AREA52 - DEBRIEFED With Chris Ramsay - What My Father Knew About UFOs - Paul Hynek - DEBRIEFED ep. 45

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Patreon Exclusive Content: https://www.patreon.com/Area52investigationsAREA 52 Shop: https://www.area52.shopPaul Hynek joins me for a deep conversation about his father, J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who led Project Blue Book and created the Close Encounters scale. We talk about his father’s work as a consultant on Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, what he really believed about UFOs, and the legacy he left behind. Paul also shares stories about meeting Neil Armstrong, dives into fringe UFO cases, and opens up about his interest in the Monroe Institute, altered states, and the role psychedelics might play in understanding the phenomenon.

son of legendary astronomer and UFO researcher Dr. J. Allen Heineck, Paul Heinek. Are you familiar with Project Blue Book? Blue Book. Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book. Dr. Jay Allen Heinich, chairman of the Department of Astronomy, a UFO investigator for the Air Force for the past 18 years. He saw so many witnesses that were so credible. Calvin Parker and Charlie Hicks and Father Gill, Travis Walton, so many of these people who you just sit down with and you can tell they are not lying. And I remember taking the call from Calvin Parker.

Whoa, no way. Good friend of mine, yeah. What do you mean you took the call? The phone rang in my house. I'm outside playing kickball, and there's this guy with a southern drawl talking about Pascagoula and seeing something in this guy. It was Neil Armstrong who asked to sit with my father and family.

Turns out that he did talk with my father, and they talked seriously about, creating a new UFO research group. What year was this? 1973. This is four years after the moon landing. Using the title of a chapter from my father's book, you actually have my father in Spielberg explaining what the movie title means.

And the close encounters of the third kind are the most interesting of all. It's really when you meet them. Jacques and I went to Socorro, New Mexico, site of one of the most famous sightings. And he told me that it was there, that case, 1964, Lonnie Zamora, a policeman, that made my father feel comfortable speaking in public about aliens and not just craft.

It was not comfortable speaking publicly. So he and Jacques formed what they called the Invisible College. My father encountered what are now known as Men in Black. He had two sightings that I know of. What he would call a daylight desk. And I think my father's favorite was Colonel Friend. And I said, Lieutenant Colonel Friend, Did you ever see anything convincing?

And he looks around and he says, Paul. Yes. Was there ever anybody that came that made you go, huh? I think I asked her, what do you do? What do you hear for? And she says, oh, well, I'm a nanny on a spaceship. For human hybrid alien babies. There's a question from my friend Jesse Michaels from American Alchemy.

Was your father part of a deeper UFO program that went beyond Blue Book? Well, I could hear this street on Hollywood Bull, see if I could with my jaw drive. Ladies and gentlemen, today we are joined by a very, very interesting person who I've met recently at contact in the desert. This is Paul Heineck, entrepreneur, futurist, and son of legendary astronomer and UFO researcher Dr. J. Allen Heinek. Paul grew up at the epicenter of the UFO conversation with Project Blue Book unfolding in real time around the dinner table. And now he's carving his own path in both technology and disclosure, futurism and the unexplained. Welcome Paul Hinek.

Rock and roll. Heck yeah. Paul, first of all, I want to acknowledge the little aliens that you brought me. Those are genuine Hynick alien skiff gnomes. They look like aliens. Can I hold one? Sure, of course. Are they made of stone?

What are they made of? You tell me. No way. These are so cool. Little butts. These are very, very cool. These will live here from now on. Yeah.

I like to bring my posse. Thank you so much. Do they protect you and keep you guarded? Yeah. Very cool. Paul, man, I'm looking forward to this discussion for so many reasons, you know, as someone who's researching UFOs, you know, you obviously come across your father's work in this. And the importance that he, I mean, he was just as such a big part of it.

in the, you know, in the 40s and 50s, a late 40s, 50s and 60s and 70s even, it's really hard to ignore a lot of his work. So I'd like to start our conversation acknowledging that a little bit before we start getting into some of your work as well, if that's okay. Sure. Great. So talk me through what it's like growing up Heineck. What is that like for you?

I think you've had quite the colorful past. So I'd love for you to touch on that. that a little bit. So however you grow up is normal, good or bad to you, until you have a little bit of hindsight. And you can look back and say, that was a little bit odd. You know, I don't know life without UFOs. We had flying saucer ornaments on the Christmas tree, Travis Walton, Calvin Parker for dinner, Father Gil. So UFOs were part of the fabric of our life. But for us, our father, was little Joey, the Czech boy from Chicago, who fulfilled his lifelong dream to be an astronomer. And that's really what he was to us, an astronomer and a professor who had a late in life

side gig of UFOs. And so we looked at him as the astronomy professor. That was like his real main hat that he wore that engaged in curiously open conversations about the fringes of the known universe. Wow. So we grew up in a house, it was academic. So we grew up right by Northwestern, at least the second generation of which I was in the family. And loving science, but also being healthily, modestly,

modestly, skeptically open to magic. And by magic, you mean the unknown, the phenomenon. Yeah. And, you know, my father, people tend to think of scientists as robotic. but my father had Rosicrucian leanings. And he thought there was divinity or magic in the universe. And part of an astronomer's job was to find that. Well, this is really interesting because later on in the episode, as you might know,

we do have questions from our interns and our operatives. One of the questions was actually something you just touched on. So we're going to nix that question and get to it right now because I think it's really timely. Rosacrucianism. Yeah. This is very interesting. Phrmatic Principles is something that I've been reading a lot on as well. And it's just extremely fascinating stuff. What was his involvement and to what extent was it was his interest

in Rosicrucianism? So he was interested in Rosicrucianism and part of his death ritual, wasn't a burial ritual, was based on Rosicrucian beliefs. At the same time, he's interested in Theosophy and Rudolf Steiner. And kind of an interesting synchronicity for me was I went to University of Pennsylvania for graduate school. And less than 30-second walk from my super sumptuous graduate dorm was a restaurant called the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia. And I remember reading the menu one day. And on the back of it, it had sort of the origin story. And it used to be the house of Madam H.P. Blavatsky. Wow. We're the founders of the Theosophy Movement.

Yeah. And so she had contracted gangrene in like the late 1800s. And they told her they're going to have to amputate her leg. And she said, fancy that. I'll not have my leg enter the spirit world before me. And she credited sleeping with her. Wait for it. White Dog is having cured her of her gangrene.

So that's why the restaurant is named White Dog. It's one of my favorite restaurants I went to with my mom. And to me, that brought into the present what seemed like some dusty old spiritual traditions that my father had. And I recently found a book of his by Rudolph Steiner, who was in Theosophy and went on to form Anthroposophical School, with all these underlines and annotations for my father. So also, I think, you know, to Jacques Valet's credit, you know, longtime family friend. Jacques really got my father more from nuts and bolts astrophysics to sort of like consciousness, where a lot of us kind of wind up going when the dust settles. So he had sort of an amalgamation of theosophy, Rosicrucianism, sometimes a little bit of astrology, although he didn't like being called an astrologer.

Not many astronomers do. But he liked sort of cherry-picking from different traditions to things that seem to most resonate. and that had some kind of implicit, bolemyan, you know, implicate universe connection that he was sort of teasing out. Wow, that is fascinating and not what you would expect from a scientist or astronomer. And do you think that's what led to him being chosen for the task that he had, or did that come as a consequence? So I've seen articles that have this grand conspiracy theory about how he is a CIA Stoge and all this. I think, you know, not to get a case of Occam's razor burn, it was a lot simpler than that. He had a clearance from World War II because he worked on the proximity fuse at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

He's in Ohio, not far from Wright Pat. He's teaching at Ohio State. The Air Force for Project Blue Book, which was not, as you know, a serious scientific effort to get to the bottom in reverse engineer propulsion systems. it was a PR exercise to tamp down public hysteria. Yeah. So I think they saw, hey, we have an astronomer nearby. He's a company man. He's got a clearance fits the bill.

I think that's probably all there was to it. Right. That makes sense. And for my father, I'm quite sure he didn't think his fourth-born child, Pesky Paul, would be talking about this decades and decades later here in the skiff. I think he thought it was all of a few weekends worth of work because this was not UAPs. It wasn't even UFOs.

It was flying saucers. That's right. Post-war hysteria. Sure, I'm an astronomer with the resources of the Air Force. I can put this to bed. Funny things happens on the way to the evidence parade, and he couldn't do that. And it just kept going on and on.

And I have to think there were conversations between my mom and my dad because my dad had not yet received tenure, which is the brass ring in academia. And I can just imagine my mom, bless her soul, saying, but Alan, how is chasing flying saucers going to help you get tenure? Yeah, it's a good question, especially back then when it was quite taboo. But you also had another, I believe, astronomer who was working perhaps on the opposite side of that spectrum,

really looking to disprove saucers, which was Donald Mansell back in the day as well, was he ever brought up in conversation with your father? Well, they were colleagues at Harvard. So my father had a relationship with him, which I believe was more cordial than is widely purported. And my father knew that for a lot of astronomers, it was not comfortable speaking publicly. So he and Jacques formed what they called the Invisible College, which is kind of an intellectual safe space for a scientist to openly express their views. And I have copies of correspondence between Arthur C. Clark and my dad, where Arthur C. Clark says, Hey, Dr. Heinek, just want to say that in public, I have to poo-poo these things, but I really greatly admire what you're saying.

Wow. And another example of that is in 1973, when I was 11 years old, my father told my younger brother, my mom and I, that were going to Africa. Like, oh, that's cool. And he says, well, sort of. But the thrust of the trip is to go off the west coast of Africa because that's the best place in the world to see the total solar eclipse. Now, eclipses are a big deal in the Heinek family. So we're like, great.

So we go on this ship for two weeks and we go for free because my dad's lecturing. And then he says, oh, and by the way, our family and one other family will be having all of our meals together for two weeks. And it was Neil Armstrong and his family. Yeah, that's incredible. As an 11-year-old kid of an astronomer, there's nobody in the world I would have rather met. What year was this?

1973. This is four years after the moon landing. Right. Oh, my God. That is like, that is unheard of. That's like, that's like having dinner with Michael Jordan in his prime. Yeah. And for Chicago Boy, that's, that's something.

Right. So it was, it was incredible and spent, you know, all this time. And after a while, you know, I, you know, people would be coming up to him. My dad was fairly well known on any clips crews, but not like Neil Armstrong. No. No. And I'm saying, Mr. Armstrong, okay, Neil, do you want me to let them come through and all this? And I got, I became friends with his kids.

and Neil deGrasse Tyson's on the ship. Isaac Asimov was on the ship. And I remember him with his mutton chops. Some 20-year-old woman asked him for his autograph. And he had a Sharpie and he wrote on her thigh, Isaac Asimov was here. Sick. What the greatest science fiction authors of all time.

Both the greatest, I think. And that's Mike. When people say Isaac Asimov and, you know, his work, that's what I think of. Yeah. Now, you know, there was an article in the Sun, a paper in the U.K., I think, in 2019, that talked about how it was Neil Armstrong

who asked to sit with my father and family. And I hadn't really thought about how this came about, but of course it's Neil Armstrong who's going to call the shots. Yeah. And turns out that he did talk with my father and they talked seriously about creating a new UFO research group.

Wow, which was... Which, well, I think became Kufo's because Neil was, he was, fairly reclusive, not like Buzz Aldrin. He didn't really enjoy the spotlight. And especially in the early 70s, there were so much more stigma attached to the phenomena that he decided it's just not for me. But for me, some of the most telling evidence are these things. The fact that Neil Armstrong publicly sat with my father, who had a reputation. Yeah, had good astronomical bona fides, but was known for UFOs at that time. He sat with.

him and I know he talked with my dad about pursuing this. So I don't know what he saw or what he think he may have seen, but he was a, you know, jet pilot, a test pilot, and he decided that there's something going on and he wanted to work with my father to figure out what it was. Wow. Yeah, I mean, and that's, you know, a lot of people speculate, obviously, you know, that post-moon landing press conference. Yeah, that seems so ominous. and not the energy you think you would have coming home, a hero walked on the moon, everyone in that room except for those gentlemen were excited.

Yeah, and I don't know. It's hard to know how you're going to react after that momentous of an experience. That's a great point, but definitely not what you'd expect. And, you know, I've had friends of mine who are behavioral analysts, who look at body language and that type of stuff. And I was like, hey, you want to come do a video? And they're like, not that video.

And I was like, I just can't touch it. Yeah. Yeah, because they're, I mean, the body language screams, you know, something else. It screams stress. You know, when you have behavioral analysts do things and look at things. It's why it's not widely accepted, obviously, in court, because you're not lie detecting. Just like a lie detector isn't a lie.

detector. Stress detector. Yeah, and people react differently to stress. That's right. Everybody has a different baseline. Correct. And so, but for them, I mean, you can tell there is stress. Now, whether that's stress of the cameras or whether that's stress of them holding onto a,

you know, a deep dark secret. Or minders just out of frame. Yes, correct. Yeah, exactly. But anyways, that sounds like an incredible trip for an 11-year-old to be on. Is that your earliest memory of holy crap? What is my dad involved with? No, because there were always reporters coming to the house.

He was on TV and radio a lot. And so we're used to this. And even apart from UFOs, he was fairly well known in Chicago for astronomy. He was really tied in with all sorts of groups in Chicago. So it was more sort of the frog getting a bit warmer and not realizing it. But that was a big deal. And it was close encounters really where it just blew the lid off things. Oh, okay.

Yeah. But with his stardom, with him being a part of it or just being associated with it. Yeah. And the whole thing about it being this big movie using the title of a chapter from my father's book. You know, we talked about how I think Star Wars is maybe one of the best movie titles of all time. Imagine Spielberg in the office at Columbia Studios saying, I want to do this movie. I'm fresh off of Jaws, which is another great title for a movie, right? The one word. Fits on the merch and the posters. Close encounters. of the third kind. Are you with me?

A horrible title for a movie. It doesn't mean anything. And in the original trailer, which you can find on YouTube, it's like four and a half minutes long, you actually have my father in Spielberg explaining what the movie title means. That's not a great way to marketing success for a movie.

Close encounter of the first kind is one is close, but nothing really happened. Close encounter of the first kind is visible contact with the UFO. Forget the shape and forget how fast it's going. It's something that you just can't explain. Close encounter. The second. The second kind are those which leave a physical trace, holes in the ground, burn rings, broken tree branches, telephone lines down, animals disturbed, stopping of car engines. And the close encounters of the

third kind are the most interesting of all. Close encounter of the third kind is really when you meet them. Oh, yeah. You would not, that would not go past like the initial pitch. No. So I know my father was a bit nervous about it because when Hollywood comes a calling, and you know, Hollywood, whether it's AI or UFOs, most of the movies they make about it are dystopian. Because drama needs conflict. If I said, hey, Chris, I got a great idea for a movie. Let's do it together. Village of the Nice Happy AI People, that's not going to get butts and seats.

So you're going to have more Matrix and Terminator-style movies. So think about my dad. Oh, I want to do a movie about UFOs. Oh, Where are the worlds? What is it going to be? Right. And it turns out it was a very different type of movie. Yeah.

Where the aliens, okay, there's a little bit of kidnapping, but it's nicer, gentler kidnapping. But the aliens, you know, you really don't see much of them. And in the original version of the movie, when the mothership lands and you get past all the little aliens who were six-year-old girls, and all those takes were very short

because they kept disco dancing. And you have that sort of gangly alien come out. In the original version of the movie, he and my father, everyone leaves except for my father, and they are sort of exchanging gestures and alien plays with my dad's pipe and things like that. That didn't play well. So, but that movie portrayed not only aliens as something not inherently to fear, but along the lines of the title, along the lines of the title, my father's book, The UFO Experience. It's not just the visual sighting of a craft, but it's the communication, as you know, sometimes before, during, and after.

It's that whole experience of contact with some other species. The sightings, the radiation burns, the chases. The mashed potato mountains. The lights entering the house and the poltergeist activity. Yeah. And a lot of those things are taken from real reports. That's right. So there's a lot of verisimilitude in the movie.

Is that thanks to yourself and Jacques, or not yourself, sorry, your father and Jacques being a part of the consultation for that movie? Yeah. And also I think Spielberg did a lot of reading. Yeah. Because he was very interested in the phenomenon. Well, I think you would have to be to name the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that just shows you how invested he was at least then at getting the truth out there.

Because we had a conversation prior to filming where you said, you know, Hollywood is very different in tackling this subject in that if you have a specific vision in mind, by the time it comes to fruition, it's gone through. so many channels and group thing, that it morphs into something else, heavily dramatized, romanticized, and all sorts of other bells and whistles are applied to it. But that kind of stayed the course, the close encounters narrative, the whole movie from beginning to end. Do you think that was partially due to the power that Steven Spielberg had?

Because I feel like that, something like that on paper doesn't look as good as it could be, you know, once it's filmed, it feels a little off. I don't know all the internal dynamics. I'm sure there were studio notes, but I think probably the biggest fight was the title. And Spielberg didn't have the clout he does now. I mean, he'd come off of jaws, so he's an up-and-coming director. So I'm sure the studio had some input. But, you know, I think he was very passionate about it and it holds together well.

Oh, and it's beautiful, beautifully shot, 35-millimeter, I mean, the wide panoramic and. And the effects hold of it. up. They did 75 millimeter in the effects, I think. Yeah, and the clouds are really interesting because they used, like they call a milk tank, where they have a big tank of water and they put cream in there. And so that, it just looks really good. And that was done by a friend of ours when he was an intern at UCLA. And there's so many fun stories about the movie. And I met Spielberg during filming. My mom had said, hey, the director is coming out. She just said, the director, to meet with

your dad, would you like to meet with them at O'Hare Airport, about 45 minutes from our house? I said, sure. So the day comes to go there. And my mom says, okay, Paul, get ready. You're going to the airport. I don't want to go. She said, you said you're going to meet Steven Spielberg. You are going to meet Steven Spielberg. So I met him under duress. Yeah, which is probably not something that happens very often, seems to Wilburne. That is incredible. I mean, what a, what a colorful upbringing that must have been. And this is also in the 70s, right? So this is, I mean, all sorts of talk of like the age of Aquarius coming out, very esoteric sort of environment to be brought up in, especially in a household where, you know, eventually at least this idea of UFOs is real and that they exist. Did you see a shift in your father going from, I mean, this is prior to when you were born even, right? So, but did you ever see any inkling of him leaning a little bit more towards this? Have you ever wondered who's watching when you're digging into UFO files at 3 a.m.? Whether it's your internet provider, a three-letter agency, or something non-human, your online activity is being tracked.

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and the increasingly hot water. I think most of his transformation from a skeptic, not to a believer, because that's not a word that scientists use, and I noticed that you studiously avoided that, to an acceptor of the accumulated weight of the data had already occurred. Right. And Jacques and I went to Socorro, New Mexico, site of one of the most famous sightings. And he told me that it was there, that case, 1964, Lonnie Zamora, a policeman, that made

my father feel comfortable speaking in public about aliens and not just craft. Wow. So a lot of this transformation had occurred in the 60s before my time of talking with my dad. Wow. Yeah, that was one of those cases that's hard to deny, especially because the witness was so credible. And I think that's why it became such an important case in history. An important case for people who were of an academic background who were afraid to come forward. Now they can lean on like an actual witness who, you know, who has practiced ability to, you know, observe things and take notes.

And, you know, policemen are very interesting witnesses for a reason that I hadn't quite understood until recently until my friend Mary and Rob told me. She has formed a group called UAPPD. She's a former comp. And, you know, for an Air Force pilot, reporting a UFO is not widely seen as a fast track to career advancement. No. But for policemen, there's an extra element that holds them back. So imagine you go off and you say, oh, I saw a UFO. a month later, you're in court testifying in a completely unrelated case.

And the defense attorney says, oh, Mr. Policeman, aren't you the guy that a month ago says you saw some egg-shaped craft landing in the desert? There goes your whole credibility. Sure. So they have not only institutional imperative to tamp down, but this very strong prosaic reason to shut their mouth and not talk about it. Yeah, that's, yeah, it's true. which makes it even more compelling. Interesting, very interesting. Now, going back to your father being interested in this, you know, Rosicrucianism and all this stuff, do you think your father ever felt like there was some sort of path laid out for him? Because if you look at his trajectory and even

your trajectory to an extent and it seems that way. You know, you go from being an astronomer to being part of this, you know, UFO project at the government or this flying saucer, whatever thing that this was in Blue Book, to then, you know, going beyond that into Hollywood and then into the, you know, it had a profound and lasting permanent effect on not only the UFO community, but the entire world and how it views the subject. Yeah. At any point, do you think your father felt or maybe yourself by extension that there was some sort of path laid out? I'll say yes and no. Yes, in that my father is born to Czech parents in Chicago, 1910. He didn't speak English until he went to kindergarten. And they took him on the roof of the hospital to show him Hallie's comment.

He told my brother Joel, and he also mentioned an interview on television, that he thought he would be like Mark Twelfare. Twain, and he would come and go with Halley's comet. And at that point, he realized he's 36 years old. His life is halfway over. Fast forward to 1986. I'm living with my parents. My father has a brain tumor. And I take him out in the desert in Phoenix, Arizona, to see Halle's comet right

before he died. Wow. So, you know, it was devastating for me and our family to lose my father. but that's somewhat of a consoling pair of cosmological bookends. No, because my father wanted that quintessential capital D disclosure incident of the saucer landing on the lawn of the White House and a Walter Cronkite type narrating it to a believing public. He wanted that case to crack it all open, and he never got that.

Now, in so doing, and being a very believable, avuncular character, he brought a lot of us along, and he really raised the temperature, he really increased the ratio of signal to noise in the debate and made a lot of people feel like,

well, if this guy, who seems pretty grounded, says that he doesn't, doesn't talk about, you know, extraterrestrials, he would use the term metatterrestrials, that there's something happening, well, maybe I don't need to know where they come from, right? It's a very difficult place for people to rest. You know, a lot of people want answers. We're pattern-seeking mammals, we want answers.

And there's a great phrase that we've talked about, that is, there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who are okay with their questions not being answered, and those who are not okay with their answers being questioned. And that draws a great intellectual fault line between those two camps. And I think you and most of the folks watching are probably in that former camp like, okay, I know there's something out there. It's ineffable.

I can't touch it. Maybe by going on the desert, maybe by going to the Monroe Institute. All these things, I can find out what it is. But I know there's something and I don't need to have an answer. And my father felt that way that sometimes there will be evidence that's annoying. It's contrary to the grant you're getting or the book that you wrote or what you're well known for. But it keeps there. You know, evidence is a funny thing.

It doesn't always conform to your preexisting belief system. So you need to keep your mind open that there may be a new phenomenon. But once you're ready to accept, hey, there's something going on, you don't just rush and grab the best available answer and shut it in and call it case closed. And that's very difficult for us to do. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Well, I mean, for a variety of reasons for survival, I think mainly. You know, we don't want to be in a place of uncertainty because what does that yield for our future?

And so we have to lock down. So I don't blame anyone for having a belief system. But if you're into truth seeking, then you need to, I think, in a healthy manner, set that aside. And I don't think you choose your beliefs. You just believe. It's something that happens and you believe something. Yes. And it's very difficult then.

And facts aren't always the most dispositive thing to make you change your mind. That's right. And just like with anything else, if you have a certain system through which you filter information, that is creating just an innate bias with how you consume that information. So, for instance, if you, you know, I don't know, if you, if you're inclined to liking things that are cold, let's say. well all the information sure all the information that filters in you're going to be looking at through a lens of well i really prefer things that are cold you know so i'm going to talk about summer and you're going to be like yeah i'm not a big fan of summer or like you know summer as summer tends to get like and all the information now is like skewed against and so any little belief system or any little personal preference bias that you might have will interfere with data collection and it's really hard for people to get past that because we are emotional beings. You know, I often talk about how if I'm going to tell you about an experience I had, whether that's seeing a magic trick or whether that's seeing a UFO, I'm not giving you the data. I'm trying to make you feel like you were there, right? So I'm going to convey emotionally

what that was like and how amazing it was because I want you to feel like you were there, because that's all I want is to share my emotion. I don't care about sharing data. And so often we feel fall into that category of wanting to, you know, uphold our own belief systems through emotional connection with people rather than just giving the boring data, which is, like you said, like the, you know, the dull side of the Occam's razor or like the, you know, the boring side, rather. But, you know, that's, that's, um, that's, uh, I do, I do enjoy, um, you know, being open-minded and speaking to like, you know, like-minded people and having an audience like this who, who enjoys these talks as well. Uh, now, let's, uh, I do enjoy these talks as well. Uh, now,

go to the Monroe Institute, something you just mentioned. You know, as my audience knows, I had my interaction with the Monroe Institute about a year ago, a year ago last week, where I had some out-of-body experiences, heard about the place through Joseph McMonagull and Dr. Edwin-May, who has spoken with. And, you know, they were like, you know, this is the place where people would go to study astral projection and all these wild things, which I thought were, it was the borderline lunacy. I was like, this is just dreams you're talking about until I had my own experiences. And I know them to be objectively different from lucid dreaming and just, just a complete, you know, unknown, complete unknown. So I go there, have my experiences, document it,

go with, you know, through the blessing of Paul Ciderrella VP over there. And Paul's a genuinely really nice guy. Everybody was just super kind, Alan, and everyone else. And do this. And then come to find out when I meet you that you are. CFO of the Monroe Institute. Guilty is charged. So tell me how that came about. Around the time that I once on the eclipse cruise, my father took me three years in a row to a Harold Sherman ESP conference because I was super interested in psychic phenomenon.

What age was? You were 11. Yeah, maybe like 9, 10, 11, 12 around there. And so Ingo Swan, Alex Tannis, Olga Warral, lots of well-known people, healers and psychics there. And I had read Journeys Out of the Body, and Bob Monroe was there. And my father was a speaker, so he would take me in the speaker's room, wherever he just sort of, you know, relaxes a little bit. And Bob was there. And I was a fan. And so I told him, hey, Mr. Monroe, call me Bob. I really loved journeys out of the body. And I'd already seen my father and talked to my father about

not questioning because I don't like that word, but talking to witnesses. You know, my father was an astrophysicist. He wasn't trained in soft arts of talking to somebody, you know, in the aftermath of a traumatic event. He had to learn how to do that. But I would see how he would talk to people and first make them feel comfortable, legitimize them, but then also ask questions from slightly different angles to try to corroborate and see if it's consistent and longitudinally over time. And so I applied some of my junior sleuth techniques with Bob because there's a very, I don't say ordinary in a demeaning way, but a normal salt to the earth guy talking about very extraordinary experiences and coming to, you know, it was very candid in how he's trying to come to grips with this stuff.

And I just remember thinking, this guy is as honest as they come. he is just trying to figure out what's going on. He's very intelligent. He's very candid. As my father, I call a highly credible witness. And I came away from their, that's just amazing. And so fast forward, over the years I bought

a fair amount of Monroe sound science stuff, which is just fantastic. And then a couple of years ago, at Conscious Live Expo, where I was speaking, I saw that they had a booth. And so I'm sort of a part of, part-time CFO for startups and nonprofits. And I just walk up to the guy in the booth.

I said, hey, you guys need a CFO? And he says, yeah, we do. So the next day I met Paul Cedarlla, the CTO, and Alan Evans, the CEO, we sat down. They hired me on the spot. And I've been the CFO since. And it's been a wonderful relationship because it's deeply resonant for me, the, you know, consciousness expanding and having met Bob as a kid. And this is a serious.

wonderful organization. And the other thing that warmed the cockles of this CFO's heart is that, as you may know, they have a goal, a concrete goal to get their technology in the hands or in the minds of 80 million people. One percent of the population. And for me, I can be quantitative, especially my capacity as CFO. I like metrics. And Paul's great that way also. And so that I was able to sink my teeth into and say, that's why we all come here. Yeah. And so it's just been a fantastic thing for me where my, I don't even want to say alternative, my interest, my natural leanings take me and where my skill sets can help.

Yeah. I mean, it's also, I think, echoes part of Robert Monroe's original was an M5,000, did he call it? But he had this goal to get it to like 5,000 people to experience that about. which, you know, long since surpassed. Yeah. I'm sure he's very happy about that wherever he's at now. I think he would be over the top thrilled with how the Monroe Institute is doing now. And we have a lot of plans now for super exciting expansions on what we're doing.

And, you know, with Alan and Paul and the board, who is deeply engaged, there's just great leadership and such a great leadership and such a great, great feeling. And I also want to give out to Jamie Roerbeck, the controller, who started the same time as I did. And it's just been, and she is a, as I teaser, recidivist program attendee. And I have not yet done a program there. I have to admit. So I need to go and do that. We talked about me teaching a UFO one, but I want to go there and do my own Gateway experience. And you were telling me about how wonderful it was, even before Gateway, how the University sort of opened up to you, as Monroe will say, that can happen. And I'll tell you, it's just been one of the most deeply fulfilling experiences of my life to work with and help such

an important effort and see how professional and capability it's run. Yeah, I love that. And it's, you know, it's one of those things that I am, I'm a lifelong chill for, Monroe, because I understand how profound of an impact it had to me personally, spiritually, emotionally, mentally. I juggle stress in a way that I've never, not even juggle stress anymore. I acknowledge stress and let it move through me like it's. Eat it for breakfast. Yeah, it's a whole other way to experience this realm once you understand the tools that they can provide you with.

So, you know, and I don't say that lightly. This isn't a, I don't get paid to talk about them. It really did, you know, change me profoundly as a human being. and I'm glad that it happened that way. And I also feel like it couldn't have happened any other way. You know, this weird, synchronous sort of path that led me to Monroe and then post-M Monroe, all the things that have happened. And inevitably, I think I need to go back as well.

I had spoken to two of the coaches and they said, you've got to go three times. And like after three times, you get the full sort of like ingrained experience and entrainment, if you will. So I definitely want to end up going back. I know they just had their second creator gateway. I was part of the original. Right. Thank you.

Yeah, creator gateway. And I'm so glad. And I heard some stories already. It's just such a magical experience. I can't wait to talk to you post Monroe. You know, I'll let you come down and get your grounding in. But after that, I would love to have that conversation with you. Yeah.

And thanks for doing that. You know, that was a wonderful initiative. And it's worked out really, really well. I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad it continues to work out well. And I think that, you know, many of the creators that even, you know, we had Michael Philip. I don't know if you're familiar with Michael Phillips. He has third eyedrops, a podcast. Yes. I just don't think of his last name. And I've been talking with him about appearing on his podcast. And we were talking together. He's phenomenal. He's well, you know, expressed some interest and wanting to go there. And I said, dude, let me let me hook you up. You have an audience. They'll take care of you because that's what they want to do. They want to spread the word, right? So I'm very transparent about that. I'm like, I'll jump on the bandwagon to. encourage him to do that. He's a great guy. No, he did it. Oh, he did it. Okay. And not only did he do it. He had an out-of-body experience at Monroe, which is very, which is not common, you know, maybe 10%, 5, 10% of people have that happen there. Well, if you're the third eye drops, I can see that happening. He had a very strong intention and he, yeah, he left his body. He had a really, uh, awesome. Yeah, and I'm trying to get

Jesse there now. He's had some hiccups because of things that have happened in scheduling, but he's trying to get there. Um, so any creator that I can encourage to go there, I think is great because to help spread the word. And if, I don't want to hijack this whole podcast here, but if, you know, everybody experiences, I think what I experienced at least, I think the world would become a better place. I really do think that. So, yeah, okay, enough about, enough about Monroe. We've given them their due here on this podcast, I feel. I want to, I want to move on into some other territory now. You're very vocal about your use and experimentation and study of dimethyltryptamine in a way that might be a little alarming to some

people and off-putting because it, you know, we are talking about a drug, you know, not a drug in, you know, all senses of the word, but in the legal sense. And it is, you know, I've had, I've had my experiences with it, one experience with it, which was okay. I know that it wasn't a full-fledged experience, but what brought you into this? Why have you been interested in it? And how can you relate this to everything else we've talked about? Well, okay, that's an easy one to unpack, Chris. That's a softball. I may or may not have done a shitload of drugs in my younger days. And, you know, back then it's the 70s and drugs are prevalent. it's just boredom, and we're just messing around. No, the only intention is to get messed up.

So I gave them up right about the time I was in college, because I just realized I prefer clarity over distortion. So years ago now, I'm with a friend who crashed landed tardigrades on the moon, which is just such a great claim to fame. And he asked me, hey, Paul, where do your dad think UFOs came from? And I said, well, you know, he's very comfortable, speaking. speaking about the weight of the evidence suggesting a metatrust or a phenomena, but where they come from, who knows? Extrrestrial feels a little bit sloppy, maybe even time travel or intradimensional. It goes, oh, you should read a book called Alien Information Theory. It said, Alien Information Theory, that's quite possibly the sexiest book title ever.

What's it about? Other than Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Thank you. That's actually a movie title. Yeah, you have our experience. So I said, what's it right? It goes, DMT, I'm like, I'm drawing a blank. It looks at me like, oh, you're the kind of guy that should, I don't.

Okay. DMT, it's, you know, ayahuasca, it's the most potent psychedelic known to man. I'm like, okay, connect this land bridge for me. And he says, well, the author, Andrew Gallimore, shout out Andrew, talks about how he thinks it's not a drug and you're very careful to sort of tease out that nuance, but that it's really a plant medicine technology and that possibly the experiences that users have under the influence of this powerful psychedelic

are not hallucinatory, but are revelatory, are showing you a very real universe that's there all the time. I'm like, okay, my father and Jacques and many others think there may be an intradimensional aspect to UFOs. Here is a gateway way, perhaps to another dimension.

Okay, that's interesting. I kind of retired that side of myself, but okay, now there's a purpose. There's a meeting. There's an intention. So I meet another guy in that same restaurant a couple hours later. Someone had said, hey, go talk to Paul. He can help you get your movie made because I worked in Hollywood. And I talked him out of doing the movie, and he's talking about what he does.

Well, I do breathwork, and I facilitate. DMT sessions. I'm like, oh, can I talk about that? He says, well, I guess we're supposed to. And so I felt like I was double-tapped by DMT in the same day. And I think DMT is in remarkable substance because I think it does kind of like what Monroe does. It, there's no sense of time. And it pierces the veil into this world, into this dimension and this realm, whatever you want to call it. And so... But it does so unwillingly. I would say more that it's not what you want, but what you need.

Because I have this boundless feeling of love and gratitude for this. So I'm like, cool. Wow. Okay. You got my attention. So I started, I read Alien Information Theory, fantastic book. I read the spirit molecule by Rick Strassman. And I'm ready. So two weeks later, my friend Curtis comes over, and I have the archetypal breakthrough on Changa, one form of DMT, and I feel transported to the other end of the universe, and yet I felt I was home. I saw not really incarnate, but these denizens of the universe as the fabric of the universe is, they're creating more universe, and I'm watching this. And I said, excuse me, because they're pretty busy.

Are you what we perceive to be aliens and UFOs? Because that was my mission. I'm taking one for science here, Chris. Yeah. And the answer was like trillions of miles of neurons and synapses, firing and it comes bubbling down. We can't explain in a way that you would understand. And it wasn't condescending or. deflective. It was like an aunt

asking how a Chevrolet transmission works. You're just not going to be able to understand. And I thought, well, that's not no. And if there is this connection between these entities that I think I'm seeing in DMT and aliens, yeah, I could see how that's beyond my ability to comprehend. I'm like, bam, already! I've got something.

I don't, they have the complete elixir to take back to the village, but I think I know where I may be able to find the elixir for that Joseph Campbell voyage. and I come out of it. And a friend of mine had done it also. Now, I'd read Spirit Molecule and Alien Information Theory, so you could say I've been tainted or primed by sort of quintessential voyages. But my friend did the same time, and we asked him,

and he'd never heard a DMT before that day. And we asked him what he saw. He saw the same thing I did. But from the outside point of view, where I just want leapt head first right into it. Right. So I thought that's interesting. Now, again, it could just be, it's the same chemical,

has a very peculiarly specific implementation. But that was interesting. So then my friend said, you want to do it again? Hell yeah, I did it again that night. And this time it lasted 45 minutes, not the typical businessman's high.

No. I wasn't transported out, but I felt similar to ayahuasca, this wave upon wave of healing. And I was listening to a song called Devi Prayer, which I've only heard during DMT and I cannot hear unless I'm doing DMT and which hits hard. It's 21 minutes and it is the official. What would happen if we played it right now? I'll run out. Literally I will run. I can't

hear it. You will run out? I'll freak out. I will run out. Run out where? Outside where I can't hear it. Yes, I will. That's incredible. Yeah, I can't. So it's just hoping this 21-minute song doesn't come on the radio randomly while you're driving. And luckily it's not the kind that comes on the radio often. A friend of mine played with me a console live X while I had to run out of the room. No way. Yeah. So, and I'm listening to this music was hauntingly beautiful. And I'm living between the beats and music, between grief and gratitude, and just feeling this loving spirit, cleansing me of emotional sludge and trauma.

Two weeks later, I do it again. And, oh, and I told my friend Curtis that, hey, it feels like it gave me what I needed. And he said, no, what you wanted. That's what the guides told me. Like, oh, man, this is. And I'm crying because it's so, I've touched the divine. And I saw the universe doing its business. It stopped.

And it welcomed me. Two weeks later, I do it again. Welcome back, Paul. Let's resume where we left off last time. And it started healing me again. Right, to right where you left off. The universe remembered me by name and had notes from our last appointment. How kind.

So it's this love. And, you know, to me, I've had people say all sorts of things. things at UFO conferences. Hey, Paul, man, we're talking about real shit like UFOs. Why you got to get weird and talk about DMT and Bitcoin? I've had people say, hey, I can get the same place with meditation. I don't know where you go with meditation. You don't know where I go with DMT. And it's not just DMT giving me access. DMT is bringing a little something to the table. And I became fascinated with it as a really a bona fide interest of mine to not only experience that love, but now I facilitate as a techno shaman. I facilitate for people. I've

had wonderful experiences that I've seen. But it's endlessly fascinating. It feels more real than here, not to devalue what we experience here. There's a surreal nature to it. Yeah. And now I start to get the DMT stutter where you're trying to describe. Yeah. And I understand that. I mean, I've had my bets with, you know, hallucinogenic sort of, uh, um, molecules, if you will, or concoctions in my youth. And yeah, there is something of a surreal nature, almost not unlike describing a dream where, you know, things just tend to make sense while you're in it. And as soon as you're out of it, making sense of it here just doesn't hold up. And again, you're trying to convey this idea of the impossible in a tangible way,

like the Flatlands Bob sort of analogy where, you know, the two-dimensional shape tries to explain what 3D is to the other 2D people. And they're just like, what is up, what is down? Yeah, that's a good analogy. And it's kind of like, to put it in your puzzling terms, a secret key to an invisible lock that's available to all of us. And it feels to me, and I think the same thing with AI and Bitcoin, They feel like Easter eggs that have been left here.

So, you know, you've had our mutual friend, Danny Sheehan, and others on here talking about disclosure. So, you know, Danny and Steve Bassett, Richard Dolan, many others are fighting a good fight in the trenches for disclosure. Okay, so what can I do? Well, I'm working more in what I call exposure. So disclosure is what they do. Exposure is what we do. and maybe disclosure or contact, it may come through an embassy, it may come through the saucer landing on the lawn of the White House, but it may come from three deep breaths and a molecule that's

already in your body. You know, there's the ayahuasca puzzle. It's, you know, imagine walking along thousands of years ago and looking at artichoke and saying, oh, that looks like food. I mean, somebody had to ticker with those things. ayahuasca is two very unrelated plants mixed together in a very specific way. So sure, we've had generations and generations of tinkering and trial and error, but still it's a little hard to understand how they came up with that exact combination.

DMT is also the only psychedelic that's endogenous. It's in your body. There's no known metabolic necessity. So it's kind of a rare biological extravagance to have this thing in here. And we don't exactly know where it's from either, like where it gets. We have speculative, you know, ideas about the pineal gland or whatever it may be, but we're not sure about any of that. We know what's in the body, but we don't really know where or how. And what?

And it's also in hundreds of plants. Why is this psychedelic cursing throughout the natural kingdom? So to me, what I'm playing with, and I don't have any answers, I have slightly better questions than I did before. can I in a sort of, so Andrew Gallimore, who wrote alien information theory, a contact in the desert two years ago, I pitched, hey, why don't he and I do a joint presentation, UFOs and DMT together at last, and we did. We've become very good friends now. So we're working on several investigations, and I love his approach that perhaps the, so I have this feeling now,

and we've talked a little bit of my ideas about an informational, conscious universe, a little bit of pan-psychism, a little bit more pan-computationalism. that there is sort of a primordial, pre-organic life readiness potential substrate out there, and that if we do have a future that's post-biological, which for good and or bad, I think, is likely, it may not be if we navigate it the right way. And frankly, I'm more concerned about the present of human stupidity than the future of artificial intelligence. We may not make it to the computers take over. Yeah. But I'm more of the Ray Kurzweil School that it's not going to be skyn

waking up with a digital chip on its shoulder coming after. See, it's Skynet right there. It's more of us adopting more and more sheen capabilities. So we may have a post-biological future. I think alien civilizations, well, to me it's improbable that extraterrestrials on another planet endure the rigors of interstellar space travel come here and crash.

Now, there's people have theories for why that happens, but it just doesn't seem plausible to me that they would exhibit flight characteristics that looked to be like 100 years past us or 200 years. By all odds, they would be millions of years, maybe billions of years more advanced than us. And so I think aliens have had their own type of singularity

when humans and AI merge, and they are, for all intents and purpose, digital. And to me, it feels like DMT entities are billions of years more advanced than us. They're here. They're everywhere. So it's not so much about seeing something in the sky and talking with them. It's not so much about us waiting for them. It's them waiting for us. They've given us the key. And once we start to unlock it and use it responsibly, we may well have opened these channels of communication that others do, like with Monroe and other ways to do that. Sure, yeah. And so that's what's fascinating to me because this is an area that I can work in. to try to build upon the legacy my father left of this solid foundation of scientific legitimacy and classification for this very strange phenomena.

And while others fight the good fight on the government front, okay, Galmore and I and others will go around on here and see what we can find there. And maybe that's the end around to the source, decentralized without any middlemen. without relying on anybody to dole out information over time. Right. How would you reconcile if you had come face to face with a crash saucer and physical beings on the inside? How would you reconcile those two notions? Would one negate the other or would you just be like, well, it's still all for it.

If you know where one is, take me there. One of my passions is to help experiencers of all kinds. UFOs, DMT, ghosts. what have you, should they desire to demonstrate, not prove, but demonstrate the objective reality of their encounters. Now, a lot of people don't care. Truth isn't, I think it's valid, it's important, or I don't care what science says. Fine. But a lot of people would like that.

And if you are someone who has received a message from an entity or entities that's of importance to the earth, I can help you amplify that. So I've developed proof protocol. So my father developed close encounters the first, second, third kind. And they speak to the nature of the encounter. So my brother, Joel, and I have worked on something we call verifiable evidence that talks about what is the evidence itself like and how compelling is that. And some protocols and categories for people, you know, you don't often control these experiences, as you know, but sometimes you can influence them.

And if you have a priori, this notion of, here's what I'd like to get, this type of information, you might be more able to come back with information that can be verified by a third party. Now, these are very challenging experiences, right? But, you know, there's a guy named Marco Rodriguez who's come up with a protocol for a DMT. You ask a very difficult mathematical question and you come back with the answer. Or I ask the question and then you go in and you come back with the answer. answer. Right. So because I grew up one foot in science, one foot in fringy science, I'm comfortable with scientists, Michael Shermer, Seth Shostick, and others. And this is the language of science, verifiable,

mathematical, unambiguous. Now, these experiences don't always distill down to that, but some of them can. So I want to help experiencers, if they're interested in this, say, here's the language of science talks. And I know you feel that they keep moving the goalposts on us, but if we look at it from this lens and try to the extent we can to nudge the experience that way, or for you to be more conscious of that aspect of the experience, maybe we can come back with something that is verifiable. And if that's the case, I could go to Michael Sherman, say, hey, Michael, is this conform with the protocols, at least? Yes. And he's not going to say, oh, you've proved. daily in life. Or let's say, you know, there are seven unsolved mathematical problems that the Millennium

Institute will give a million dollars for anyone to solve. P versus non-P, the Riemann hypothesis, et cetera. Now, the challenges are these, it's not just like one equation, it's probably like 20 pages of equations. But if I could solve one of these, or if I work with an experienceer and find like a proof or partial proof of one of these, take that to Michael Sherman. He's not going to say, okay, I believe in aliens, he's going to say, okay, someone, I don't know who, has given a solution that nobody has ever done before. I want to know more about this, and he'll lean in. So do more proof protocols. Okay, now I want to come and watch it.

And they comes and watch one. I said, I need to see 10 more before I go on CNN. Yeah. But at some point, they will. And so what I think is, I don't care what the U.S. government says. I don't give a rat's ass what they say or do. they've squandered their leadership position in my view. For me, we move the needle forward by experiencers having more productive conversations with scientists.

And that's how we go forward. And that's what I call exposure. Yeah, I'm all for that as well. And I'm very vocal about the fact that if you want to know also what the inside of a UFO looks like, you know, you could interview people like Bob Lazar and you could, you know, look down the road of these whistleblowers. But there's always a caveat there. They're always, they've worked with the government. There's reason to hide. things, but experiencers, I mean, they can tell you what the beings were wearing, what they

smelled like, what they felt like, what they thought, you know, and these really, really sort of granular elements that you would never get through, you know, official channels, you might have access, direct access to contact through them, which I think is really, really interesting. Did you, and even when you say official channels, that sounds so. limiting in my mind. Yeah. It doesn't sound privilege. It just sounds censored. Yes, it does. And I am reluctant, you know, when I have people come to me and say, because there have been people that have reached out to me and say, hey, you know, if you can protect me, I have this information. And I am a YouTuber. Okay. So I am like as much as, you know, people are out there being like, oh, you know, you're doing conducting actual investigations. This is just a place.

to facilitate conversation in a judge-free environment by entertaining people and fulfilling my creative needs. That is what this is. You know, I don't, I don't sugarcoat that and I don't pretend it's something it isn't. But that being said, I don't know where to send these people. That's the other thing. And now, yeah, now maybe I do. Because, you know, prior to that, it's like, oh, where do you go with this? It's like, I don't know. I'm not going to send you to Congress. I don't trust that you'll be safe. you know, and I don't know who to call, you know, and if you're ready to have the conversation, and I'm happy to host that conversation. But if it's, you know, some type of, I don't know, I don't know, I'm just, I just don't know where to send people a lot of the times. And, you know,

we used to have people like John Mack or Bud Hopkins or even David Jacobs or John Carpenter, like, even, I mean, even Linda Moulton Howe, you know, who's, you know, in the trenches for so many years. And people also like your father who were who were there for that. Now, I feel like more and more that isn't available. I mean, podcasts are available, but podcasts are podcasts. You know, these are public conversations. They're not private. They're not being studied.

They're not. But yeah, it feels like we're missing that element. And so I'm glad to hear that you're. putting some foot forward for that. Yeah, and I'll say, I'm not everyone's cup of tea because, you know, I've heard UFO accounts my whole life. Sure. So, but what I'm interested in is a very narrow lens of demonstrating objective reality.

So if you have, and I've had people approach me with a dizzying variety of proof protocols from the very interesting to, I would say, the less interesting from a scientific point of view. But of course, there's also the Jayon and Heinek Center for Yovo Studies. There's Mufon, there's New Fork. There are places, you know, garden variety, existing clearinghouse places for UFO reports. Yes, but the UFO reports just end up in, and this is no offense to any of those institutions, because I think they're great and they're necessary. But they do end up just being. sort of cataloged and like put in a bin. There's still value for that because you can, there is value. You can tease patterns out. And there are a lot of very good investigators. Yes.

That will doggedly track down cases. Yes. There are, that is still available. It's just I feel like the, and this might just be my own sentiment, but I do feel like it's echoed by some people. I feel like as we move forward in this conversation,

it grows more and more complex with layers of individuals involving themselves into the conversation. You know, people are a little more reluctant to trust an organization or a person or a party with some of that information. And rightfully so because of not only ridicule, but because of actual, you know, dangers potentially to their own, you know, well-being. You know, and that's just something that it's such a touchy subject that's filled with like all sorts of unknown variables and, you know. But imagine, so you have what may well be the most traumatic experience of your life. whether it objectively occurred or not. Let's say you're convinced of it.

Yes. Is your first instinct to tell your family, your friends, and call some group that you may have never heard about? How long would it take you to realize that you're not dying, first of all, that you may not have radiation, that you still have some shred of sanity left to you? Is this going to happen again tonight? all these things that you're worried about, just basic adivistic survival concerns, then what will happen if I tell my family? Sure.

Doesn't always go well. Yeah. Spoiler alert. Or if I call this group, what good will that do me? Do I want to relive it? Do I want to re-testify? That's true. And they're going to want a lot of details.

Am I ready to relive that experience? So, you know, I don't know, but for every case that's reported, there have to be 10, 20 that are not for a whole lot of valid reasons. I would agree with that. How, going back to your father, how did he deal with a lot of that on a personal level? Because it takes a toll. I've noticed even from my interactions with experiencers, as limited as that is and was, it takes a toll on me and emotionally as well because you can't help to put yourself in that position of, like you said, vulnerability, uncertainty, and a lot of cases, incredibly traumatic. And so, you know, your heart goes

out to these people to a certain extent. How was your father with that? How did he deal with that? As someone with more of like an academic background and less of like you said, like a soft science as approach, like how would he deal with that? I think he did really well. When I was old enough to realize what's going on. He'd been at it for some time, you know, 20 years. Yeah. So he'd had time to sort of acclimate and get his, you know, his sea legs. And I think he was just a very empathetic man who, more than anything else, here's an individual who's gone through some trauma. Real or not, this is a traumatized individual. And he'd often talked in the immediate aftermath of an event. Well, you know, they've not had a chance to process anything. And they're still worried, are they coming

again, et cetera. And so just dealing with that trauma all the time, you know, I haven't really thought about it the way you just pointed out what kind of impact that would have on him because I always saw him as stoic, confident and boisterous and active focused. But he must have had moments, and I'm sure a lot was Jacques and Paula Harris and other confidants and my mom, you know, frustrations with the U.S. government. frustration and not, you know, untying this Gordian knot. And just the accumulated weight of all these traumatic confessions, yeah, it must have taken a toll. And sure, a lot of that, you know, I mentioned the credibility of the witness, but he saw so

many witnesses that were so credible. Calvin Parker and Charlie Hicks and Father Gill, Travis Walton, and. So many of these people who you just sit down with and you can tell they are not lying. And, you know, my father has asked about the Pasco Gula case, Charlie Parker and Calvin Hickson. Calvin Parker Charlie Hickson in 1973 in Pasco Gula, Mississippi. And I remember taking the call from Calvin Parker. Whoa, no way. Good friend of mine, yeah.

What do you mean you took the call? The phone rang in my house. I'm outside playing kickball. And there's this guy with a southern drawl talking about Pascagoula. seeing something in the sky. And, okay, this is just a Tuesday. And I met Calvin much later in life and his wife, and we became good friends and, you know, rest his soul. And that was a particularly good case.

And Philip Mantle has been very good at bringing forth more and more evidence. It's been a lot of witnesses that have come in the subsequent years to corroborate more, more aspects of the case. So it gets stronger over time, which is not usual. And one of the aspects of the case, I'm sure you know, is that. that Calvin Parker and Charlie Hickson, and they're their young dock workers. And I think the event happened on a Friday. And on Saturday, they're literally being interrogated

in the police station. And the police, sergeant, whoever it is, leaves the room. And there's a recorder. Story goes, was inadvertently left on. And so Charlie and Calvin are just talking amongst themselves. Now, these are not Hollywood actors. Now. They're young men in a trauma

and they seem to be very consistent. And that's just one more piece of data. My father very much liked the case, but somebody asked him, Dr. Heineck, did this case happen? How the hell should I know? I wasn't there, but I believe the witnesses believe it happened,

which is as far as a scientist would go. And what Calvin told me, which I didn't know, was 7.30 in the morning, that next Monday morning, they go back to work. And my father is waiting in the 8. office at the shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Wow. That morning. I didn't know. And he must have been down in the region for some kind of business to get there that fast from Chicago. But so he saw them in this aftermath. And I think talking to all these people who are just

coming to grips of this had to take a toll on him. And part of that was pushing them along that spectrum of like these credible witnesses, Air Force pilots, who are trained by this same Air Force who's trying to debunk the whole thing. All these people coming forth, many of them, nothing to gain, very intelligent, not embellishing, able to do, like in Father Gil's case, trigonometric calculations at the time of the sighting to determine the distance and the size. These witnesses have had experiences. Yeah. And so part of the impact on him was making him say, yes, there's clearly something going on. And I think it just must have. And I think it just must have converted him from a nuts and bolts astrophysicist into an Erzatz psychologist almost overnight.

Wow. Yeah. And especially with some of those stronger cases, being able to speak directly with the witnesses in such a short time after it happened. Also, you know, as anyone knows, in an investigation is absolutely paramount, you have to, you know, as soon as possible because memory, you know, gets altered. It changes for a variety of reasons. Or your willingness to come forward will change. Yeah, everything changes. Or men in black. My father encountered what are now known as men in black, which to me, I think, and I've heard a lot of theories, I think they may have been part of the Air Intelligence Service Squadron.

What was one instance of your father encountering the men in black that you remember? As I remember, it's hard to keep all these stories separate, but he was leaving a case and he saw a white, sedan pull up with two guys in dark clothes. And when they next talk to the witness, they wouldn't talk anymore. What case was this? Do you remember? I don't remember what case it was. And that was just one instance. That was one instance. And to me, it's part and parcel. So I think it was the Air Intelligence Service Squadron whose responsibility was to respond to any crash of any craft terrestrial or extraterrestrial within six hours in the continental United States. They had Russian speakers as well. And I think their mission was to retrieve anything that landed.

any sensitive materials. But I think part of that mission was also to contain information fallout. So it would have been on them to go to a case and make sure that information is not spreading. And could it just be for garden variety in national security concerns. But it's an example of how we tend to think of the U.S. government is this one monolithic block acting in cohesion. And nothing is further from the truth. There are very intense turf battles. Yep.

And so Project Bluebook's going out there, and my father is frustrated because he's not getting all the information. There's clearly at least one government agency working at cross purposes. And then even within an agency, you have different people doing different things. Yeah, there's obfuscation. There's all types of players involved in the game with different agendas, both within the government and possibly, you know, outside of the government that seem like the government is something we hear a lot about as well. Do you think your father, in your opinion, ever saw information that made him absolutely believe that UFOs are real? No. You don't think so.

He had two sightings that I know of. They're just sightings of something in the sky. What he would call a daylight disk, not even to the level of a close encounter of the first kind, which is roughly within 500 feet. and there were no deathbed confessions. And I think also he would have loved to see something, but also he saw value in his position as an impartial arbiter, sort of a monitor of the noise level. It's not so much, I've seen something.

I know this is real, but look at the weight of the data. Project Blue Book, for example, non-serious scientific effort, officially investigated about 12,000 odd cases. Of those, even with the super strong institutional imperative to stamp solved, you know, weather balloon

on all the cases, they still couldn't solve 5%. Statistically significant. So it's the weight of the data over time that I can point to as a scientist that my father would say that indicates something is happening. What it is, I don't know, but the evidence warrants further scientific study. And I think he thought he had the most value to add by that as opposed to personal testimony.

What do you make of Danny Sheean's claim that he was allowed into the sort of bowels of Project Blue Book? You heard of this story that he opened this box, went through these folders, and saw a picture of a craft craft in the snow. Do you think your father ever got to see that as well? Or was that hidden from him? Or was Danny shown passage material in a sort of limited hang sort of situation? Like, what do you make of that? Well, first, I believe what my friend Danny Sheehan says. I don't know what my father saw.

Clearly, he was convinced. And whether it was simply on the prosaic level, the accumulated weight of the data, or having seen something in particular like that, that kind of smoking photographic gun that Danny talked about, I don't know. Okay. Yeah, but that's the sense you got that, like, there was something in him that shifted. And it wasn't just the testimony. I don't know.

Okay. I don't know. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. But he was convinced that there was a phenomenon as irritating and annoying as it may be. Yeah, especially to a scientist. Wow. I mean, that is just, that is incredible.

And, you know, I, there's, you know, part of me and part of, I'm sure a lot of people listening at home that are, incredibly envious of someone being, you know, so close to the potential truth as you were as a child. But obviously for you, that was just your upbringing. That was just how things were. That was just normal in the Heineck household. Looking back, do you ever find yourself going, like, are there any instances where you're, like, uncovering and unpacking memories that you can now make sense of a little bit more than you could before? Well, one of the things I look back at, and, you know, I have three brothers and a sister, and I think we all kind of look back and say, why didn't we have more super long conversations

with our dad and our mom, who was deeply involved as well? And part of it was just there all the time. You know, for the UFO phenomena, I've never until recently had to be active and lean in and do research. It was just there at dinner. And so it was there all the time. And I had a lot of talks with my dad, as we all did. But I would have liked to have even more. And, you know, one of the things I made my father promise is that each of us would sort of communicate with the other one after death.

And I'm pretty sure he did this with my siblings, too. And I've seen something interesting, but not dispositive for that. But, you know, it's not. not like I look back now in hindsight with adult vision and can reinterpret something. Because even at the time, we were there for so many adult discussions that I had, I think we all had a fairly good idea of what's going on. And so for me now, looking back, I would have just liked to do even more things than I did. I tried to get my junior field investigator merit badge from my dad, because this guy called one day, oh, I got to tell you about Prince Michael.

One of my favorites. Prince Michael calls, and he says, hi, I'm Prince Michael from Orion. I said, yeah, you're probably from the Pleiades. And I'm like 12 years old. What an insults. Right? You know, you're one of those renegade pleadians. And he says, no, I really am.

And I said, yeah, well, yeah, I don't think so, dude. I think you're full of shit. He says, well, I'll prove it to you. I said, okay, good. See, it's all about proof with me. And he says, how about if I put a million dollars in your bank account? That'll do it. That'll do it.

So I said, hey, mom. She's like, what? She said, can I give this guy my bank account number? And I think, I was sure. She goes, oh, hang up the phone. She's like, sure, why not? Like, go, mom. So I give my bank account number.

He says, okay, the money be there tomorrow. So that next morning, I ride my Schwinn fastback bike to the bank. And I say, hey, Paul, what are you here for? Well, I have a million dollars on my account. I said, well, sorry, Paul, it's still $17. $0.43. Okay, so I ride home crushed. Three days in a row, I do.

this. Prince Michael calls back on the phone. I said, you know, you bastard. And he says, the money's not there. And I said, no. I said, you liar. And he goes, I tell you what, we're going to do it another way. I said, no, this way is good. This is the way. He goes, no, no, I want you to call the CIA. And they gave me the number with the CIA. He said, you call them. You tell them about me. And they will tell you they're afraid of me. Like, I still like the bank account. No, no, we're doing this. Okay, okay. So I call the CIA. And I say, first of all, big fan of the work you do, red, white and blue, go USA. Thank you so much. And she said, okay, okay, what is it you're calling about? He said, well, I follow his advice, involved with the UFOs, and we get a bunch

of crazy people to call, and this guy called me. He's Prince Michael. He says you from Ryan. I think he's from Pleiades. And she's like, okay, what is it? And I said, well, he told me to call you and that you guys would admit that you're afraid of him. And this is the receptionist at Langley. And she says, well, Paul, let me put it this way. We're not exactly losing a lot of sleep over this. So like, the CIA has a set of humor. Go. So Prince Michael calls again the next day and I tell him and he goes, well, you didn't really think they would admit it, did you? I'm like, oh, come on.

So that was Prince Michael. Did you ever show up? No. And we had crazy people come to the house. Was there ever anybody that came that made you go, huh, what if? Like, was there ever like some tall, blonde? Oh, I mean, like, are they not human? Yeah.

Was there ever any sense? even just for a second that you were like, maybe this person is who they are claiming to be or maybe they're someone else who they're claiming not to be. Not as a child, but as an adult, I've met a lot of people who claim to be hybrids or full on aliens. Tell me about that. So I was at UFOCon in San Francisco,

and I met this German woman, this older German woman, very, like Bob Monroe, very salt of the earth. earth. She wasn't speaking, and she heard who I was and said, oh, it's very interesting. And she wasn't overly enthusiastic about talking about what she wanted to talk about. So it wasn't like she was just lying in wait because she got a high knick on the line to talk about it. And she just starts talking. And I think I asked her, what do you do? What do you hear for? And she's, oh, well, she took a couple beats and said, I'm a nanny on a spaceship for human high. hybrid alien babies.

Like, you and I have both heard a lot of hybrid accounts, but this was a very, matter of fact, workman-like, a nanny on a spaceship. I'm like, okay. I mean, it doesn't, you can't really startle me at this point, but that's sort of a new sort of work-a-day tank. I'm like, okay, cool. Tell me about this. And she's just matter-of-factly answering questions. She's not like. Like what?

What are the questions? Like, so I thought, I thought, let me ask her. secondary questions because I think like the first questions will be how did it happen, how do you get up there? So I asked her like, do you have insurance? What are the species? What are your relationships with them? What were the species? Different. And she said they didn't have insurance, but they kind of healed her. And every question I asked, which I thought would be ones that she wouldn't get, even though I don't think she's broadcasting this widely, she just paused for a second and gave me a reflective answer. And it's almost like when you talk to people, they sort of look up one way

and they sort of bring back visual memories. It was like that. And it wasn't like, oh, I hadn't thought about that before. It was just like, oh, and just without skipping a beat would just sort of tell me. And it was this very low-key delivery. What were the species? I don't remember if she told me what they were. But one of the things that jumped out at me was that she said, you know, I have grandchildren here. I've fulfilled my purpose. This is meaningful for me. And it was nine to five, Monday through Friday.

And just this super chill, non-overly energetic, prosaic accounting of this extraordinary day-to-day event. That's something that we hear about, especially with David Jacobs and his They're Among Us book where you have these abductees that are trained in sort of a lot of times menial sort of tasks or whatever that train the sort of the hybrids, the later stage hybrids, how to behave human-like and show them mundane things and activities. And a lot of times as well, abductees are taken to be a sort of mother-like figure to the younger extraterrestrials on it. So this is kind of that.

What year was this around? This was like a few years ago. It couldn't have been. Right before COVID. Okay. So just not too long ago. So this lady is around potentially still? Yeah.

And I asked her, there was, I asked two people of that conference who said they regularly go on saucers if I could be a plus one. Now my sister tries to make me promise not to go on a craft, but I'm going. And so, but they've not come by the house yet to pick me up. Yeah. And they've come by her house to pick her up? Like that, how does that work? How does the drop off work? I'm still not sure because I didn't ask that kind of question, like how she gets there.

But it's, I like witness accounts like that. Dude. They stick with me more. So I'll tell you one of the things that was the most, not chilling, but the most interesting to me. So my father is a scientific director for Project Bluebook. There were Air Force directors, and there was a spectrum. Repelte was great. And I think my father's favorite was Colonel, Colonel Friend.

and he was an American hero. He was a Tuskegee Airman. He worked on the space shuttle, and he was at Project Blue Buck. And he actually saved my father's life in a scrap in South Chicago one night. Wonderful man. So when my brother and I were consultants

on the TV show Project Blue Buck, we filmed a bunch of background footage, including interviews with Bob Friend. And at this point, he's 98 years old. and he would start to drift off it sometimes. But if you ask him sort of a process-related question, sharp his attack. So somebody asked him, Lieutenant Colonel Friend, were alien bodies ever taken to write Patterson Air Force Base?

And he said, now, he's still a patriot and abiding by his oath of loyalty. He says, no, alien bodies wouldn't have been taken to write Pat, that was a mechanic center. They would have been taken to Fort Hood, which was a burn center. He's not violating his confidentiality, but why is he adding that coda? Wow.

So I thought, okay, that's pretty cool. So about a month later, he's celebrating his 99th birthday party. His 99th birthday. We're at a party at an outdoor restaurant at Manhattan Beach, California. And I'm sitting at the table with him, and I'm like, this is my chance.

And I figure, I've got to loosen them up, So I tell him this famous joke about George Burns, who everybody knew he wanted to live to be 100 years old. And so I'm telling us to Lieutenant Colonel Friend at his 99th birthday party. This woman comes up to George Burns says, but Mr. Burns, who really wants to live to be 100 years old? Ah, someone who's 99. So I tell that to Lieutenant Colonel Friend.

He starts laughing. I'm okay, now is my moment. Now I can't ask him to violate his oath. So I have to sort of tease around the edge. And I said, Lieutenant Carl, friend, I'm just the son of your former buddy. You could tell me, did you ever see anything convincing? And he goes, his eyes light up. And he looks around.

This is like 60 years later, a restaurant in California. He's still looking around. And he says, Paul, yes. And I just had chills up and down. because this is a guy who had a front row seat and may have seen things that my father wasn't allowed to see. Maybe he saw what Danny Sheehan saw. And sharp as attack when you get him on these process-type questions,

not violating his oath, but wanting to convey information with a family personal contact. These are the things that I gravitate to more than this or that case. This is a guy who spanned so many cases. and was convinced, and he didn't go into this like, oh, I love UFOs. This is probably not the assignment he liked. This is Wright Patton Dayton, right? He made the most of it.

And that really stuck with me. Now, we were going to go to his house a little bit later, and he passed away soon after that. But to me, there's nothing more convincing I've ever come across personally than that encounter. Wow. Yeah, that's profound. That's a one-word answer that just foof. And, you know, reading between the lines, giving information like you did in the prior interview, this is a guy that saw stuff. That's a great question. A smartly formulated question that he, what seems like he was excited to answer finally. Yeah. And, you know, he knew what I meant by convincing. Yeah. Wow. That's, uh,

Yeah, I mean, dude, you know, one of the goals here, and I've, you know, talked to talk to the audience about this before, but one of the goals of this channel would eventually be to have some type of non-human sat right there, you know, and I put that out there because I know how crazy that sounds to some people, but I don't think it sounds that crazy at all. Well, we got three here now. That's right. Three guardians. But, you know, to me, if there are. people interacting with these entities, these beings, in a way that is so casual as to become a nanny for them on their ship and, you know, show them how a stove works and like all of this, then why can't I be the one to show them what a podcast is? Like, is that so hard to believe? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me, Chris. I think the closer we get to this being uncorked, I think the more that this becomes a reality in which I can play a part in.

And I want that part and I want that to happen. So let me devil's advocate. Sure. So I talked about how I think extraterrestrials may be post-biological. And DMT entities well beyond post-biological is. So, and maybe it comes through DMT or Monroe facilitated experiences. To me, that seems as likely as a landing of a saucer or sitting down with a flesh and blood non-human. Maybe it comes through chatypT.

Comes through dreams. Maybe we've already had these. Maybe they don't, you know, maybe they can instantiate. You know, I have this nagging suspicion that many phenomena that we, especially in the West, silo in different buckets, aliens, Bigfoot, ghosts, DMT, there may be this sort of common substrate at the base level where they're not different. And maybe we perceive them in different ways based on cultural biases, or maybe they just instantiate in different ways at different times for different reasons. But I, you know,

Maybe they'll communicate through machinery more than just sitting in person. Sure. And that's more comfortable. Maybe that's less of an ontological blow across the head. And maybe it's happening already. Yeah. And I'm all for all of that. But I meet me halfway here.

Because, you know. Maybe just have the headphones here. Let's do it audio only. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of a first step. Sure.

And I don't think that that's that impossible. I'm reading so many stories about interactions with human-like entities, whether they're incredibly short but don't have, you know, any of the little person sort of qualities and they all look kind of alike, very bizarre, to being extremely tall and ridiculously good-looking, like, you know, blonde Nordic types, to other ones that just look like regular people, like all of the in-betweens. but there are these really mysterious encounters with these physical beings that are somehow or another integrating into our lives, be it temporarily or on some semi-permanent manner. And let's say that appear to be physical because a lot of the encounters, you don't actually have any kind of touch. Yeah. But certainly it seemed to be incarnate in some place. Sure. But then you look at like you mentioned earlier, Travis Walton, there was physical interaction.

Yep, yeah. Yes, pretty much. grabbed him and manhandled him, who is a young vital lumberjack. Right. You know, the last guy you'd pick on, really. And this lady as strong as anyone, you know, who's. Yeah, you're going to pick on like five lumberjacks of the Mogi on Rim in Arizona. Yeah, and just pick them up and put him in a chair.

And like, I mean, yeah, there does seem to be a physical element on some level to this. Now, what that is, I don't know. Yeah, and whether that's their permanent state or... Yeah, or whether that's just us in the future or some shape or some unknown government or whatever or breakaway civilization, whatever that is. You know, let's have a conversation. Let's open it up to dialogue a little bit more. I mean, obviously they're towing the line of disclosure. They have been.

If not, they wouldn't interact with us. They wouldn't, you know, come have these strange conversations or, you know, just show up to a constant. are dressed in blue and like they wouldn't do this if they weren't curious to how we'd react to it, at least on some level. Let's let's talk it out. Yeah. And you know, we've talked about how the U.S. government isn't one central coordinated actor, but also is it really up to the U.S. government to disclose information and all the governments in the world? Or do the non-human intelligence has have some say in the matter. Yeah.

And clearly, there's a phenomena here. Where, when, how, don't know. But if these beings that can manifest being here, in my view, clearly vastly superior technology than we have, if they were here with pure hostile intentions, we'd be gone. Yeah. So at the very worst, they're manipulating us or hybridizing or et cetera. Yeah, or pranking, I don't know. Yeah, or are there us, you know, Michael Masters,

there are us in the future, et cetera. But, you know, Danny Sheehan is great at deftly maneuvering the levers of power to get information out. And one of the things he told me, which is brilliant, was, you know, I told you about my roleplay where I do the Jack Nicholson. You want me on that wall. I'm not giving up the information. I'm here for full spectrum dominance, yada, yada, yada.

Well, Danny goes into and meets with an inspector general at one agency at the Pentagon. And he tells them what an existing statute requires of them. The inspector general is concerned with compliance. That is their job. So Danny was able to turn the tables from him being seen as this muck-wraking people's advocate into somebody pointing out a part of his job that he didn't know that he had to do. And then that guy starts talking to other inspectors. sector as general. Now, that is a way I can see you actually pry this information out. Sure, in like an

official government capacity. To the extent that the non-human partners would allow that to happen. Right. Do you think that they in some part are controlling disclosure? That's beyond my pay, right? I don't know. Yeah, but I mean, hypothetically, it would seem like they have some hand in it, like at least. I would think they either control or influence everything. If we have, non-human intelligence, especially extraterrestrial, that are here for whatever reason, there's very little that happens without them allowing it to happen, I would say. That makes sense. What do you make of, while we're on hypotheticals, what do you make of these ideas of, you know,

time travel and stuff like that within, you know, these certain black projects or whatever? Is that ever come up? Have you ever talked to anybody that says, hey, we've jumped through portals or, hey, we've had a looking glass device to see in time. Has any of that ever crossed your path at any point? I've never talked to a purported time traveler, but Michael Masters, who I mentioned, has done great work in advancing that theory in a really skillful way.

One of the challenges, though, is if people can come back from the future, we could have millions of millions of people all the time. It wouldn't necessarily just be a few, because once you figure out time travel, now it's possible. And at some point, it's, you know, those machines are sold at Walmart. Yeah, where are the twists?

And everyone's coming back, right? Yeah. So that's like, why do saucers crash in the desert, right? So time travel, you know, I think for me, personally, extraterrestrial travel in nuts and bolts ships going conventionally from A to B is unlikely. How do they find us?

We're like a speck of dust. in Kansas. And yes, we've been beaming out episodes of I Love Lucy, lo, these many decades, but if they're post-biological, they're not thinking about radio waves. And then why would they care? Why would they come so far away and be somewhat elusive? That's why interdimensional rings true to me, because they're adjacent to us and may be us in a many worlds dimension. So I like that. my brother Joel and I spent a fair amount of time with a guy very interesting guy

who said he was employed by HP Hewlett Packard to go experience or go experiment and investigate anomalous phenomena around the world to see if they could monetize it somehow distill it down to printer cartridges he told me the story about how

and I wanted to go on an investigation with him and it doesn't happen. So that there was this guy rescued at sea who had jeans on with a designer that didn't exist in the world, talked about a former vice president who was president who was not, and slight shifts in reality and this consistent story of a world slightly off of ours. and that was fascinating to me of a potential dimensional traveler, not a time traveler. Did you ever follow up with that?

I kept asking him, and I said, I want to go into an investigation with you, because another one he talked about was how he was in Australia, and people were looking up, and it's a sunny day, no clouds, and yet there is this square pattern of shade on the ground, and that nobody could explain. So I was like, I want to go.

And for whatever reason, it just didn't materialize. But the time travel, I mean, Michael does a really good job showing how we could involve to little grays, right? Yeah. But it's a tough nut. Now, when I was about, maybe about 10 years old, around the same time as the Eclipse cruise, my father and I watched the movie The Time Machine. And after I said, hey, Dad, I'm going to go build a time machine. He starts laughing at me. I pissed me off.

Why are you laughing me, Dad? He goes, you know, he couldn't even articulate why I was so preposterous, especially me of all the children doing it. And I said, but, Dad, when you were a kid, wouldn't have they said it's impossible if you said, you know, man, we'll go to the moon. He goes, oh, you're right, bozo. Well, you go downstairs and build that time machine because you can do it

because you don't know it's impossible. I'm like, yeah, Dad! So I run downstairs and I get some balsa wire and some duct tape and some wire. You know the first things you need for a time machine. You know, that's cross. and then I sort of start to lose steam. I'm like, what do I do next? And then it dawned to me that I really can't build much of anything,

but that even more I had no working theory of what a time machine would be or how it would work, even though I had a nice cachet of duct tape. So I just ran out, you know, played with my friends outside. But I'll never forget how buoyed I was by my dad's confidence that I, could do the impossible. So that is almost like a little time machine story because whenever I say that, I feel that exact crystal of emotion that I had at that moment. Yeah, that you don't know that something's impossible, therefore it can be done. Yeah. That's a beautiful analogy with a lot of things in life, I think. And that's a really important lesson for a lot of people as well is that

a lot of people are fundamentally instilled with this idea that something isn't possible or they can't or they're not enough. And that alone prevents it from happening. That causes a time shift. Yes. And so now here's me trying to demonstrate the objective reality of supernatural phenomena. Of course it's impossible, but that's maybe why we can do it. Yeah, exactly.

That's beautiful. Great. I have some questions, maybe only a couple, because I think we touched on one of them already, but I have some questions from the audience. We time traveled to the question. Great question here. Didn't write who this was by. I think J.D. says,

what's your favorite case that your father has worked on and have you researched that case yourself? That's a tough one. We've already talked about Travis Walton. Pascagoula. And Pascagoula. And I mentioned in passing Father Gil. So I'll go to this one.

Father Gil was an Anglican missionary in Papua New Guinea. And either 1959 or 61 had a sighting. raise inside for evening prayers, here's commotion outside, goes outside, and sees a craft. And he's the guy that's doing this on-the-spot trigonometric calculations. And they see this craft hovering,

maybe about 500 feet. And at one point, a hatch opens up and entities come out. Father Gil waves, and they wave back. And he goes back inside. And there were other sightings that kind of map out of flight paths, etc. And that was about it. So years later, and my father went there and investigated,

years later, Father Gil comes to Chicago for an ecumenical religious conference. He has not written a book. This is, again, just like in the Air Force, not fast-track to advancement in a religious environment. And he's having dinner with us because he just happens to be in Chicago. Now, if you are a witness to a UFO event and you're coming to the Heinek House and you're eating our food, you're probably going to have to talk about it. So like with the woman who is the nanny on the spaceship, he didn't launch into it. But when my father or my mom brought it up, he started talking about it. And again, this is part of my dad's sort of longitudinal analysis to see if the story is consistent over time. And like Bob Monroe, I saw this man who was very intelligent, very comfortable in his skin,

matter-of-factly in an ordinary fashion relating an extraordinary account, viewed by multiple other witnesses, in a way that just screamed credibility of the witness. So I'll go with that case, J.D., as one that, really stands out because of my personal interaction, again, with the witness and seeing my father and talking to my father about this case with multiple witnesses. So I'll go with that. Did you ever conduct investigations? Like, I mean, because you talked about going on investigations. Oh, no. Okay. So I think I mentioned I tried to get my junior investigator, field investigator, merit badge. So that's right.

I got sidetracked by Prince Michael. Forget Prince Michael. So this guy calls up and he says... Who the CIA is terrified of, by the way. Good work. All of our three-letter government agency folks do a great job. So this guy calls him and says, I'm an alien. I can prove it by looking at the sun.

Well, that was enough for me. So I say, hey, dad, we can go out and see him. My dad said, yes. So we go out and see this guy. And suburban Chicago, you know, normal type house, knock on the door. Let's say his name is Robert. Hi.

we're here to see Robert. And it's this elderly couple. He's like, he's in the basement. Oh, my God. This is not going already. You don't need a spidey sense at this point to know it's going south. So we go downstairs and there are thousands of pennies. I know Nelson likes dimes, but there are pennies.

Thousands of them everywhere. Literally thousands glued everywhere on this ceiling on the floor and the walls on the things everywhere. I'm like, what's up with the pennies? I just blurt it out. And he said, oh, copper is just some kind of garbage. And then the next thing I remember was turns off the lights, turns on black lights, whips out the big hunting knife with like these elvish runes on it. I'm like, I stand between him and my dad.

I'm like, I brought my dad. I got to, you know, I got to shield him. And he's like, just talking gibberish. And then I said, you said something about looking the sun. How about we do that? He's like, oh, okay. And so now we come out of like the wood panel den with the pennies everywhere. Go outside in the yard.

Feeling better now. And my dad has already kind of look inside with me. And he said, look at the car. Now there's a car in the drive with pennies everywhere, including on the top of the cigarette lighter. That level of detail. You would appreciate that. And like, okay. So I said, so look at the sun.

Now it's a bright sunny day. And he starts looking at it. And for like five seconds, my dad says, okay, that's enough. That's enough proof. Well, look at the time. We got to go. I don't remember saying one word with my dad and a half hour drive home. Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's so nice to your dad to be like, you know, taking clearly understanding probably that this is not going. Like, he's a smart guy. He probably already knew where this was heading, but maybe wanted you to experience that. Yeah. Thanks, Pops. Yeah, that's a really cool story. Pennies is interesting. The copper stuff.

What did you say about copper? It had no, there was nothing valid. It was just some goofy strung together series of theories. Yeah. I don't remember. I mean, at that point, I was already like. Yeah, already skeptical. Well, afraid.

Yeah, afraid. Fair enough. Well, disappointed that this is not going on the cover of the International UFO Reporter magazine, but that is going to be a long drive home. Already at that point I knew. I have somebody who hit me up with a really interesting. story involving copper. So that was why I brought that up.

Maybe I'll share that one day. But copper seems to be coming up quite a lot, actually, with a lot of beings. This is the only reason I ask. It seems like such a benign sort of like element, you know, we make pennies out of it. We don't really have any. Blumming, yeah. But somehow, you know, also used in a lot of conductivity. Okay.

Let's go next question here. That was great. This one we answered. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to get into it. But essentially in forbidden science, Fervidden Science Valate mentions your father's interest in Rosicrucianism. Could you expand a little? So that's something we already kind of touched on.

We time travel that bitch. Yeah, we did. All right. Question here from someone who I think you should have a conversation with eventually. There's a question from my friend Jesse Michaels from American Alchemy. The question here, Jesse writes, was your father part of a deeper UFO program? Well, he did work with Blue Book past the official cessation of Blue Book in December, January 69, January, 1970 as a consultant. I don't know the extent of that.

And that sort of goes against the narrative that they shut everything down. Now, I don't know. I mean, I've heard rumors of. of deeper involvement with other, perhaps more serious government programs. And I have to think, and I know from Jacques and others, that there are lots of talks with people, Air Force generals, et cetera. And there are several cases like, hey, come to the hangar at five o'clock, we're going to show you, but then the hangar is closed.

So I don't know of an institutionalized involvement, but more sort of ad hoc over time, lots of conversations, and a lot of them, you know, unsanctioned. But he was not only somebody knowledgeable and an astronomer, but I think somebody that people felt they could be candid with and be very open, that he could keep the secret and not, you know, ridicule them. And he was especially responsive, as I mentioned briefly, to Air Force pilots. I mean, they're great observers, great vision, calm under pressure, trained to spot objects, trained by the Air Force. And stable.

And stable, right? And again, not going on a book tour afterwards. Yeah, not showing you a million pennies. Yeah, right. And so I know there were a lot of conversation. I just don't know how structured they were. And a lot of people came forward to him because he was seen as sort of a. sympathetic clearinghouse.

Great. Yeah. Man. You ever find anything? Like, you know, that your father didn't share with you while he was around, like, post and you're, like, going through stuff or does everything, anything ever come up where you're like, oh, I didn't know he was. Even if he met someone that you didn't know, like, was there any, even like, non-UFO related? Like, was there things that surprised you about him that you didn't know? Yeah.

I think a lot of us go through this with our parents, because our parents don't often lead conversations. I'll tell you the time about this. So a lot of things, like the correspondence with Arthur C. Clark, I had no idea. Met with Donald Rumsfeld, all sorts of meetings and things that I didn't know about. And we talked earlier about the Betts sphere. This is kind of an interesting example. I was asked when I was giving a presentation one day, hey, Paul, here's an article about the Bettsphere from a famous case in Florida that your dad was involved in. Did you ever see the Betz sphere?

And I'd never heard of the Bettsphere at the time. I said, well, I remember when I was a teenager, my younger brother and I, my dad came home one day with this big kind of weird metallic sphere, kind of like a bowling ball, all metal. And he just gave it to us. And we were sort of kicking around on the floor and play with it. And I thought, I don't know if it's a Betz fear or not, but that's kind of an interesting out in the open hiding place

to give it to your kids and not tell them there's anything special about it. Now, I think it's probably not that because I think there was like a little seam where you could feel like the metal was injected into it. But there's a lot of things that I look back and I've heard a lot of experiences. Dave Schindler, who you may have met at Contact in the Desert, was with Robert Salas, one of the many people at the Air Force bases in Montana in 1967 when they were shut down ostensibly by UFOs. and talk about credible witnesses. He came to me and he said, look, you're the one person I wanted to meet. And he came and talked about his experience

and he's just the most honest, direct guy you can find. And he had a package of correspondence between my father and one of the people in that event. Now, I'd known Bob Salas for years, another unimpeachable stand-up guy. But now here's correspondence. Some handwritten between my father and one of the,

military personnel. And one of the letters was my dad with a sense of humor saying, you can call off the dogs hunting for my jacket, I found it. And now that's on brand for my father, you know, to be funny and to be absent mind at the same time. So it's things like that that, you know, people talking about my dad involved in this, but when I see my dad's unique handwriting or I can see, yes, I know that's from my dad. It brings that case to life for me. Beautiful.

I'm going to ask you just one last thing. And thank you so much for sharing all that about your father. And, you know, it's, it must not always be easy. But it sounds like you, you know, have very fond memories of him. And so, you know, maybe cathartic to some extent. So thank you for indulging us and, you know, regaling us with those tales. Very much appreciated. But now I want to know what's Paul Heinek up to?

What's next for you? I mentioned my passion for proof protocols because let's say we have a official capital D disclosure. If it's a Republican administration, the Democrats won't believe it, and vice versa. Disclosure is not what it used to be. And there's a lot of problems with priming the narrative, et cetera, for that. But how would the world change if independent, famed, famed, scientists say, I have in my hand evidence that I don't know what it says, but it can't be explained. And we're funding an institute to do this, to replicate this more, and publishing

the guidelines for other people to do this, to replicate it, because I've never seen anything like this in my life. And it involves the potentiality of non-human intelligence or of capabilities that we shouldn't seem to have. And that gets promulgated and echoed and amplified. That's exposure. That will change the world. So my passion is the various modalities of talking to experiences, creating a protocol to enable experiences of all kinds of things

where they say I have contact with something that seems to be, what we would consider metatrestrial. My own investigations with DMT to try to show the world beyond

a shadow of a doubt that what many traditions, what many individuals, what many groups have talked about out there is there and is accessible

and is coming to us with information. that's wonderful. Is there a place where people can reach you if they should want to reach out or do you want to keep that, do you want to keep that close to you? Yeah, I have a pretty anemic social media footprint, maybe Twitter or if someone really has something I want to share with me, they can find me. They can hunt down the scurvy dog that I am. Okay, good enough. Fair enough. Paul, thanks for your time.

I really appreciate this conversation. It's been super enlightening, fun. you're such a charismatic and funny person and it's such a joy to meet you and talk with you. Pleasure. I was wondering if you'd like to stay for an extra 20 minutes. We're going to end this public interview and go into a bit of a deeper skiff

and just kind of let loose a little bit for the members, if that's cool. 25 minutes. 25 minutes. Okay, accepted. Thanks so much, Paul Heineck for your time here. Folks, thank you guys for watching. and if you want to become part,

you want to be a member, want to become part of the internship, do so, and then we can continue the conversation over there. And until then, we'll see you next time.