Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/27/26: Putin Escalates War In Ukraine, CIA Secret Cartel War in Mexico, Recovered UFOs?

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

In the second half of the show, Saagar and Ryan look at Putin escalating the war in Ukraine after talks go nowhere; then we're joined by returning friend of the show Juan David Rojas to talk about a potential secret CIA Cartel War in Mexico, and finally Ben Schreckinger joins to talk about the latest in UAP mysteries. Juan David Rojas: https://juandarojasro.substack.com/Ben Schreckinger: https://x.com/SchreckReports Sign up for BP Free Trial: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements.

We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard,

and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B.

I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent Media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and

all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. So as Ukrainian drone attacks continue to pummel Russia's oil industry, the CIA director traveled to Moscow to warn Putin against an attack on NATO interests in Europe, while Bloomberg is reporting, put this first element up on the screen, that Putin is considering ways to escalate the war against Ukraine, with a lot of people are kind of around him starting to talk about

the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons. And so this Bloomberg report doesn't say that anybody close to Putin is saying, anybody in Putin's inner circle is saying this. What they're saying is that kind of the hardliners who are influential in Putin's world are increasingly talking about the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Which Professor Mearsheimer has been saying here for months on the show and has been warning about this. Now the reason that a lot of other analysts think that that's not an immediate concern is something

else that Bloomberg alludes to, that Russia has significant escalatory options at its disposal that it has not used yet. And that the thinking is that before you take the political hit from breaking the taboo, against the first and becoming the first country to use nuclear weapons since the United States

in 1945, you would do these other things and the other things include major ballistic missile attacks particularly on the downtown Keev as well as striking

infrastructure targets throughout Ukraine in other major cities Putin has said in recent days that Russia is going to attack the kind of you know, beating heart of the Ukrainian economy. And it comes as Ukraine is effectively out of ballistic

missile interceptors. Exactly. Partly as a result of this war going on for four years, partly as a result of the United States launching a war against Iran and using the ballistic missile interceptors to defend its positions in the region as well as to defend Israel. And so now when there is a ballistic missile attack, even with conventional ballistic missiles, you often are seeing, you know, dozens or scores of casualties in Kiev. And that's before, you know, they've kind of climbed up this escalatory ladder. There seems to be a, in the U.S., there seems to be very little focus on what's going on. It's like, oh, that Trump said he was going to end the war. He didn't end the war. Oh, there isn't just focus. Let's be honest. Like,

They support this. The security establishment in Washington. And frankly, most of the Democratic voters, they're like, oh, this is good. Ukraine's taking the war to Russia. Like they have Republican voters now that Trump has flipped or even flipping. You're right. Yeah, good point. You know, I have to update my priors when it comes to the cult.

But you're exactly right. And of course, everybody's, oh, Putin's shill. No, I'm a humanity shill. Like, I don't want to see the normalization of tactical nuclear weapons. And this is actually exactly fulfilling the same, the exact prophecy, which we saw from the destruction of weapon stockpiles in Iran. Because let's put D5 up here on the screen. This really colors in the lines of what we knew about this shady meeting, which everybody knew had taken place, but we didn't know the exact details. So the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, flew to Moscow in a surprise trip was, quote,

to warn Russia not to attack NATO. Now, the reason why I think we should all take this very seriously is the last time that a CIA director flew to Russia was right before the invasion of Ukraine. To warn them not to attack Ukraine. Yeah, where they, I forget, Bill Burns, I think was his name. Bill Burns sat across from Putin. He's like, we know you're going to attack Ukraine. Please do not do that.

And Trump actually tried to downplay this as, quote, a routine, a semi-routine visit. Sorry to disappoint people. We actually saw just yesterday there were pictures snapped of the CIA director, Secretary Hegeseth, and the entire National Security Council who met with Trump apparently about this meeting. So you can see it important enough to summon full National Security Council situation room meeting. And for him to fly to Moscow, there's obviously at least some intelligence, which, you know, shows that this is a potential possibility. But I specifically want to read this one. A shortfall in critical munitions, driven by expenditures in Iran, could also factor into Putin's

thinking. The U.S. has degraded its stockpile of certain weapons because of transfers to Ukraine after Russia's 2022 invasion, as well as the Iran conflict. And so the neocons, ironically, who were obsessed with Ukraine and then also were even more obsessed with Iran, have now created a reality where Kiev has no interceptors left. We've got no interceptors left to give them. Putin is now thinking, well, you guys want to give them all these drones and all this technology and all this weapons manufacturing support and they're going to be sitting here taking out my critical oil infrastructure. Maybe I'll hit you a little bit and I'll undermine Article 5 because you and I both know

that if they're going to go and hit some town right on the border of a Baltic state, nobody in America is going to say, oh yeah, let's go to nuclear war, right? Nobody, including me, I would say we shouldn't do it. Yeah, and to give a sense of, you can roll the D2 here, to give a sense of like why Putin is, you know, being pressured and contemplating serious escalation. This is the Kostovo oil refinery that was, that just fell victim to a Ukrainian drone attack. One of the biggest refineries in Russia and put up D3 here, Reuters reporting and others as well, that it's been, taken offline that a central node of the Russian kind of fossil fuel economy shut down as a result of this. And we could put up D4, this is part of a pattern.

And so this is Ukrainian media, but this is, you know, verified. This is a report August 14th Ukrainian drones attacked nearly one-third of the large oil refineries in Russia, in addition, one of Russia's major oil refineries, which I can't pronounce, or Schnifertz, I don't know, Sagar, if you can handle that one, completely stopped operations following Ukrainian attacks. They're hitting export capacity in the Caspian and the Black Sea. They're taking, you know, the Russians are hitting Ukrainian ships. Ukraine is hitting Russian ships. And that's on top of the This is harvest season Ukraine and Russia This region provides something like a quarter of the grain

For the world And so Both sides are seeing their economies getting Battered Russia is also There was also yesterday Another massive attack on Basically what is Russia's Amazon

It was called wild berries And what Ukraine has been doing has been blowing up these absolutely massive warehouses and destroying billions of dollars

worth of goods that are held in waiting to be transited to small business owners and I've seen a bunch of interviews with Russian Russian people who they're living off of their version of Etsy or whatever and they're just retailers

who have seen their entire lives wiped out by these attacks on these warehouses. And here's the thing, for the Ukrainians who are like, oh, but they've been attacking us for four years. Yeah, fair. No, fair. All's fair in war. But that's the problem.

You can't claim some moral high ground when you literally invaded Russia like two years ago and held a significant part of its territory. Now you're hitting their critical infrastructure and you're crying if they're going to hit your critical infrastructure. Your only defense is just going to be, well, they started it. Yeah, you're right. But you can't

end it. You literally can't. You know, it's funny too because you get accused of being a Putin shill, and as usual, nobody who is obsessed with Ukraine ever actually even reads the news. Their own senior defense official, who Zelensky just fired, prompting mass protests throughout the country, wrote an entire thing about how Zelensky has no plan to end the war, how they potentially had a chance in some of these initial attacks, how the current attacks have no actual endgame. And, I mean, you could read between the lines for his own firing and say that he was fired because he probably. but we was in the meeting saying, I think this is a real problem. We have no actual plan to end this entire thing, and we're eventually going to lead to disaster. So both sides of the conflict, it's very, actually, it's very Iran-U.S. in a lot of the same ways, where it starts out in one limited way, things dramatically change the security architecture. People hunker down. They're both

trying to hit each other in a very painful way. Russia, though, has the manufacturing on its side. It has the population, obviously advantage on its side. And Ukraine is, increasingly reliant on a West, which is broke from munitions and can't necessarily help them. And so they're going to escalate in the only way they can with their drones, which, again, you have to give them credit, at least for being able to build them, but they're using them in a way that's going to invite a major retaliation from Russia. And then what happens? We're all living in a new world. And right, and we're all going to see, you know, higher gas and prices and inflation across the entire global economy. Plus, people are going to starve to death as a result of the food crisis. It's creating. the one of the things that has been reported to be a major hiccup in the in the peace talks that just broke down has been apparently Russia's insistence on seizing towns and and and areas being given you kind of Russian speaking areas that they haven't taken yet that they couldn't take by force uh which to me like it's not something that's followed like extraordinarily closely I understand Ukraine's point there they're like like okay it's one

one thing for you to ask for the territory that you already control. Yeah. You tried to take this stuff you couldn't and you want us to give it to you. Like that's like come on. Get out of here. Like what do you talk? But on the other hand, if if there is an ability of the entire world, China, the United States, Europe, Africa, South America, everybody just come together and be like, guys, we've got we have to figure something out here. Yeah.

I think you're right. Like, something has to give here. Now is the time. Someone needs to end the war in 24 hours. Somebody needs to do that. Somebody needs to end the war in 24 hours. Before they even take office, hopefully. Apparently, Chairman She, telling Putin don't even think about using nuclear weapons,

we'll see what that matters. And they're going to meet next week. Yes, that's right. Good point. I think SCO or some meeting is happening soon. Let's get to Mexico. We've got Wanda Vid Rojas standing by. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense.

Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman.

Not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? we flip the script, okay? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott,

this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect, I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something

like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity.

Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, they're like, oh, what's just a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested. or just like, oh, I've got my life, I don't care about your life.

And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors

who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, joining us now as journalist Juan David Rojas to discuss. The question, has the CIA launched a secret war in Mexico?

Juan David, thanks so much for being. here. Good to see you, man. Good to see you guys. All right. So has the CIA launched a secret war in Mexico? There's been a number of disturbing allegations. Ryan, you Emily and I, some months ago, we talked about how there were these two CIA deaths in the state of Chihuahua, which was on the border. And, you know, the story there was that these two agents died in a car crash. At the time, I was a bit skeptical that we were getting the full story since then and talking to people with, you know, close to the matter. I find it to be more believable. But after that, we started to get these whistleblowers, anonymous whistleblowers within the agency, telling us that there's apparently a secret, this covert assassination campaign by the CIA against cartel operatives.

And in March, in Mexico, there was a lot of confused reporting about. this car bombing against supposedly a Sinaloa cartel operative and apparently what these anonymous sources have said is that this was a hit by the CIA and there's a number of really what's odd about it is that these anonymous whistleblowers here I have the quotes like CNN said that quote the March car bombing was a targeted assassination facilitated by CIA operations and then for the time someone told them that the agency provided intelligence and support but was not on the ground when Mexican authorities killed the operative. So, you know, there's a lot of ambiguity leeway there to interpret what's being said. The second quote kind of like gives a hint that

like Mexican authorities are involved. There's some degree of coordination, which could be better, frankly. And, and this is the last thing. This has all come in tandem. There's a lot that's been going on between the U.S. and Mexico just this year. In tandem, we've seen like this campaign of like targeted lawfare against sitting a Mexican politician specifically and exclusively from the governing Morena party. Go ahead. Go into it. Yeah.

So basically they indicted like the whole state of Sinaloa, which, you know, per like the famous cartel, Sinola State, like it's, you know, every governor ever is like involved in the drug trade, you know, going back to like Kiki Kamarina, the DEA agents, assassination. in the 80s, like the governor at that time, like, supposedly sheltered the head of the Guadalajara cartel after he ordered Kamarina's killing. But it was really unprecedented to indict a sitting governor. It was never done because it was always thought that it would be counterproductive. It would really screw up relations. And also, you know, like, you're messing up like this entire, you know, like security ecosystem. You know, you need to work with these guys to some extent. And the problem

is in Sinaloa, actually, it has been counterproductive. I'm good friends with a journalist there, and he said that since Rocha Moja, the governor there resigned, the security situation has gotten worse. You guys covered back when, how Joaquin Guzman, one of Enchapo's sons, tricked El Mado into flying over to Texas, and they both got arrested. And this kicked off this horrific civil war within the cartel. It's created a lot of violence within the state. So now you have loyalists of Mado, the Majos, and then the Chapo, the Chapito,

was going at it. And Rocha Moja supposedly was like on the side of the Chapito. So once he was out of the way, the Majos moved in. They've been settling scores. And it's been a complete disaster. Yeah. Go ahead. Right. Yeah. So talk us through the politics of this. Why, what is the, what would the CIA objective be and what would the U.S. objective be in only targeting officials that are linked to Claudia Shinebaum's government are the kind of opposition party

conservative figures just so above involvement with drug trafficking that they can't find anything on them or what is what are they actually going for here? That's the big question and a lot of like former like intelligence officials

have been asking that question too with no good answers so and look this is the drug trade in Mexico, like, you know, cartel corruption, this goes way back, like, once upon a time, like, under, like, the one-party pre-that, you know, the government in the country for 70 years, the country really was basically a narco state. It was really the pre-in-charge, like, telling the traffickers what to do. Now, the funny thing is that back then, the CIA was like, okay with

drug trafficking. Historically, the CIA didn't care in general about the drug trade in Latin America, one, because they thought it was useless to oppose it. And two, they cared more about, you know, like opposing leftist and communists. And so that's now where we get the whole like narco-communist thing come in. But so, you know, what we've seen in the rest of Latin America is that the Trump administration is really willing to condone corruption from like right-wing politicians. And, you know, talking about like the drug trade, like Trump pardoned, like gangster disciples, Kingpin Larry Hoover.

So it's hard for me to make a case that really what they're after is like, you know, gains on security in the drug trade itself. But so, um, what I've noticed that, and after the, the Sinaloa indictments, they seem to have taken like a software approach. They seem to be trying to co-op certain, uh, Morena governors specifically on the border, mind you. So Mexico has six border states with the U.S. And three of the governors there, all, uh, the three, the three that belonging to Morena specifically, they've all had their visas revoked. Some of them have investigations against some of them. in the U.S., and all three of them are supposedly

cooperating with U.S. authorities as informants. So there's questions there of if they're trying to build like a bigger indictment. But the other three governors are all opposition. And notably Chihuahua, which is opposition governors, where we saw

the deaths of those two CIA agents. Right. And yeah, like I can tell you, like one of those governors is very like tain with corruption, too, like narco corruption. One of the things, one, I think. One second. Just step back a little bit because you had said that this is all, let's put your piece up on the screen. You had said, will Trump target Mexico next? The forever war logic demands it. Can you link kind of the World War III element that you had worried about here with what you're talking about in these corruption scandals?

exactly exactly so the thing is like really the the key bit of interest between both countries is the border everything that matters between the u.s and mexico is the border it's mexico's ultimate source of leverage both for immigration and trade and so what i think they're trying to do and again this is speculation on my part i laid out in the piece they seem to be trying to co-opt governors that they view as unfriendly from the governing party that's left wing, and they seem to trust the ones from the opposition. And I think a lot of this is geared towards kind of safeguarding the CIA operations along the border. Down the line, there's elections next, midterm elections next year in Mexico. The three Morena governors are actually,

there are elections in their states, so maybe the idea is to try to get opposition governors in there. And beyond that, well, you know, this is an administration. that, you know, declared a war in Iran is escalating the Ukraine war, kidnapped Maduro, wants to invade Cuba. And in their own stated words, they also would like to bomb Mexico. So I think that really what they're doing, they're kind of laying the groundwork for if they're interested in the future, really trying to secure the border. And if they ever decide to take kinetic action in the future, I mean, this is a very dangerous and real possibility. Yeah, no, fascinating stuff.

Really scary. All right, Juan, continue to stay on top of the story, and we'll hope to see you again in the future. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies?

Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94. month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com.com. Connection is everything. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility.

Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to both, your first trip. I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining us now is a great friend of the show, Ben Shrekinger. He is the publisher of Paradigm.News. Let's put it up here on the screen, gentlemen, and there will be a link down in the description. He, Ben, previously at Politico, we wrote a great book on Hunter Biden, interviewed him here at Breaking Points, has now decided to look into the UFO. phenomenon and to uncover everything that he possibly can. So he writes, Reality Shock, a beginner's guide to UFO's aliens and disclosure. Big picture, Ben,

before we get into the piece, why did you decide to do this? He had a good gig going. You're at Politico, Hunter Biden, corruption guy, and you're like, you know what? It's UFOs for me. You know, for one thing, I just got sick of Washington. I took some time off. I haven't been in D.C. for a year and a half. I've decided to come back for the fall because the story's so good. But I'm inspired by what you and Crystal and Ryan and everybody have done here. I think that internet media is still evolving. I wanted to throw myself into the middle of it. And I became completely obsessed with the UFO, UAP issue, the mystery.

There's clearly room for investigative reporting to get to the bottom of this. And I think it's going to be a massive, both political and cultural phenomenon over the next 12 to, you know, 120 months. And where did you find the immediate gaps? Like where does your journalistic capacity kind of fit in? Like what's been what's been missing in this conversation? What are the first things you've kind of uncovered? Yeah, you know, to start with, I think just putting everything that's happened in the last three years especially since David Grush gave testimony to Congress, since the first attempt at a UAP Disclosure Act.

started, lay that all out and then lay that out in the context of what's been going on on this topic for 80 years. I think that's sort of part one. Before you even try to add new information, I think you need sort of a lot of context and sensemaking, and that's what reality shock is for. And then in terms of where there's room to investigate further, I think that David Grush, has been escalating his public claims. I think there's room to get to the bottom of what the basis is for him, for example, going

on Dr. Phil and saying that people have communicated telepathically with aliens. I think probably there needs to be some work done trying to delineate between this UAP issue, which is a very real, concrete, airspace security issue that not only is the U.S. dealing with, there is now reporting that, you know, Europe has been making progress on track of UAP. There's an investigation in Japan. And figuring out how that does or does not relate to claims of non-human intelligence. There are obviously a lot of claims floating around.

Some of them from people who should not be dismissed out of hand, that these two things are intimately related. Some of that may be disinformation. Some of that may be misunderstanding. And I just think that somebody needs to sort of focus on it and try to start blocking, tackling, and getting some more clarity. All right. So, Ben, you know, go into the piece, reality show.

It's very long, which it's very good. I read through the entire thing. It's a good primer. Why don't you pick some tidbits for the audience who may be skeptical, sick of hearing me cover, the ins and the outs? And I get it. It's been years. I've been talking about this topic.

We're always being promised, including me. I get fatigued. People are like, oh, something big is coming. And it's like, okay, all right. You know, been hearing this now for quite some time. So give us a reality check and a reality shock. Yeah. You know, one of the things that shocked me, honestly, was learning about the extent to which

not only our government, but foreign governments over the decades have taken the UFO phenomenon seriously as a potential threat and seriously as potentially representing non-human intelligence. there's a memo from 1950 by a Canadian official who cites conversations with people in the United States writing back to Ottawa, saying that the U.S. has recovered downcraft and is trying to reverse engineer them. So, you know, David Grush didn't invent this claim in 2023. As early as 1950, an official of a neighboring country, believe that to be true. very possible that he was exposed to disinformation that was cloaking some sort of, you know, terrestrial Cold War American program, but nonetheless fascinating. In 1972, there's an Australian intelligence analyst named Harry Turner. He also concludes that the U.S. is secretly reverse engineering alien craft. So there's a lot in the history here that made me fascinated, made it

harder for me to dismiss this. Even if it is just a story of how did these intelligence analysts over decades keep arriving at the same wrong conclusion, that's a fascinating story. And it gets more fascinating when you have David Grush not analyzing the United States actions from the outside, but from inside with apparently full access arriving at this conclusion yet again. I had some interesting interactions with Jim Clapper's lawyers in the course of reporting out this piece. The point of this piece was not to report out new information, but I did want clarity for something he said in age of disclosure, this sort of pro-disclosure documentary that came out last fall that was very popular. He said that when he was in the Air Force, they had a program for looking into anomalous activities they otherwise couldn't understand, often over ranges out. notably area 51.

Jim Clapper on camera talks about anomalous activity over area 51. And it's a very short clip. And I know that people in the disclosure movement treated it as a big deal that they went to the hill and they said, look, we need to get more information out of the Air Force about this because officially the military was not looking into UFOs from the late 1960s until the 21st century. So if in the middle of this period there was a UFO program at the Air Force, that would be notable. I went back to Clapper's attorney for clarification. He said something along

the lines of, well, Director Clapper was talking about how in the 80s, when we were testing stealth aircraft, there were a lot of reports, and many of them were traced back to these stealth aircraft. Wow. If you ask me, that doesn't add a lot of clarity. He's not emphasizing the idea that there are unexplained activities under Area 51. I think it was a lawyerly comment. And then after my piece came out, in the liberation times, I saw a headline that Jim Clapper is now getting uncomfortable with the attention around disclosure. So what was going on with the Air Force in the 1980s?

I'd like to get more clarity there. Great, great question. Yeah, and I'm particularly interested in the way that this, the entire UAP conversation, you know, intersects and interacts with classified programs, sometimes I suspect that it operates as kind of a cover for other interesting things that you'll find. I'm curious if you ended up looking, I think it was back in 2024 in New Jersey, when there were all of these unexplained kind of UAP observations above kind of military facilities in the region.

Mayors were talking about it. Like, we covered it the time. It was great. And then a few weeks after that all kind of faded, you had this extremely complex drone attack by the Ukrainians, deep inside Russia where they drove kind of Mack trucks filled with drones, you know, deep, deep into Russia, and then released them and attacked a bunch of infrastructure nearby. It felt to me like an interesting coincidence that, and that perhaps we had, been observing what was being understood to be some type of UAP phenomenon, but what what it may

have been was training for this operation that they that was then successfully carried out later. Do you ever look into that weird 2024 New Jersey phenomenon that was major kind of international news for a couple weeks and then just kind of vanished from the public consciousness? I've not yet had a chance to go deep on it. It does deserve someone needs to to look back at that and write the definitive account of that. I've heard rumors, none of them bear repeating. Certainly, whether it's that New Jersey drone flap or other aspects of this, it's quite queer that some of this activity is human technology. Some of it may be American adversaries. Some of it certainly is American technology. I'm looking at the moment into some leads

involving plasma physics and what our military is able to do with plasma physics. I expect that will be a piece of the puzzle when all is said and done, but it's not by any means clear that that's going to be the entire answer to this. You know, some of the other things that you point at are scientific research and some grants that you found interesting. Can you go into that? Yeah. Well, what I'm seeing is that, you know, UFOology, if you want to call it that. Growing up in the 90s, it was, you know, what you assumed, what you absorbed from the culture was that this was for kind of weird people who need to get a life, who wear tinfoil hats. Turns out that over the decades, there have been very serious civilian efforts to collect and analyze UFO data.

And now that's migrating into the realm of institutional science. You have the Galileo project at Harvard, which wants to use advanced instruments to study UAP. You have a paper in a nature portfolio journal claiming that there's a statistical link between nuclear tests and strange lights appearing in the night sky in the 1950s. And there is funding. There is grants starting to be made here. New Jersey itself appropriated some money, partly to study UAP after that drone flap. at the University of New York, state University of New York in Albany, there's been a gift to a physicist named Kevin Knuth, who's studying UAP physics.

And my expectation is that trend is going to continue that there's going to be more scientific funding for this in the future. It's very interesting. And I'm excited to have somebody like you who is on the beat and is going to dig into all of this. So everybody go and subscribe to the newsletter. It'll be right there, paradigm. dot news link down in our description as well. Ben, thank you very much for doing this and for dedicating your efforts to this phenomenon. Thanks, guys. This is great. All right. Everybody, great show. Thank you, Ryan. See tomorrow. Appreciate it, brother. For Friday, I think so.

Excellent. Pretty sure that's the plan. So anyway, there you go. That's what's happening. And we'll see you all tomorrow. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, this is Hayes, Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood. Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. I'm Munga Shatigula and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talked to scientists, biopunks, kermudgins, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. To make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.