Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] The Final Episode: It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

All good things must come to an end. And this podcast, and the international community that has sprung up around it, has been a very good thing. It’s been one of the best things in my life. Which is why it’s hard to actually say the words that this episode will be the last episode of The UFO Rabbit Hole.  But before you panic—this isn’t the end. It’s just the beginning.Tune in to find out about the future of the podcast, and to say good-bye to The UFO Rabbit Hole.See Karl Nell's Sol TalkWatch Cosmosis: UFOs & A New Reality Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everyone, what is up? I'm Rob. I'm Aiman. And you are listening to a trailer for our podcast, Monster Fuzz, which is brought to you by Spectrevision Radio. Do you like your high strangeness with an element of high silliness? Are thoughts of subterranean lizard men keeping you awake at night? Maybe Bigfoot's robbing clothes from your clothesline? Should you enter into a romantic relationship with a poltergeist that's haunting your house? If thoughts like these spin around your head like a UFO or a UAP to use the parlance of our time, then you're in good company. Tune into Monster Fills Podcast every Monday and Thursday, anywhere you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. All good things must come to an end. And this podcast and the international community that has sprung up around it has been a very good thing. It's been one of the best things in my life, which is why it's hard to actually say the words that this episode will be the last episode of the UFO rabbit hole. But before you panic, this isn't the end. It's just the beginning. The truth is, the UFO rabbit hole has always been evolving. And almost from the start, it's been a UFO podcast where we never really talk about UFOs. Because I quickly realized that UFOs are the least interesting thing about the UFO phenomenon. They're a portal, an entry point into something much bigger, something much stranger. And as my work has grown, I found myself being pulled deeper into. to those mysteries. That evolution has led to something new, something I think you're going to love. The UFO Rabbit Hole is transforming into the Cosmosis podcast. It will have the same soul, the same curiosity, the same rigor, but with more support to make the content more consistent,

and more voices to enrich the conversation. A huge part of that shift has been the result of my work on the docu-series, Cosmosis, UFOs, and a new reality, which, by the way, has been a way, has been doing phenomenally well, even with a marketing budget of exactly zero dollars. And that's all thanks to you. The process of making this series changed me. It changed how I see the world. It changed how I see the phenomenon. And it challenged me to rethink how I want to show up not just in this work, but in my life.

Through it all, I found invaluable collaborators whose research and insights have become indispensable to what I do. This is a team sport, and at Ontocalypse Productions, we're building one hell of a team. At the top of that list is my brilliant friend and creative partner, Jay Christopher King. Jay is the director of the Experiencer Group and co-creator of the Inquirer Anomalous Conference series. He's a lifelong experiencer himself and has his ear to the ground with regard to the day-to-day realities of contact with non-human intelligences in a way that very few other people on the planet do. Coming quite recently from the Normie world myself and being just a couple of years into my own process of grappling with the anomalous, I can say without reservation that my work wouldn't be where it is if it weren't for my friendship and collaboration with Jay.

Our work and shared sense of mission has naturally brought us together, and it just makes sense that he'll be joining me as co-host of the Cosmosis podcast. So how will this new podcast be different? Cosmosis will take everything you loved about the UFO rabbit hole and expand it. It's an opportunity for us to double click into the stories and frameworks we explored in the docu-series and to make room for so many of the important ideas and insights that inevitably ended up on the cutting room floor. For those of you who love episodes like this one, we'll still be doing monthly old-school rabbit hole deep dives. But to that, we're also adding video content interviews and so. much more. I am so excited about this next chapter. I hope you'll come along with me.

If you're already subscribed, Cosmosis will launch right here in the same channels and RSS feeds, so you don't have to do anything. But if you aren't subscribed, fix that now so you don't miss out. The new podcast launches on Friday, February 21st. I'll see you there. When I started this podcast, I made you a promise. I promised that I wouldn't say anything that I couldn't back up with evidence, and that if I later found out that I was wrong about anything, that I would be honest with you all and own up to that. I was very sincere when I made that promise, but it took me very little time to realize how utterly naive it was.

I had assumed when I began this journey that the truth about the UFO phenomenon was something that I would be able to apprehend through traditional means of research and verification. I assumed that the information zone around this phenomenon was somewhat sullied, but that with enough time and effort that it would become decipherable. I didn't realize that every single shred of knowledge that one can have about this field is built upon continually shifting sands.

In short, I didn't know what I didn't know, and I thought that all of this would be a lot easier. Three and a half years after the anomalous experience that set me on this path, and a little more than three years after I started this podcast, I can still look back at everything that I did with a lot of pride. this podcast is the best thing I've ever done. But it's also true that if I had to start it over, knowing what I know now, I would do everything differently.

And I'm okay with that. Because that's the nature of this mystery, isn't it? There are as many roads into it as there are people to walk them. No two paths are the same. And though the one I took was imperfect, full of false starts, wrong turns, and assumptions that didn't hold up, it still brought me to insights that change the way I see everything about myself in the world.

And I'm still not done. I'd argue that the work of true inquiry is never done. When I started with the simple question of what UFOs are, I assumed that eventually I'd find a solid foundation of truth. Instead, I was startled to recognize how much of what I believed was built on bad information that I had accepted without questioning. And even more startling was the realization of how little responsibility I had actually taken for my own worldview, my own beliefs. That reckoning, that seismic shakeup was the real beginning of my journey. I look back at the person I was before I started this work, and I never want to be that locked into a worldview again. If there's one thing I've learned in the last three years, it's that intellectual humility is the only stance that makes any sense, in the face of a reality that is this big, this strange, and this unknowable.

A constant student mindset has become a core value for me, not just in this work, but in my life. So it actually feels not just deeply appropriate, but necessary. The best way to honor the journey we've taken together, to spend these last moments of the UFO rabbit hole, burning it all to the ground. Not in despair, not in cynicism, but as a jubilant and defaunt. act of creation and renewal. I couldn't possibly go through every single thing that I think I got wrong or what I would do differently if I could do it again. But there are some major threads of the UFO rabbit hole that I think are worth our time to unravel. And that's what I want to do in this

episode. So let's start where this all began in episode one with the disclosure movement. The only reason that I'm talking to you right now is because of the disclosure movement that kicked off in 2017 with the publishing of the infamous New York Times article revealing that the government had a secret UFO program. It wasn't until 2021 that stories about UFOs and our skies and our government's acknowledgement of them slipped their way past my filters and into my awareness, but without those seeds that were planted in 2017, I wouldn't be here. Over the past few years, I obviously have followed the disclosure narrative very closely. And up until the fall of 2023, I had no real questions about the overall authenticity of that movement. I certainly acknowledged not just the possibility,

but the probability that certain information was being withheld or obscured by those spearheading disclosure in the name of national security. But I also took the events that were unfolding more or less at face value. I made the case on this podcast more than once that what we were witnessing was an unprecedented movement led by brave patriots within the military intelligence apparatus that were putting everything on the line, even their lives, to break. UFO disclosure to the public. I don't believe that anymore. Some of you are going to bulk at that and others of you are probably wondering what took me so long to get here. Wherever you land on that spectrum, I hope you'll hear me out. What's going on here is complicated and understanding it

involves a level of nuance that is rarely employed in the disclosure discussion that seems hopelessly mired in a black and white, good guys versus bad guys paradigm. It took me a while to get to a point where I felt like I really understood what I was looking at, and even longer to feel ready to talk about it publicly. To be clear, having been wrong so many times before, I don't assume that I have arrived at the final answer or that what I think today is going to be what I think a month from now. All I can do is be open about what I see,

and I leave it to you to decide what you think about it. For me, the unraveling of the disclosure narrative can be traced back to Carl Nell's presentation at the first Soul Foundation Symposium, which I attended in November 23. There has been a lot of conversation centered around Nell's talk. For example, much was made of his comments about the potential for catastrophic disclosure, which quickly entered the lexicon of the UFO community.

But what I find remarkable is that as much as people give lip service to that presentation, very few of those same people seem to have integrated what he said into their understanding of the disclosure movement as a whole. They took the parts that made for good clickbait or that confirmed their desire for sudden, unambiguous disclosure, and generally ignored the rest. I think that's a mistake. If you aren't familiar with Carl Nell, he's a retired Army colonel, aerospace executive, and corporate strategist, who has worked with organizations like Bell Labs, Lockheed Martin,

and a slew of other Fortune 500 companies. In short, he's one of the highest profile members of the military intelligence community to have stepped forward to weigh in on disclosure. And in my opinion, his talk at Seoul was one of the single most important moments in the conversation thus far and offered rare insights into how the intelligence community is approaching the topic of UAP transparency. I want to go through some of the main points of that presentation and why I think they're so significant. But I'd really encourage you to take the time to watch or rewatch this talk in its entirety

and decide what you think for yourself. It's worth your time. You can find that video on the Soul Foundation's YouTube channel. and I'll link to it in the episode description. For the sake of this conversation, I think it's worth it to break this talk down piece by piece, so let's do that. But before we do, I just want to acknowledge that,

in a lot of what follows, I'll be referring to a shadowy they. That's obviously not a very precise way to refer to any of these various factions and organizations, but for the sake of not making this a 20-episode series, I hope you'll indulge me in taking some verbal shortcuts. The talk begins with Nell referencing the major milestones of the disclosure movement from the 2017 New York Times article up through

David Grush. He lauds these milestones specifically for their role in making people more comfortable with the idea of UFOs and in lowering the threshold to make talking about these things respectable. He seemingly admits that the switch from UFO to UAP was an intentional one. The goal was both to reframe the UFO phenomenon by creating, quote, intentional ambiguity to allow consensus to occur around the topic at the same time as removing historical stigma, end quote. Most importantly, this reframing allowed legislators to begin to take the topic seriously and to do so publicly, which was the first step toward making progress towards transparency. Nell then acknowledges that there are issues with the term UAP, specifically that the intentional vagueness of the term has rendered it

almost meaningless. UAP has come to be the label assigned to anything in the sky that is not immediately identifiable, from air trash to intel surprises like the Chinese balloon to foreign recon drones to true unknown unknowns. Nell argues that to make progress, we now need to narrow down what UAP means because it's difficult to write legislation or policy for a problem that we can't name or put boundaries around. He then points to the original UAP Disclosure Act legislation that attempted to define UAP as any object operating or judged capable of operating in outer space, the atmosphere, ocean surface or undersea, lacking prosaic attribution due to performance characteristics and properties not previously known to be achievable based on commonly understood principles of physics.

So why is this important? I think there are a few important insights that we can take away here. First of all, as we'll become even more clear and undeniable as we move through the rest of this talk, what Nell is saying here isn't just a recap of the road so far. I'd argue that it's an admission that from 2017 onward, what has unfolded in the disclosure movement has been, on a substantive level, guided by the objectives of the DoD, not just rogue whistleblowers. What he's speaking to is a longer timeline and a plan to slowly and systematically introduce

the concept of UFOs into the public awareness, and more specifically to members of Congress. There was a clear awareness that the stigma around UFOs that the DOD itself created and perpetuated over decades was so strong and pervasive, that no member of Congress was going to be willing to touch it. So they had to start by chipping away at that stigma. That was accomplished by rebranding UFOs to UAPs, a term that didn't hold all of the historical baggage of UFOs because it didn't really mean anything at all.

Instead of saying UFOs are real and invoking all of that history, they could instead say UAPs are real. But what are UAPs? Well, they're everything and nothing. there anything we see in the sky that we can't immediately identify. Contained somewhere within that is the suggestion that there could be something anomalous going on, but that's not what the term UAP is referring to. With this rebranding, the anomalous became nameless and lacking all definition.

And with that accomplished, they're now able to fill in that vacuum of meaning with a sterilized definition that whittles the vast spectrum and broke history of the phenomenon down to simply the anomalous performance characteristics of unknown craft. And in the name of protecting the newfound, though marginal, respectability of the UFO topic, the community as a whole has supported and even self-enforced this rebranding without a second thought. It's a masterful sleight of hand. The next thing Nell covered in his presentation was the need for there to be a process in place to facilitate greater transparency. Basically, if there's not a process in place, along with funds, resources, and personnel to facilitate that process, there is no real

way for anything to happen. Nell pointed again to the attempts made by the original UAPDA language that was intended to put just such a process in place. He lauded this legislation for being written in such a way as to presume disclosure. This means defaulting to a system where information about UAPs should be shared with the public unless there's a good reason not to. That sounds good, but I also think it's important to recognize the fact that this language was modeled after the legislation that was intended to create greater transparency around the JFK assassination. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act was passed in 1992, 29 years after JFK was killed in broad daylight on national television. This legislation mandated that all government records

related to the assassination of President Kennedy be collected and made available to the public through the National Archives. The law originally required full disclosure of these records by October 26, 2017, unless the president certified that withholding certain information was necessary due to national security concerns. So, 62 years after JFK was assassinated, 33 years after legislation was passed to require public disclosure, and eight years after the drop dead date on that disclosure, President Trump just recently signed an executive order to finally make that information public. It remains to be seen when and if that will happen, and if it does if the public is satisfied with the answers that are given.

Regardless of that outcome, I think it's hard to argue that legislation that was created using the same model is the win for disclosure that advocates like Nell and others have claimed that it would be. I think most in the community would agree that a disclosure timeline that is measured in decades

and which can be postponed at any time by something that is both as vast and as nebulous as national security concerns is not an acceptable outcome. And yet this is what we're supposed to be cheering for. I want to be clear that my intention here isn't to tear down all the work that's been done on disclosure thus far. This isn't about erring grievances or pointing fingers.

I bring all of this up because what I realized in the course of Carl Nell's talk is that in all of the excitement and anticipation of getting swept up in the disclosure narrative, that I had pretty fundamentally misunderstood both what the disclosure movement is and how the Department of Defense and the intelligence community were actually approaching this topic. And honestly, that's on me. That's my bad. I'd been blinded by a story that I desperately wanted to be true. But in sitting in the audience at Seoul and listening to Nell work his way methodically through the reasoning behind the disclosure process, I realized that the story I believed didn't actually make a lot of sense. Because here's the thing. The Department of Defense's primary objective is to ensure national security, protect U.S. interests, and maintain military superiority.

Their purpose is to mitigate and manage threats as they arise and to anticipate possible threats before they arise. One of the core functions of the intelligence community is to cut down on uncertainty. Uncertainty breeds risk, and when you're talking about national security, risk is unacceptable. There is a strategic truism often used in the military that you should never get into a fair fight. In other words, you shouldn't make a move unless victory is assured. If the fight is a fair one, things could go. one way or another based on luck, the weather, an accident, whatever. And the DOD does everything that it can to make sure that it never finds itself in a situation

where the outcome is so uncertain. And ultimately, that's what UFO disclosure represents, risks and uncertainties. There are the obvious risks around divulging information about advanced technology for an adversaries and classified defense operations. And there's also the legal quagmire surrounding the ownership of UAP-related tech and eminent domain. Historically, these materials have been held outside of direct government control, often siloed within private aerospace and defense contractors. The government is now working to reclaim possession through mechanisms such as eminent domain. Nell referenced reports that indicate that some

defense contractors have attempted to offload UAP-related materials into government programs as seen with Lockheed Martin's connection to the OSAT program. Yet those attempts have been denied. Further complicating things, there is strong evidence suggesting that some private entities are reluctant to relinquish control, seeing these technologies as proprietary assets rather than public resources. The battle over these materials has created deep divisions within the disclosure movement itself, as key players often have direct ties to defense contractors. Mapping these connections reveals a hidden proxy war over ownership and control of UAP technology. I personally have zero interest in entering that discussion, but if you pay attention to who in the field is associated with which government agencies and which defense contractors, the various factions and subtle infighting that can seem so opaque, suddenly becomes remarkably easy to parse.

But I digress. The point is that acknowledging that this tech exists means that suddenly all of these legal issues need to be solved, and likely in a much more public way than those involved would prefer. And that daylight seems likely to uncover further scandals, ranging from unfairly awarded government contracts, to misappropriation of taxpayer dollars, to wetworks. So there is considerable risk there. But there's an even greater risk that disclosure represents outside of the advanced tech and the palace intrigue.

And that risk is to consensus reality itself. The reality of the UFO phenomenon has the potential to entirely disrupt nearly every facet of both public and private life from our legacy institutions to our deeply held beliefs about who we are and what reality fundamentally is. And the truth that I think disclosure advocates are quick to overlook, and I include myself in that, is that we really don't know what will happen when the greater public is finally confronted with that reality. But while we may overlook that problem or even judge the risks to be worth it, for the Department of Defense, which judges any new development within the matrix of risk assessment,

The risk of societal disruptions isn't just a potentially negative consequence. It's kind of the whole story. The thing that I've come to realize about disclosure is that it's not realistic for anyone to expect the disclosure is going to come from the Department of Defense. All of their mandates, charters, objectives, policies, institutions, resources, and precedents are aligned behind the objective of national security. It has never been the function of the DOD to tell us the truth about anything. And in fact, telling truths that could destabilize the country in ways that are ultimately

impossible to foresee makes it antithetical to the very job that we've given them. Okay. So if that's the case, then what are we even talking about here? What's going on? Because while on the one hand, it seems like the DOD has very little reason to engage in any kind of disclosure efforts, we are seeing some movement. So what does that mean? I think there are a few important conclusions that we can draw.

The first is that what we've been watching unfold since 2017 is controlled disclosure. It's a strategic approach to releasing information about UFOs in a way that manages risks, preserves national security, and minimizes societal disruption. In his talk, Nell did not shy away from this reality. In fact, he referred to controlled disclosure as a campaign plan or a meta plan that would guide how and when this information was being disseminated in a way that hedged against potential risks. And he didn't just talk about the campaign plan for controlled disclosure in an abstract sense. He actually showed a slide that gave the proposed timeline for this control disclosure.

In this slide, the first phase goes from January 2024 through January 26, and this is the phase where the existence of UFOs is revealed to the public. It isn't until around the October 2030 mark when disclosure is supposed to happen, though what that actually involves, whether it's an actual declaration by the president or just a general consensus among the public is unclear. An actual engagement with these NHIs is set for 2034 and beyond. To be clear, I don't think that the slide that was shown was the actual plan for a variety of reasons. But I do believe that it was representative and illustrative of a very real plan that exists. And that was likely already in motion when he gave that talk. Something that one quickly realizes when doing research in this field is

that everything is redacted. And I don't just mean foie docks. I mean the books that are written, the talks that are given at conferences, podcast appearances, even scholarly articles, essentially all the information that we get from people who are actually in a position to know is heavily redacted. And that redaction itself is a form of communication for people who have eyes to see. The people in this world understand this shorthand, and they use it to communicate with each other in plain sight. They know how to point to something in a way that is almost imperceptible to those who aren't initiated, and they know how to decode what someone is really saying by paying attention to the parts that they are leaving out. I will admit to sometimes using this technique

myself when talking about things that I think could place myself or others in danger. It is, unfortunately, how the game is played when the stakes are as high as they are with this topic. And I'd argue that if you look at Carl Nell's soul talk through this lens, it's suddenly very easy to connect the dots on what he's actually saying. Once again, I'd encourage you to watch it for yourself and decide what you think, but here's what I took away from what he said. First, we are about seven years into a nearly 20-year process of controlled disclosure. Second, the point of controlled disclosure isn't about disclosing all of the facts to the public, but rather to hedge against risks while also opening up lines of logistics and oversight between the DOD and the various contractors and entities that

currently are in possession of non-human technology. Third, serving those objectives doesn't require the truth. It only requires that people believe a version of the truth that enables the meeting of those objectives. In fact, in the meeting of those objectives, it would almost certainly be better in the eyes of the DoD that the public believes a good lie rather than a hard truth. And finally, most, if not all, of what we've seen on the disclosure front since 2017, has been theater, designed and acted out with those core objectives in mind.

All right, so I just said a lot there, and I want to take a quick minute to answer the questions that naturally arise. First of all, what about catastrophic disclosure? Could the motivation behind controlled disclosure be, as Carl Nell suggested, a hedge against catastrophic disclosure coming in the form of revelations from other governments or even NIH themselves? Absolutely. I certainly don't think that we can rule that out. Disclosure is not in the interest of the DOD, and it undermines its core objectives. So if it's happening anyway, we have to assume that there is some sort of forcing function at play here. If everything is ultimately a cost-benefit analysis, then it stands to reason that something has changed since 2017 to change the math on disclosure. Basically, the DOD is aware

of something that has happened or that could potentially happen that makes the risk of not getting ahead of the narrative with some kind of controlled disclosure, greater than that of maintaining the status quo. We don't know what has changed, but something undeniably has. Which leads to the next obvious question, which is, could pressure from whistleblowers, starting with Lou Elizondo in 2017, be the source of the threat of catastrophic disclosure? Is that possible? Sure. But I seriously doubt it. And in explaining why I think that, I'm going to commit the highest form of heresy that one can commit in this field. I'm going to say the thing that everyone knows is objectively true, but that no one is allowed to say, which is this. The disclosures that we've gotten from

whistleblowers so far have come from known and in most cases current members of the intelligence community. Most, if not all of them, still hold high-level security clearances and still work, whether directly or as contractors for the DOD or for aerospace defense companies. In many cases, it's both. And the information shared with us by those whistleblowers is the information that has been approved by the DOD through Doppser. Dopser, or the Defense Office of pre-publication and security review, is the U.S. Department of Defense Office responsible for reviewing and approving information before it's publicly released to ensure it does not compromise national security. So basically, they have said only what the DOD has said they are allowed to say, which is why I don't think

that the whistleblowers that have come forward thus far represent a threat of catastrophic disclosure. It's hard to think of any other cases of whistleblowing in either the private or public sector where whistleblowers remained in such good standing within the organizations that they were blowing the whistle on. So at the very least, these are whistleblowers who are more than willing to play by the rules.

The fact that it's so controversial to even acknowledge these basic truths is because the disclosure narrative is doing exactly the things that it's supposed to do. It's getting people invested in a story and in personalities that they want to believe in enough to not just overcome cognitive dissonance, but to deputize them to help further this narrative. If you want to see how absolute and insidious the narrative control is, just try this little experiment. Log on to

Reddit or X and try posting a direct quote about Lou Elizondo, in his own words, from his own book, explaining that he was recruited into OSAP by James Lakatsky to run counterintelligence for the program, without adding any further commentary and see how that goes for you. It's a fact about Lou that we only know because he told us, and yet no one is allowed to say it, much less raise any kind of legitimate questions about what it might actually mean, because those are questions that no one really wants to know the answer to. So am I saying that I think all whistleblowers are liars who are working within a DOD campaign plan for the purpose of controlled disclosure? Not exactly. I suspect it's far more

complicated than that. It's easy and often necessary to talk about entities like the intelligence community or the Department of Defense as though they are monoliths, but they're clearly not. Over 1 million people are employed by the Department of Defense and over 4 million people hold security clearances. Within those millions, there are countless warring factions and all kinds of different objectives. Nothing about what is happening is straightforward. And I certainly don't rule out the possibility that there are good faith whistleblowers who are taking on considerable risk, to do what they think is right. In fact, I'd be surprised if that weren't the case. But at the same time, I'm no longer willing to overlook the glaring evidence that the disclosure narrative, at least as it's

been presented to the public, is largely a fabrication. When you look at what's happening objectively, I think that's hard to deny. And though I'll admit to experiencing a significant amount of disillusion and weathering a long series of Dark Nights of the Soul over that realization, I ultimately don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I could wax poetic for hours about the different ways to read this situation, how the tangled web of alliances, agendas, and competing interests could explain why things have unfolded the way that they have without requiring that everyone involved be a mustache-twisting villain. But at the end of the day, that's all speculation. The truth is, I don't actually know what's going on. And neither do you. And that's

the point. Whatever the disclosure movement is, whatever teams the various experts and whistleblowers ultimately play for, this is not a game that we get to play. We don't even get to know the rules. We're just spectators watching a performance where we have no way of knowing who's actually pulling the strings. And frankly, I wouldn't even want to. I've seen enough at this point to know that there are aspects of this that are very dark, very disturbing and absolutely dangerous for anyone who wanders too close. I don't believe that it's possible to get real answers from these people anyways, so why would I bother? To be honest, I'm just no longer interested.

But that's not to say that I don't still believe in certain aspects of this fight. I still believe that some form of controlled disclosure, however imperfect, probably does some good, at least in terms of moving the needle of public acceptance forward toward a broader reality. I also still fundamentally believe that holding our government accountable for how it spends our money and demanding greater transparency, especially on topics that pertain to our understanding of the cosmos is a very worthy cause, even if true transparency is something we can only ever approach asymptotically. So you'll probably still see me, lend my voice and my support to that world as it makes sense for me to do so, if any of them still want to talk to me after this

episode. But make no mistake, I am over disclosure. It's not just that I think it's unrealistic to expect the Department of Defense to ever give us real disclosure. It's that I don't think we should be looking to the government for answers about the nature of our reality in the first place. That was never meant to be their role. And we, as a country and as a species, have gotten ourselves into a real mess by blindly believing the leaders of our legacy institutions. It's time to grow up. It's time to take responsibility for what we think, to pursue knowledge instead of just consuming content. And I think ultimately, that was actually the point of Nell's talk. It's my opinion, that he said what he said specifically to that audience at Seoul,

because he was speaking directly to academics in the humanities and the content creators who follow and amplify them. He was laying out the state of play as plainly as he could and making the case that real disclosure, if it's going to happen, needs to come from outside the military intelligence paradigm. And if that's indeed what he was saying, I absolutely agree.

Because here's the thing. The UFO phenomenon is not something that can be locked up in an underground bunker somewhere, and hidden from us. It's happening everywhere, all the time. It is, in many ways, profoundly democratic in that it contacts people directly, not through heads of state, not through government officials, not by landing on the White House lawn. This is something that we can do together, and it's something that we absolutely should do together. I'd argue that in many ways, euphology itself needs to be saved from the disclosure narrative. Right now, it's being

completely subsumed by it. We're allowing an act of theater, one carefully constructed to serve very narrow DoD objectives to define the entire conversation. Moving forward, my work will be focused on the phenomenon itself. And doing that has required me to entirely rethink my approach to how I do this work. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at USAA.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. When I first started studying UFOs, I avoided the so-called high strangeness aspects of the phenomenon. I thought that if I wanted to be taken seriously, I had to focus on what seemed credible. Nuts and bolts craft, government disclosures,

and declassified documents. I thought anything involving entities, psychic experiences, synchronicities, or encounters with a truly bizarre would undermine my credibility. But the truth is, I wasn't avoiding those things because I feared that others wouldn't take me seriously. I avoided them because I wasn't ready to take them seriously. Now I would argue that those elements of high strangeness

are the phenomenon. Any attempt to understand UFOs that doesn't center them isn't just incomplete. It's a fantasy, a larp. We can't cherry-pick aspects of the mystery that fit neatly within the frameworks of materialist science, or government secrecy, while ignoring the vast body of experience or testimony that paints a far stranger, more unsettling, and more complex picture. The phenomenon doesn't conform to our expectations.

It challenges them. The UFO conversation has been trapped in a loop for decades, always on the verge of disclosure, always searching for physical proof, always arguing over whether the government knows more than it lets on. But when you sit down with experiencers, when you listen to the stories that don't fit within the clean lines of aliens and spaceships, a different pattern emerges. These encounters aren't just about technology or extraterrestrials. They often involve telepathic communication, missing time, poltergeist activity, precognition, and other phenomena that stretched the boundaries of reality itself. If I could go back and do it again, I would start there. I would begin with the experiencers, the high strangeness and the full spectrum of anomalous events.

not as a side note, but as the core of the inquiry. The phenomenon isn't just about something out there visiting us. It's about something that's already woven into the fabric of our reality, something that's always been here, interacting with us in ways that we're only just beginning to understand. If we ignore the weirdness, we're not actually investigating the phenomenon. We're just playing at it. Another integral part of the UFO rabbit hole that I would approach differently now

is the hypotheses about the origins of the UFO phenomenon. For most people, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the only framework they've ever encountered for explaining UFOs. It's the one that dominates pop culture, government narratives, and even much of the serious research. And while it might be part of the answer, it's also deeply limiting.

Breaking people out of that framework isn't just valuable, it's essential. When you start looking beyond the extraterrestrial hypothesis, you find a range of alternative hypotheses, each offering a different way to understand the phenomenon. There's value in all of them, but none of them fully account for the data. This is why so many researchers ultimately land on an all-of-the-above approach. Maybe it's alien beings and beings from other dimensions and time-travelers and something

even stranger. And that could very well be true, but all of the above isn't really an answer. It's just a way of admitting we don't know. The deeper problem is that every one of these hypers, hypotheses at its core still operates within a familiar conceptual framework. Whether we say they're from Zeta reticuli, another dimension, or a distant future, we still tend to imagine them as beings more or less like us, coming from a place more or less like Earth, traveling in vehicles that are more or less like our own, and with motives more or less like ours, curiosity, conquest,

research, or self-interest. But the UFO phenomenon doesn't just challenge our understanding of the visitors. It challenges our understanding of reality itself. And if it suggests that our reality is far stranger and more complex than we've imagined, then any hypothesis that we come up with is already cursed by flawed assumptions. We're still trying to fit something deeply alien into familiar categories. The best new theory I've seen is James Madden's Uber-Umfeld hypothesis, which he's outlined on this podcast and in his book Unidentified Flying Hyper Object, UFO's philosophy and the end of the world. It goes further than any other model I've encountered in making

sense of the vast and often contradictory nature of the phenomenon without making any undue epistemological commitments. Instead of trying to shove UFOs into a box labeled extraterrestrial or interdimensional, Madden asks a different question. What if this is something so far outside of our understanding that we don't even have the right conceptual tools to grasp it yet? That, to me, is the more interesting and ultimately more honest approach, because whatever the UFO phenomenon is, it's probably much more complicated than we think. Another point that I think is worth making in this final episode is about the Skinwalker Ranch series, which I started and then never finished. And you guys never let me hear the end of it.

Honestly, I didn't finish it, not because I lost interest, not because I ran out of material, but because I got seriously creeped out. To be clear, that's not a commentary on the TV show, or the current ownership, the ranch itself has a much longer and deeper history, one that reaches into places that I ultimately decided I didn't want to go. Skinwalker Ranch is more than just a hot spot for UFO sightings. It's a portal, literally and figuratively, into a nexus of phenomena that includes interdimensional anomalies, cattle mutilations, the occult, and black budget military intelligence operations. It's one of those places where everything strange seems to intersect, and the deeper you go, the harder it becomes to separate

fact from manipulation, reality from deception. At a certain point, I had to ask myself, how far down this rabbit hole do I really want to go? Through further research and reflection, I made the decision not to say too much more about where that particular line of inquiry was leading me. There is a dark side to this, and frankly, I don't think there's much value in chasing it. I don't want to do it in my own life, and I certainly wouldn't want to to encourage anyone else to do it. When you start getting too close to certain aspects of UFO secrecy, especially the intersection of secret technology, intelligence operations, and the occult, you quickly find yourself lost in a hall of mirrors. Nothing is what it seems, and no one is telling

the truth. At best, you waste your time chasing phantoms. At worst, you find something real, something that doesn't want to be found. And here's the thing. The phenomenon isn't just shadowy corridors and government black sites. There's also an incredible lightness, a deep sense of potential wonder and hope. I've seen it in my community and the people who have come together around this mystery, and I've seen it in my own life. That's where I'm choosing to focus my work going forward, and not just out of fear or convenience, but because I genuinely believe that that is where the real story is. The other thing I want to say is that for all the talk about craft, crash retrievals, in government secrecy. The real secret behind the UFO phenomenon isn't about technology. It's about us.

Look at the biggest names in uphology who have been in the field for decades and remain at the center of the conversation. People like Hal Putoff, John Alexander, and Bob Bigelow. These aren't just people interested in UFOs. They're interested in sci phenomena, human potential, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and what one might call the soul. Their research doesn't just probe into questions of what UFOs are, but what we are and what we might be capable of. And they're right to be interested. Cy phenomena, telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, anomalous synchronicities aren't just footnotes to the UFO mystery.

They're an integral part of it. When people encounter UFOs and non-human intelligences, they don't just see something unusual. They often experience a profound shift in consciousness. They receive messages in their minds. They undergo spontaneous out-of-body experiences. They witness reality bending around them in ways that suggest UFOs aren't just vehicles, but something far stranger, something that interacts directly with human perception and cognition. This has always been the real secret, not nuts and bolts, not propulsion systems, not retrieval programs.

The true mystery of the UFO phenomenon isn't just what's out there. It's what's inside us. And that's dangerous knowledge. Human potential, our ability to access non-ordinary states of consciousness, to expand our awareness beyond the limits we've been conditioned to accept, to interact with reality and ways that defy mainstream science, is a threat to authority. Any power structure that depends on control depends on people believing that they are small, powerless, and disconnected from a larger reality. If the UFO phenomenon points to anything, it points to the opposite, that we are far more powerful, far more. more connected and far more extraordinary than we've been led to believe. Maybe that's why the secrecy exists, not just to keep the truth about UFOs from the public, but to keep the truth about

ourselves hidden. There is a quote from T.S. Eliot that I love. We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time. In many ways, this podcast is ending where it began with a question, the question, what are UFOs? And yet, though I find myself in the same place, the world around me has changed. I have changed. It reminds me of coming back home after years of traveling and living abroad. When I returned to Northeast Ohio, I saw it with new eyes. Before, I would have told you that it had no culture at all. But that was only because I was too close to see it. The culture in which I was raised was like water to a fish, so ever-present, so fundamental,

that I had mistaken it for nothing at all. I had to experience something different to really be able to see it. And I think that's always how it goes. We define ourselves through the other. To know what we are is to know what we are not. The UFO phenomenon, whatever it is, forces us into that same process of self-recognition. It confronts us with something radically other. and in doing so reveals the deep, unexamined assumptions we hold about reality, about consciousness, about ourselves.

And once you see yourself in the world differently, you get to ask yourself from a deeper place of grounding and wisdom, who do I want to be? Thank you for taking this journey with me. I love you all, and I appreciate you choosing to spend your precious time with me more than you could ever know. Here's to the next chapter. I hope I make you proud. Now receiving frequency transmission. I remember having a very profound realization about my dog when I was on mushrooms one Halloween. He sat by me and I realized with immense gratitude that dogs are all sentinels. We've merely fooled ourselves into thinking that we take care of them.

But they are truly our guardians sent here to watch over us. us. They are angels. And yes, we need to feed them and bathe them. And yes, he peed in the hallway. And I wished that angels didn't pee in hallways, but they do. That's the thing about altered states. They don't show you what isn't there. They show you what was always there, hiding in plain sight.