Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Pentagon’s Former UFO Chief Speaks Out On UAPs & Government Secrets | Sean Kirkpatrick [Ep. 451]

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

Have you ever wondered what’s happening inside the US government’s UFO program? How far has our hunt for aliens come? Are they hiding evidence of alien life or alien technology? And how should we deal with all the misinformation surrounding these subjects? Here today to speak out on the intricacies of our national (and amateur) hunt for aliens is none other than Sean Kirkpatrick, Pentagon’s former UFO chief. Primarily a laser and materials physicist, Kirkpatrick became the first director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) at the United States Department of Defense. The AARO is responsible for investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), commonly referred to as UFOs. Later, he quit his position as director of the AARO due to constant threats and harassment.  Tune in! Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 01:43 Are we in a conspiracy?  06:48 The impact of Venus on UFO sightings  10:42 Does the public have a right to classified data?  18:22 Government projects mistaken for alien tech 21:30 Biases in UFO sightings   27:51 Trends in UFO reports  32:26 Trust in government agencies  36:38 Actors in the search for truth  44:29 Government investigations  49:50 Audience questions  59:22 Outro Additional resources:  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast    —   Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known.   Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is the government hiding evidence of extraterrestrial craft? Were aliens present during a Department of Defense technology test? Does Tom DeLong have alien artifacts? And where did he get them from? Today on Into the Impossible, we have the first director of the all-domain, anomaly, resolution, office, or aero, at the U.S. Department of Defense. Sean is a physicist and ex-intelligence officer. his work has brought him into the public eye, especially given the increased government, transparency, and interest in the UAP and UFO-related topics.

Sean quit his position as director of the ARO during a constant threats and harassment. However, even after he quit, the criticism and harassment only worsened. He actually had more harassment from U.S. citizens than the Chinese and Russian adversaries that he used to work against. So after 18 months on the job, Sean called it quits last December. and Aero published its first part of a report that he and others had worked on. Today we discussed the world of UFOology, the study of UFOs, the scientific secrets they may reveal, the personal and professional motivations for so many people that are interested in this topic.

Today we'll discuss the evidence for extraterrestrial technology, UFO threats, Skinwalker ranch, and skepticism in science and UFOology in general. Let's go into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. So, Sean, we normally on this podcast do a deep dive into the cover and the subtitle of a book, and we ask, what's the artwork for? You don't have a book yet, although I'm sure people are reaching out to you with many offers. Maybe I'll introduce you to my agent.

But I want to instead go over an article that you wrote as, the so-called U.S. government's UFO hunter. And that was the title of the article. And the quote I want to get your reaction to is this one, that you write, the conspiracist story goes something like this. The UFO has been hiding and attempting to reverse engineer as many as 12 UFOs

from as early as the 1960s and probably earlier. The great cover-up failed to produce any salient results, and consequently the work was abandoned to some private sector defense contractors. Apparently the CIA stopped the supposed transfer back to the U.S. government, all of this is without substantiating evidence. But alas, belief in a statement is directly proportional to the volume at which it's transmitted. Sean, what do you say to those people that say, that's exactly how conspiracies work?

And we're in the midst of many, many conspiracies. How do you react to the criticisms of, well, that's just normal and that's how conspiracies go? Then why are we filling around with conspiracies? This is not the dark ages. This is back in the land of reason and science. thought, and the way you combat conspiracy theories and the associated misunderstandings that fuel them is in fact and science and truth. So if you've got evidence for a conspiracy, then that helps to investigate what the underlying truth is.

There has been none that has been substantiated for this. And everything that has been brought to our attention and everything that was brought to my attention when I was in that position as the director, we investigated and discovered that it did not come from where they thought it came from. Most everything was explainable through other documentation, other programs, other people that had talked to other people. You've, of course, done a lot of research as part of ARO, but also you're a physicist, and I thought it would be very interesting to describe some of the interest that, as I've made the case for, why physicists should be interested. How did you get involved in this project? It doesn't seem to be a likely

segue from somebody who was a laser and materials physicist in the University of Georgia. How did you get interested in this? Why should a physicist have anything to say about this subject matter? Well, so understand that as a career government official, as an intelligence officer, most of my last assignments I was told to go to not necessarily applied for. This being one of them. I did not apply for this job. So why did they ask me to do it? And the answer actually goes to, I think, where you're trying to head, especially for the students

that are going to be paying attention to this. The difference between scientific investigation and intelligence trade craft is actually very thin. There's a lot of overlap between them. And in fact, we have a field in the intelligence community called scientific and technical intelligence. And it is exactly what it sounds like, is trying to understand what an adversary, what another country, what anybody else is investigating through their science and technology programs.

and you do that by studying them, studying what they are putting out in the publication, studying what actions they're doing, trying to discern what are they actually researching. Why are they doing that? This is not very different from that, in that you have an unknown observation or phenomena and you're trying to understand what is that and is it a threat and do I really need to be worried about it? Or is it something else? And is there another underlying problem that we need to shoot?

So the reason I was asked to take this particular thing is because there's not that many PhD physicists in the intelligence community doing analytic work, who has stood up programs, stood up new offices and new organizations. So I had experience doing that. I had experience doing research. I had experience doing intelligence work and tradecraft and collection. So in the intelligence community, I would also be known as a collector and S&T developer. So I would develop sensors or develop experiments to go out into the world and measure what other people are doing, whether that's through remote sensing or overhead or bring all that together, try to understand what's happening. And you have a background in assessing data.

applying likelihood frameworks, et cetera. I've heard rumors or perhaps there are just, you know, claims that may not be true, that when the planet Venus is above the horizon for some period of the day, which is not always, that UFO or UAP sightings go up by some very large statistically significant amount. Is that true, Sean? I don't know that I have that statistic anyway. Now, we did do some work, I think, as you know, some work with the University of Utah, and my colleagues out there on some correlation math, right?

So trying to understand some of the underlying environmental factors that affect reporting, reporting statistics, reporting dynamics. And we put that out in a paper. There's a second paper that's coming out that does the neck kind of round of that. But in that paper, we looked at things from sky view, cloud cover, light pollution, trees, right? So just some of the basics, we're not trying to draw any massive conclusions out of that, but to set a baseline of understanding. So to go back to your question about why should physicists be interested in this,

but they should be interested in this because it is, you know, a conspiracy-laden problem that needs truth and needs basic scientific method applied to it. And let me give you the same kind of, metaphor I've given before. Do you know how much money just the U.S. alone has spent on looking for life out in the universe? It's in the millions, less than billions perhaps? Oh, it's billions. Billions. Okay. NASA's, one of NASA's primary missions is the hunt for extraterrestrial life out in the universe, right? Whether it's probes on Mars, you know, there was an article I was just reading this morning

about a finding from perseverance, right? They're very excited about what that research might lead. Probes out in the universe, probes out in the solar system. We send spacecraft to other planets. People don't normally think of it that way, but we are sending spacecraft to other planets, right? Cettalites, probes, and what. That's right.

As long as we're having that conversation in the context of scientific research with NASA, out in the universe, you're out in the solar system. It's a very scientifically based, data-based, rational argument and discussion. As that conversation gets closer and closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, maybe a little bit closer than that,

right, it starts to morph, that conversation starts to morph into science fiction. And then somewhere when you get in, you know, across the ionosphere of Earth, it becomes conspiracy theory. To go back to why should physicist care, well, you need to elevate this conversation,

the level of this conversation, out of the conspiracy theory and into fact. So base it with some baseline math, some baseline pattern of life's baseline scientific method, and show some data. Hey there, I hope you're enjoying this out of this world episode of The Impossible, and I'm wanting you to do just one small favorite,

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. See people claiming, and I asked some of my audience to, you know, contribute questions for today. And there's so much vitriol and hostility. And a lot of themes that come up is, well, this guy's salary is paid by the taxpayers, which is not true anymore, correct? You're no longer working for it. So that's not true.

Well, that's granted. We have a right to this data. And I say, I could show you the Hubble Deepfield. And that's data. Do you have a right to it? You know, I guess you could say you have a right to it. Could you do anything with it as an amateur? And I think, of course, the answer is no. You can make certain images, but to do actual real science, other than, you know, kind of just playing around and making pretty wallpaper and screensavers for your desktop, there's very little that an average person can do. That doesn't mean they shouldn't, you know, have access to. But what right does the public have to data? Isn't there some, you know, is there some balance that you try to strike between all these reports that you claim, you know, flooded your office, but also transparency to the, to the taxpayer?

How do you balance those to competing constraints? The American public does not have right to any classified data. And we are awash in classified data. We have how many wars going on right now. And every time we take an overhead satellite image from one of our intelligence satellites, that's classified data. You have no right to that. That is used for national security reasons, purposes, and missions.

and the taxpayer pays a subset of the public, military, civilian, and contractors for the purposes of national security and to protect this nation. Now, you either pay them and you trust them to go do their job, or you don't trust them to go do their job, and you should stop paying them and let somebody invade and take over this nation. I mean, you know, pick your poison. When it comes to this particular data, the government is trying very, very hard to declassify stuff and push it out so that people can see so there can be transparency. That was the whole purpose of standing up arrow and that's all I spent most of my time trying to do. And it doesn't go fast. What people don't understand is contrary to what you see in the public media, you can't just snap your fingers and say something as declassified. Nobody has that authority. It has to go through an interagency process for one. Two, the owner of that data has their own declassification procedures. So everybody is different. And why is this a problem? Well, if I get as the director, if I got data that came from the Air Force, I have to go through Air Force procedures to get it declassified. And what does that mean? That means they have to make sure that there's,

there's no mission-specific operational data, there's no capability data that can be compromised. It's not that there's a balloon in it. It's because I'll come back to why things are classified. But that's the Air Force, right? The Army has a different process and a different procedure. The Navy has a different process and a different procedure. The intelligence community has different processes and procedures and different rules. And so you have to go to each one of them separate depending on who gave you the data, if there's data to be had.

So there's a process and it takes time. And that's what people don't understand is that each one of these things takes time. That's why it's still slow. Some of the things that you're seeing getting published on Arrow's website now, we had started 18 months ago while I was still there to get it declassified and now. Now, why are things classified? That's another good question that people should probably understand. Especially if you're a graduate student, you want to go into technology development for the department or the IC. These are the things you're going to have to understand.

You can build the best sensor on the face of the planet, like the newest camera that's 16 megapixel and can take a picture from 2,000 miles away and get pristine. data. Okay, great. And I'm going to put that on an aircraft. I'm going to slide. Well, because you've developed that for a Air Force platform, for example, they're going to classify the capability of that sensor because nobody else has it. And we don't want anybody else to have it. And we don't, we don't want anybody to know that we can do this. So they classify it. Now, the aircraft goes out, flies around, takes a picture of a bird. Guess what? That picture is class. It's not classified because the bird is special. It's classified because if I gave that picture in all of the raw data to an optical physicist

or an optical scientist, they can reverse engineer the capability of that camera. And now you've lost this, the technological edge, right? Everybody hears about this in the news, about how we're losing our technological edge to China. Well, this is one of the reasons why. You lose that data, people figure it out. So you have to do things to the image to declassify it. So what does that mean? That means you scrub the metadata down and out.

You get rid of that. You probably compress the image. And once you do all that, you kind of lose the ability to reverse engineer the original capabilities use of the census. And so the image at that point can be downgraded, declassified to, you know, unclass. Here's a bird. It's a great picture of a bird. It's close up. Okay. That's sort of the whole classification problem in a nutshell. Now, to make matters even worse, you've heard a lot of discussion in the media about the department and the IC recognizing that we've overclassified a lot of things, and we need to fix that. We've been. It's

struggling with that for decades. Okay, well, they're getting around to figuring out how to do that. But here's what that means. Why do we say we've over classified things? We've made it difficult because, all right, you're an optical physicist. You go and you work for Raytheon or Lockheed or somebody. You build a nice sensor camera system, you know, state-of-the-art, government-funded. it's going to be classified.

If it goes to the Air Force, the Air Force will classify it with one compartment. And then it goes to the Navy, it'll be a different compartment, not even the same compartment. It'll be the same camera, but it'll be classified with different compartments, different protections. And so you can't just take one and declassify it without consulting the others because they have to figure. out, is there any compromise to each other's programs? So that is the problem that the government's trying to get a hold of. Fix, right? So we don't need two compartments for the same sensor on different platforms. We need, you know, maybe you need one compartment. You don't need a compartment. That's the review that's going on right now. I've had, you know, two former CIA agents on the podcast before,

and they've both spoken about the problem of over classification. And we saw that, you know, you know, even impact the presidential race in the past few years. But going back to the article, you wrote that, you know, many of the, you know, sightings and allegations that from the public claim to be UAPs are derived really from the misrepresentation or inadvertent disclosure of legitimate U.S. programs that might not be related to UFOs at all. So without revealing any sensitive details, now I want to pivot from observations and classification of data once it's been observed.

But what about the other way? Can you share an example of a real government project that might have been mistaken for something extraterrestrial? Sure. There's a bunch of historical ones that have already been declassified. So what is it? One of the original stealth planes, F-117, right? State-of-the-art stealth fighter being developed out, tested out in Area 51, and everybody saw it, thought it was an alien spacecraft. Right.

In fact, that is one of the key programs that gave rise to the whole conspiracy starting back then. That was the platform. Everybody was pointing to saying this is alien technology. You know, it's understandable if that is the first time anybody ever sees that sort of shape. Nobody would believe it could even fly. And so how do you, you know, to see something like that, one, it doesn't look like. an aircraft too. You don't think if it is an aircraft, it can it fly? And then you see it fly. People get all kinds of notions in their head. Well, why would you think it's any different today?

Okay. So just because you all out in the world, the entire, you know, human race has now seen the newest stealth bomber. Okay. Well, but you've only seen it from how many different aspect ankles. They don't think pictures all around. There's a reason for that because it looks weird. There are things that are classified that you don't want to see or share. And so it's not unreasonable to think, hey, there's a new technology that we're testing, a new design. And we don't recognize what it looks like. So that must be, that must be the technology. And I've had people talk to me about, well, you know, there's a lot of people that think stealth technology was born of extraterrestrial technology. No, it hasn't been because we actually have the entire record of

how stuff technology was developed, who developed, where it came from, why it came from there, how did we build it out, how did we advance it over the years. It's a rich history. Most of it's still classified, but it's a rich history of technology development, advanced. technology. Another thing is that, you know, the question of the data collection methodology, are there some, you know, filters, are there some, you know, kind of overlays or biases, as we'd say, in the trade? Because, you know, I've noticed a lot of the people that I've had on my podcast, people like Ryan Graves and others like David Fravor, I haven't had on it, but I've talked to his wing woman and Dietrich. You know, the question is, well, of course you're going to see

strange things around military bases. And in the Science Reports article, you overlay and, you know, a large number of so-called hotspots are in the Western United States where we have most of our, you know, secret bases are not around, are not secretive bases, but actual bases are not in, you know, downtown Manhattan. They're in the great expanse of the southwest and the, uh, and the northwest. So can you comment on, you know, kind of some of the overlay biases that people aren't aware of and that, you know, can probably dismiss a large number of sightings due to legitimate, though classified government programs. In the very first annual report that we put out after I stood up Arrow, we put that heat map

together for this very reason. We have a global heat map. It's on the website. Everybody can look at it. And we actually wrote, too, this is clearly collection bias. in the reporting community because the reports are coming from military pilots, military operators, Navy and Air Force predominantly. And why is that?

Well, because we're flying around testing stuff. A couple of things that people don't probably recognize, right? So one, a test range is huge. It's like several hundred square kilometers. I mean, it's huge. And so there will be tests, multiple tests can occur on a test range simultaneously by different owners, different organizations. And not everybody knows what everybody else is doing on a test range. That's the reason it's called a test range.

The very few people that understand the entire scope of everything that's happening are like the range test director or the command. who has to know everything that's happening in there if you are their area of responsibility. That sort of thing one. There are times where, you know, you've got group A is doing one test and group B is doing another test and group A might inadvertently see group B. And they're going to see it because it's only during test times that sensors are turned on, which is another collection bias. Now I have a collection bias of I'm only getting reporting out of those areas where we're doing sensitive testing, not only from the U.S.'s side, but now I've now think of it from the adversary's side. I've got my test range where I'm going to be testing all of high advanced technology. So if I'm an adversary, I want to know what's going on in your test range. Well, I'm going to try to get into it.

How am I going to do that? Well, I can float a balloon in there. I can fly a drone in there. I can do all kinds of stuff. And we have to try to sort out, hey, is that a threat? And do I need to shoot it down? Or is that just a piece of trash that's flying through the air? Or is that, you know, so we have that problem.

And then the underlying sort of secondary collection bias there is sensors. because we don't run those sensors on those ranges 24-7. It costs a lot of money. Contractors run it. If they have support, electricity. So we only usually turn those things on, and that's all of our sensors, when we're running a test. We need to have sensors on for tests. So the other thing that we were trying to get fixed was you need a pattern of life.

Scientifically speaking, I need a baseline. I need a pattern of life of everything that happens in that airspace 24-7 for, I don't know, two, three, four, five months at a time. Just turn everything on and collect all that data and monitor everything. Well, we can't afford to, you know, turn everything on and collect all of that, all that energy of all the things that are happening and all. So what we have to do is design purpose-built or brain. out already built, purpose-built, monitors, whether they're radars or telescopes or whatnot,

that are better slave to it, and watch. Collect all that data and then analyze. Okay, so here's what happens when there's no tests happening. How many objects come through the airspace? Here's what happens when a test happens. Does the number of objects go up? Because if it goes up while we're doing a test, that's an indication that somebody's trying to do something.

If it doesn't go up, then there's probably just your normal stuff that's going through all the time. Hey there, I can't get you any of the possible extraterrestrial technology that Sean and his team at ARO evaluated, but I can get you something that's out of this world and that's a meteorite. It's a meteorite that was fell to Earth, that great velocity made of exotic materials that you will get, if I pick you as one of the monthly winners that I select when you join my Monday Magic mailing list, where I send out all sorts of cool information about research and science, technology, engineering, and math, including a very deep dive into this very episode that you're enjoying today. So I hope you'll do me that favor and subscribe to the Monday Magic mailing list.

And if you have a dot edu email address like many of you do, you're guaranteed to win one of these suckers if you live in the United States. So for those of you blessed to be a student or a professor or trapped in a lab somewhere, Go to Briankeating.com slash edu and you're guaranteed to win if you live in the U.S. Now back to the episode. And what about things that aren't in our airspace? For example, one of my listeners, Ashton Forbes is asking, an event like Malaysian airline, 370 flight mysteriously disappeared, it's tracked on many different sensors. Is this something that Aero would be involved with? Or he claimed that this could be of interest because it might involve some sort of advanced technology, non-human intelligence.

That wouldn't be something that era would be involved in. That's all FAA. It's a known aircraft. It's a known aircraft. It's not the first aircraft that's gone missing from radars. Can you talk about the broader trends over the last 20, 30, 40 years? The zeitgeist is a buzz since, you know, 2017 when, you know, past guest Tom DeLong, you know, kind of got a lot of attention in the, you know, New York Times front page, sightings and so forth, the strange anomalous things that he's, you know, he's, you know, also involved with on a personal level through his own, you know, for and not-for-profit endeavors. But talk about the temporal trends. I mean, have you just seen this like overwhelming flood as well as you're seeing with classification and that problem we already discussed? But with reporting and just people's attention being, you know, fixated so much on the subject. So at the first blush, has reporting numbers gone up? Yes. Have they gone up exponentially? eventually, no, and why have they gone up? So the underlying reasons why reporting, and remember, we're talking about, you know, military, intelligence, civilian, you know, not the general public reporting, but the, right.

So that reporting in the department and in the IC has increased because we wrote orders. my team and I wrote orders with the joint staff to all of the services and all of the combat support agencies. For those of you not tracking combat support agencies or some of the intel agencies that support commands and say, you must report if you see something. Here's everything you have to report. We put that out. It's been more than a year now.

And I reported that. I think the Pentagon made an announcement about it because we were answering one of the problems that had been identified that there was no standardized reporting. Well, we fixed most of that. We said, here are the orders. You must report. And you will save data and you will transmit it to Arrow for analysis. And once that started getting out, because it takes time to propagate those orders

out across all of the forces and the training areas and whatnot, then reporting has gone up. Right. And then we started working with the FAA. So one of the other things, one of the last things I was doing was working with the FAA on integrating FAA pilot reporting. Now, there's a huge difference between a commercial pilot and a military pilot and what they report and how they provide the data. because a commercial airline does not have on-board radar that it's going to use to collect against that. It doesn't have sensors. It doesn't have data recording of the kind that a fighter jet will have, right? As it has health and safety recording, that's about it.

You have limited value of what you can get from the civilian reporting in the commercial airlines, FAA airlines, but they are working really hard to standardize. You need to tell us exactly what was your lat long at the time. What was your GPS coordinates at the time? You saw where do you think it was? What was it doing as much information as you can provide? Now, you go into ARO's reports and they'll tell you how many FAA reports or civilian reports had been received.

I think by the time I left, it was less than a couple of hundred across the globe. So, and many of them, believe it or not, turn into Starlink launches, satellite re-entries. Those are some of the biggest things that get reported all the time. I've interviewed these pilots. I actually did an interview live with Ryan Graves and my good friend Ariel Kleinerman, who are both F-18 pilots, they serve together in the U.S. Navy. One reaction I get is, you know, how dare you, Keating? How dare you criticize these military flyboys and girls?

And you don't have the guts to strap onto an F-18. And, you know, I fly around a little Cessna around Southern California. But how dare you, on the one hand. And the other hand, you know, they have this implicit trust of the military when it comes to sightings of UFOs. But on everything else, including you, and we'll get to my friend David Spurgel, and their involvement, they have utter disdained contempt and real suspicion. How do you, what are the forces at work here that would allow somebody to have such cognitive biases?

On one hand, support the government, you know, when there's pilots that, you know, ascribe to my pet theory that there are alien technology flying around our skies. And then the ultimate distrust of folks that are civil servants or maybe even in the military that, you know, give their whole careers to this effort. How do you balance those? How do you square those two? You know, that's one of the things that is the most disappointing about this entire endeavor is, you know, my team is made up, was made up of military and civilian intelligence officers who have dedicated their lines and careers to serving the national interest, national security, have served overseas. I've been overseas. and yet the civilians often get shunted aside

and not ascribed the same level of respect. And I'll tell you as intelligence officers, most intelligence officers, when they serve overseas, they're serving in war zones right alongside the uniform military. They are supporting the military by doing intelligence. They are collecting. I mean, collection against an adversary means going behind enemy lines where uniformed military can't go. And yet, somehow that is not as good in the eyes of some of the public.

And when it comes to things like this very divisive topic area, when you have a group of people like my team was, who are outstanding top-notch people who are trying to answer what Congress told them to go do and trying to do their job and present an objective evidence-based analysis, and they get harassed and shot down about that, that's just not acceptable. So I would turn that argument, that statement back around to the American people that have said that and go, how dare you? Why don't you get off your couch and come help do some actual military or intelligence work? And let's see how well you do. Yeah, having this, you know, kind of instant access, instant gratification, you know, 24-7, you know, kind of overwhelm. It just seems, you know,

almost like a losing proposition. I think you said once you get more kind of attacks from U.S. citizens than you do from people in Russia or China, which are, adversaries. It's ridiculous, Brian. I was deputy director of intelligence at U.S. Strategic Command, supporting, throwing nuclear weapons around. And I was deputy director of intelligence at U.S. Space Command, you know, overseeing all of our space. And two of our key, key capabilities of the United States national security apparatus, space and nuclear weapons. And I had less trouble from Russia and China trying to figure out what I was doing than I have from the American public who's pissed off because I didn't tell them that they were aliens. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises.

It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. So pivoting now to this question of the power. popular narrative that surrounds, and this is such a rich environment, you know, for characters, for almost caricatures of people. I mean, you've got billionaires, you've got rock stars, you've got egghead scientists, you have Avey Loeb and Gary Nolan, you know, rigorous professors at the top institutions in the world. And then you have, you know, people that are working to really get to the bottom of it that are dutiful studio scientist, David Spurgel. Again, I mentioned him, my colleague here at UCSD, Shelley Wright, who's actually looking for

aliens and you see that there's no greater person, no greater personality than a physicist like yourself, like me, who would be more interested, I should say. There's no one to be more interested than a physicist, right, if this were true. And I think, you know, if I had a suspect, you were possibly animated by your, you know, interest, hope perhaps that we could shortcut three centuries of physics if these things were real, perhaps, but you didn't let that get in the way of where the data took you. But talk about these other characters. You mentioned Robert Bigelow in your scientific American article.

I mentioned Tom DeLong. These are people who have claimed on my podcast. They have evidence of alien technology that has crashed. They have it. And then when I ask him, well, can you give me the chain of custody, Tom? No, no, no, we lost provenance to it here, but everything else. Well, if you lose one shred of the causal chain, it doesn't hold together. So why are people like the Bigelows and the late Harry Reid and.

other people. We often hear about that. The government is spending money on this. How dare, again, they love to, you know, they love to question, you know, people that, that oppose their senators, except if their senator is on an opposing political party during election season. So talk about that. The characters like Bigelow and others, what are they doing positive and negative for the search for truth? You know, nothing would make me happier than to uncover the evidence to say, hey, here, I found them. Here they are. Let me roll them out for you. But that didn't happen. The evidence does not support that. None of the evidence.

And it's important to note it's evidence, right? Just because somebody said, you know, something and they heard it from somebody else or they saw something. Humans are fallible, right? They are fallible. They are subject to optical illusion. They're subject to their own interpretations of sensors, their own sensory perception. Right. But it's data that is the coin at the realm, especially in something like this.

The people that you've named, right, I can't think of anything that they've done that I would say is positive in the search of answer to this question. And why do I say that? This piece of material was claimed to me from a crashed UAP, right? no providence, as you pointed out. They think it came from the Roswell. Nobody can say for sure because they lost chain of custody. They don't know where it came from. It got bought and sold.

And now there's this belief. Okay, so you take that. It gets pointed to as the evidence. This is the evidence. Therefore, we must believe. Okay. Well, once we got hold of said evidence, to actually go measure it, investigate it using science.

Science does not support said thing. It's not even extraterrestrial. It's terrestrial. We know pretty much what it is, and we know probably what it came from. We can't say for 100% that it was definitely a missile casing. I could say it's probably a material that was used in the aerospace industry back in that time. But the isotopic ratios do not support anything other than earth-based.

So unless you want to debate whether isotopic ratios are definitive in that answer, along with all the other spectrum that was taken, you can't really debate it anymore. So why do they do it? I get asked this question a lot. I got asked it in Congress. I got asked it behind closed doors, on camera, off camera all the time. Why do people do it? And my job was not to determine intent. Let's be clear, my job was not to determine intent. My job was determine truth and then let other people figure that out. People do things for a variety of reasons. There's fame, fortune, there's power. Their drive for power is, you would be surprised how much that one comes up in this. You think it'd just be money and But the ability of people to say, I helped ghost write the legislation that forced the Pentagon

to go do this, right? I've had three people tell me that. That is, I mean, they, and they like to say it a lot. It's like, okay, well, that's great. But you know what? We all, and if you're in the government long enough, you pretty much all end up helping write legislation at some point. And then there's just, there's misperception, the misinterpretation of things that are real that you just don't understand.

Then then you're down to its belief. And once you get into its belief and not evidentiary-based fact, now you're almost into a religious discussion. Right. Because you can't combat belief. and I've told people this before, right? I can put out all of the hard evidence in science that will, you know, unequivocally say, this is not that, just like this piece of material that the report came out, you know, whatever, last week or a couple weeks ago.

Finally, that was another thing that we finished last fall and it took this long to get, you know, released. But you can put all that out and people are still going to believe and they're going to believe because they want to believe. And in today's, you know, and I've actually, I've heard this from a couple of people. I mean, I get emails all time. And I've had a number of people concerningly because, you know, it actually makes me worried about where these people are headed. But I've had people say, look, the state of the world today is such that I'm scared, this is horrible, we're all going to die.

this is all bad. And, you know, aliens are going to save us. Hey, there's a good chance you might be a scientist or an engineer aspiring to be, maybe going to school, graduate school, or after school, or maybe you're a professor like me. If you're wanting to learn the greatest tips and ways to become your best scientist, you might want to get my book into The Impossible. Think like a Nobel Prize winner with a forward by my friend Nobel Laureate, Barry Barish. In it, we describe an incredible series of tips on how to collaborate.

better, unlock your creative genius, and get over common pitfalls like the imposter syndrome. I hope you'll take a deep dive into it, and I know you'll enjoy it. You can read a free chapter at my website, Brian Keating.com, slash books, and you can buy it at Amazon.com, an ebook, audiobook, or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot. It's not necessarily that they believe aliens are going to save us. They want to believe somebody is going to save us. Right. It's eschatological in a lot of cases. And I think that's part of the human impulse and the human urge. And I think that there's no reason to suspect that they would save us. I mean, I always say, you know, if you want to find life, just go, you know, a couple miles off campus here. And there's, there's an ocean full of life with trillions of viruses per cubic centimeter. And yet we still dump a lot of trash into the ocean. So the question is, you know, what will change the day after we really discover aliens? And I want to take you back to some of these, you know, very evocative. I mean, we used to do a really.

good job of naming these investigative programs. And I want to read to you some of my favorite ones, as we only have about 10 minutes left. You're generous with your time. But Project Saucer, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Twinkle Grudge, Bear, and then, of course, the famous Blue Book. Which one of these is closest in spirit to what you did, or which one, would you say, gave the most, you know, Bayesian credulity to the search either for ordinary prosaic explanations or perhaps led the way to probe new mysteries. I really liked not the original Blue Book, but there was a Blue Book follow-on report. It's out at NARA, but it's basically the Air Force coming in some years later and saying,

and I'm summarizing. We're getting beat up about Blue Book and that we didn't do a job. So we're going to convene another group of people. to review what Blue Book did and do an assessment of that. Did they do their job? Did they follow procedure? Did they give evidence? Did they turn over everything?

And that report came out and said, yeah, well, they did. And we validated most of what they had turned over. Here's everything we found. We think they did an exceptional job. And I think that, you know, if you look at it through the review of scientific method, right, that's peer reviewing of a paper and it got validated. So I think that was the closest to what we were trying to get to what we stood up arrow of. We're putting all this together.

We're doing the investigation and we're doing peer reviews and we're getting people out and involved across multiple communities to try to get this evidence on the table so people can look at it. and understand what the conclusions are. So in ARO's first report on the historical record of U.S. government involvement with UAP, I have a list of nine or ten different, really shocking headline-grabbing, attention-grabbing incidents ranging from a CIA officer who allegedly mishandled or managed the UAAP experimentation to a claim that a military officer touched an off-world craft. Yeah.

Yeah, to the question of experimentation on extraterrestrial spacecraft samples, and we discussed that earlier. And then a named company allegedly experimenting on alien technology, which of these, you know, took the longest to resolve in eventually coming to the conclusion, as you state very clearly, you know, in the end, that there is no evidence. And any of the findings in volume one, at least, I mean, hope could spring eternal for the future. but to date, IRO has not discovered any empirical evidence that any siding of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence of a classified program that had not properly reported to Congress. Which of those gave you the most, you know, kind of caused you to stew the most over it? Each of them took different amounts of time to dig into. Clearly, I got to resolution on all of them to write the report so I could retire.

I think the thing that took sort of the longest to unwind was the alleged company that had the material and was experimenting on it. That's actually linked to this piece of material that the report came out about recently on what it was because that piece of material, somebody had asked a company to look at it and they came back with the,

It's this type of alloy. We don't think that's a single layer we can reproduce. We can't do anything with that. That's fed the conspiracy. That's fed the storyline, right? If somebody called a company and got them because they knew a guy, right? So it's like if I had called you up and said, hey, Brian, would you mind taking a look at this piece of material for me and tell me what you think? And I think it's this.

and it's going to be based off of this paper, and I'm going to give me this paper that says, hey, this is a thing. And if you apply this field, it's going to do this. When you pull the thread on all of that, it all comes down to, again, that same kind of group of people. We identified in the paper.

They had their fingers in all of this, and it all is self-consistent within the story. But once you start pulling the thread, on the facts, it doesn't hold together. So just a couple of questions from the audience before I ask my final question and wrap up. Thank you so much for your time. So this is from Nick Pope. You've probably heard of him.

He wonders, what consultation process, if any, do you follow when receiving interview requests? And aside from the obvious prohibition on divulging classified information, does the DOD or anyone else give you guidance on points to stress or points to avoid? So nobody gives me guidance. This question has come up a couple of times. So did the White House put pressure on me? DoD put pressure on me? Nobody you did.

I was told to go do a job and a mission, and that's what we did. And I did not run those questions by anybody. We came up with those questions on interviewing in order to get to what does the person want to say and how do they want to say it? And then we would have them put it on paper and then they would review it. They would make any changes they want and they would sign their statement for the record. All of those are on file on the record, right? So things like this alleged military officer who put his hands on that.

Well, that finally got tracked down. He put on record, no, that's not what I was touching. These are kinds of things that we need to, people need to understand. So the interview process was a two-person process. It's an interview process that's standard in both the IC and law enforcement. enforcement. And if anybody came in and had something that they wanted to share that was crossing a legal boundary, like they were claiming they were being threatened or somebody was coming after them, we can refer them direct to law enforcement. Law enforcement would pick up

the criminal aspects of that. We would focus on the factual investigation. Renata, one of my listeners, I don't know who she is. She asked, well, what would happen if you did discover that something did turn out to be extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence? What would be the next steps? I mean, presumably there'd be some process. Were you in possession of a process or procedure to enact should it turn out to be the case that some of these were, you know, verifiable in some sense? So I got asked about that by both DOD and I see leadership at the highest levels. If you find something, what are we supposed to do? And we debated it. And the answer is if we found evidence of extraterrestrial life, a gold star extra credit to any student who knows whose mission that is,

because it's not the departments and it's not the ICs. It's NASA's. So we brought NASA in as a partner early on, as everybody knows. I had a NASA liaison in my office. And if we had ever come up with actual evidence of extraterrestrial life over to NASA, good luck. Good luck. with that, it's your job. That's their job. That's their mission. That's what's in their budget to go do. Now, if said life turned out to be hostile, well, then there'd be an interagency process

that would probably rise up to the president. And I think that's something that a lot of people don't know. There's an interagency process that handles every major decision like that comes up, conflict, wars, whatnot, finance. This would not be any different. How do you react to claims? made by people that were not going to mention my name, but seem to indicate these things violate the laws of physics.

The question has come up many times. Why isn't Ed Witten involved in this? Why aren't the top theoretical and experimental physicists in the world involved with this program? So people describe things like craft that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. There's an upcoming book by an author I hope to have him on. he's tentatively, his team is agreed to have him on, perhaps, after the book comes out, claims, you know, these kind of negative energy curvature, all sorts of things that do violate the laws of physics as we understand them.

How do you as a physicist react to those claims that you don't have enough physicists on it? We need the top, you know, strength theorist or, you know, whoever working on it. I claim those would be irrelevant because you'd really want a metallurgist on board. But how do you react to those claims that you don't have the right people or the government doesn't have the right people on the job? Well, first of all, nobody knows what people we have, do they? The only people they've seen are me, a handful of others. So we had access to all of the scientists across the entire interagency, and you don't need theoretical physicists.

Because nobody has produced any evidence of anything that violates the laws of physics, not a single shrie. So there's a lot of people that say it violates the laws of physics. Well, based on what? What data do you have? You have none. Nobody has produced a single thing. Not a radar track, not a video with raw data. None of this compressed data that comes off the internet.

So any compressed video that you get off the internet is not analyzable for anything that's defendable. Because image compression does all kinds of interesting artifacts to your video. and a lot of people don't know that. You end up missing frames so things look like it's moving differently than it is. You're missing the bit deaths. You don't know what none of the reflectography or the spectral analysis. None of that matters on a compressed image. You just can't do it.

And I've got a great example of this that was put in for declassification well before I left. And I think it's almost done and it's going to be released. It'll go through a really great example of a thing that we really thought was maybe this was it. Maybe this was the evidence we needed. And it turned out, no, it was image compression that made it look like it was doing something. It wasn't. Once we had to go get the raw data. We actually finally tracked down some of the raw data.

It didn't do anything that they thought it did. Yeah, I pointed out when I spoke of the Joe Rogan experience, I told Joe, you know, in 1945, a guy named Luis Alvarez, a type of spoofing technology that made the Germans think that allied bombers were receding when, in fact, they were coming closer and you used the inverse fourth law power. And that, if you were a German physicist, look, you say, all these things defy the laws of physics. They're moving faster than the speed of light. So, yeah, you have to be very careful, and I'm excited to hear about that. Last question for me, I know you've got to run. I'm depressed hearing what you've gone through and even reading some of the questions from people that follow me.

it seems it seems hopeless. It seems pointless. And I wonder, you know, when you think about the future of Aero and so forth, you know, hopefully this won't be the end. But given everything you've been through and, you know, harsh treatment and really thankless job, I mean, where do you see the future going in this field when, you know, there's been, as you say, a whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication, secondhand and third hand retellings and outright lies. So looking ahead, what do you see as the most important steps for the next ARO directors and the scientific physical physicist study of UAPs in general? This is a larger problem than just hero. What you're describing is, and as I pointed out in my op-ed, it's a systemic loss of intellectual capacity, critical thinking skills, rational thought, and even common sense. and the general populace has lost respect or even understanding of scientific method and science and how do you go about discerning truth from fiction. And it is getting worse and it pervades every aspect of our society. I am depressed because I don't see that improving.

The only way that's going to improve is through education, information and whatnot. and we are hamstringing ourselves in educating and in providing information and in validating truth. And instead, we are getting our gospel from social media or the internet or the 24-7 news cycle and how many clicks can I get. Instead of actually stopping and asking yourself, does this actually make sense? And if so, where's the evidence? So all these people, right, great. You want to believe what you want to believe, believe it. Stop wasting taxpayer time and energy to chase it for the purposes of getting some of that taxpayer dollars put into your pocket,

which is a whole other story. But people need to start questioning, where's the data? Where's the evidence? I've seen everything these people have said they had, and there was. nothing there. Some of these people gave me, you know, information after information, information, information. We went and investigate everything and not a single thing turned out. It's true. So why? That goes back to your question. So I'm depressed because I don't think the future looks too good from a cognitive perspective across the populace unless people start

relearning critical thinking. Yeah. And to leave us off on a depressing note, I'm afraid that is the truth and I've heard that from many different sources including those in the NASA panel. So, you know, obviously there's some big conspiracy, you know, about technology. I always say I don't, I don't believe in gravity, Sean. I have evidence for gravity and I think that's what we have to hold people too. And if you want to be a citizen scientist, we love it. I had on one of the best citizen scientists in the world. Chris Lentot, you know, brought citizen science to millions of people through Galaxy Zoo. Nobody, you know, nobody's clamoring and saying that that's closed off to the general public. But if you want actual alien

materials. I do have some here, Sean. When I come and visit you on the East Coast and the near future, I will bring you some alien technology. No, it's not technology. It's just a meteorite, but I give it out to my dot-edu customers for free when they go to my website, Brian Keating.com. And I will bring you one too, my friend. Thank you so much. This has been a blast. And thanks to Avi Love for connecting us. Have a great day, Sean. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Slot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package, the biggest prize in Yamava's history.

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