s, early 2000.

Starting point is 01:29:48 And we get into an argument, me and this guy, Tim Coleman, who I just worked with a little bit on the program. And he was like, bloody hell, mate, you know, it's got to be like this. And I said, you know, Tim, actually, no, I'm the director and it's going to be, and he's older than me. And he was a smart guy, but I felt really adamant that I'd wanted it like this. And he wanted that.

Starting point is 01:30:08 He got really angry. And he stormed out of the room. And because I just put my foot down. You know, I was like, I'm sorry. I'm not doing that. You know, and he wanted to add, like, cheesy smoke to a scene, you know, the kind of stuff that one expects with a UFO film back of the day, you know? All the things I wanted to avoid.

Starting point is 01:30:26 He was like, he wanted, he thought it would spice things up a little bit or something that I just, it was a hard no. Good for you. He got really aggravated. He left. Oh, slammed the door. Off he went. Ten minutes later, I'm sitting there.

Starting point is 01:30:40 It's on the third floor. There's a balcony. But I'm not on the balcony. I'm inside. Still editing. I get a visual image in my head. I see him with a key. Clear his day.

Starting point is 01:30:53 It's like a film strip. keying the right front fender of my car. Yes. I was so certain of it that I didn't even need the validation of walking out on the balcony and looking down on the street below. That's how positive I was. I just carried on editing. Five hours later, six hours later, finished up the editing, packed up my gear, walked down to go leave, and there, lo and behold was the key scratch on the panel that I saw. There it was, plain as day. So I called to him, told him, hey, I know you had a frustration and you keyed my car. I demand you take that back.

Starting point is 01:31:34 I demand you retract that statement. How dare you accuse me as such a thing? I said, Tim, listen, I know you're upset, but I saw it. I know you did it. And I'm okay. Like, I know you were angry and, but I'm not going to, you know, go around telling it, you know, just get it fixed and we'll put it behind us. It's not a big deal.

Starting point is 01:31:52 and he, I demand you, you know, click, about three or four days later he calls me up, he goes, you're bloody psychic. How do you know? I said, I don't know, man, I saw it when it was happening. How do you explain that, right? How do you explain that? I couldn't, I didn't ask for it. I didn't, like, and I had proof that it happened.

Starting point is 01:32:12 Yeah. I got, you know, it happened. Yeah. I saw it. Yeah. I knew exactly where it was. Yeah. It was like I was already outside looking down at my car.

Starting point is 01:32:20 Yeah. How do you explain that's really weird? I actually told Hal. put off about it. Well, I was going to say, he could explain it. Yeah, I know, but I told it. I was like, I had that experience. Well, there's something about, you know, there are two models of consciousness. One is that it is produced simply by the senses, and it's produced locally. And then there's another where the body is a biological collapsing function on a default state of greater perception or greater omniscience. And so actually, if you cut off certain senses or silence certain things,

Starting point is 01:32:53 like a transmitting tank or the... Yeah, like sensory deprivation. You sense more, not less. And so the body is like a transmitter. Like you have in consciousness, you have the binding problem of consciousness, right? You have the battery. So you have like, you know, the occipital lobe. You have the, you know, the prefrontal cortex reasoning. You have Wernicke's area, which is reading comprehension. You have Broca's area, which is speech. have the cerebellum, which is movement, right? We have no idea, though, how those all mesh together to create our seamless perception of, like, it's almost like you're watching a movie when you're conscious. And so, so what is that? And then if you look at the radio, a radio has its own

Starting point is 01:33:34 binding problem. So you have the capacitors, the battery, the antenna, you have all the constituent parts, but you have no idea how it's playing Vivaldi's four seasons. And you could take out a battery and, you know, it will stop playing, but that's just one of the components. And in fact, you'd have to know that it's tapping into something much larger. It's tapping into, you know, an electromagnetic frequency that's allowing it to play the actual music. And so maybe, you know, this is something I've sort of started to get interested in.

Starting point is 01:34:05 Maybe there's an expanded version of electromagnetism that allows for more wave types than just your traditional transverse herzian waves. and then, you know, maybe your brain is sort of an antenna. And William James is a big fan of this called Transmission. Experiencers have a certain. Codate, nucleus, and Patamen, and the basal ganglia. The Codate, Potam, and Basil Ganglia is at the core of many of the, let's say, the more mainstream things that we were claiming, even before we had our first publication,

Starting point is 01:34:39 that a Codate is basically is a central node involved in, in two, intuitive and other, well, crystallized and fluid intelligence. That could be the part that is the antenna. Exactly. Because when people make... Going on around us, but some people can detect it better than others, right? And it allows you to... Yes.

Starting point is 01:35:02 And it's the neuronal density in that area that determines your ability to do this. And it's this ability to act on instinct. So it's not based on the senses that you're picking up. In fact, that area, when hooked up to an FM, MRI, lights up when somebody makes a quote-unquote brilliant move and go. And a brilliant move is a move that makes no sense rationally. It only makes sense in the context of a future endpoint of the person winning. So it's almost based on, you know, their opponent making some dumb move that they somehow psychically knew about. To begin with. So that part of the brain, I do think that might be

Starting point is 01:35:38 a really core part of all of this. I didn't even know that that even existed. I didn't even if we can heard about remote viewing at that point. Yeah. I didn't know. And the remote view, yeah, so you just got it down spontaneously. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember distinctly saying, I don't even need to walk out to the balcony, which

Starting point is 01:35:56 was right there and look down. Yeah. I would have seen it. I didn't need that level of validation because I saw it. Isn't that weird? That's super weird. But I mean, people have like pre-cognitive dreams. People have experiences like this.

Starting point is 01:36:09 And you have in Stargate, Help Put Off's program, it was up for funding and funding every year from 1972 to 1995, and every single year it got refunded. In the 1980s, the Defense Intelligence Agency began Project Stargate. It was top secret, actually beyond top secret. Dean Radin, a scientist, worked on the program that employed about a dozen psychics and mediums. For what? For espionage. To see whether someone in the United States could spy on other countries,

Starting point is 01:36:44 from here. Right. Just using their mind. Right. Did it work? It did work. And you have to think, you know, the amount of optical scrutiny a program like that would get, they'd cut it off if it weren't working. Absolutely. And you have the top guy, Joseph McMonagull, winning a Legion of Merit for over 200 cases where he's adding to real intelligence. And then you have skeptics. Jessica Uttes, who's a statistician at Stanford, Ray Hyman, who's a skeptic at Oregon. And they're coming in, they're saying, we think this is BS. They go, They look at the data that's been, you know, revealed post-2017, and they come out saying, we think there's something here that's unexplainable. Well, didn't they have an SR71 go down or a spy plane or U-2 or something in Africa?

Starting point is 01:37:27 Yeah, in Zaire. In 1995, former President Jimmy Carter revealed that the CIA, without his knowledge, consulted a psychic to locate a missing government plane in Africa. The plane had crashed in Zaire during his presidency and, Despite extensive satellite searches, it was still missing. The psychic from California entered a trance and provided specific latitude and longitude coordinates. When the CIA focused their satellites on that spot, they found the plane. That's pretty incredible. It's incredible.

Starting point is 01:38:02 They found it. Yeah, and it had Russian weaponry on board. Yeah. So it's, yeah, what are the chance? It's beyond probability. There's something here. And then it's hard. I think why science doesn't accept it.

Starting point is 01:38:14 it's because it is not fully repeatable and it's hard to turn into instrumentation. And you need, but, but exactly, you know what that means? It means we're in the Stone Age. It's like with quantum mechanics, you had black body radiation, which occurred in the, we figured that out in the 1860s, and, but we didn't exactly know that light came in quanta. And so there's no way to harness any of this stuff or do anything with it. You couldn't build, you know, semiconductors and all the stuff we use, you know,

Starting point is 01:38:41 quantum field theory for now. because we just didn't understand it, but there's this anomaly that's happening. Right. That's not fully repeatable. You can't instrumentalize it, but it's a thing that's measurable. Just because you can't explain it doesn't mean it doesn't...

Starting point is 01:38:54 It doesn't really. In fact, that leads to the next paradigm. Anomalies lead to the next period. If you read Thomas Coon's structure of scientific revolution, you have to systematically look at the anomalies because that breaks the current model. Wow. That's really cool.

Starting point is 01:39:09 Yeah. No, it's fascinating, you know? And I'm kind of a number of, nuts and bolts guy. Yeah. I just, I have been. I am. But I'm also, I've had some experiences that have to get me to be open to, you know, who knows? Well, I think it's empowering. I mean, it happened to me. I can't explain it. Yeah. And I'm not out there trying to prove to anybody that happened. Fair enough, if you don't believe me, that's fine. Yeah, but I think, I think it's good to share because I think nine out of ten people, if you actually probe a little bit more, you're like, hey, have you ever had

Starting point is 01:39:38 like a really weird synchronity that just makes no sense? Everybody's had that. Unless you're completely cut off. I was 13 years old. Yeah. I was with my cousin Ian on the streets of San Francisco. We were attending an older buddy of ours 18th birthday party. We weren't with our parents at the time. Somebody dropped us off.

Starting point is 01:39:56 We're going to go into the building in San Francisco, downtown San Francisco. And some creepy guy approached us and he was going to mug us or do something. I don't know what. And he, he, my cousin Ian was on one side. I was on the other side. And I was scared, man. I was 13 years old. I was scared.

Starting point is 01:40:12 Something bad was happening. and we communicate, he communicated to me telepathically. He said, on the count of three, I'm going to, we're going to break. You're going to go left. I'm going to go right. You're going to run as fast as you can. I'm telling you, I swear. And boom, just like, there was like instant.

Starting point is 01:40:27 We just looked at each other and that was the plan. Wow. But I was in a heightened state of, you know what I mean? Yes, I did. That's where to happen. I never questioned it. Yeah, yeah. It just happened.

Starting point is 01:40:36 Yes. Yes. But I'm telling you it happened because exactly, we executed exactly like the communication was instantaneously. Well, I think some of the sometimes studying alien. How do you bring that? Yeah. Well, I think humans are way we realize. And there's something about- We certainly are.

Starting point is 01:40:51 We are. And that the variance between, I'd say, the top ape and the, you know, or maybe not even ranking, just the variance between like apes or dogs or whatever is just far less wide than the variant. There are humans are, you ever, you, I'm sure, because of the line of work you do, I'm sure you meet people all the time where it's just like, what's going on with you? Like, sometimes it's a very interesting way. I don't mean that in a denigrating way. Like, you're on some sort of trippy thing.

Starting point is 01:41:19 It's really cool. Yeah. I love going around the world. I love meeting with different people, cultures, you know? Yeah. Language is in hearing about the phenomenon. It's fascinating to me, you know? It's like, I'll give you an example.

Starting point is 01:41:33 I met this Iranian pilot that had this dramatic UFO encounter over Tehran Iran in 19. I want to say 75. and a phantom F4 jet. The 1976 Tehran UFO incident involved radar and visual sightings of an unidentified flying object over Iran on the morning of September 19. Two F4, Phantom 2 interceptors

Starting point is 01:41:59 from the Imperial Iranian Air Force reported losing instrumentation and communications as they approached the object, which were restored upon withdrawal. One jet also experienced a temporary weapon system failure while preparing to engage. Instead of trying to make peaceful contact with this thing that was clearly not of this world,

Starting point is 01:42:21 he tried to shoot it. Yeah. The Defense Intelligence Agency documented the event in a great detail, and it was sent to NSA, the White House, and the CIA. The DIA assessment said, this case is a classic that meets all necessary conditions for a legitimate study of the UFO phenomena. And that didn't end well for him. No, it didn't.

Starting point is 01:42:53 But he goes, you want to tell the audience what happened? Yeah. So he was flying an F4 Phantom Jazz. It was at night over Tehran Iran. I want to say it was 75, but it could have been 76. Your audience got to look it up, UFO encounter over Tehran. His name was Parvice Jafari. And I remember I was working with Leslie Kane, and I was about to go down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a two-week expedition, maybe even almost closer to three-week expedition.

Starting point is 01:43:19 And Leslie and I were putting on this event at the National Press Club in 2007, where we're going to have all these high-level military and government officials from like seven different countries come and convene and talk about the reality of the UFO phenomenon. I thought it would be a really good example to demonstrate the global nature of what's going on, right? So she calls me up, and I'm about to go down in a canoe, actually a wooden dory with this guy. I was shooting a short film on this guy who helped save the Grand Canyon from like five introduced dams during the 50s and 60s. His name was Martin Lidd, an amazing guy. Sounds like a hero. Yeah, total hero. And he was greeted like a king going down the Grand Canyon, Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

Starting point is 01:44:00 Anyway, I said, Leslie, I'm going to be off the radar. There's no phones. We have a satellite phone We're under an absolute extreme emergency If one of us gets hurt We can have a satellite phone I'm not going to be reachable all She goes, oh my God, well, we got this event

Starting point is 01:44:12 What are you doing? Parviz Jafari, he needs, you know, and it was like some astronomical amount of money To go from because they just, George Bush at the time had said that It was the axis of evil was Iran And so now they're on the terrorist list And like trying to fly in the United States

Starting point is 01:44:28 And he's a general North Korea and Russia? Yeah, I can't remember But at the time it didn't help my efforts because I was like, oh, God, now I need to fly this Iranian general in from Tehran, right? So he had to fly to, like, Dubai or something for a week or two to apply for a visa, and I had to put him up in his hotel for, like, I don't know if it was a week or it was two weeks, a long time.

Starting point is 01:44:50 And it was, like, really expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars. And Leslie says, you know, and that's not even sure that he's going to get his visa. What do you want to do? I said, so I have to spend, I'll just throw a number out there, five grand, maybe six grand, seven, whatever it was. I don't even know he's going to get a visa, and then I have to fly him out on top of all that. And she's like, yep, I said, let's go for it.

Starting point is 01:45:11 Let's green light this. Yes, go. So I go down the Grand Canyon. I come out, got the good news, he got his visa. So he comes to D.C. And it's an incredible encounter. It was at night. He was scrambled to intercept some unknowns or an unknown.

Starting point is 01:45:27 And he said this object was, it was exhibiting a technology. this is the 70s, that was just so far beyond his jet. He was like, it would be here, and then it would be here in the blink of an eye. And it would traverse these miles we were talking about. Like, you said it would just stop, and it was, but he got a lock on it. And he got the, I guess he got the green light or the authority to shoot at it, right? So he locks on it, and he tries to shoot it.

Starting point is 01:45:59 And his whole cabin, everything locks up, and he starts spiraling out of the sky, or lose the control. And he was like, I thought I was going to have to eject at night over, you know, Tehran. And then last minute, he regained control. But then in retrospect, he told me on camera, it was a very intimate, cool moment, you know, on reflection of, you know, he had all these years to think about what had actually happened. And he goes, you know, my biggest regret was, why did I take a hostile position on this thing? I could have communicated with it in a friendly way.

Starting point is 01:46:33 Like I, you know, like we have an unknown and I just try to shoot it. Yeah, yeah. So that was his biggest regret, you know? Yeah. And it was very interesting, but there was also a psychic thing, too. It's like, it read his mind that he was going to shoot it. Yeah. And then it locked up everything in his pad, in his jet.

Starting point is 01:46:48 Isn't that wild? Well, you hear that a lot. But it was so worth, like, all the effort we got. But people don't know the backstory like this. That was just one out of many, you know, we ended up making a, I know what I saw. Amazing. Yeah, you know, for its time, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:02 Yeah, Spielberg. I know. Compelling. Spielberg. He was, by the way, a total UFO nut. He's obviously coming out with a new, weekend with his Netflix thing, and then he's coming out with a new feature movie

Starting point is 01:47:16 with Emily Blunt, I think, in the next year or two. He told me about Rua. He told you about the Ariel School in the 90s. That's wild. So, yeah, he knows his stuff. He's like, we have a mutual friend, Jenny Yang, that worked with him, and Janet, I was,

Starting point is 01:47:32 Of course, just young and naive enough to think that I could get a... Hey, I'm doing a documentary on UFOs. Of course, Billberg's going to meet with me, right? And that didn't happen. But he did actually say to Janet, hey, tell him, you know, he's doing a film on UFOs. He should look into this landing case that happened in Africa. And, of course, I didn't. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 01:47:50 I was like, that didn't happen. There's no way a UFO could land there at school with 100 witnesses and broad daylight in the whole world not know about it. I just not know, you know. Yeah. How wrong I was. Yeah, well, it seems like a recurring trip. in your life. I just believe things

Starting point is 01:48:04 when I first told you. So now I know, I'm not going to believe it, but I suspend judgment. I'm not going to not believe it. I will look into it. I will review the evidence. That's why... Yeah, it's the best way to be. I know I'm going to get a lot of pushback. Criticism

Starting point is 01:48:22 for including that encounter in the Nellis test range in the desert in 94. I know, but people are going to say, I'm already seeing the Stephen Green Streets. I know what they're going to, you know, they're going to try to just credit the whole film based on that. And I don't say with any definitive position that it happened.

Starting point is 01:48:42 But how is one supposed to determine or dig into or uncover more evidence about a specific case if you don't know about it? Yes. So we're going to start somewhere. You have to start somewhere. Right. And as long as you're honest and not shilling a thing that you actively disbelieve or whatever. I'm not, yeah. If I didn't believe it, I wouldn't put it in there, promise you.

Starting point is 01:49:03 I wouldn't do that. No, you don't. I would strike me as a guy that would do that. No. Fortunately, you know, I've never done any of this for the money. You know, of course, takes money to survive. Yeah, I just learned you were, while making some of your early films, you were working other job.

Starting point is 01:49:19 I was. Valet in cars. Yeah, so that's amazing. I worked at a hotel. I painted. I used to paint houses. Thank God you persisted. Yeah, I know.

Starting point is 01:49:28 Awesome. I've got a photograph of me. I'll share it with you. Not now, but. during the making of the phenomenon. I mean, that was an eight year, eight years. I ran out of money, had to find new investors, you know, disagreements with former partners.

Starting point is 01:49:46 As his one partner, he was like, we're going to create a hybrid. It's going to be part sci-fi and part reality. I was like, no, we're not. Yeah. That's not going to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, I was doing random jobs just to, you know, keep the cash flowing in because the investments dried up.

Starting point is 01:50:00 And even though I'd made some pretty good documentary prior to that, you think it would have been a little easier. Yeah. Having had, you know, what, 20 years or 17 years into my belt? Yeah. You know, I've made money. Every one of my films has made money. I paid everybody back 100% of the time.

Starting point is 01:50:15 They were considered some of the better films out there on the topic. But no, it was not. It was very hard. You need a Medici. It's getting easier now. A friendly patron. Yeah, it's getting easier now, provided I don't get ripped off on my distributor.

Starting point is 01:50:27 You won't. Don't even say that. Sorry. Don't even let it enter the, you're going to be good. I don't want to say that because I'm not going to have it to. No, yeah, exactly. Go independent. I'm going independent.

Starting point is 01:50:38 Yeah, it's exciting. So the movie last night was, it was incredible. There's so many moments. One that strikes me, you know, it's been talked about a little bit in the UFO world, but I think you summarize it and go into a level of detail. That's just fascinating. That's this Wilson memo. So you have Admiral Thomas J. Wilson.

Starting point is 01:50:56 The Wilson memo refers to a document allegedly summarizing a conversation between Dr. Eric Davis and Admiral Thomas Wilson regarding UFOs and alleged reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology. The memo, reportedly written in 2002, discusses Wilson's claims about the government's secretive programs related to UFOs, including discussions about unacknowledged special access programs. So complicated. God, I had tried to, I mean, I listened to Richard Dolan's review on it. He's very smart guy. Yeah. Listen to that.

Starting point is 01:51:32 I contacted everybody. In fact, some of the people I contacted, I can't even talk about that one. It's like... And this document was found at the Edgar Mitchell estate, right? I think I know the guy that found it. And I'm... I also know...

Starting point is 01:51:47 I think I do too. I also know Ontaris, who is Edgar Mitchell's goddaughter. She was a model of the 90s, and she was the one instrumental in helping me get to Edgar Mitchell. for the first time, Sontars, a number of other efforts as well.

Starting point is 01:52:03 I think I wrote Edgar Mitchell, it was in my 20s, I wrote him probably, this is letters, right? I didn't even read emails. I wrote, well, emails probably two later, but 20 letters. And I had like 20, you know. You're persistent.

Starting point is 01:52:17 I did. That's awesome. I'll get back to the relevance of the second, but I was finally with him at his home. We were walking in his, he had a corral with horses and beautiful house. in Florida, and I was walking with him, and I said, gosh, you know, Dr. Mitchell, like,

Starting point is 01:52:37 what finally, you know, allowed you or permitted you or made you approve to meet with me? And I was expecting some sort of profound answer. He goes, I realized, James, that you just wouldn't go away. Yeah, that's awesome. That's simple. That was it. I think I was the top of that. I didn't woo him with any kind of, no.

Starting point is 01:53:00 That was it. You wouldn't go away. There was no other way. Yes, there have been E.T. visitation. There have been crashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. There was no other way to get rid of me. That's hilarious. Anything that, I want to jump back to the Wilson member.

Starting point is 01:53:20 No, so I'm going to get to that in a second. So in Tarris met a girlfriend at the time that I was dating, and she's like, oh, my boyfriend's trying to get to Edgar Mitchell. Oh, he's my god. you know, my Godfather, whatever, and let me help. So she did, and she got me the interview. She ended up, she's doing a biography on him now, and we were talking, and she's like, yeah, that interview that you got, do you think you can make it available to me for my,

Starting point is 01:53:43 I said, absolutely. You kidding me? Yes, you can have the whole thing. And then we're talking, and she goes, you know, Edgar Mitchell died, and Ratfrey died. There was a flurry of activity at his house in this Australian guy. I caught him leaving the house with like a big briefcase to. just bloated with stuff. And she was looking at him like, what are you doing?

Starting point is 01:54:04 And he's like, oh, nothing to see here kind of thing. And just kind of just goes around her and out the door and he was gone. That's what Untaris told me. She saw that. She's like, I don't know what he went into his files, took with that stuff. And then later, the document, right? And so that's, I think, the moment that that document walked its way out of his house, Antares caught the guy that was an Australian guy.

Starting point is 01:54:26 Do you know the guy? I think I do, yes. What's his name? I'm not going to give his name now. Okay. So, but in any case, because I was in Australia just prior to that doing, covering the landing case in Westall. So I met a lot of the researchers, the Australian counterparts over there, right?

Starting point is 01:54:43 So anyway, getting back to the memo. So then, but at the time, I didn't really process the significance of the memo. And I wasn't really touching on crash retrieval stuff because I don't know when that memo finally went public or was leaked officially in the sense of. that when did it actually become made public once it walked its way out of Edgar's house? Do you know? I don't.

Starting point is 01:55:08 I may be fairly recent. What year would that have been? Do you know? Because, I'm only asking because I didn't put it in the phenomenon, but I, maybe I wasn't ready for it. I don't know. So you have this document basically saying that Wilson is extremely frustrated,

Starting point is 01:55:27 and he has to meet, with Davis because he met with some corporation. The corporation has no oversight, no government oversight, and it's completely outside of his jurisdiction. He finds a special access program, right? He finds a special access program. They have four to 800 people working, but then they're working on craft that is not of this world, but progress is sort of slow and it's cumbersome.

Starting point is 01:55:53 And it's this bombshell document. And he's extremely frustrated and he's like, what's going on? Like, who's in charge here? And he says to Eric Davis, if he was saying, I should have oversight. He's saying I should have oversight. They told him to kick rocks. It's so wild. They told him to kick rocks.

Starting point is 01:56:10 It's so wild. So what do you think that document's real? Totally. I think that's real. I would never have spent six months on it because, God, there's so many complexities and so many different moving parts and meetings in D.C. And people at that lab, there was a guy, Shannon's a. and Shaananin. Oakie Shannon at Los Alamo.

Starting point is 01:56:30 At Los Alamos, verifying who Eric Davis was and to meet with, with the former head of the DIA. Like, there was just so many things and I was like, okay, I need to condense this down. I remember my sister and I worked on this and I watched everything I could possibly watch. I read it 50 times.

Starting point is 01:56:48 I was like, God, this memo is just there's so much to include, but I really need to kind of simplify it for the film, right? So I really just highlight, I mean, I worked very hard on that. That was a very good, and the reason why I got the level of participation, I would say, even from Hal, it's like, I'll talk about this because it was mentioned in open congressional hearings. And it was actually made part of the record of the congressional hearings.

Starting point is 01:57:19 And I think that made Hal feel a little more comfortable, not to say that, hey, look, I can affirm this. But he didn't say, you know what? That's outright. That's just hogwash. Nothing happened. It was like, hey, if this individual is willing to admit that... And then I talked to a bunch of people behind the scenes. A bunch of people.

Starting point is 01:57:34 And they all say it's real. Absolutely. Again, I wouldn't have put it in the film. If I didn't feel it was legit. I think it's legit, too. Do you think the corporation talking to Wilson is throwing him on... When they say the progress is slow and cumbersome, do you think maybe it's actually they have reverse engineered UFOs?

Starting point is 01:57:49 I talked to some staff members of the Senate Armed Service Committee. Uh-huh. And they... I was like, well, you guys could subpoenaed. Admiral Wilson, right? He's like, yeah, we could. I guess we could. But we talked to him.

Starting point is 01:58:02 And he's like, look, you know, I'm not saying anything at all on that. They're like, well, we're going to bring you into a skiff. He goes, okay, well, you could bring me in a skip, but I'm going to tell you the same thing. I'm telling you right here.

Starting point is 01:58:15 So it's not going to make any difference. So they kind of, and I asked this particular staff member, I said, well, could you subpoena him? I think they said, yeah, that could be done. And not to say that it wouldn't be done, at some point, but they, that was ad remit Wilson behind the scenes recently. A couple of weird, that's fascinating.

Starting point is 01:58:32 Isn't that interesting? That's very interesting. A couple of weird things about that. That meeting took place in the parking lot of EG and G. Yeah. Which is where Bob Lazard, I pretty sure worked. Really? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:58:44 I think Bob Lazar, I did not know that. Yeah, I think they found him in the records there. So that's very strange. There's some other weird connections around EG and G, like what might be going on there. A government contractor to sort of... Extremely secretive government contractors. Right. I don't know exactly how they relate to this, but they've come up enough where they clearly relate to it somehow.

Starting point is 01:59:05 And the other weird thing about that document is, I think Eric Davis says, don't listen to J.A. J.A. is a liar. Do you remember that part? I do not. Well, J.A. Yeah. Who's that? Maybe John Alexander.

Starting point is 01:59:23 Really? Yeah. And so for people who don't. know John Alexander's this long time. I've had spirit of debates with him. Uh-huh. Well, he, you know, obviously since Roswell, like knows tons and tons about... He's all, he's all the phenomenon's real, but there's no cover-up. I looked at him, like, really? Well, it's one of the things where... Phenomenon's real, but there's no cover-up. You're in a room and you don't know who the Patsy is. You're the Patsy. If you're saying there's no cover-up, maybe you're part of the cover-up or something.

Starting point is 01:59:49 So one fact about John Alexander that I find interesting is you covered Rendlesham so well, and I know what I saw. So this is this case of these guys working at them. I looked in Rensom for a long time. For a long time. So this is Royal Air Force Woodbridge right near Suffol. It's one of the best landing cases in all of England's history. And you have John, you have, John case. Jim Penniston, John Burroughs. I interviewed the only, I'm the only person to have interviewed Cabansag, Burroughs, and Penniston. All the three guys that went out that night to investigate that. And Caban Sag got cold feet when I met with him. Yeah, and I hear Burroughs has sustained some weird possible injuries that.

Starting point is 02:00:29 Bansett got close to the crap and he got really freaked out and apparently stayed back. But carry on, I'll interrupt you. Very good landing case. But a very good case. That's worth looking at. And Charles Halt looked into this stuff and came to the conclusion that, you know, there's something here. And the crazy thing about the whole story that relates to Alexander is I think John Alexander gave the readout and knew about this before anybody in the U.S. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:00:55 Yeah. So there's some, there's some. How do you know that? I heard about this from a friend who's incredibly well-in-more of it. Yeah. Somebody that you hold up. Yeah, very high esteem. Okay.

Starting point is 02:01:07 Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's funny because we were shooting in L.A. Mm-hmm. And John and I've had great, you know, dinner's together and I'll tell them exactly how I feel. Yeah. You're wrong.

Starting point is 02:01:20 I'd say, and I think I could prove in a court of law that you're wrong. Yeah. with overwhelming evidence. Yeah. And he, you know, kind of... But then he was on set in L.A. when I was telling you, I was filming stuff in L.A. He was on set.

Starting point is 02:01:32 And again, I like John Alexander. I really get along with him. I mean, in the sense that... But I tell him to his face how I feel. I disagree with you strongly. I don't think you're correct on this one. And but then there were people on set. They're like, who's this spook?

Starting point is 02:01:46 I'm serious. Who's this spook? This guy's spook. He needs to lead. Are there any... He's just poking around on the set. Are there any? people you can definitively say are sort of bad actors in modern ufology then i know maybe i don't want

Starting point is 02:02:00 i try not to be negative or overly negative but just for the audiences sake around who should if you're new to this stuff who should curate information for you is there anybody to look out for as to you know maybe steer clear maybe avoid maybe look at a little more skeptically well here's how i feel about it anybody making definitive statements as to exactly what's going on i'm highly dubious of thought it's for sure. Do you know what? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, you know, tell somebody that's like, I know exactly what's going on. I'm like, really? I don't know about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be the first one to tell you, I have no idea what's going on. Yeah, yeah. I have a little tiny idea. Yeah. You know. When people say this many, six races.

Starting point is 02:02:38 Yeah, I'm like, I don't, look, I'm starting to cover close encounters of the third kind only recently in my, in my long career. Yeah. It's a slippery slope and those claims require evidence, you know. And even the people who've seen these things firsthand, though, don't know often what they're. They go, this is unclassifiable. And there's nothing wrong with admitting just because we can't explain it. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, right? Yeah, no.

Starting point is 02:03:05 Or it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And I'm so I was telling you earlier, I've learned to be open and to suspend judgment and listen to the testimony and dig a little deeper. Yeah. Again, that's why I'm including a controversial case. It's going to be a case that people are going to have trouble with. Yeah. I know that.

Starting point is 02:03:24 But it's like, hey, you know, these guys were on duty. Again, we have a date. We have a location and we have the names of the other witnesses. Hopefully more will come out. Yeah. You know? Yeah. In terms of John Alexander.

Starting point is 02:03:39 Yeah, and I don't know. I don't want to accuse of any. I don't know. But I think there may be an interesting threat there. I'm always highly dubious of people that say they have all the answers. There's this many races. This is happening. Does Alexander say that stuff?

Starting point is 02:03:51 No, no, I don't think he'd go that for it. But there are people out there that, you know, make those assertions and stuff. Well, it's like Doty would say, this guy, you know, Richard Doty, who is, we now know, was counterintel for the Air Force. Like, he admitted, like, he would throw people off the trail. And he would speak insanely definitively about, you know, we have this many races and like, you know, these are the... Yeah, John Lear would say shit like that. Muddies of Waters. Which makes me, again, John Lear, I don't know if he was like an agent or useful idiot, but like he was a dissoning.

Starting point is 02:04:19 info arm or extension clearly to me. Like he was, you know, and he was Bill Cooper guys like that, you know. Pale Whitehorse. Let me tell you how the government works. You have the aliens. Come on. Like, you know, and there could be bits and kernels of truth and a lot of this stuff. Well, look, I'll give an example why I never believed Holloman and I didn't even

Starting point is 02:04:38 look into it for a long time. And that's because they were like, oh, yeah, President Eisenhower had a meeting with an alien. Really? You know, maybe that was deliberately put out there. to throw people off the trail that a landing did happen at Holloman Air Force Base. Now I'm kind of convinced it it did. Yeah, well, the best, often the best disinfo is slightly adjacent to the truth. So what you'll do is you'll say, put out some wacky stuff in connection to something wacky actually happens. Then you'll put out a wacky thing that's like right next to it. Then you'll

Starting point is 02:05:11 debunk that thing definitively. And it's like, that's over. And then it takes the whole thing out. And it takes the whole thing out because you can't speculate at all on it. Left at Eastgate, I think it was. was a book written about that there was actual contact with aliens at Bentwater's in 1980. Now, all the key players that I've talked to, and I've talked to a lot of them, General Gordon Williams, Deputy Base Commander Charles Holt, Paniston, Burroughs, Bansag, nobody, and other witnesses that are in, I know what it saw. No one talks about aliens, none of those guys. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:05:45 Okay. No one. But then one book came out that there was alien contact. Excuse me. And that threw everybody off. It's like, oh, yeah, they've met with aliens. That is a prime example, in my opinion, of disinformation to throw people at the trail. Absolutely. And often these things are put out in the worst outlet. So it's like, why is the daily mail getting like the first stories? Like they're like, the CIA's Office of Global Access has a, I also think they, they systematically use marginal, like, weird, fringy outlets that aren't super believable when it comes to putting out actually very good credible and information, and that way you can retract it if people don't, you know, take it through to it. It's not the gross credible source. So you have the daily mail. Like tabloid reporting on something that really happened. The daily mail reporting about, you know, an egg-shaped UFO from Area 51 a year ago, you have them reporting on the CIA's Office of Global Access

Starting point is 02:06:39 being the main, you know, part of the crash retrieval program all around the world. Wait, wait, wait, what do they say? In the Daily Mail, they say that the CIA has this office of global access. access. Yeah. Yeah. And so, no, it's fascinating. And so, you know, I think that is a strategy. I hate talking about Epstein. I won't after this, but I do think this relates a little bit. Um, so Gilleen Maxwell. Yes. She's in prison now. She's, she's in prison now. Yeah. Her father's Robert Maxwell. You know, this, you know, MI6, Massad affiliated, you know, kind of, you definitely, definitely, definitely. That's a fact? Oh, full fact.

Starting point is 02:07:22 Yeah, yeah. And intelligence associated guy. Yeah. And he was kind of always a rival of Rupert Murdoch, like Murdoch, and he would always kind of go out of because he owned a lot of, you know, various, he owned the Pergammon press, a bunch of textbooks actually in the U.S. Oh, he's a big player. Oh, big media magnet, for sure.

Starting point is 02:07:38 Oh, and he would have these lavish birthdays and the 80s and you'd have like all sorts of, you know, really famous people show weird. He owned the National Enquirer. And so I always think it's like if you were trying to like marginalize a thing or actually condition people into like believing it. Right. Or put out the adjacent theory and then like be able to retract. Test the waters, do whatever. Right.

Starting point is 02:08:02 You buy a publication like that and you can do whatever you want, you know. And so I think that stuff is used strategically. You know, why did in 1972 two relatively, relatively unsubriced, relatively unsubriced. unknown filmmakers get this unprecedented level of access, making a UFO's past, present, or future. I mean, anybody looks at that film, I mean, they've got, I mean, they've got full access in the military, active.

Starting point is 02:08:33 You're talking about, um, Bob Mnigonegan and Ellen Sandler. But, but wasn't Rod Serling? Yeah, Rod Serling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's like, well, they were approached by the DOD. They basically, yeah, but they basically admit in the film that it's real, They put forth some really shit crazy, like, accounts. You know, Rods.

Starting point is 02:08:54 I mean, like, contact. Look, they're staying contact with active military at Holloman Air Force Base in in 1972 or 74, whatever, it ultimately got released. Like, who was behind that? I'm a little skeptical of it. And the reason. Skeptical of who's behind it? No.

Starting point is 02:09:13 Well, they were originally approached by Nellis Air Force Base, and they were, I think, promised that they would be shown a UFO. Well, yeah, they were given, they were given one bit of footage, which he still has to this day, and that is a launch at Vanderberg Air Force base of an Atlas Rocket. And there's

Starting point is 02:09:34 two, or, I think it's two discs that are flying around the tip of this Atlas Rocket watch doing thousands of miles across the sky. How do we get the video, James? I know. I'll play a recording from Alan about it. Yeah. But he's like if you get 25 grand this is like 2013 14 you get 25 grand i will all you know i had to put

Starting point is 02:09:57 the money into an escrow account that i go to his house and he's going to show me the footage and if it's not everything he said it was i get the money back you know and if it is and he gets the you know and then i got the money together at the last minute nope not going to do it ah and so uh he i went coincidentally multiple times since then, and I met with him in his house, and he's got the footage, and I was like, so you're just going to die with this footage, you know, and, and, um, uh, he's like, yeah, probably, you know, he said, my lord says, I have nothing to gain. I'm a wealthy man. I'm retired. Like, I'm not going to risk stepping on. I was like, well, you know, then why don't you

Starting point is 02:10:36 give it back to the government? I know, I know, I know some people that could, you know, so that's, I don't know. So I, it's always, but it's not the Holoman landing case, but it's, I know. Still, it's a pretty good, totally. Two different camera angles, according, I've talked to people that have seen it. But something inside me thinks that maybe the Air Force or the DOD decided we're going to flip into being vaguely pro UFO, at least in the ET extraterrestrial context in the early 70s, because you had the Condon Commission sort of basically just kill Blue Book. That's 66 to 69. Then nobody really talks that much about, you know, any of this stuff. and then in

Starting point is 02:11:17 Edward Condon that he was part of a panel in what year was that so this is a this is the crazy prehistory on Condon so Condon was good friends

Starting point is 02:11:29 with Oppenheimer in fact they studied it Gottengan together in the Germany in the 1930s so they had known each other forever Condon is from Alamagordo so he helped pick Los Alamos

Starting point is 02:11:39 as the spot for the Manhattan project you wrote for sure for sure fact he wrote the Los Alamos primer which every single employee of the Manhattan Project had to read upon arrival. Then six weeks into the Manhattan Project, he falls out with Leslie Groves over issues with like over compartmentalization and secrecy, which feels like this weird thing.

Starting point is 02:12:01 It's like, you know, he's so close with, he wrote actually the first English language textbook on quantum mechanics. He's just a renowned physicist. And he's so close with Oppenheimer. And it feels like this bizarre sort of story. Then he goes on to kind of to work on civilian outreach when it comes to kind of nuclear initiative. So obviously with nuclear you need nuclear physics as like an academic program, but there's some trade secrets around building the bomb that you want to keep secret. In 46, he writes the McMahon Secrecy Act.

Starting point is 02:12:30 And this is at the time the most important sort of protocol when it comes to secrecy around nuclear trade secrets. In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission gets formed. DOE. And the DOE gets formed, exactly. And that's basically, you know, Oppenheimer, Sarbacher, and they're creating, you know, special definition of nuclear material is basically anything emitting any sort of radiological properties, you know, alpha, beta, game. It's a whole different classification. It's a, it's born secret. Do you actually read the Atomic Energy Act?

Starting point is 02:13:05 If something is not a nuke, but it has radiological energy coming off it, you know, alpha, beta, decay, whatever. Same secrecy. And so it immediately falls into this sort of DOE classification system. Completely free from oversight, is that right? Completely free. Yeah, completely as compartmentalized from like, you know, civilian government. So you have, you know, NPQ. So you want to keep up being super secret. It's not TSSEI. It's an entirely different classification system. And, you know, it's all occurring in these incredibly.

Starting point is 02:13:35 sensitive areas as well because the crashes sort of mostly occur there. That's a little known secret that you are very aware of. And that language for the Atomic Energy Commission is using the McMahon Secrecy Act of 46. So Condon... So Condon is basically writing up UFO secrecy before he then debunks the entire thing. And this is, okay, it gets even deeper. I don't know how much you want me to keep going about it. I found really good color footage of Condon for the for the phenomenon. Incredible. That little smirky face he had on when he was...

Starting point is 02:14:08 It's so cynical. I was like, this guy's mind's made up. I know exactly where this is going. Well, he's, members of his staff are saying that they, you know, actively are not taking anything seriously. He's meeting with Air Force Colonel Robert Hippler at the time. And Robert Hippler is saying, please show this is a waste of money so the Air Force can stop paying for this.

Starting point is 02:14:25 And they're letters, they're transcripts that we have now between the two. And here's where it killed it for so long. Here's where it gets so weird. So there is an FBI field agent named Guy Hoddle. He's a Washington field agent. And the number one memo on the FBI's website, the number one, the most search for memo is called the Hoddle memo. And it's basically describing an Air Force technical officer coming upon a craft that has crashed and you have the crew intact. And so this guy's claiming that there are aliens inside this craft who's crashed.

Starting point is 02:15:01 and it's on the FBI's website. So you're like, what the hell is this? And it's a memo to Guy Hoddle. So Guy Hoddle is a guy who clearly is aware of the UFO issue. And Guy Hoddle is investigating Condon in the early 50s right around the time that Oppenheimer gets his cue clearance stripped. Remember, we talked about that earlier. Condon has the same sort of kangaroo court process, and he gets his cue clearance stripped as well. And so it's this crazy thing where, you know,

Starting point is 02:15:31 Maybe it actually- Guy Hoddle. What was his... So he's doing, so he's investigating Condon. Oh, I messed that detail. Oh, so he's creating a dossier in the background on Condon. And Condon is getting his cue clearance stripped. So you have a UFO knowledgeable FBI agent creating a dossier on the guy who wrote up UFO secrecy.

Starting point is 02:15:51 So he... Can't make this stuff on. Can't make it up. So Condon then doesn't have his cue clearance for the longest time till the Condon commission, 66. He's out of the government. and this guy named Lou Branscombe comes to him. Lou Branscombe is on the Jason Advisory Committee,

Starting point is 02:16:08 and he is studied under Don Menzel. Don Mansell is the number one. Skeptic. The UFO skeptic, debunker. But he's also rumored to be on the Majestic 12 or whatever, equivalent committee or whatever. Stanton Friedman was a real advocate for that. He goes, if it's not called Majestic 12,

Starting point is 02:16:25 there's a group dislike. It's a legitimate document. It establishes one that a flying saucer crashed, two, that the wreckage was recovered. covered, 1947, three, that the government has successfully kept that secret since that time, four, at a very high-level group, including, as it happens, the first four directors of Central Intelligence, First Secretary of Defense, et cetera, was set up, established to deal with. He was convinced me.

Starting point is 02:16:49 Well, those were all the guys who were like, who would be. So Menzel is this, you know, kind of, you know, incredibly smart astronomers. He's at Harvard. And he works at the, I think, Bureau of Public Standards as well. on, you know, like the time zones, like that sort of thing. You know, so also like the kind of public astronomical data at the time. So his understudy, this guy, Lou Branscombe, who's on the Jason Advisory Committee, so it's, again, deep as you get as it gets when it comes to larger, you know, American defense policy,

Starting point is 02:17:18 goes to Condon. And Condon even talks about this. This is a transcript where Condon is talking about this in an American Institute of Physics interview. And he says, hey, you know, maybe it's time you get your clearance back. and condens go. But do a little job for it. Yeah, literally. He that's like,

Starting point is 02:17:35 no reason, on that secrecy document that you wrote in the 40s. Exactly. No reason given. He's just given, he's given his cue clearance back. It was probably like,

Starting point is 02:17:44 hey, we have all this compromise on you because Guy Hoddle has it. So do your job. He comes back. He ends up the University of Colorado Boulder and he does an absolute hit job on UFO. And it was inconsistent

Starting point is 02:17:55 with the data within the body of the reports. It completely inconsistent. Exactly. Absolutely. It's like they just were to summary, basically, hoping that the media wasn't going to do their job and sift through the actual cases that they, because they determine that UFOs are real. It's not all UFOs or any UFOs real. Yeah. You know?

Starting point is 02:18:13 Yeah. It was a brilliant job, and it really, it killed. That was it. It all fell apart. And it took so long. But I want to get back to, you mentioned that Guy Hoddle's FBI memo. Another FBI memo that was extremely popular on the FBI's website. I featured it in out of the blue.

Starting point is 02:18:28 And honestly, I don't know if it's still floating around on the FBI's. FBI site, it probably is, I would imagine. But it's in, is it Eisenhower's own handwriting? No, no, no. Jay Edgar Hoover. Jay Edgar Hoover writes and you, there's multiple interpretations of this because it looks like S.A. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:47 Or it could be like a W that wasn't written quite right. They're just not quite sure. But it says, former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover was also denied access, as he stated in his own handwriting in July of 19. We must insist upon full access to discs recovered. Hoover continued. The Army grabbed it and wouldn't let the Bureau have it for cursory examination. And it's in Jay O'Gah Hoover's own handwriting. That's on this document. It says, as in take the SA or SW could be Southwest. Don't know. Case. It was a crash disc. The Army grabbed it and wouldn't

Starting point is 02:19:30 let us have it for cursory examination, and it was written like five days or six days or a week after Roswell. So that was, did you ever see that? Wow, no. It's in out of the blue, and you could and I actually put at the time in out of the blue, of course, that's changed now because that was probably late 90s or early 2000, probably late 90s. And, but that was the document that was on the FBI's own website. I remember members of, staff members of Congress at the time because I, it, God, it was right around 2000. I went around and I gave out copies of out of the blue to every single member of the House and Senate. Five hundred and thirty-five and every letter was personally addressed to their chief of staff. So that was like a lot of work, right? So I wrote like a kind of a template letter

Starting point is 02:20:17 and then I had five hundred and thirty-five and at the time it was VHS tapes. That's what they used. And I had five hundred and thirty-five VHS tapes that I gave out to every member of the House and Senate. Oh, my God. And one of the documents that they were most impressed, I had a conversation with some of the staff members at the time, but they're like, that FBI memo. Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, my God, it's right there in black and white, you know, if we could just figure out. And apparently at the time, probably changed since then, but it was one of the most popular memos are documents on the FBI's website that was downloaded all the time. That's what I mean you said, Guy Hoddle. Yeah. I don't remember that. It's so fast. It is, and it is interesting because you mentioned maybe there is something more to the Majestic 12 documents. You now have Dulles' diary coming out, and it says on the day that, you know, Eisenhower was supposedly sort of briefed on this stuff. It says, you know, meeting with the president or whatever. So this stuff, it comports in such a, you know, kind of be a lot more coming out too.

Starting point is 02:21:12 Very specific way. You think so. Well, because people are digging for it now. Yeah, people are digging. You know what I mean? It's starting to come out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, like, I remember watching Lou Elizondo on 60 Minutes, and, you know, there was this sort of incredulous look on the interviewer's face.

Starting point is 02:21:27 and Lou's like, look, I'm not telling you they're real. Yeah. The government just admitted that they're real. The government has already stated for the record that they're real. I'm not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that. The phenomenon is real. That's done.

Starting point is 02:21:41 We're moving beyond that, you know? And that happened. That's why I said earlier on the show. It's like you're not putting the genie back in the bottle. Like, you can't make that statement. The implications are so profound that if all that is true for all of humanity, there's no way we're just going to sit on the sidelines and just ignore. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 02:21:59 Like keep, keep thinking. I remember, I posted something on X, Twitter, X, I don't know, maybe it was like a year ago or something. People were really discouraged because, you know, David Crush comes forward and says all the things he says and it's amazing Grasional hearings. And then it seemed like we almost kind of went backwards a little bit. Like they did a hit job on Mr. Grush.

Starting point is 02:22:19 Yeah. There were some denials. And, you know, and I said, everybody calm down because people were really freaking out. I said, I've seen this pattern, you know, increments, nothing like what I've seen in 2017 now, but hey, I've seen efforts to get the stuff out, and we are making progress. There's no question about it. I mean, I remember in 2007, 2008, there was a release of previously classified documents of the British government, the French

Starting point is 02:22:43 government that started releasing stuff. There's stuff coming out. There's press conferences, there's things happening. And now, that has escalated between 2017 and today, 2024, exponentially, in my opinion. And I just tell everybody, like, you know, those are feeling discouraged. Don't worry. We take one step back, two steps forward. There's going to be pretty significant progress, in my opinion, in the next five years. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't, like, at least a disclosure in the sense that,

Starting point is 02:23:17 and I've talked to government insiders about this, the plan is, when I say full disclosure, they say they're not going to give up the technology. That's not going to happen. They might be an admission of having some, but that there is definitive proof that we're not alone. Now that, I'm told by 2030, am I going to sit there and make a prediction? That's absolutely fact.

Starting point is 02:23:36 No, I'm not. If I had to guess one way or the other, did you? Well, I bet Mick West $10,000. Oh, you do? Okay. Which is such a stupid bet if you were to have, like I should have a hundred thousand to one odd, but I just bet one to one.

Starting point is 02:23:49 Oh, you did? Yeah, because I just, I'd believe that. I believe what you're saying. You got to put the money in a joint account? We, like, wrote up something. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:59 I don't, I don't remember if it was signed or gentleman's thing. Talk to the Mick West's out there, you know, because there's people. I'm going to be under attack. Everybody's under attack. Fair enough. I've seen this before, you know. Yeah. Nothing new.

Starting point is 02:24:10 In fact, there's a lot less of you today than there was when I first started in the 90s. Everybody attacking me. I think it's good, and it causes us to, like, raise our game or whatever. I think it's fine. Hey, look, I don't blame them. I get it. You know,

Starting point is 02:24:22 but it's like, at the issue, I just debated Michael Schumer. You know, Michael Shermermer. Oh, I debated him on Larry King Lime? Oh,

Starting point is 02:24:28 there you go. If UFOs, when I use the word if, we're buzzing around in our airspace, who would be best equipped to know about it? Well, our government, perhaps. Military?

Starting point is 02:24:39 Maybe. So we've got high striking military officials in the world telling us right now that these things are real. We've got generals, we've got generals, we've got presidents, governors. But it's always,

Starting point is 02:24:49 it's the same thing. I laugh about it too. You have, I'd love to hear your experience because it's like always like you have this data set that they don't have. Yeah. And you're like, look into that, like look at this. But you can't right now because we're in a live debate setting. And they always say, oh, I'll look into that. And then they have these like armchair smug like.

Starting point is 02:25:05 Oh, God. It just irritates the heck out of me. Yeah, it's irritating. I'll see this little smirk on their face and they're like, that's all anecdotal evidence. I'm like, radar, photographs, visual confirmation ground radar, air to air radar. are like, that's not anecdotal. I'm sorry, okay, I might not have the disc in my possession. Maybe they do.

Starting point is 02:25:26 But, you know, that's really compelling evidence. That's like all the sensory data that the military has. Yeah, well, like in the case of-a-adnecdotal. It's not anecdotal. In the case of Nimitz, it's like multisensory. At the very least, it's fleer, which we have. But it's multisensory. You have 11 or 12 witnesses.

Starting point is 02:25:44 You have three days, you know. Four people in planes put their eyes on it. Four people in the planes put their eyes on it. and like dog fight. There was like a dog fight with it or whatever. And so to say that that's just your eyes playing tricks on you, no, you either have to figure out that we have next level spoofing tech.

Starting point is 02:26:02 Like that's on you then. It's either that or the thing is real and worthy investigation. Look at the history of it. I did in the phenomenon. One of the things I really wanted to do was settle that debate once and for all. There is irrefutable, in my opinion, and the opinion of anyone that looked into this,

Starting point is 02:26:19 irrefutable evidence, irrefutable data, that there's a technology that exhibits characteristics that are light years advanced, you know, than things we had back in the 40s and even today. And what I did at the end of the film was I would put testimony from people that had sightings in the 50s, 60s, 70s, all the way up to 2004. And all the pilots are describing pretty much the same damn thing, had the ability to hover and accelerate from a stand. concealed out of sight in the blink of an eye, right angle turns at high speed, without any sonic boom, without any wake, without any real visible means of propulsion, you know, all these things.

Starting point is 02:26:58 Yeah. Those are, that's observed. That's 75 years easily, I can prove that in corner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What exactly is it? It doesn't appear to be us. It's not the Russians, not the Chinese. Guess what?

Starting point is 02:27:09 I went to Russia in the 90s. I interviewed generals in Russia. I interviewed military personnel. I interviewed civilians, witnesses in Russia. I'd done the same in China. Apparently in Russia, they would use. use nuclear material to bait UFOs. I got to Russia. I remember sitting down with this admiral and he said to my interpreter, he's like, look, if you're here to ask me whether or not the

Starting point is 02:27:33 phenomenon is real, the doors right over there, I'm here to talk about the implications and opening the doors to a possible communication with international communication, like an exchange of information on international levels, what they're interested in. And in China, I mean, I've observed technology. It's, it's global. And the Americans is like, oh, well, it could be the Russians. I was like, hear that. Oh, it could be the, no, it's not the Russians. Yeah. How do I know? I've been there. Right. Yeah. They're shrug of their shoulders just like we are. A hundred percent. You know? And this stuff, I mean, you really have to go back to like 40s and 50s around our most precious nuclear assets. Yeah. There's no shot. Like now, yeah, we might have like, you know.

Starting point is 02:28:15 I have to hand it. Drones that are flying, you know, really fast. And of course we've got things that are misidentified as UFO. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But at that time, we just didn't have anything close. You didn't have DARPA was, I think, the early 70s or like late 60s. There's just no chance. We had like the XP80.

Starting point is 02:28:31 Like, I'm just thinking about our most advanced, you know, flight tech at the time. And it just wasn't even close. Well, okay, this is really kind of sort of a natural, say, realization. I'd heard about the connection with nukes and UFOs, kind of a little bit, you know, brush the surface, whatever. When I met with Senator Reid, and it was funny because, you know, he sat down, and I think they said he's got like 46 minutes, you know, and then he's out of here, you know, very, you know.

Starting point is 02:29:04 So I got down to, like, having like three minutes left of his presence. And I said, oh, God, I forgot to get a walk and talk. I need a B-roll shot and didn't have time. time for us like, oh, and the security details looking at me and make it quick kind of thing. Like, okay, let's hit this, let's hit this hallway. You know, we hit the hallway. I'm like, well, I'm walking with the former Senate majority leader who spearheaded this whole program.

Starting point is 02:29:27 I should ask him a question. So I said, hey, what was, and the audio wasn't great because I didn't, I don't think we were miced at that point. I said, hey, what was one of the more, I think I said, astonishing aspects that you uncovered during atyp and during your efforts to, you know, investigate the stuff. And like immediately without a pause, he goes, the fact that they're shutting down our nooks, basically. Yeah, yeah. That's when I got in touch with Robert Hastings, and I was like, I got to cover that in the film.

Starting point is 02:29:54 So I went back and I remember being... That's such a powerful part of it. Such a powerful thing. And I remember in Hastings, thank you, Robert. He was amazing. The level of access, he gave me all of his material. He was like, go, you know, and gave me all of his material. And I think I compensated him by helping him build a fence in his yard in Creston,

Starting point is 02:30:13 Valley. It's really cool. Any case, my buddy, Lance Munja, was in the editor room with me and we're listening to all these different accounts of sightings in and around like New Mexico and other surrounding states. And he goes, James, why don't you get a map out? Let's put the map on the wall. We're going to put a little pin where all these are happening. So we did that. And I was like, thinking to myself at the time, like, who do you want to get a map for, you know? But he was dead right. So every time we get to an archive interview or a case, in goes the pin. Nuclear.

Starting point is 02:30:47 The proximity to Trinity's site was unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it was like, here's Trinity site. It was like, ding, ding, ding, dig, dig, ding, ding, dig, tick, ding. The nuclear connection shows up if, if, absolutely. I mean, like, it's like the Nimitz, you know, carrier strike group or whatever. Isn't that a nuclear? Well, most, most, it's, can't say for sure.

Starting point is 02:31:09 Oh, got you. It's classified, but it's most of these things. have nuclear, have tactical nukes on board. So I don't know. Tactical nukes on board. Oh, yeah. Is it nuclear power too? And I might be.

Starting point is 02:31:20 I don't know. But I'm pretty sure they have. Yeah, because they can stay out to see it forever. So there's that. There's a town in Japan. Oh, it has nooks on. There's a town in Japan called Lino, which is in Fukushima, which is famous for its 2011 spill.

Starting point is 02:31:34 And for a nuclear spill, they have a civilian nuclear grid. Is that when that happened? 2011, yeah. And they have a. town dedicated to UFOs where like, you know, a very high percentage of the residents believe in UFOs. You have a museum around UFO. Vice made a documentary on this in like 2020. So you have,

Starting point is 02:31:55 this thing in the middle of the air in, to come down. Yeah, you have Baroloche is a nuclear energy grid. And UFO's buzzing over the air. Tina 95, I believe, is a famous UFO case around there. So it's one of these things where, you know, I always, this is how I take skeptics down the rabbit holes. You go, Robert Hastings, UFOs, and nukes, or the phenomena, nuclear connection section.

Starting point is 02:32:28 You know, one of those things, because it's this beautiful, like, it's like the most credible witnesses. Super compelling. It's super compelling. They're taking out the NSA uses the top cryptography for all of the, you know, nuclear armament and disarmament. And the idea that they're just like taking down silos is absolutely insane. In fact, in 2010, Wired wrote an article about F.E. Warren, where there was an outage in F.E. Warren. It was this big story

Starting point is 02:32:53 just because, you know, one of our nuclear sites went down, the power went out for an hour. And Hastings, after he had retired and written UFOs and nukes back channeled to the missileers there. And they were like, yeah, there was a tick-tack flying around. That's what caused the outage. So. Well, I got a story from my not. Well, I won't go into. too much detail, but Minot Air Force Base. Wherever they come from, somebody is in Minot

Starting point is 02:33:21 shutting off the missiles. So there was a guy, we started researching another reason why we got what footage was that interview. Yeah, he did a project called like Project Sign or Project Archive Sign.

Starting point is 02:33:40 Overall effort to study Saucers was called Project Sign with headquarters at Wright Field in Ohio. In 1949, sign personnel wrote a top secret report, concluding UFOs were extraterrestrial craft. When the report made it to the desk of Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg, though, he rejected it and ordered all copies burned. This rejection from the top was, in the view of many, the death knell for objective study of UFOs. And he went around in the 80s, not only of who's as early as the 70s, but definitely the 80s and 90s, and he interviewed all these critical witnesses from like the 50s

Starting point is 02:34:16 and 60s that were in their twilight years. And thank God, because he got interviews that, quite frankly, nobody even knew existed. That's why when you get, like, in a story, like Richard Dolan, who watched the phenomenon, he goes, God, I never knew that archive footage existed. There was an interview with so-and-so or this person, you know.

Starting point is 02:34:37 And I got in touch with this guy, and he's to this day is sitting on interviews from, well, the interviews were in the 80s, but the incidents occurred at Minor Air Force Base, and I want to say in 66, or it could have been 68, they were separated by miles, right? And at night, they had to, when they were working on these things, they would have one guy down in the hole, and then another guy, armed guard, standing there, armed guard, protecting while the guy's down there with the silo and working on it. And it was like 2 o'clock in the morning or 3 o'clock in the morning, and a UFO came over the base.

Starting point is 02:35:15 And apparently was like hovering and the guy was screaming. Like, it's landing. It's a UFO. It's like an orange, you know, orb coming down landing. And the guy in the airplane, as I said, was a guy in an airplane flying over the base and he could see the UFO landing. He interviewed that guy, the pilot. He interviewed the guy that was, you know, the armed guard that was watching it all land. Apparently is one of the most spectacular incidences and unprecedented.

Starting point is 02:35:38 interviews, and you reminded me when you started talking about that stuff, I need to go back and revisit and do a piece on that because that is testimony that the world hasn't seen, and I know the individual has, you go to, yeah, I'm going to do some plans, we've got some plans with it, but I managed to get some footage out, and I credited the guy in the phenomenon, and I'm sorry, I can't remember more details on that, but apparently it's the most dramatic case and testimony ever heard, ever given about a UFO and the nukes. What's his name? Mario, is it Mario?

Starting point is 02:36:14 It'll come to me. It's in the credits of the phenomenon. His name will come to me. And when it does, I'll let you know. You could put it over the screen here because I'm struggling to remember the guy. But it's so, you know, another interesting aspect of the UFO's and nukes thing that I almost hesitate to say because I think maybe in the minds of certain people who are, you know, not capable of understanding this possibility that sort of marginalizes the story a little bit

Starting point is 02:36:41 is that I think a high percentage of people who've had close encounters of the crafts themselves around nuclear bases have actually had abduction cases as well. So I was on the phone with Hastings and it was like, I was like, you know, what percentage of the, because he, he wrote a follow-up, it would be beyond terrifying. He wrote a follow-up book called Confessions with Bob Jacobs. Bob Jacobs was the photo instrumentation specialist. Andenburg. Loved him. He sees the UFO circling around, you know, the Atlas 5 dummy missile filmed it.

Starting point is 02:37:13 Yes. And then the Air Force Office of Special Investigations got. He's so credible. He's awesome. He's so credible. He's so credible. You see there's a message he gave Kirkpatrick? No, what do you say? He could be a little hot-headed sometimes if he didn't mince words.

Starting point is 02:37:26 I posted all my Twitter again. It was really funny. Okay, wait. Yeah. Dave Grush told me he's going back to D.C. time in the next week or so. And I said, Dave, please do something for me. Tell Dr. Kirkpatrick, the Dr. Jacobs says, fuck you. That's unbelievable.

Starting point is 02:37:45 He was so upset because apparently he went and met with him. He gave him all the documents and the case that happened and told him where the footage was or where it should have been and it was taken. And I guess Kirkpatrick just completely dismissed all of that. He's been traumatized because he originally... Dr. Jacobs was, I've never seen. He's so articulate and he's so funny and he's so... I just love that.

Starting point is 02:38:04 guy. Well, they took him out as a photo instrumentation specialist, and then they said that he never worked at the Air Force, which is ridiculous. He had all the documentation and I covered it in out of the blue. Exactly. And then his former, his former boss came out later and was like, no, this guy worked for me. But they tried to erase him. Oh, my God. It's really, it's really messed up. And this is time and time again, Bob Hastings, the F.E. Warren guys that I mentioned, the Missileers, their careers were really hit after this. You, and I know what I saw, you talk. about Penniston, you know, not making it to as high of a rink as he probably could have because he, you know, was a witness for the renters.

Starting point is 02:38:42 It wasn't a career-enhancing move at all. Not at all. So, but the really crazy sub-thread that I think people aren't that word. Thank God. He's amazing. He's a legend. It's a total legend. I know.

Starting point is 02:38:54 But this book that he wrote after UFOs and nukes is called Confessions, and it's about his own. His personal experiences. Abduction cases. He put his reputation on the line for that one. I commend him for that. I agree. Because that's, that's a risky move. It is. And it's, it's tough, I think, for people to realize that, I mean, that guy's so detail-oriented. He emailed me. I never met him. He emailed me after I did my piece with Grush. And he was like, actually, it was like a lower percentage of miscelliers that I interviewed. It was like 12 out of the 167. But I loved it. I mean, he wrote me this long thing. Wow, super detail. Yeah. And I was like, thank you. I was like, I should make a correction. You know, but it was like, it's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like extremely semantic thing, but I was like, oh, this guy's legit. And we talked and I could tell

Starting point is 02:39:38 that he was extremely detail-oriented. And then there's this bizarre kind of follow-up angle of like, but, you know, I've also had these experiences myself, which by the way, in the worldview where they're showing up on these, you know, nuclear bases, which are incredibly protected for everything else. Of course, they can show up in your bedroom, too, you know, and they can track the people themselves. And that's a weird thing to admit. I've never had those experiences, but I've met very credible people that I have tremendous respect for that with nothing to gain and everything to lose that I have to say, I was like, I believe them. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:40:16 I've never covered that aspect of the phenomenon in any of my films. Yes. And I've had people criticize me for that. Yeah. But it's like, I feel like baby steps. I feel like you can't go too far because I know my own progression has taken decades. Like, you know, I can, like I said, I'm going to. nuts and bolts kind of guy. I need

Starting point is 02:40:34 that's entering into a realm that there's even less evidence for, right? Sure. Then some of these other cases. Although you do have like implants a lot of people. Well, I'll tell you biological changes and I met with Bob, not Bob

Starting point is 02:40:51 Jacob, sorry, I'm looking at his face right now. He's written the book, he's written a number of books on so-called alien abductions. David Jacobs? No. Yeah, sorry. Leslie Kane, was with Ralph Blumenthal? No, he came to, he attended this event. In any case, I met with him, and he said, he ended up dying like a year,

Starting point is 02:41:13 Bud Hopkins. He ended up dying like a year or two later of cancer, and he was all excited. I was in New York City to see Leslie. We were putting on this event together, and he's like, oh, I want to have coffee with you. I want to show you something. And he was all excited. And I'm not really that into the whole, I'm not into it. I just haven't really looked in, you know, professionally.

Starting point is 02:41:33 for any of my films, because I felt like it's a slippery slope. But in any case, he had a number of so-called experiencers from all around the world, and he said, I want you to draw what you see on the inside of the ship on the table. And they all drew the same symbol on the wall. What was the symbol? I can't remember, but it was like... Oh, you can't do that to be a minute.

Starting point is 02:41:56 Sorry, it was like almost 20 years ago, but I remember looking at the different variations of this. Clearly, they're looking at the same damage. thing. Do you know what it? How the hell? No, I'd no idea what it had to take it to a symbol. He was, look, we had a 15-minute thing, and he was super excited about it, and he had drawings from all these different people. We have to figure it out. None of them knew each other. Well, I don't know. Again, this is not my area of expertise, and I don't really look, I don't not look into them. I'll listen, and again, I suspend, but that was the most compelling evidence for alleged

Starting point is 02:42:27 abduction cases because they were all drawing a slightly different variation of that. Yes, no question. He was like, what do you see? And they were drawing it. Yeah. And it was like, oh, my God. No, that's pretty. This is impossible.

Starting point is 02:42:40 Yeah. How is this even possible? And he was all excited about it. Yeah. So, anyway, that's my two cents on the alien abduction aspect. Well, you have, you know, Gary Nolan is a Stanford professor. He's, you know, claimed not an abduction, but, you know, aliens at the foot of his bed. I would have been probably six or seven because it was in our first house that we, my parents had bought in when

Starting point is 02:43:03 of little men in the bedroom, you know, I mean, I was awake. I knew they were there. I could see them. Room and stuff. And so you have, you know, some extremely credible people who've done very real things outside of UFOs and aliens or whatever. Like he's a Nobel nominee every year. And he said that. What a risky thing to report on.

Starting point is 02:43:28 Why would anybody do that to themselves knowing it's like, you know, Well, that's what I think. I think the dirty secret is that everybody has something autobiographical and that causes them to look into this or, you know, and I think that that should be owned and it shouldn't be a source of shame or, you know. You know, I talked last night because I've had my own experiences, you know, and I just said, you know, I'd rather just not. Yeah. And the reason is my reasoning behind it is it really has nothing to do with where my position stands today. With the phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:44:04 And I think that people might interpret that as like, oh, well, he's clearly jaded because he saw something. Or he thinks he saw something. I have no interest in proving. Well, it also would be weird if you hadn't. I think it'd be weirder if you hadn't seen anything. So it's like you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. But if you do, if you do, it's like, yeah.

Starting point is 02:44:23 I base my beliefs today on my interaction with witnesses, my research, you know, I mean, I remember going to the National Archives, and that's a whole story, but coming up all those original documents from Project Blue Book files that were so amazing, because it was right there in black and white, some color, of the documentation of one of my favorite landing cases. It was like, the footprints of the alien was documented, and then a diagram by the first military officer on the scene, like, oh, my God, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:44:58 Like, it's right there. Yeah, yeah. And so that is why that in all the other cases, all around the world that I've investigated, That is why I believe what I believe today. And I feel like if I start talking about some personal experience that I had, you know, people are like, oh, well. You don't want to start there. I don't really, you know what I mean?

Starting point is 02:45:14 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get that. I don't think it's going to help me any bit. And it doesn't really matter. No. Well, I don't know. I'll talk about it. Yeah, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:45:24 I thought James was a freak. No, I know he is. No, no, I think quite the contrary. But you, I think, sold some UFO footage to Logan Paul. Is that true? I didn't sell it to him. No, here's what happened. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:45:40 So, this is so funny. Yeah. He went on his podcast. Yeah, well, okay. In the 90s, on my first documentary, I was working with this guy, Chuck Clark. Chuck Clark, a self-described military watchdog, says FBI agents and other lawmen used a sealed search warrant to seize his property,

Starting point is 02:46:04 including computers and personal files. Bob Lazar was just exploding in the headlines. It was all over the place. It was in the 90s. I think he came, met public in 89. But in any case, it was in the early mid-90s, whatever. And everyone's talking about Bob Lazar and his tape. It was exploding.

Starting point is 02:46:20 I mean, it was all over the news. Everybody's, you know, because, wow, if it's true, you know, really? And Chuck Clark, who had written a handbook on Area 51 S4 guide. And he was an amateur astronomer. and he was out under the night sky quite often in and around the base or not in the classified area. He had figured out a way that there were a handful of vantage points on these specific mountain ranges where he could spy on the base, and he would take people out there and stuff. And he had a sighting of something that exhibited technology that was just, you know, light years,

Starting point is 02:46:58 like ding-d-ding. So I was interviewing for that, and I was going back and forth during that period of production. and became friends and hung out with him on numerous occasions. And one day he called me up. And he said, I'll give you the truncated version, but he said, James, I got something you need to see. And I was like, oh, okay, well, I'm like 12 hours away at least. He said, well, can you tell me anything more?

Starting point is 02:47:23 He goes, well, I can tell you that when you see it, your jaw is going to hit the floor. I said, that good. He goes, that good. Cancel my plans, jump from my car. Boom. went straight out to the alien or Rachel Nevada. Going to, he had a trailer and he popped in this VHS tape

Starting point is 02:47:42 and there were two guys on a typical road trip. I know the type. I've done it myself. You know, they're videotaping each other, goofing off, they're listening to music, they're driving down the long road, super remote desert highway. They're goofing off and the little alien. And then all of a sudden, they're super serious.

Starting point is 02:48:01 they're inside a parked car, it's dusk, and, you know, they're arguing in the car, like one of them's, like, the object is either over them or coming towards them and almost over them, and they're yelling back and forth in the car, and it sounds to me like they're trying to crawl under the seat, is what it sounded like at the time. Then the dashboard lights up, and I could see all these shadows eerily moving around, So the source of light is moving because it's causing the shadows on the inside of the car to move weird. And then one of the kids says, I'm getting out. And the guy's telling him not to get out.

Starting point is 02:48:40 And he's like, I'm getting out anyway, and he gets out. And then the next thing you see is a orange disc-shaped thing, just wobbling in like, like it looks like magic. The way it just kind of just hovers there like this. And I tell you, man, I was like, holy shit. Where did you get this? So I was telling this story to Logan Paul. He's like, yeah, yeah, the footage that disappears. I said, well, you know, this guy, Chuck Clark apparently still has it.

Starting point is 02:49:08 But it had been 26 years of a VHS tape playing over and over and over and over and over. It's going to be seriously degraded. Anybody knows half-inch VHS playing over those heads for 25 years? It's not going to look great. It's going to have dropout galore. I mean, you know. So I guess. At the time, at that time, if this guy's so pissed off with me now, you won't even talk to me, but whatever.

Starting point is 02:49:35 Sorry. You know, I feel like the one that he should be pissed off with, Chuck Clark for not sharing that footage when he could have, right? Yeah. Wait, who's pissed off of you? He's a private investigator. I can't remember his name off the top. In any case, I wouldn't say it anyway because he's upset. But he had found Chuck Clark, and he was in touch with Chuck Clark.

Starting point is 02:49:52 I said, do not mention my name because if you do, Chuck Clark's not going to meet with you. Because Chuck Clark is pissed off of me because I asked him every two years. for 15 years to get that tape. He said, you ask me again. I'm never speaking to you. And I asked them again because I had somebody to come along that was willing to give 30 grand for it. So I said, I'll ask.

Starting point is 02:50:10 And I asked him, that was that. He cut me loose. Never going to talk to me again. And he's a man of his word. So I told him, I said, keep my name out of it. And so this guy's going to go out and Chuck says, yeah, I still have the VHS tape. I'll show it to you.

Starting point is 02:50:23 And this is a couple years ago. Yeah, about a couple years ago. So I'm telling, like, after the Logan Poll interview, you know, they shut the cameras off and we're talking. And Logan, I said, well, you know, the guy's going to go, I got this guy. He's just contact me. I never met him. But he's going to go meet with Chuck Clark. And Logan's like, well, where is he?

Starting point is 02:50:41 I said, he's in Arizona somewhere, remote Arizona. So Logan's like, I'm going to meet. I'm going to meet with him. I said, do whatever you got to do to get that footage, you know, like, that's been sitting way too long. So I guess he bought, like, I want to say about $100,000 in cash, I think. I think it was $100,000. It was at least 50. It might have been honored.

Starting point is 02:50:59 And I could ask him. And he gets out there and he's got a couple of button cams on his thing. And, you know, the tape was pretty degraded, you know. And but he filmed, you know, could I see it again, you know, and repositioned itself a little bit, played a bunch of times. And I guess he offered him 100 grand, but he wouldn't take it. And anyway, that whole story broke. And that wouldn't take 100 grand for evidently he's not going to sell it

Starting point is 02:51:30 it's not going to happen and so here's the real kicker what really gets me so I don't know what Logan's going to do with the footage but Logan said it's pretty he's like you could see it wobbling but it's really degraded I mean again VHS tapes don't last you know should have been digitized or put on it the footage is compelling not convincing it's from 1995 the tape had been worn down. It's been played probably over 100 times and so the quality is not great and

Starting point is 02:52:04 everything about it screams bullshit which is the true reason I haven't released it. But before that happened and right around that time, this really frustrates me, I contacted George Knapp and I said

Starting point is 02:52:20 George, as I was wrapping up the phenomenon, I said, George, you have got to go and get this tape from Chuck Clark or at least see it. George's like, oh, yeah, I know Chuck Clark. I did a whole story on him for the news. Local news station.

Starting point is 02:52:34 His place was ransacked by the feds. You know, they came in and I don't know what he had. Maybe he had photographs of planes and hangers. I don't know, but he had that, or maybe it was that footage. Don't know. I said, you got to go. You got to go. And I kept telling him, like, I can't do it.

Starting point is 02:52:51 But I'm telling you, I've seen this tape and it's amazing. And like, you got to go fine. He's like, I'll get on it. And I kept pushing George. And I like George Knapp a lot. and I have tremendous respect for him. And I kept pushing him. And one day he goes, listen, man, you're not my damn wife.

Starting point is 02:53:05 Or, you know, my girl would stop needling me. Just stop. I said, he goes, I'm really big. I said, okay, sorry. I'm just trying to hand you what I feel is the best. You've done all this reporting for all these years on Area 51 and Bob Lazar and UFOs at Area 51. And I saw the best footage I've ever seen in my life out there.

Starting point is 02:53:24 So, George Knapp doesn't event. doesn't go out there. The guy that gave it to Chuck Clark was a TV producer in Los Angeles, and he had it on like a beta SP tape, a master, I'm told. From that master, he gave a copy to Chuck Clark, right? So as soon as the private eye and got the name of that individual, we went after him, and he had just died. So if we would have gotten there, just if George would have gotten there, just a month or two earlier, we probably would have had the master on Beta SP. Oh, man. So we contacted the guy's network where he worked.

Starting point is 02:54:07 Then we contacted his son, got in touch with his son, and his son couldn't be bothered. He's like, my dad just died. You're talking to me about a UFO tape? Yeah. You know what I mean? And so it might be ripe. I can't really do it because Chuck doesn't like me. And now this new private eye, because of Logan Paul going out with cameras he found out,

Starting point is 02:54:24 and now he's pissed at me, you know, and I'm like, you know what, all's fair. Like, as far as I'm concerned, Chuck Clark's the one that kept this really compelling data hidden for 20. I even said to Chuck, just put me in touch with the guy that gave it to you and let me talk to them. Yeah. And he wouldn't do it. So Chuck was kind of in on it. So anyway, I went to Area 51 just like last year. And I went to the little alien and I talked to some people there that had been there.

Starting point is 02:54:48 Uh-huh. I've known me since I was in my 20s. Uh-huh. And she was like, you think we're that stupid? You don't think we would have made a digital copy and looked at me? Oh, wow. Give me your number. Let me talk.

Starting point is 02:55:00 And she's like, there's reasons why that tape hasn't been leaked like that. I said, well, can you tell me? She's like, no. But you think we're stupid? You don't think we made a digital copy and looked at me like that? Well, there you go. And then she just walked away. I was like, so.

Starting point is 02:55:16 Wow. So, you know, Logan Paul's like, you know, this is seriously eroded and chewed up. And, yeah, he's, it's. So why won't he put the video? If, like, he has something. Well, it's risky for him because Chuck said, I'll sue you. Oh, he did. For one. And two, it's not, you know, it's not crystal clear. It's, I saw it when it was a week old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I saw it was pretty damn impressive.

Starting point is 02:55:40 Yeah, and this is a button cam version. Yeah, it's a button cam of a screen. It's like double corrupted. Yeah, he tried to buy it. He tried to get it. He said he had a stack and nope, wasn't having it. So the unfortunate thing is the guy that gave him that I'm sure there was a master tape, Hopefully, when they cleared out as cubby holes at this news organization, they didn't throw everything away. Yeah. Hopefully, maybe his son got it. But, man, I've been chasing it since I was your age. You know, I mean, younger than you.

Starting point is 02:56:06 Yeah. Like, I've done everything I can. It's not like I'm giving up or anything. Yeah. I'm busy making the program. I got to go back to Brazil. It'll come back around. I got to go back to Brazil.

Starting point is 02:56:15 I got to update that film. Yeah. I got an event to the National Press Club I want to do. Yeah. I want to film that. It's going to be a modern-day version of I know what I saw. Like, I wish I could clone myself. There's only so much you can do, and I'm raising the 10-year-old.

Starting point is 02:56:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the most important thing. Yeah, most important thing. And I'm dealing with, like, nightmare scenarios with all these different distributors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesus. Not making it easy off here, you know. No, no, no.

Starting point is 02:56:43 Well, hey, you're doing a hard, hard thing. You're getting a very important core truth out, and it would make sense. You signed up for a hard, you know, it's a hard long road. Well, at least I'm getting laughed out a little lessly. Oh, yeah. Because I've been getting laughed at. I've gotten laughed at my whole, hey, think about it. My whole adult life.

Starting point is 02:57:01 That's amazing. I mean, I mean, that. That's a lot of laughter. That's a lot of laughter. But you should be laughing now because you really, I think, have been vindicated and proven right on a lot of stuff. And you were there before it was popular. Well, we have, you and I are indebted, like, you know, we've got people like

Starting point is 02:57:17 Stanton Friedman and Dr. Heineck and Kehoe and. and all these people that came before us that were advocates and pushing, and they really had it tough. Like, my God. Yeah. Right? I mean, they never got to see

Starting point is 02:57:33 what we're seeing right now. Yeah. I'm so fortunate as someone who's been doing this as long as I have. Yeah. To see what's happening today, it's fast. I was, when I watched those congressional hearings, I'm not kidding, man.

Starting point is 02:57:43 Tears just flowing down my face for an hour and a half straight. Yeah. I was like, it's coming out. Yeah. Look, yeah, we're not having the, you know, the progress that we'd like to see is having as quickly, I say be patient, you guys. I was in that room.

Starting point is 02:57:57 You should have been in that room for me. I had a conflicting. I had a conflicting thing, and I just simply couldn't be there. There's something going on for a filming. I was delivering something. I can't remember. I was like, if I killed myself,

Starting point is 02:58:09 I could have made it, but it was like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I just say, you know, be patient. There's, we're going to see significant pushback. Lou Elizondas book. There's other documentaries. There's the program coming out.

Starting point is 02:58:21 I don't see, quite honestly, how the program is not going to make waves. Yeah. I think we put together a pretty compelling case. Oh, it's incredible. Right? Awesome. Like, I think it will make waves. And, and, and I pushed it. I wanted a good, strong base hit because I knew that I couldn't take the time that it took to produce the phenomenon. I mean, the phenomenon, in my opinion, I hate to toot my own horn. It was a group effort, but it's kind of a masterpiece in terms of like the production qualities and the B-roll and the archive footage that we got and stitching the whole story together. I worked with this guy,

Starting point is 02:58:51 Mark Beres. He's a really brilliant writer. He was, really instrumental in helping, like, stitch it all together in a very comprehensive way. And I'm very proud of that film, and I'll always be proud of that film. But this is timely. Things are moving quickly right now. And I wanted to get the program out as quickly as I could because it's relevant now. Yes. And a lot of the people that are risking themselves coming forward and meeting with me, they want it out now because they want to keep that momentum.

Starting point is 02:59:15 And so, but I'm still very proud of it. I think it's a very good, you know what I mean? By the assertion that the U.S. government has spaceships of non-human intelligence in their presence. That kind of revelation unearths people's beliefs. I would go to jail to say things that I've been exposed to in the program. No, Gary McKinnon, who I've known about for a while, a story that's out there, this hacker from the UK, who is hacking into like American military database,

Starting point is 02:59:54 biggest hack in U.S. history, he's getting into NSA archives. NSA, DIA, CIA, CIA, NASA, you name it. And a page comes up, and it's this list of 11 or 12 off-planet officers. After a year he got paid to it. And I found an Excel spreadsheet that was actually called, or at least in the heading of the column, it said non-terrestrial officers. That's like, my, my God, that's just...

Starting point is 03:00:19 Non-terrestrial officers. With ranks and names. And there are a separate sheet with tabs for material transfer between ships. And these were, I mean, I don't remember the names now. That's a long time ago. A lot of people give me a hard time for not remembering the names and stuff, but it was a long time ago. That's crazy. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:00:41 So that's always stuck in my head. Because in my mind in the UFO world, you have people like you doing very hard-headed nuts and bolts investigations. Yeah. And then you have the kooky, like, secret space program, like really weird stuff. like Operation Solar Warden and, you know, 20 and back, you get your, you know, you go to somewhere. And, like, I've always been super skeptical of that. But when I hear that this guy, Gary McKinnon, who's in the program, you interview, who just seems so normal, incredible.

Starting point is 03:01:11 Right? Yeah, just like, actually like a cool guy. Yeah. You know, he's clearly made a big mistake. But, but outside of, you know, it's a big issue. Oh, God, that talking head song, what have I done? Yeah. Remember one of my favorite lines of the movie?

Starting point is 03:01:25 Oh, that's what that talking head's like, oh, God, what if I died? Yeah, that's right. He says that. When he got caught, that's what he said. That's funny. And he has a guitar in the back. He's kind of like a funny guy. So, you know, he just doesn't see.

Starting point is 03:01:37 He seemed like in over his head, but not a liar at all. No, God, no. And so what is, how do you interpret that? You see a page of off planet? Extratrestrial officers. Is it extraterrestrial or off planet? Extrrestrial, I'm pretty sure. Okay.

Starting point is 03:01:53 But you could Google that, but I'm pretty sure it's extradrestrial. Yeah, because I remember going crazy. Well, extraterrestrial, could that be, because you're off planet, would that be? Right. Astronauts? Would that be extra trust? But officer? No, an astronaut's not an officer. A list of extraterrestrial officers. You just astronaut. You wouldn't say officer. Right. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, that was really weird. I mean, gosh, and that was like... How do we get that list? I know. God, can you imagine? What, like, what is that? And then the craft. The craft is very similar to what crashed in In, God, that was 96.

Starting point is 03:02:29 That's when the UFO crashed in Brazil. But it was a cylindrical shape, metallic object that. No rivets, no... Yeah, all that. And quite similar to what he described, except his had like a little... Like a little... Well, he draws it.

Starting point is 03:02:45 He drew it, yeah, yeah. It's basically a cigar with a thing here and a thing there on either end, but... But, but what? Like, unless they were messing with him, like, you know, which they didn't. I mean, he's still a criminal, according to the U.S. He can't leave England and Wales.

Starting point is 03:03:02 Wales, yeah. Yeah. That's right. He's restricted there for the rest of his life. So, yeah, that's just what's going on with that? I mean, that's, I find that interesting, at least to me. They wanted to lock him up for like 60 years. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:03:18 I mean, it's, that's a, but it's also, it's like. That's real jail time. That's real jail time. But when you look at these crashes that occur in, your nuclear sites, I don't want to say, but still, it should be mind-blowing for the average person. Right. I think for me or you, it's a little like, okay, yeah, it's expected. That's not quite as mind-blowing.

Starting point is 03:03:34 When you see this new fact, this, you know, this guy hacking into, you know, these super thing. It makes you wonder. It makes you wonder. And, you know, it's funny because I'd forgotten about that aspect of what he'd seen. I forgot about that. I always remember was that he saw photographic evidence. And then he brought it up again.

Starting point is 03:03:51 And while that, while I was thinking about that, it was just like, Exeterrestrial officers? What? And then I interview the individual U.S. Air Force X in the film, and he talks about this alleged encounter at Nellus in 94 with a guy dressed in, you know, military outfit that clearly, according to him, did not appear to be human. I started thinking about the exorcual officers. I was like, is that what they were talking about? Like, we're in touch. And there are other, like you had mentioned earlier.

Starting point is 03:04:25 about books that have been written from military, about encounters with these alleged encounters with these, the land in Holman, like, I don't know, man. There's no smoke without fire, right? Well, you have high mesh. You have to discount everything, not to believe any of it. Absolutely. Well, you have, well, you have, I think you have to need gradations of probability.

Starting point is 03:04:47 Yes. And that's okay. You can say, I think this is 20% probable, but worth cataloging in my mind and not forgetting about and then looking for more corroboration but admitting that it's low probability and i think most people they think in this sort of two d like yes or no binary but you can but you know high meshed you know who's head of the israeli space force who oh i remember that yeah he writes two years ago yeah two years ago he writes his biography and it was like yeah he says there's a galactic federation he says that they're bases on mars and you know that like the just right over the

Starting point is 03:05:22 of almost everybody. Yeah. When you make those kind of statements, because not to say they're not true or maybe they are true, I don't know. But it's like a given example of how it's almost too much to process because when I did a moment of contact, I just got back from Brazil and I had this like news organization at my house with Leslie Kane interviewing me and, oh, we're so excited to talk about Brazil. I was like, yeah, no, I'm not going to talk about that case because they weren't ready for it, right? Live aliens, all the rest of it.

Starting point is 03:05:49 Well, what was the example of? was going to use, I just lost my train of thought, with, okay, I interviewed some hospice workers in the 90s that had that huge boomerang-shaped craft that we talked about earlier in March 13, 1997, including the governor of Arizona-5 Simonton, all saw this massive, and there were other UFOs too, but one in particular that was of interest, was this boomerang-shaped, apparently It was some people say it was a mile across. Some people say it was two miles across. It was colossal.

Starting point is 03:06:25 And it flew over people's home silently and, like, made no noise. And they could see compartments in the metal. I mean, it was massive. And I interviewed this group of hospice workers. I think there was like five or six of them all together. And they were sitting there having tea. It was late in the afternoon. And this thing went right over the top of them.

Starting point is 03:06:41 And they said it took like five minutes to pass overhead. And the reason why I'm telling you this is that after it passed overhead, they just went right back to their conversation. and I'm like, you didn't get up and call 911, get a camera, like chase it with your car, like nothing? They said, no. I said, so you, hang on. So all five of you stood here, you know, sat here looking up at this thing as it passed overhead

Starting point is 03:07:08 and you say it took like five minutes. That's how big it was. And then you did nothing. And they said, yep, I don't know why. We just didn't do anything. We didn't call. We didn't yell for my husband. We didn't get in our car and check.

Starting point is 03:07:21 because I was like, get in a car, chase it, you know, get camera. Didn't do any of that. And I just thought, maybe it's just too much for people to process. Like when they hear, like, sometimes the mainstream media that's not educated on this topic, and even it's hard for me to process things sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:36 Like the crash retrieval stuff and people testify, like, I never thought I'd see that day in my career. And so with this statements you're saying from this Israeli military official, was he intelligence or something? I know, I read about it. He was head of the, so space, Force, I believe, you have the NRO, which is like optical observation and recon, and then in National Reconnaissance Office, and then you have Space Force, which supports other, you know,

Starting point is 03:08:02 Navy, military, but with comms. And so he's head of the Israel equivalent of Space Force. Okay. Which is an extremely important position. They're doing all their space commas. You wouldn't put a wacko ahead of that. No, no. But my point is, is like that, you know, you got someone of that level of credibility, of that level of government insider, a military insider coming forward to making those statements, it's almost like the media doesn't know how to process

Starting point is 03:08:26 it. I, with 30-year background of looking into these cases all around the world, I have a hard time process. Yeah, right? So it's like I'm only going to imagine with the media. It's like, if you make those statements and they're that significant, why wouldn't you put some of the resources that we put in for President's sexual piccadillos?

Starting point is 03:08:42 Like, if you put one-tenth of resources into investigating some of these claims, let's get the bottom of it. Or David Grush. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. David, David came forward like he put in his credibility, he lost his position, like he, at great, at great personal sacrifice, he came forward. The implications of what he's saying are so profound. Yeah, beyond. How could you possibly not put some resources and follow up? I mean, News Nation is really the only outfit out there, really sticking their teeth into this topic, right? Well, I did a piece with them too. But I kept thinking the whole time, why am I in this? I mean, I've become close with him, but I'm like, you know, it was a great piece. And it was, my point is, why isn't Fox News, CNN? No, totally. I kept thinking the whole time.

Starting point is 03:09:28 They should all be doing resources and contacts. Well, the, the backstory is they had an opportunity. The New York, I mean, Leslie Kane published the initial article that prompted the whole thing. But she had to do it in the debrief because Julian Barnes, who's the, I know I was right there when it was all going down. He has a bias against the whole, I spoke to her at the, um, Julianian Barron. Barnes has a bias. He hates the UFOs. And it was her biggest story in 2017, right? Wasn't the most popular stories they've ever published? When I was, I sat next to her at the congressional

Starting point is 03:09:56 hearing and I was like, why didn't that go in the New York Times? He was like, Julian, he was like, maybe I'll cut this if I'm throwing her under the bus by saying this. But like, she was like, they just are anti-the- It was going to go to the Washington Post and it was going to go to Politico. Which is, which shows that, like, it would have gone to Politico, but Politico needed another week. And I guess, uh, Grush was really worried. I mean, it had to come out. Yeah, Yeah, because his name was out already. And the news nation piece was going to run, and they were going to run that. Yeah, the execution of how that all came about, and it wasn't anyone in particular's fault.

Starting point is 03:10:26 You know, I guess the New York Times was looking into it for quite some time, and did they take a pass? Well, so Leslie Kane is a staff writer for the New York Times. I think her default was, I want to do this on the New York Times. Yeah, that's what I think. Was it number one? I think they were like, you can't do this year, which is insane. because I guess they wanted to speak to one of the 40 witnesses. Fine.

Starting point is 03:10:49 You should be able to speak to one of the 40 witnesses. However, not saying that him coming out is worthy of a story given Dave's credentials is showing that you have a complete bias. It's ridiculous because that is a story. Yeah. And it's a story when you have. Then you see the publications. Like the stories that have been published in the York Times post.

Starting point is 03:11:10 Yeah. For the most part? Give me a break. They were like plea. Well, they've been in April of, you know, know, 22 or something, they were saying that COVID was zoonotic origin. Like, after everyone in their mother was saying this is obviously came from a lab. They were sticking with the, you know, idiot party line.

Starting point is 03:11:27 So like, yeah, I don't know. I think some of their contacts and the intel said, do you want to continue a nice relationship? Of course. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing to the story. No, that's exactly what happened. Drop it. That's exactly what happened.

Starting point is 03:11:37 Don't you think? I know that. And I've also, I've helped since then with trying to get Gresh's op-ed out or whatever. a little bit and like I see the the pain he's going through. I worked so hard to portray him in the light that he deserves in the program. I think he did. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:11:56 Like I hope he sees that. Yeah. I sure he will. I told him that. Yeah, and he was like, awesome. Oh, I'm really glad. Yeah, because, you know, I don't blame him. I mean, he was a bit skittish and he was very selective with a handful of interviews that

Starting point is 03:12:09 he gave, you being one of them. And I talked to somebody there. And even Leslie tried to get him for an upcoming. production. He's like, you know, I'm just not really doing it anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't blame him. You know, I don't blame him. I don't either. I don't, yeah. But I really tried to do his story justice. And not for any other reason that I believe him. I believe him. And I think he merits that, that level of coverage. I fully agree. You know? Yeah. James, this has been an honor, man. This is awesome. I really appreciate it.

Starting point is 03:12:41 It's been a long time coming. Yeah, thank you for coming. Cool. Yeah, cool.

American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - The Most Important UFO Investigator On The Planet (ft. James Fox)

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