Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - British UFO Head Exposes Most Chilling Alien Sighting in UK History | Nick Pope • 179

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Nick Pope ran the British Government’s UFO desk in the British Defense Ministry. From 1991 to 1994 he researched and investigated UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles and other strange phenomena, leading the media to call him the real Fox Mulder. EPISODE LINKS: - Protect Your Retirement W/ A Gold. IRA https://www.noblegoldinvestments.com/juliandorey or call 877-646-5347 Noble Gold is Who I Trust ^^^ - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/qCu27Zcp  - SUBSCRIBE to Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  NICK LINKS - NICK TWITTER: https://twitter.com/nickpopemod - NICK FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/nickpopeofficial  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Nick Pope’s background in British Ministry of Defense UFO Program 11:03 - Nick’s interest in UFOs & Space; London 19:53 - Nick’s investigations into UFO / UAP archives 30:21 - Handing UFO media 34:59 - Nick read in on UFO / Alien Situation 47:06 - 12 hour UFO data checks 49:49 - Nick introduces the Rendlesham Forest UFO Case 58:51 - History behind Rendlesham; Jim Penniston & 3 Witnesses 1:08:33 - The Rendlesham binary code translation; UFO investigations like police investigations 1:19:29 - 2nd night of UFO activity at Rendlesham 1:27:36 - Colonel Holtz and the mold of craft landing; UK UFO Program formed 1:41:49 - Demonic Alien reference; Nick’s discussion w/ Lue Elizondo; Nukes 1:51:22 - Rendlesham Witness Mysterious Health Problems 2:01:28 - Did Nick ever see an Alien? 2:07:29 - David Grusch UFO Testimony 2:18:29 - UFO Disclosure & National Security; Collapse of meaning / religion 2:29:07 - Global Response to existence of Aliens 2:32:37 - Silicon Valley simulating human reaction to UFO Disclosure 2:39:53 - WW2, Nukes & UFOs 2:48:03 - Future Humans 2:55:47 - The Calvine UFO Incident 3:03:07 - James Fox Witness got UFO images; Nick responds to Steven Greer 3:13:35 - Identifying Intelligence links to UFOs; CIA UFO Crash Retrieval Claims 3:21:37 - Thank you Nick CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 179 - Nick Pope Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up guys, if you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a 5 star review. Thank you. December 1980, over 3 consecutive nights, this took place at 2 military bases, somewhere between 50 and 80 miles northeast of London. On the first night of activity, some security police and law enforcement personnel saw strange multicolored lights in the forest. Their first thought was maybe a light aircraft has crashed. We should kind of go out there immediately and investigate. Well, they found out there wasn't an aircraft crash. Nothing like that had been reported, but they did. Nick, you're the first British guy in here.

I finally checked it off the diversity list. Okay. The British are coming. The British are coming. Actually, the British are here. Well, we kind of fought a war over this in 1776. It didn't go as well for you guys. I don't know if you're still bitter.

Well, no, we're all friends now. That's good. But you're a New Yorker now too. Yes, I've lived here since August. My wife is a professor and she got essentially headhunted. She's a visiting fellow at Heterodox Academy, so we moved to New York for a year. And what does she do as a professor? Physical anthropology, so she studies skeletal remains and from that makes kind of calculations about past peoples, how they lived, how they died, their diseases, their diet, their lifestyle, all of that.

And you were saying, we were just talking off camera before you came in here, you were saying that she was under attack for identifying remains as female or something like that is that right yes she was due to speak at the american anthropological association at their annual general meeting as part of a panel to discuss the importance of biological sex and as a physical anthropologist elizabeth was going to talk about how skeletal remains are, of course, either male or female. And she was told that's hate speech. You are so fucked. It might cause harm to the LGBTQ whatever the rest of the thing. You did a good job. I was nearly there.

Yeah, you were right there. Anyway, so all nonsense, of course, because she because she said look people can identify as whatever gender they like but you know whatever you you believe or or identify as your skeleton is only ever going to be male or female when they dig you up in 10 000 years time no hate speech out so like they say the only time in 122 year history of the triple a that they've actually accepted a panel and then cancelled it once the woke karate found out about karate i like that i'm gonna use that it's really good well we might have to get her in for a podcast to talk all about that that's uh fascinating to me well it was a huge story yeah it was it was uh

in the new york times uh News covered it, Newsmax, lots of other places. You guys are just the news family over there. You guys are everywhere. Can't get away from the popes. No. Interesting. But your whole backstory is something that people have turned me on to maybe about six months ago. I had been unfamiliar with your work and everything, but over here, we kind of look at the chris melons and the louis alizandos of the world as the ones who were in the us government working on things that at least had to do with ufos obviously lou was like literally the head of the atip desk for that but over in britain you were as i understand it it, effectively at one point, that guy for the British

Ministry of Defense. Am I saying that correctly? You are, yes. I was a civilian employee of the UK Ministry of Defense, which is essentially the equivalent of the DOD here. And my job, they move you around every few years. I was there, as I say, 21 years. Lots of different postings at various different grades. But from 91 through to 94, I ran their UFO program. Now, we were a public-facing program, unlike ATIP. So we were more in common with the old U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book. We took reports from the public. We investigated those. You could look us up in the phone book

we weren't a secret we did some classified work interesting okay so so there are similarities with a tip but differences too i was i'm a little bit off on that because that that makes sense from your end but i didn't realize A-Tip. I know that I guess the desk itself was secret for a long time, but when public reportings happened, my understanding was that they did, they were in charge of looking into that. You just, as you put it, couldn't find them in the phone book. Is that the only difference? So you're hosting the family barbecue this week, but everyone knows your brother is the grill guy,

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Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Why not? Well, AATIP, no, I would say it goes further than that. I'm not sure, and of course Congress is getting into this at the moment, I'm not sure there was, for example, proper congressional oversight of the AATIP program. It was kind of buried and disguised as something else. And even

when the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote to Congress in January of 2018, just a few weeks after the New York Times broke the story about AATIP, they were still trying to dress it up. And they were saying AATIP is a program that looked at next generation aircraft and weapon threats to the US, which was just not true because they attached at Annex a list of the studies that they've done under the AATIP program. And none of them were about Russia or China or aircraft production or drones or missiles. They were all about anti-gravity, invisibility, warp drive, wormholes, stargates, all that kind of weird X-Files stuff. Yeah. And for your whole life, though, leading up to this, I guess, how old were you when you went to that desk?

Gosh, I think mid-twenties, I guess. So I was at the junior managerial grade, which was, the grade was called executive officer. And it was the first rung on the management chain that would eventually take you up to the senior civil service. So I was not at the time, obviously, that far progressed in my career, but it was one of those niche jobs that exist from time to time where you are the deep specialist. I was going to say, you're running it. You are, yeah. You are the subject matter expert. And if the Secretary of Defense gets, for example, a question in Parliament that needs to be responded to,

I was the one drafting the answer. And you're like 26. I'm like 26 or whatever I was the one drafting the answer. And you're like 26. I'm like 26 or whatever, whatever I was. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, but that's, that's part of when you are identified as I think I was as a potential high flyer, they deliberately give you challenging jobs and deliberately pick those sorts of jobs where there isn't necessarily that kind of safety net of lots of other people who do the same thing. Where really you are one of the only people who have that deep specialist knowledge of it. And it's sink or swim. And you are expected to swim.

What was your job for them immediately before getting that one? Immediately before, I was a briefer and so my job was to take large and complex amounts of information involving Royal Air Force personnel issues and that could be anything from pensions through to medical and dental care, through to recruitment, retention, whatever it was, anything on the personnel side. I was the briefer for a post called AMP, which was the air member for personnel. So I had to put his briefing packs together for the, I'm sorry, I'm throwing a lot of acronyms out, but you asked. There was a top level personnel committee called the PPOs, which was the principal personnel officers. And that's where basically the army,

the Navy, the Air Force get together to discuss personnel issues with a view to trying to integrate them and make sure that there aren't single service differences. It was that time when everything was about jointery and purple, as we called it. Make it purple. So don't have the Air Force do one thing and the Army do another because otherwise the Air Force person will be saying, well, how come he gets all this medical and dental care that i don't right so that was my job briefing um putting

together briefing packs for those meetings and in that kind of job obviously you're reporting to people yes whereas meaning let me better state that you're not the head of the whole shebang you're you're an important piece of the cog but then they move you to something where you're technically like the head of the whole shebang with it. Yes, because there really isn't – I mean everyone's got a boss. So, of course, I had a boss. He wrote my report. He had a boss and so on but in terms of a boss who has that knowledge of the subject no with the ufo program that that was very much ring fenced and the subject matter expert the executive officer

posted to that position is is really that's where the buck stops. Was this something you had been interested a ton in as a child? Like were you thinking about extraterrestrials or even less than that? Were you always interested in space and you would express that before getting this job? Or was this something that was thrown on you in trial by fire? I really didn't have a previous interest. I guess I was interested in space. And I mean at school when I was about 10 or something, I did a project on the solar system. But it was very science-y.

I had, as a kid, I guess, seen, as pretty much everyone had, the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Oh, yeah. Spielberg. I had read, I think, the book The Bermuda Triangle, which had one chapter on UFOs, I think, Charles Blitz. But that was about it. And it was not top of my list ofs or interest or belief. It's just that that vacancy opened up at pretty much the time I was due for a move. So it just seamlessly came together. Now, did you have a say in getting that job or was it they just brought it to you and said you're doing this? Well, it was a slightly unusual situation. At the time, the Ministry of Defence had you don't really want deep specialists who know for example contracts policy inside out but know nothing about counter-terrorism security

you know those sorts of things or personnel issues so and you don't want somebody who's done all ops and policy and knows nothing about finance. So the thinking was give someone a grounding in all the major areas of the department's business so that there aren't any gaps in their knowledge. So the personnel department handled those moves. But I had been posted, as I mentioned, to Secretariat Air Staff, which is the name of the division, doing this briefing job. And I'd been doing it for about two years. But for a number of reasons, I was looking to move out of that. And then we had the first Gulf War, the Persian Gulf War, Saddam invading Kuwait, August 1990, the ground war starting, I think, in January 91. And during that period, I was seconded into the Joint Operations Center in the Air Force Operations Room, again, as a briefer, a watchkeeper. I did 12-hour shifts. We would monitor the information coming in in real time, brief it up the chain, that sort of thing. And I

had worked very well with one particular manager. And he was the guy in this same division who had the vacancy coming up. And he said to me, look, Nick, we've worked together quite well in the Joint Operations Center. I know that you're looking for a move. But instead of getting the personnel department to do a standard move, why don't we just do an internal reshuffle? You come in and do the UFO job, and we'll play it that way. And that's what he called and do the UFO job and we'll play it that way. And so that's what happens. And that's what he called it, the UFO job? I mean, you know, I'm trying to recollect a conversation that's 30 years ago. I don't know

if he quite put it like that, but yeah, however he put it, that was the does what it said on the tin. I mean, of course, we can get into this. There's a whole debate about what you should call that particular post. Technically, it didn't have a name at all, aside from Secretariat Air Staff 2A. God, everything sounds so smart and British. I know. Do you ever just talk to us and think we're so dumb just based on how we talk? No, you know i was having this discussion actually with with travis taylor the other day and um we were talking about intelligence work and we were saying isn't it funny how some accents are perceived some somehow as as being less smart and i was saying what an amazing thing and of course he he was saying absolutely we're, what an amazing thing. And, of course, he was saying, absolutely.

He was saying, what an amazing thing it is, particularly in intelligence work, to be underestimated by someone. That's true. I'm being underestimated a lot then. Let's go. But anyway, no, I just have this BBC English accent. Yeah, you're like a touch off the Kings. It's not quite, you don't say like yous. Yes. You don't do that. It's definitely high-end. Your Majesty are you interested in environmental issues? Youse. Youse. That was good. You practiced a little bit.

Off to the towel with me off with my head if I carry on down this road. Sorry Your Majesty if you're listening. They're not gonna let you back in. But what's the I cut you off with my head if I carry on down this road. Sorry, Your Majesty, if you're listening. They're not going to let you back in. But what's the, I cut you off with the, when someone came to you and your guy was telling you it's the UFO desk and there was an argument between what to call the... Yes, it's not so much an argument then, but an argument now from people who write about it. Should we call it the UFO program? Should we call it the UFO project, the UFO desk? Should we stick to the actual divisional titles? And the reason we don't, it's really only the media and the public that say things like UFO desk. Although, actually, I saw that in Parliament the other day, so they have adopted it. Oh, wow. But we have this kind of internally you want to speak. When you're speaking to other people in the system, you fall back on all the acronyms and divisional names

because they know it. And they say, oh, I'm in SecAS. Oh, yes, I was there a few years ago. And that's fine. But if you're talking, say, to the media or someone outside the system, They don't know that. They, you know, secretary of their staff 2A. Oh, yes, 2A, not 2B. And they're like,

what the heck is this guy talking about? So, that's where you use the sort of does what it says on the tin things like UFO program. Sure. So, I guess the thing that none of us can relate to is how that would look I mean we don't even know how it looks in any of these offices you guys have to tell us about it but thinking about the year there this is what 91 when you come on to that one okay this seems to be so long before this was back I mean it's only recent years where UFOs and the idea of it have even been taken seriously by the mainstream in a way. But back then I'm thinking they got to be like, oh, great, the UFO guy over there. So I'm picturing a desk here that's like in a back musty room with the mops on the side because you got to clean it yourself, some paper you can write on, no secretary.

Is it like that or were you actually like decked out a little bit it's somewhere between the two scenarios we i we were on the eighth floor of ministry of defense main building in whitehall london okay and uh we had a great view actually out literally over number 10 Downing Street. Is that where in the James Bond movie where the explosion happens? No, that was MI6. Yeah, that's right. Beautiful, actually. It's one of the few pieces of modern architecture I actually like, but that's on the south bank of the Thames a little further up.

Oh, this is it right here? Yeah, that's it. Okay, wow. It kind of looks a little Stalin-esque actually. A little bit. I see the blocks. But yeah. And interestingly, although it's a modern building, I think it went up in the 40s or

the 50s during the war, it's built on the site of the old Whitehall Palace. And there's this really spooky moment that if you go down into the basement, you actually come across King Henry VIII's old wine cellar, which is restored to as it was in medieval days. Whoa. And I had my leaving due there. And my father had his leaving due there. The leaving due?

I think we're on british terms oh uh your farewell party got it see even that sounds smart leaving to two two nations divided by a common language yes we are yeah i was trying to figure out the british word for fed earlier and i couldn't figure it out right we had to give you a label on the on the mug if you're trying to navigate market turbulence why not set course to the noble gold investments safe haven We have to give you a label on the mug. haven. And if precious metals are new to you, Noble Gold Investments will hold your hand throughout the entire process. Why? Because they have a team of experts who will guide you every step of the way to safety. Thousands of investors have sheltered their retirement savings with Noble Gold Investments. So don't leave yourself completely exposed to the markets right now. It's way too risky. With gold at an all-time high and looking to climb further, it's the perfect

time. To open a Noble Gold Investments IRA and secure your future, along with a free gold bullion coin, act now before it's too late. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com slash Julian Dory or call 877-646-5347. And if you do so right now, Noble Gold Investments will also give you one free 3-ounce Silver silver American virtue coin as well. Once again, that's www.noblegoldinvestments.com slash Julian Dory or simply hit the link in my description below. So head there now and open up your own gold IRA with the only gold company I trust. But you so when you were down there, though, it was four years.

Are you looking? Because UFO, we forget this it can mean other things besides et it's it's literally meant to be unidentified flying objects so that could be a drone it could be something else but i'd heard you speak before where you said the the quote was it's russian not martian or something was that kind of the directive you got like hey we're probably looking at foreign intelligence here. Don't worry about the aliens. Or were they saying, hey, just look for everything. And if it's alien, let us know.

The latter. You can't – well, let me rephrase that. You can't really be conclusion-led in an investigation because then you won't do a good investigation. You should be data-led. And so we were. However, you know, just Occam's razor and common sense and the archive of previous files, somebody had done this job going way back to the 50s, tells you that, yes, you are more likely to be looking at misidentifications, sometimes hoaxes or delusions, but sometimes sensor errors than extraterrestrials. But we didn't take the extraterrestrial hypothesis off the table. It was in the mix and as i say we tried to be data led so so we tried to set aside

preconceived views about whether aliens did or didn't exist and whether if they did some of these uap sightings were attributable attributable to them or not so, you're absolutely right. In pop culture, UFO equates to alien spacecraft, but that was not our view. Our view was if there is anything unidentified in the UK air defense region, we need to make every effort to try and find out what it is and to determine, is there a potential threat in any of this? And conversely, are there opportunities? And yes, when I'm saying threat, essentially the thinking is most of those threats are going to turn out to be adversaries engaged in espionage.

Because you're also coming into that desk at a weird time. Thatcher's leaving office, getting pushed out. She's she's been in there i guess for like 12 years margaret thatcher and we're also in 91 that's that's when the soviet union officially fell i believe right i always get that mixed up yeah we are now and and was it yeah i'm trying to to think of the fall of the Soviet Union and then the wall coming down. The wall was before. I think. And so, yeah, 91, that sounds right. Right.

So it's at a weird inflection point. Not that people suddenly are like trusting everything about Russia, but it's not, you're not coming in there in 74. You know, at like the height of the Cold War. But it sounds like that was still, if there was any foreign adversary that was going to be perceived as a threat, it was still like, look, Russia. And that's what it is. And it was a real culture change. I mean, the Falklands War happened before I joined the Ministry of Defense. It was like 83, 84?

81, I think it was. If you had said to someone in 1980, what do you think, where do you think, against which country do you think the next three wars in which the UK will be involved, what do you think those three countries are? I guarantee nobody would have said Argentina, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq. Right. They would have said Russia and maybe China. Russia, Russia, and Russia. Yeah, Russia. Yeah. And absolutely.

So you're right. It's an interesting question because it was a pivotal moment in all our lives, but particularly for anyone in the Ministry of Defense, because you had to do this narrative flip. And for a while, there was a, I mean, only half serious, but a sort of, does this mean we're done? Can we pack up and go home? I mean, I'm exaggerating, but there was this sort of struggle to identify what your new role would be and how geopolitically things would change. And there were some, I think, misguided, as it turned out. But, you know, for example, the armed forces found itself getting in increasingly

to things like counter-narcotics and even the fight against organized crime, which were arguably more properly, I think, the provenance of other parts of government. But that's another story. Sure, yeah. We'd go down a rabbit hole on that one for sure. But to keep you on track with your career, what was going on. When you go to a desk, actually, even before you went to that desk, when you were working as a briefer, I would imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, that's not the kind of job where you are coordinating with other governments, say intelligence or defense services as much, right? No, those jobs were more flying solo type.

You would reach out to the various subject matter experts, get the raw data in, and then you would sit at your desk, read everything, try and really mentally digest it and then try and find a way to take all this large complex data and boil it down to the key issues and then make a recommendation for the senior people that you're briefing and say this is what the issue is this is the background to the issue. These are the various different opinions and key facts. And this is the recommendation for the way forward. So the question is then when you got to the UFO desk, I'll just call it that for people following out there. Did that completely change and now you are discussing a lot of things

with say american counterparts french counterparts and ally governments or is it still very much this is an internal british project and we're going to keep it to ourselves it changed not with the foreign engagement because there was very little um for a of reasons, and we can get into this. Please. The British government, like a lot of governments, was very ring-fenced on this. You would think, and common sense would say, hey, look, this is a global phenomena.

Shouldn't we be at least talking to allies and finding out what adversaries know, for example. But our brief, our remit was very narrowly defined. So for example, somewhere in the terms of reference, it said, investigate any sightings within the UK air defence region. So we had no jurisdiction, no legal remit to, for example, investigate a UFO sighting in French airspace. Now, that's not to say that you couldn't say, well, look, couldn't what the French are doing and have found out inform our own investigations? And absolutely, we should have been doing more of that. But I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I liaised with other nations about UAP through the embassies. I wouldn't have guessed

that. No. And it's a problem. I mean, fast forwarding way, I mean, after I left the Ministry of Defense in 2010, I attended a Royal Society discussion meeting in the UK about UAP, or rather more focused on the... and 3-liter V8 engine, 20-inch high-gloss black-painted aluminum wheels, off-road suspension with available 2-inch factory-installed lift kit, plus a towing capacity of up to 13,200 pounds. You'll be ready for anything this truck month. Truck month is on now. Ask your GMC dealer for details. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka. Soda. Natural flavors. vodka soda natural flavors so what should we talk about

no sugar added neutral refreshingly simple. Scientific search for extraterrestrial life. And the then director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, the Malaysian astrophysicist Dr. Maslin Othman, was there. And some people were saying to her, shouldn't the UN take a coordinating role with this and she's like yeah well if you come to us with consensus fine but a that wasn't going to happen

and b it was fairly clear the un didn't want that role they didn't want it they didn't want it why do you think that is i think because of the pop culture baggage that's associated with the term UFO. Right. That's part of it. But, you know, the other, I mean, part of it is maybe the bureaucrat's natural aversion to taking any new work on board, particularly in a subject where you could say, well, look, people have been working away at this for 70, 80 years without resolution because it's still called the UFO mystery. This doesn't sound like something very productive in terms of us suddenly being able to

cut through it all and come up with definitive answers. But it just illustrates the fact that this was not done on an international basis. Now, to answer the other part of your question, yes, my job changed because suddenly I went from being a briefer doing internal work to being in what was a public-facing program. I mean, people knew that the Ministry of Defense investigated UFOs, and indeed, nine out of ten of the reports we received, maybe two or three hundred each year, whatever it was. Would you ever, like, go on the news and talk about this while you were on this desk? Like, did people know you at that time at all? People did know me.

Again, it's an interesting question. this desk? Like, did people know you at that time at all? People did know me. It's, again, it's an interesting question. Normally, the subject matter expert does not go on TV. Normally, the specialist press officers go on TV. But it was felt that the subject of UAP was so complex and labyrinthine in terms of its 80-year or 70-year at the time backstory, say, that they would do an experiment. And instead of having the public affairs folks do the interviews and get briefed by the subject matter experts, they would put the subject matter expert, i.e. me, on TV and give me the media training. So they flipped it. And so yes, on a couple of occasions, I was the man from the ministry. So you're a real trained pro on this at this point. Smartly dressed, yeah. And I, of course, we joke about it now, but I, of course, was the debunker because it was my job to frame this in terms of nothing to see, move along.

We consistently downplayed the true extent of our interest and involvement in this. And so, yeah, there are – Were you told to do that? Yes. Downplay it? Yes. To unplay it? Yes. It was... I mean, we were given... We were given points in my job. I probably updated them, so had a hand in shaping them. But we had key messages, key lines to take on this, which you would always... Whatever you were asked, you would always try

and bring it back to those key messages and lines to take, even if it wasn't specifically the question that was asked. So I don't know if you watched the old comedy series, Yes Minister. I did. Great spoof of British politics. And they have a line in there, which is funny because it's so true, where the main character gets asked an awkward question. And he smiles at the broadcaster and he says, well, that's a very interesting question. But you know, that's not the real issue here. The real issue, the question on which the British people want an answer is, and then you go straight back to your key message. And our key message on uap was this is

pretty much all misidentification um russian not martian russian not martian well we didn't want to say russian either oh you didn't want to even say that no no i thought this was the popular time to be like not the soviets no you don't want the implication that somehow because that would be an implication that wait a minute what about all our air defense network? Are you telling us the Russians have snuck a spy plane past our radar systems? We haven't got our quick reaction alert aircraft up to intercept them and they're flying over, you know, rural Hampshire with nobody having a clue about this? No, absolutely not.

So we just framed it in terms of to the inexperienced observer, bright stars and planets or aircraft lights or weather balloons can be, yeah. It was MH370 up there. Don't worry about it. You didn't see anything. Yeah, nothing to see. So I guess I'm curious with the same question you've probably gotten your whole life

about that first day in there, though. And you go, you sit down at the desk, and now I assume, being the head of this desk, you're read in on, I'll say, a majority of the, let's say, intel they have on this kind of stuff. Did you just sit there for days and read through files and say, are fucking aliens real? No. I mean, of course it was my first question. Whether it was articulated out loud or not, I don't know. But it was like we had a whole filing cabinet of files and many more at the Public Records Office and in our own internal archives. As I mentioned, there's been a formal program looking at this since 1953.

And we had some even older sightings that occurred during the Second World War of so-called Foo Fighters. So, for example, Royal Air Force pilots in bomber command on missions over Germany and occupied Europe would occasionally encounter not just balls of light, but sometimes strange metallic craft keeping track with their aircraft, not firing on them. And those sorts of reports went into the files. So we had files on this dating back to about 43. God, why has everything happened World War II and on? Yeah. You know?

You know, it may have happened before, but you can have an argument about when we really got a sort of global media setup in a way that wasn't just so compartmentalized that one small town just read those small town stories or not. I don't know. But you're saying that the pilots were describing, I'm just, you know where my head's going with this. When they say small metallic object, I'm thinking very similarly to what we've seen with the Tic Tacs from the Nimitz. Is it that kind of type thing? Not necessarily the same, but that's along the lines of what they were seeing? Similar, yes. Yes, there are similarities for sure. And those old bomber command files, I've pointed at some researchers in that direction.

And I think someone wrote an entire book on it. So there's some good information out there. And it's quite surprising. People have this view that they were all just balls of light and which enables the skeptics to say come on it's a war zone it's it's probably triple a and yeah and all of that but it was it went further than that it was in in some occasions it was what looked like structured metallic craft hundreds of feet in diameter. Whoa, hundreds of feet. Yeah. So, you know, there was something going on. So, so yeah, I had access to those archives of files. And of course I wanted to know, well, what have we found out about this? But, but going back to that point about my first day, actually in your first week,

you actually shadowed your predecessor. So what happened was that I came in on the Monday morning, my predecessor was there. And so you put the two chairs at the one desk, and he's the one who briefs you, and you watch him in action. We had literally a hotline where the public could phone up and call in reports. We got some by letter as well. Some came in via military signal. This is all before still. This is wild. This is like, yeah, back in the day, you'd literally get mail.

The clerical staff, the admin staff would come in with the morning post, and it would come into your in tray, and you would open it up, literally, and it would be, you know, dear sir slash madam, I am a retired Air Force officer, and I was out walking my dog last Tuesday when I saw this. And so it would happen like that. And so that first week I was shadowing my predecessor. And then the tradition was that increasingly he would hand over to you as the week went on. You would be expected to be more and more read in. You would be expected to be answering

the correspondence, dealing with the calls yourself. And on the very last day, of course, you would work the morning. And then at lunchtime, my predecessor would have his farewell drinks, and you would give him a good send-off then that next monday that was you it's all you now are you getting extra security clearances and x and being i guess like double check to be read in on extra stuff now because of the nature of this desk or was it not same old no not because of the nature of the desk. Most, I would say 80, 90% of the work that we did on that desk was at unclassified level, which is kind of logical because a lot of it is taking those public reports and then investigating them with open source people like the Royal Greenwich Observatory. This is how you do an investigation, by the way. You get the data in relating to the sighting. When and where did it take place and what's the description? Then you try and correlate that with something you either know about or can find out about so you talk to to

the astronomers you talk to the meteorologists you talk to the radar people if you've got a photo or video you talk to the the imagery analysis folks now those would be within the intelligence community so that does take you into classified work now i, I already had a very high security clearance, as did my predecessor. You've been at a young age because of what you did, I guess. Actually, because of the Gulf War. When I mentioned being seconded into the Joint Operations Center, you were literally seeing real-time information about SCUD launches, scud launches for example so so you had access to to satellite data um you know i probably can't say too much more about that but but you know i had what was what was at the time in the the uk called positive vetting everyone has negative vetting to even be allowed through the front door.

That's make sure you don't have a criminal record. Make sure there's nothing unusual on your finance side, like either large unexplained payments or financial problems that would render you vulnerable to blackmail. Right. Everyone gets that kind of basic background check. And I say basic for the Ministry of Defense. It's obviously quite advanced and complex. But for the jobs that involve a high level of access to top secret information, for example, on a semi-regular or regular basis. For that, you need positive vetting. Nowadays, in the U.S., you would call that a TSSCI clearance. I've heard that.

Yes, top secret slash sensitive compartmentalized information. And what kinds of things are they looking for on that? When you were being security vetted um anything and everything they literally they went back to your your almost to your kindergarten they would talk to every principal that you they would talk to your your family your friends your teachers your bank manager anyone that you had worked with, and anything that didn't check out, they would grill you on relentlessly. So for example, when I was about 15, 16, I did a summer job and I worked in an old people's home doing the dishes and I worked at a record warehouse taking orders and putting them in a like a cart for shipment out. But that company had gone bust. And this was before the internet.

And so it was a period of unaccounted for time because I was like, well, it was called PRT Records. And I know I don't have the address because it was through an employment agency. And these people came back to me four or five times because they couldn't nail it down. They thought you were a Soviet spy, man. I was like, yeah, it's like any period of unaccounted for time, they think you're back at Moscow Central. Right, right. Being, you know, whatever. So I was like, well, maybe it was PTR records and not PRT.

And look, I don't know the number, but this is the street it was on. And then you would be called in for the dreaded final interview and it was good cop bad cop only it was actually two bad cops and they got they were using like circuit break they were not quite like that they didn't exactly waterboard us and uh we didn't we didn't have to actually take uh because it's not legally admissible or usable in the UK. We didn't do a polygraph check or anything like that. Neither did we have random drug tests. What do you mean it's not legally admissible? Well, it's not in the British criminal justice system. I don't think you can use polygraph

information. Right. But that's different for a background check, right? It is. I think it's the same here. But the feeling was, look, if you can't use it in the criminal justice system, then surely that says something about its reliability. And we will rely on old-fashioned methods. And the old-fashioned methods were, like I say, going through every aspect of your background, talking to everyone that knows you whether they're family friends

Colleagues whoever it is and then as I say the dreaded final interview To and they have these are usually retired Cops but senior cops who've investigated I mean detectives who've have done like homicides and the most serious of crimes, who have interviewed hostile witnesses who are often quite smart, sort of people in organized crime. And the job of these people is to break you down, to try and find inconsistencies in your story, anything like that. And so this is the positive vetting process. It doesn't sound very positive.

It's not very positive. It was positive for them because they find people who aren't being entirely truthful about things. So you had that happen before the Gulf War, you were saying? I had had that to enable me to be seconded into – they didn't have enough people to do these 12-hour shifts on and off 24-7. So what they did is they took people who said, yeah, we can do it. And they wanted people at the younger end of the spectrum who had the energy to do like seven, 12 hour shifts in a row. Then you would go home, come back and do another 12 hour shift, do that for a week. And then if you were doing day shifts, you'd take a break, go back to your normal duties, come back and then you do nights. So they wanted people kind of in their 20s. They also wanted high flyers.

And they wanted people who either had that positive vetting or were prepared to go through that process. And I said, yeah, bring it on. Because, of course, that opens up to you a much wider range of the more interesting jobs. So, of course, people with nothing to hide are like, yeah, I'll do that. And it's a UFO desk. Let's go. Yeah. So I didn't need the security clearance for the UFO job. But part of the job involved working alongside people in defense intelligence staff. So

scientific and technical intelligence folks, and they wouldn't sit down and talk to you openly unless you had that higher level of security. So my predecessor had it because of his Gulf War work. My successor actually had it because she had done a briefing job associated with special forces, but not everyone over the history of that job had it. And I think those people kind of got cut out a bit. Some of the other people though, whether it be the person before you, person after you, or the other people after them, has there been anyone who worked that desk who is as publicly open or publicly open at all like you are? No. In fact, only one person had previously spoken openly about that, and that was a former

head of the division. Of what division? Of Secretariat Air Staff, the whole division. So 25, 30 people, whatever it was. And so that individual sat at a much higher grade and his name was Ralph Noyce. And he, after he retired, he spoke about his time being head of that division. And he said, well, one of the things that our division did was the UFOs. And he said, no, I was not the desk officer doing it, but I was the head of the division. So of course, his opinion on this and his involvement was very important because he was someone who had a degree of oversight of this. And somewhat bizarrelyly he actually wrote a fictional book called a secret property which was a thinly disguised fictional retelling of the rendlesham forest incident which was britain's

best known ufo case can you walk us through that that's actually a great segue a lot a lot of people in america i just heard about this recently but lot of us, we don't know this story like we know Roswell and everything. So can you just go through the whole thing? Sure. And it is, I think, the best case we had in our files. It took place in December 1980. So by the time I joined, it was already over 10 years in the past. I later did a cold case review of it, but

it was my predecessor, one of my predecessors who did the actual contemporaneous investigation. So the story of Rendlesham, December 1980, over three consecutive nights, the early hours of December 26th, then the 27th, then the 28th, there was activity. This took place at two military bases, Bentwaters and Woodbridge. Now they were US Air Force bases on British soil, so they were part of the wider U.S. military presence in Europe. And on the first night of activity, and Bentwaters and Woodbridge are a couple of miles apart, and Rendlesham Forest lies between them. And what part of the island are we on? This is I guess you would call it I mean the county was Suffolk. Got it. Can we pull this up Alessi? Just on a map. It's um yeah it's it's I don't know 50 somewhere between

50 and 80 miles northeast of London. Okay got it. Close to the coast. I was going to say, it's going to be right up on the coast. So there's two bases separated by the Randles... By Rendlesham Forest. Rendlesham. Rendlesham Forest. Yeah. And on the first night of activity, some security police and law enforcement personnel

saw strange multicolored lights in the forest. And their first thought was maybe a light aircraft has crashed. Maybe there's a fire. We should kind of go out there immediately and investigate. Well, they found out that there wasn't an aircraft crash. Nothing like that had been reported. But they did find out that an uncorrelated target had been tracked on radar directly over the base, was there for a few sweeps, and then had disappeared.

So again, that was maybe indicative that something had come down, but no aircraft had been reported missing or anything like that. No distress calls had been sent in or anything. But nonetheless, they thought, well, something's going on. Let's go out and investigate. So a number of different people went out there, maybe about half a dozen. But then their radios started malfunctioning. And these were line of sight radios. So sometimes it was just topography.

But this was kind of talking to the guys in later years. They said, you know, we know what our radios didn't didn't do and this was unusual so they set up a radio relay which which was just pretty low tech in a sense it just meant well leave one guy back there uh then another guy another few hundred yards in and if we can't't relay a message back to base, we'll relay a message to the last guy behind us and he can relay a message to the next guy. Because what I'm saying is that the range of the radios

seem to have markedly dropped. So at the end of all this, three people kind of approached something. And over 40 years on now, if you talk to some of these guys, they all have different recollections now over what exactly they saw and encountered. One of them talks about it in terms of being a structured craft that had landed, not crashed. One of them talks about it in terms of just being a really intense light. A lot of these characters have had some fairly aggressive debriefings from their own chain of command, both being interrogated by Air Force Office of special investigations but also the use of regression hypnosis and aggression hypnosis yeah what is that where you hypnotize someone take them

back to the incident and say now give us your recollections because sometimes the feeling is the conscious memory has lost something or blocks something. Wow. There might be something in the subconscious. It's very controversial because some people say, no, no, it can actually create false memories. But it was a technique that was and maybe still is used from time to time. As I say, there are mixed opinions on its value, but also drugs were used. Sodium pentothal, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, sort of truth serums.

And again, it wasn't clear. And I'm getting ahead of myself here, by the way. Yeah, this is wild. But it wasn't clear whether some of the witnesses were being given all this to deliberately jumble their memories of this, to maybe hide the reality of what they encountered. Or maybe the chain of command really wanted to know and thought there's more details here than these people have consciously recalled. So that's one of many, many controversial areas of this case. How big were they initially reporting they thought the craft was, approximately? Well, Jim Penniston, who was, I think, a sergeant or a staff sergeant at the time, he is the one that talks most definitively about this in terms of it being a structured

craft. He estimates maybe about nine feet across at the base, kind of triangular in shape, almost like a lunar landing module. So sort of tapering, moving upwards, maybe nine feet tall. But, and this is the really surreal and bizarre thing, with strange symbols, almost like hieroglyphic symbols on the side of this thing. They could see that? He talks about that. How far away is this craft? Jim's testimony is that he went right up to it and touched it.

Oh, shit. And he said when he touched it, he got a kind of almost like a mental shock or something, and something changed in the feel and the brightness of the craft. And he immediately thought, oops, I shouldn't have done that. And he's like, one of Jim's specialisms was aircraft recognition. He was one of these people that could see a silhouette on a flash card and immediately go, that's a MiG-29, or that's an F-16. And he's like, this is not an aircraft this is like not you know it's like a lunar landing module or something but it isn't you didn't see any

creatures or anything no so it wasn't there are stories about that but but you know that the witnesses who talk about that they so far as i can tell are just wannabes who've written themselves into the story over the years the people who are actually verifiably there and when i say verifiably because we have their after action reports you know as part of the u.s air force files for example so we know who was there and who wasn't. So I don't take reports of entities seriously. How long? Because you said you were looking basically through the cold case of it at that point. Yeah. At the time, was this a very

public known disclosure in a way of an investigation or was this private and came out later? People knew the incident had happened because the story actually made the front page of a British tabloid newspaper in 1983. A few years later. Yes. But again, remember that this is before the internet and the old saying, today's newspaper is tomorrow's fish and chip paper. Right. It's a British saying.

I've heard that one before. So, yes, there was some knowledge that this incident had taken place. There'd been this newspaper story, some follow-up stories, a couple of books written about it. But a lot of the information was pretty wide of the mark. And so Jim Penniston talked about touching the side of this thing, getting almost a – I hate to use this phrase, but I'm going to use it, telepathic download. Because this takes us into, and again, I'm getting ahead of myself, but it takes us into one of the most controversial aspects of this story, which is the so-called binary code message that subsequently came out. The zeros and ones. The zeros and ones.

Can you explain that? This is wild. Years after all this. Years. Years. In about 2010, Jim Panniston was taking part in a TV program. Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz, make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals.

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and he had his original police notebook there in which he had sketched the symbols that he'd seen on the side of the craft because his testimony is that he'd taken photos, but after he shot off the whole roll of film, he thought as a fallback, he would go back to old-fashioned methods and start making some sketches and notes.

Good job he did, because the base processing laboratory later told him those photos didn't take out, didn't come out properly. Now... That's convenient. Yeah. One theory is that that's true and that that is a byproduct of radiation at the site. And I want to come on to radiation later because it's the single most important piece of physical evidence that we have

i'm so far i've talked about eyewitness testimony but i'm going to come on to talk about physical physical evidence um but it may be that it was a cover story and that the actual pictures of this craft exist in a file in a basement office somewhere in the intelligence community. I don't know. I don't know that. to our Amazon store below. You will find his book right there, along with a bunch of other books and films of guests that have been on the podcast that is now live, so check out that link in the description. Also, if you haven't checked them out already, our Discord and Patreon links are in the description. We are starting to do AMAs on Discord, and we are also now releasing a new show

called The Julian and Alessi Show with my producer Alessi Alamon on Patreon along with some other exclusive content from episodes that we have been putting out on YouTube that are not seen on YouTube. So anyway, Jim was leafing through the notebook where he'd written things like speed impossible because this thing was on the ground for, don't know 10 15 minutes then it and this was a small clearing in the forest where apparently it had smashed some branches to come come in through the canopy and then uh it took off vertically very slowly cleared the the treetops and then shot away at high speed now he had touched it after he touched it after he touched

it after so nothing happened when he touched it. Well. Other than his own effect. His own effect. No nothing happened. Well no I think it did change in brightness but I'm doing this from memory in a situation where I haven't looked at his testimony for some time. I can't remember whether he described the hull as being hot, cold, or neutral to the touch. I can't remember whether he said that that changed when he touched it or not.

And I can't recall whether, although I think he said something changed physically as well as getting this. But I can't swear to it. Okay. So, you know, I don't want to guess it. So, yeah. Anyway, it shot off at high speed.

He wrote in his book Speed Impossible. And how did it rise up like anti-gravity? Well, you know, I don't want to say anti-gravity because we have vertical takeoff and landing technology. It could just be like a Harrier jump jet, except there was no sound. No sound. So that is interesting because normally where you have these vertical takeoff, there's a huge sound, a roar of the engine. So again, indicative possibly of an exotic, radically different propulsion system. And you said there were three verifiable witnesses though. There was, what's this guy's name again? This guy is Jim Penniston. Jim Penniston. And then there were two others.

John Burroughs, who was a little further back, and talks about this in terms of intense light that he couldn't see past. So he didn't see the craft. Then Ed Kavanagh, who was even further back and was so spooked by some of this that he's only ever gone on the record a couple of times very briefly. So we don't have much testimony from him at all. Afterwards, a lot of them were told to write statements. He did later say, Kavanagh said, look, I didn't even read my statement. They typed something up, put it in front of me. I signed it. He said, I just wanted to get out of there. That's interesting. Anyway, so the story of this binary code is that Jim Penniston for this TV interview was going to

talk about the symbols. And somebody just walking past him and looking over his shoulder before the interview said, what's that? And there were like 16 pages of ones and zeros. And Jim looked a bit embarrassed and said, oh, that's, I don't really know. And they had to kind of tease the story out of him. And the story was that he got this kind of download when he touched the side of the thing and that two or three days later at home

he got a sudden compulsion to get out this book and he just wrote 16 pages of ones and zeros was then almost too embarrassed about it and or forgot about it and didn't say anything for another, you know, few decades. Yeah. And bear in mind – Was it translatable in any way? Yes, it was. Although I want to come on to that. I just want to make one other point about Jim.

Jim stayed in the service. So it kind of became okay to talk a little bit about the UFO because as I'll go on to say, I've only talked so far about the first of three nights of activity. On one of the later nights, the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt, himself became a witness and kind of got dragged into the public domain on this. So Jim was kind of okay with talking about it because it's like, hey, well, my colonel, he saw it too on a different night, not landed. But look, if the deputy base commander saw it and is talking about it, it's kind of okay for me to talk about that. But he knew it was not going to for me to talk about that but he knew it was not going

to be okay to talk about telepathic downloads so he just either kept quiet or blocked it or both so he thought that's interesting though because the whole thing especially back then would have sounded preposterous to anyone but he was still separating out like well that i could talk about but this i can't yeah he still put a grade on it you can talk about the ufo because you've got that top cover from from from colonel hall fair okay but ones and zeros no it sounded crazy then arguably it sounds crazy now it does have apparently a translation the tv production company founder a computer engineer, computer scientist who did the sort of whatever that code is, what is it, the ASCI, whatever it is, but anyway, binary to basically to normal language.

And apparently, and I'm doing this from memory, so I may get this. Yeah, it's out there on the net. But apparently it translates to continuous exploration for planetary advance. Eyes of our eyes, origin year 8100. And there then follow a series of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Wait a second. Yeah, I know. Is this like a future human implication? Yes, it is.

Oh, my God. Those latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates apparently correlate with some of the most mysterious sacred sites on the face of the planet, including the Great Pyramid at Giza, Sedona, the Nazca Lines, and so forth. Wow. And so forth. And a mysterious lost continent from Celtic legend called High Brazil. It's bizarre. Myself, if this is genuine, I think it's kind of too good to be true because it's like almost like a buzzword bingo of your new age bucket list. Yes, it is. If this is real as opposed to something that Jim – and I don't mean made up, but – Well, I don't like that a TV production company is the one who like oversaw this and brought in the computer guy. That –

Well, they didn't know. I do enough TV to know that normally they don't like surprises. So they kind of had to scramble around for this and this was all a bit last minute. So I don't – and they weren't so much pulling the strings. They were just like, is this something or is this nothing? I don't – and they weren't so much pulling the strings. They were just like, is this something or is this nothing? Did they show his full zeros and ones code? Oh, yes. Is that public info now so we can pull that up?

Yes. So technically the expertise of – among the public of people who do translations like this could check that work. Oh, yeah. I mean nowadays it's much easier. I mean, there are literally, if you manually now put those ones and zeros in the correct order, there are sites that will translate binary to English and vice versa. And it translates to similar. Like a sort of Google Translate or Bing Translate. There's an equivalent for binary.

So I don't think there's much dispute that that's what it translates as. Wow. But my point is this is too good to be true. And if this is a message from, you know, ostensibly, I guess, because it says origin year 8100, the implication would be time travelers from the future. Multiverse.

Yeah. But I don't know. Grandfather paradox. A lot of things. Yeah, a lot of things. It could be a lot of things, yes. I think if this is real, that this is just like an attention getter and that the real message somehow is hidden deeper. What do you mean by that?

Well, it gets our attention because everyone goes, ooh, Great Pyramids, Sedona. Sexy. But if there's a real and important message from the future, or maybe not from the future, maybe from extraterrestrials, maybe it's hidden somewhere else in the message. Now, look, I'm not a cryptographer, but I do know that there are, I don't know, ways of almost like presenting a solution that looks like a solution, but really it isn't. The real answer is much deeper in.

Maybe I'm not describing that very well. No, that's perfect. I understand exactly what you mean. Right. You'd need to talk to a cryptographer about this is much deeper in. Maybe I'm not describing that very well. No, that's perfect. I understand exactly what you mean. Right. You'd need to talk to a cryptographer about this or a symbologist or both or a mathematician. Anyway, look, it's one of the most controversial aspects of the case.

But if you take it out of the case, you've still got a case. I mean, I mentioned the physical evidence. That's a big part of it. Now, I don't know what you're allowed to talk about and what you're not. So if I bring up things that you can't talk about, just say you can't and we'll move on. Absolutely. I mean, any public interview I do can only be at an unclassified level.

Otherwise, I'll be breaking the law. Sure. So basic question did the you said you looked at like the cold case file of it which means you're still looking at it right i i did the cold case review so i had the original 1980 file so did they have a conclusion on there no they did not they didn't no it was it was unended so i use an analogy about ufo sightings which i think is quite helpful that i say to myself i say it's kind of like a crime file um cops will investigate all the crimes and hopefully they will have a good solving rate and those cases can then be closed. Any case where a cop opens an investigation but doesn't actually solve the case,

technically, even if there comes a time when you stop putting resources on it because you've just done everything that you can do, you've interviewed interviewed all the witnesses you've done all the forensics you can do technically that case is still an open case because it's unsolved I mean to give an extreme example the Jack the Ripper murders are technically an open case now we know as a degree of intellectual certainty that the perpetrator is dead of course because the murders were committed in 1888 so so clearly a real son of a bitch yes alive so so yeah nobody is obviously going to try and investigate that case with a view of bringing anyone to justice because it's too late. They may, however, as a matter of historical interest and curiosity, occasionally pull out that file and do something with it. So UFO investigations are very much like police investigations.

At the end of the day, you solve most of them. And I mentioned we got two or 300 cases each year and I do my investigations. Oh, okay. I misunderstood you for a second. Keep going. No, so I interview the witness.

I analyze any photos or videos that we have. I cross-reference with flight paths, with weather balloon launches, with astronomical data. And each of my cases at the end, it's like this was almost certainly a military exercise where flares were dropped. But not for this one. Not for this one. So an unsolved UFO case is like an unsolved crime case. It sits there kind of, even if it gathers dust, but technically unsolved open case. Rendlesham was an unsolved case.

All right, so I'm going to cover your camera real fast. And I want you to blink twice if you actually do know what happened. I'm not playing that game, but no, honestly, hand on heart. He's got a good poker face. Hand on heart. We did not have a definitive explanation. The way I tell it is this. I can tell you what it wasn't, but I can't tell you what it was. All right, well, let's do that. I mean, not can't, you know, as in I know and don't. I literally do not know, and I'm not convinced that anyone does have an explanation. But, look, we went through very carefully all the possibilities.

Was this, could this be some sort of elaborate practical joke that got out of hand? I mean, there is a culture of practical jokes in the military. That'd be a hell of a practical joke. It would be. But a couple of people have retrospectively claimed that they played that practical joke. I think they are either mistaken or they're just outright lying.

Yeah, having some sort of drone-ish technology and that size of a craft in 1980, come on. Sure. There's one guy who says that he drove his police car into the forest and then put the lights on without the siren. Well, that kind of doesn't really make any sense. And there's no evidence that even happened. The guy may simply be trying to write himself into the story, even if it did happen. There's no evidence that it kind of played any role in this. There's another guy who said that they had, one of the things that they had at the base was they had a unit called the, I can't remember what it was, but if one of the Apollo capsules came down in an unanticipated area, like obviously for an Apollo mission, you have your splashdowns in designated areas, but sometimes things can go wrong. And what if it splashes down in another

part of the world? You have to have a unit that would be able to go at immediate notice and fish them out. So there was a unit there that had a dummy Apollo capsule. So one of the theories was, could that have been... I know it's kind of... Noiseless though? I know, I know. That's why this doesn't make sense. That's why it doesn't make sense. But somebody said, is it possible that this could have been lowered under a helicopter, dropped in the clearing? Again, it's... With the invisible strings and shit.

Yeah, I know. It doesn't make sense. But in a thorough investigation, you have to... If somebody says, we did this prank, even if it's years afterwards, you have to say... Yeah, you've got to look at it. Is that possible? Yes.

Could it be? Yeah, you have to look into it. Yeah. And there's another theory that British special forces played a prank on their American colleagues and snuck into

the facility and I, you know, it's all friend of a friend stuff when it comes to this. But you have to consider it. So we looked at all that and eliminated it we looked at all the look i mean again as i say 90 percent of all of this

is going to be aircraft lights weather balloons meteors satellites how many cases would you say ballpark you had to review and at least look into before crossing it off the list, or maybe not, over your three, four years there? Thousands? I would say, I don't know. The number of cases that came in that I investigated was probably less than that, probably 700, 800, 900, something like that. But obviously from time to time I would dip into the archives because one of the big things that you tried to do was do some trend analysis. As I say, I did this job 91 to 94.

We'd had sightings going back to the to the second world war we'd had a formally constituted program from 1953 onwards we had a lot of files i mean one of the reasons i can talk about this and my security oath my secrecy oath binds me for life but so i i can only talk about things that are unclassified and in the public domain. But one of the reasons that I am able to talk about this is the British government has declassified and released a lot of this material. And just to give you an idea, and they, by the way, I'd taken early retirement when they released this, but they asked me to come back and help publicize the campaign uh so so because it was a good good way to show our commitment to when was that that was um the program to declassify the first batch of files was declassified and released in may 2008 i recorded a video for it somewhere at the National Archives. Oh, and you had gotten out in 06.

I'd got out in 06. But the point is that that program, which was originally't declassify because it was unclassified, but you still have to redact, for example, the names and addresses and personal data and witnesses for data protection. We've released about 60,000 pages of UAP-related documentation. So there's a lot. And how much of it comes to a conclusion and says, oh, it was this, or oh, was most likely that versus how much of it is the open end of stuff like we can't explain this? Well, most of it comes to a definitive conclusion or if it doesn't actually say so in black and white, it is obvious from the documents what it is. I mean, to give an extreme example, bright white light with green and red flashing

lights either side seen close to Heathrow Airport. I mean, literally, you would... Yeah. So, some of it is blindingly obvious. So, that was that. But before I lose my thread, let me get... Please. So that was that. But before I lose my thread, let me just get back to the Rendlesham story. I'll do the second and third nights quite quickly. Well, we've got all day. Take your time.

Well, no, we haven't. Hey, tonight they're turning on the lights of the Bryant Park Christmas tree. Oh, they are. Yeah, yeah. We've got to get to that. Yeah, got to get to that. What time is that at? I think it's six okay

but we'll have you there um yeah um but so anyway and um yeah but and and maybe there's some hot mulled wine oh yeah yeah stuff i mean the christmas market right that's it every word is like say it's got such a pizzazz to it in british it's great. Anyway, back to Rendlesham. So the second night of activity, we don't know much about it because these people did not submit formal incident reports, really because it turned into a bit of a scandal. Apparently some military personnel, and I can't remember whether it was Bentwaters or Woodbridge, but they were driving a Jeep and a ball of light kind of went through the cab and there were two witnesses, the driver and the front seat passenger. And I can't remember

whether their testimony was that the windows were open I rather think not because this is December UK it was freezing cold I think the testimony is almost like some of these weird ball lightning cases that this ball of light sort of physically somehow went through the closed glass window on one side and then out on the other. And apparently one of the witnesses was so traumatized by this that they had a kind of almost breakdown

and had to be returned to the United States to their parent unit. I'm less authoritative on that because I have not spoken to the individual concerned. I've only had this story albeit from two or three People who were there, but I've only had that second hand so it's fascinating the Especially would like the biggest story as you say in the UK that there is At least on the ground us involvement yes it's it's always there

yeah so the third night things get quite interesting there is an award ceremony in in the social club one of these kind of Christmas end of year events and all the the senior officers are present and then the door opens and a flustered junior officer comes up to the senior commanders and salutes and says sir it's back and and they all like what what are you talking about the guy guy says, the UFO has returned. So there is a discussion. Obviously, people, the senior commanders had been briefed that something had happened. And they were still investigating. No one knew exactly what.

Or if they did, they weren't saying. So the senior officers, the two senior officers present, or I think the three, kind of batted it around between them and like, okay, who's going to deal with this? And the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt, he said, I'll do it. And he threw together a team of about half a dozen people and sort of went out. They didn't see anything straight away. So what they decided to do was they were like, well, let's go to the location where this thing apparently landed on the first night. And they went to the site and I

kind of skipped over this when talking about the first night but it kind of wraps up with the third night so it doesn't matter you had said that there was I just remember this though you had said that there was conflicting reports from an eyewitness over time as to whether or not it crashed or landed well I don't think anyone said it crashed. But there were conflicting reports over whether branches had been smashed off the trees. Fairly small clearing. Branches smashed off the trees apparently by this object as it had first come down and perhaps as it had taken off again.

Did it look, I don't know if you'll know this detail offhand, but did it look like it had almost incinerated what was in its trail or like it had a rough landing and, you know, there's a bumpiness to the, to where the branches used to be and stuff like that, if that makes sense. There were burn marks and scorch marks on the sides of some of the trees and there were three indentations in the ground broadly speaking in the shape of a triangle and bear in mind this is december um uk it was freezing cold. The ground was fairly frozen. Colonel Holt has estimated that the object must have weighed several tons to have caused the indentations that it did. And at one point,

I think a couple of the witnesses, both Colonel Holt and Jim Penniston literally poured plaster of Paris into one of the holes or maybe more than one to get a mold of what the strut or whatever you call it the landing leg whatever terminology to what it looked like it was it was not particularly scientific but still do we have that mold yeah we have that mold somewhere like britain has it or you know what i want to say that i think colonel holt still has it oh he kept it he kept it because when he left... Can we pull up Colonel Hope, if you don't mind? Yeah. And maybe Jim has one too. You know, these people are quite sneaky

at taking things which you would think would be in the official case file. But this was more kind of personal memorabilia. One time, I forget whether it was Chuck or Jim, one of them was telling me that one time he took it somewhere and TSA kind of like, what the heck is this? Oh, TSA stopped him. Oh, that's nice.

Yeah, it's like, what the heck is this? This guy's still alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, shit. I think he's about 80 now. Yeah, he's on his way out. But he's a friend of mine. Oh, you know him still? Yeah, yeah. You think he'd come in now. Yeah, he's on his way out. But he's a friend of mine. Oh, you know him still?

Yeah, yeah. You think he'd come in and do a podcast about this? I don't know if he'd come in. He's based – where is he based? You know, I do know, but I've kind of forgotten. We'll talk about it off air. Yeah. I think by a spooky coincidence, at one time, he moved to Woodbridge in Virginia.

And the name, of course, of one of the two bases was Woodbridge. Is it just one of those spooky coincidences? Or is it something? I don't know what it is. Anyway, so Colonel Hall, he goes out to the landing site. But one of the people that he takes with him is a guy called monroe nevels and monroe nevels is the disaster preparedness officer and he has with him a geiger counter and of course this is where i say look thus far we've talked quite a bit about

you're saying eyewitness testimony from military personnel, some quite senior, but it is just testimony. Here we're segueing into physical evidence stuff because Munro Nevels takes – he surveys the area with the Geiger counter and he finds peak readings right in those three indentations. Not dangerous enough that he calls a halt and says, hey, back off, but enough of a spike reading to be like, whoa, you know, something happened here. What the heck? And that's written into Colonel Holt's initial incident report sent to the British Ministry of Defense. So because at some stage after this, of course, the base commander, the wing commander says, hey, you've got to tell the Brits about this. Yeah, so how long after was that? That's my next question.

A little bit too long. Like a day? Oh, no, no no like uh about 10 days that's sketchy it's it's a long complicated bureaucratic you guys had to be pissed about that we were a little yeah you know a ufo investigation a u UFO investigation is like a police investigation. As I said before, the first 48 is critical. To get a written report from the U.S. Air Force saying that there's been a landing. Oh, but by the way, it was like two weeks ago now.

Yeah. That's not great. We were not, I say we, of course of course you know i was only doing the cold case review so i was not the contemporaneous someone got chewed out somebody was you know well i don't know if they did but um if you if you know how to read a very polite british sarcasm some of the documents in the now declassified file reveal a degree of irritation with the u.s authorities for the delay and for the lack of information sharing so for example this object was briefly tracked on radar um you know and there's there's a sarcastic comment along the lines of perhaps the Americans would

care to share this information with us. You know, it's, I won't have time to get into this, and it's a level of detail too far, but that the status of forces agreement governs, is the overarching, the NATO status of forces agreement is the overarching policy document that that kind of sets out the framework for how all this works in terms of u.s bases on british soil and you can you can have all sorts of esoteric things like what if an American serviceman shoots an American serviceman on the American base who investigates? What if an American shoots a Brit? What if it happens off the base in the forest? And there are all sorts of kind of permutations of this.

Who has jurisdiction? Who has primacyacy anyone can have jurisdiction jurisdiction can be concurrent but only one person has primacy self-evidently so what's the difference jurisdiction is the legal authority to investigate something primacy is who has the lead for it ah okay so it gets weird it gets weird and to be honest confusion about that is one of the things that led to the delay and the poor information sharing on this case but the 64 000 question is is about this this level of radioactivity i feel like it's worth a little more than that. It's, well, and... Add a few zeros, maybe. When I did the cold case review, I was told that, well, this is actually spooky.

My goodness. You know, this is like a Russian doll or an onion. Every layer you peel, this is why... You should say a Russian doll and an onion. A Russian doll or an onion where you peel the different layers. This is why, even though we're covering this as part of an interview on the whole shebang... It's a good word. This is why I've written a 100,000-word book about this case alone.

Which book was that? encounter in Rendlesham Forest which I co-authored with Jim Penniston and John Burrows two of the The US Air Force will put that link in the description. So people check it out I Didn't mean to come on and do a book plug but it no I'm just trying to tell you how much information There is about this that just one of these cases I could write a 100,000-word book on. And be able to do it without revealing classified information. Yes. I had to submit the manuscript of that book both to the UK Ministry of Defense and to the Pentagon, to DOPSA, to the, what is it called, Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Security Review.

So you had to do both. I had to do both. Again, because this was, no, people like Lou Elizondo, who has his book coming out, at least he only has to do it in one country. I had to do it in both because this was on British soil but involved U.S. military personnel and U.S. military bases. So I had to go to both the Ministry of Defense and to DOPSA. Wow. The radioactivity levels turned out to be 6.66, okay, onto infinity, 666, times higher than average background. Which, for those...

Future humans playing some games with us. Well, future humans pretending to be demons by going with the whole 666 thing. Right. pretending to be demons by going with the whole 666 thing. And of course, there are people who think that some aspects of the UFO phenomenon are demonic. I've come across that. Lou Elizondo has come across it. I remember him saying one time when he was trying to get his skeptical Pentagon bosses, one of them said to him, son, go read your Bible. And, of course, a lot of those people with that mindset get that from the book of Ephesians where they describe Satan in terms of being, quote, the prince of the power of the air, unquote. And that's one of a number of reasons why some people think that this is demonic or aspects of it are. And therefore they say you shouldn't study it because studying it feeds it and gives it energy, which you shouldn't do.

God, it gets so weird. It does. Yeah, I've done – there's been two podcasts that have covered this. I had Ron James in here for episode 151. So one thing that Lou Elizondo told me and that he's told this to other people and he said it in the show unidentified one of the biggest things surprisingly that he ran into with opposition within the pentagon within the defense department to the work that he was doing is that there was a very large contingent of people that believed that this

was a demonic force as in demons and that we shouldn't be doing it we shouldn't be investigating it we shouldn't be poking the tiger in the eye they thought the phenomenon that was being witnessed was demons yes within the military establishment within the pentagon within dod there was a large number of people that opposed his work because they thought from a very very fundamentalist viewpoint that we're dealing with demonic activity and he was talking about like he spent a lot of the last six seven years really studying lou alessandro sitting down with him for a very long interview kind of got him to say a couple things that i'm sure lou didn't really like saying and lou had told him all about that and how there was there was like a a piece of the pentagon that was hell bent on that's what it is hell bent very good yeah exactly i didn't even mean to do that but that was pretty

good but then i had another guy in who comes at it from like a very different angle this guy dr hugh ross and so i was able to explain about 99 of what people thought was a ufo but there's one percent that didn't fall into the category of a natural explanation secret military activity or a hoax can you explain that one percent they clearly violate the laws of physics they're observed going through the atmosphere thousands of miles per hour, yet there's no sonic boom. There's no heat friction trail behind the, quote, craft. And there's 2,000 cases where they're documented as crashing into the Earth. You go to the crash site, you see a shallow crater.

If there's snow, the snow is melted. If there's vegetation, the vegetation is damaged. But when you go around the crater site, site there's no artifacts there's no debris it's like when an airplane crashes into the earth there's lots of debris to recover with a ufo there's nothing but the fact that you got a crater something real must have done that who's like he's one of those guys extremely nice guy guy, smart physicist, the whole bit. But I think like his religion is kind of – his science is built to kind of fill his religion. That was just my takeaway. But he does talk about the angelic versus demonic end of this and how his argument kind of hinges on one thing it seems like.

And that is because we don't have physical evidence that these things were here like they don't leave behind physical evidence that therefore it must be demonic what would go against that argument there would be some of the eyewitness stuff though that you're speaking of in this case at rendlesham as one example being there was a craft it was it had hieroglyphics on it whatever it was touched by the person but again allegedly because it's not like he chipped off a piece and kept it well it is kind of scary i guess that that the argument for some of this being demonic is that it doesn't seem physically tangible and yet this one case where it was we ended up with 6.6. Yeah. So, that's kind of... And again, does that tie in

demons and notorious tricksters? Almost every culture in human history has a trickster god. You know, again... A joker. It is the cosmic joker in this context. But it's funny. It's ironic, I think, that sometimes the roadblock to serious scientific research into UAP within government isn't a hard-nosed skeptical faction who think it's all nonsense, but is a faction who think it's very real, but demonic. That's one of the ironies of this. So they're afraid, it's ironic to me that then they're afraid, like, that argument's kind of bullshit to me. Like, oh, well, we don't want to study it because we're giving it energy or whatever. Wouldn't you want, that's like saying, oh, we don't want to solve this murder case because

we're giving the murder, like that's, that's horse shit. Yeah, no, no thine enemy. But I don't know these people are probably biblical scholars or think they are and they've probably delved into it in more detail and a lot of them probably aren't they're probably just like religious and they think they're biblical scholars yes that's a very good point i think that's that's behind a lot of the the miss i i don't know misstepssteps that we see here. Did you encounter any of that?

Yes, I did. In yours? Yes, absolutely. Because you referred to it with Lou. I wasn't sure if you said it for yours as well. The reason it resonated with me, and I had this discussion with Lou, is it turned out we'd both come up against the same thing. There is, and in the UK, one of the people who was something of a champion for serious UAP research was a retired five-star admiral, former chief of the defense staff and chairman of NATO military committee called Lord Hill Norton. He was an admiral of the fleet five-star Admiral

He'd come up he'd served on Destroyers, I think in the the Second World War and some of the most difficult dangerous theaters and stayed in got to the very top Retired then got interested in UFOs, you know, why why couldn't he get interested when he was still in? Yes. Yes. I'm up Yes, yes. I briefed him on a few occasions. He's gone. He was a character and a half. He was getting interested in this

but he fell under the influence of a maverick priest called Paul Inglesby, who was of the view doors for us on this. He was in danger of being brought down this kind of fundamentalist, religious rabbit hole of demonology. Was that priest Catholic or Protestant? I think he was Protestant. But you know what? Again, I don't think he was Protestant, but you know what? Again, I don't think he was mainstream. He was one of these, maybe he was one of these small, I don't know, sects. I don't know. I want to say he was Protestant, but I am not 100% on that that because when i hear stuff like that that's where the tinfoil hat gets tingly a little bit because you wonder if there's some sort of i don't know historical narrative known to few that they're like oh other people can't know about this so we can't have them study this kind of stuff i i don't know how realistic that is because that requires a lot of gatekeepers

i i would think but makes you makes you wonder it a little bit yeah i i don't i don't really have an opinion on that but um to to finish up on rendlesham i'd say a couple of things so so colonel holt gets to the landing site um they take the radioactive radioactivity readings and then they see the ufo themselves not landed but through the trees then up in the sky they see it move around erratically colonel hall says that at one point this thing fires a narrow beam of light down at the ground shortly in front of him and his men, and reflecting on this in later years, he's given a number of interviews where he said, was this a weapon?

Was this a warning? Was this communication? What was it? And he doesn't know. And he chooses his words carefully on this. He has once or twice, I think, articulated the word extraterrestrial. But generally speaking, what he has said is, I don't know what it was, but whatever it was, it was under intelligent control. What does that mean?

It means there's a technology behind it and he doesn't think it's ours because it seems in terms of speed maneuver acceleration capability to to be way beyond the cutting edge of anything that we have at the time okay same sort of thing david fravor says about the tic-tac okay all right i was picturing that wrong he says second. Well, he says, I don't know. Dave Fravor, of course, famously said, I don't know what it was, but I want to fly one. Yeah. So, and he says, Colonel Holt talks about this object moving around rapidly in the sky as if it's performing a grid search. So going back and forward and then the very last thing that happens is it

fires narrow beams of light down not now at him but back at the base and subsequently he was told some of the light beams penetrated the WSA the weapons storage area and May have had some sort of effect on the ordinance on the what the ordinance the ordinance the weapons Oh, that's a term for weapon. That's a term for where I like weapons better. Yeah of course this story is debated publicly and people say well, what kind of weapons are they? And there has been speculation about that. And some people have said, well, those were nuclear weapons, weren't they? Took the words out of my mouth. And my response to this by law has to be as follows. I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at those bases. So there you are. Okay. But you'll find a lot of people, some of whom were there being a little bit more forthright about that

and there was a part of the weapon storage area which was nicknamed hot row and people can do their own research and draw their own conclusions that's something I have to admit I've never looked at. Obviously, we've heard through various geopolitical events over the years and just an accounting of things about how, for example, the United States has military weapons, including nukes, that aren't necessarily stationed here. But I had never thought about if they would have it on like the UK soil or something like such a

close powerful ally I guess it makes a ton of sense well I I think some parts of this may not be classified I don't think it is disputed that that during the cold, the UK had nuclear weapons in Europe. I mean, there were big campaign for nuclear. Well, there were big campaign for nuclear disarmament marches about, I believe, cruise missiles at Greenham Common. Now, maybe we didn't even confirm then. But anyway, look, whatever, I can't remember the history of what was declared and what wasn't, but when I last checked with the Ministry of Defense press office, with whom I'm in touch still from time to time, just to make sure, I generally know

where the line is, but every now and then something will come up and I'll have to check it. And when I last said, look, a lot of people have said, can I comment on the allegation that there were nuclear weapons at the twin bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge and that the light beams, some witnesses testify that they interacted. And the press office said to me, no, you had better stick to the NCND, neither confirm nor deny line in relation to that. So maybe if I check today, it'll have changed and they're like, oh yeah, that's now a little bit of Cold War history that we can talk about, but I don't know that. So at the moment, I'm neither confirm nor deny. So that's basically the story of Rendlesham. But I do want to fast forward to something that

bridges the gap between Rendlesham and what's going on in the US right now, because it's a very interesting segue, I think. Some of the Rendlesham witnesses have in recent years said that they have some health issues which they believe are attributable in some way to whatever it was they encountered in Rendlesham Forest. What kind of health issues? You know what? I think because of HIPAA, I'm not going to go there. I think there are some things in the public domain, but because I'm not sure who said what, I think I'm going to decline.

Yeah, see if you can Google that, Alessio, see if there's public information, but that's fine. For the moment, I'd rather err on the side of caution and not disclose people's personal medical dossiers, even if those people, it may turn out, have discussed some of this in public. Got it. Anyway, it's not necessarily critical to this story. I think what's critical to this part of the story is the fact that some of these people had been engaging with the VA about this to try and get their medical records, to get some sort of acknowledgement from the military that this

had happened and to see if they couldn't get more help and support with dealing with some of this. And rightly or wrongly, people had, some of these people had convinced themselves that radioactivity at the landing site might be a part of this. So a lot of these people were interacting with the VA, and the VA were taking a very tough line on this and saying, we're not going to change policy or give help or you know because of a ufo story and and these people will look it's not really a ufo story it's it's or it is but it's look the chain of command knows about this and it's in the files and and our senior officers or at least one of them saw and interacted with this um you know himself so this this was they were hitting some roadblocks so they went to um they went to their various congressional representatives they got a lawyer

involved called pat fresconia who did hundreds of hours of pro bono work to make Freedom of Information Act requests to try and take this forward. One of Senator John McCain's aides, I forget her name, her first name is Cheryl. She did such a great job of working with at least one of the witnesses to try and move things forward. She was told, I think, oh, these medical records are classified. And she's like, what do you mean medical records are classified? She handled hundreds of cases. Each senator or congressional representative will have on their staff. Somebody does the immigration. Somebody does the VA stuff. Cheryl did the VA stuff. She knew her way

through the system backwards. And she's like, I've never seen anything like this before. People claiming this medical record is closed. Not sure they ever did get it. Anyway, then I dropped something into the conversation. And I know one of the witnesses is rather upset with me because he thinks I was sitting on this information and should have said something earlier. Maybe I did. Pardon me.

Maybe I should have said something earlier. I can't remember the timeline. But anyway, what I remembered was this, that all the time while these people were getting rebuffed by the VA and saying there's no evidence that this happened and there's no evidence that any of this could have caused any health issues. I remembered that there was a declassified United Kingdom intelligence assessment of not Rendlesham but UAP as a whole. I was involved in setting it up, but I had been posted by the time it actually got going, so I didn't write the thing.

But we felt that there should be an intelligence assessment, just as you do an intelligence assessment on, say, Soviet, Russian, now long-range bomber capability why don't we do an intelligence assessment of uap and we did and i remembered just before i left actually just before i took early super early retirement um so this is long after you're off that long after I'm off the set. I go 506. Yeah, but I it was May 2006 I think It may you know what it may have been May 2005, but no, I think he's a thousand six Okay, we declassified I say we um, I knew that it was coming of course Declassified a final the final report of this intelligence assessment, colloquially known as Project Condign, C-O-N-D-I-G-N. of the study was actually unidentified aerial phenomenon in the United Kingdom Air Defense region.

It's a lot, but I got it. Yeah. I remembered what was almost a throwaway line in the, that's the one. Project Convict. Okay. I remembered a throwaway line from buried deep. And this was like 468 pages long. But I remembered one line stood out to me very clearly. And it lodged in my brain when I first read it.

I was like, this will come in handy. And it lodged in my brain when I first read it. I was like, this will come in handy. And it did. might be postulated that witnesses were exposed to UAP radiation for longer than usual time periods. So I said, wait a minute. I said to Pat Frascogna, the lawyer, I said, look, this has been declassified. If the VA is saying, we don't have any evidence this happened. There it is. Here's your evidence. And this report was originally classified, I think, secret UK eyes only. So very high level, only one below top secret.

And I said, look, there's your smoking gun. There's what you need. Pat, of course, was on it in an instant. And he went back to the VA and he said, hey, look, here is. And you can read it on the National Archives website. So it's not or the Ministry of Defense website or both. So there's no dispute about the provenance of this document. This is an official intelligence assessment that the British government has itself

now declassified. It's hosted on their website and acknowledged as being the real thing. And here, it has that phrase, well, the VA settled immediately with at least one of the witnesses. I can't say who, and I can't go into details about other cases, again, because of HIPAA and data protection and things. But I guess I'm trying to say how there is a physical evidence behind this. They took the radiation readings. They recorded them in the documents. And they then were able to write this into the intelligence assessment and then present this to the VA. So when I was saying physical, I should have been clearer about that.

What I meant was kind of like Michio Kaku says, next time you see one, steal a pen, steal something, get a piece of aluminum. You know what I mean? Like allegedly. But again, governments may have this stuff and we don't know about it but the general public doesn't have anything verifiable right now that's physical in that way i never saw anything that i would characterize as a physical smoking gun so i unlike people like david grush well even dav David Grush, of course, we can come on and talk about this, says he hasn't seen this personally. But I, let me just make this very clear, I have never personally seen anything which I know or believe to have come from an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Blink twice. Blink twice if you're lying no no i look if i now bring blink twice naturally people will be going oh look um but no i have never seen i've never seen a spaceship or a bit

of one and i've never seen an alien live or dead sorry ah so i really thought this guy coming in today i'm like i i was saying earlier somebody I'm like the guy coming in today might have been face to face with an alien no or any probably won't be able to tell me but you could be lying sad I could be but sadly I'm not I know, obviously, I am now, I suspect that if this is true, if we are being interacted with by either extraterrestrials or let's use the wider term to encompass other theories, whether it's time travel, demons, whatever it may be, let's use the phrase term to encompass other theories whether it's time travel demons whatever it may be let's let's use the the phrase non-human intelligences uh i have never actually seen any of that actually in person in person but maybe if it were on a page that you read. from a defense intelligence staff, British DIS document.

It says, we could use this technology if it exists. The point is we in the UK did not know whether or not it existed. If the Americans, if the US government or elements therein know this is true, I'm pretty confident because of my security clearance and my need to know at the time that they didn't brief it to us in the UK, that they had this on a no-fawn level, not for no foreign nationals, not for distribution to foreign nationals. And I can understand that. Firstly, because the nation, if this is true, the nation that first figures out how to use that technology. That's a huge advantage.

Absolutely. But secondly, your allies may be your allies, but you know intellectually and from history that sometimes your allies are penetrated by foreign intelligence services. So everyone that you tell, you run the risk of it. You run a greater risk of it getting back to an adversary. I got a little theory about that that you could speak to much better than I could, I would imagine, because you at least operated within these worlds. But I – the more I've talked with people who are from that world, come from intelligence or people who have reported on it, the more I feel like underground when we're looking at pure espionage, there are friendly encounters but there are no friends. Yes, I think that's a very accurate perception. And of course, the question, do you spy on your allies as well as your adversaries, is always a very sensitive and difficult question that very few people... The answer is yes.

The answer that you get from government is we don't comment on intelligence matters. Right. Which, of course, is a complete lie. They comment on intelligence matters all the time if it's intelligence matters they want to comment on to make a particular point. But it's a great one-liner to hide behind when you need to pull it out. Yes, absolutely. I think you guys are going to be excited about this one, but if you'd like to have a mug like this, like the one that I put on every episode, we are going to start releasing some of the greatest hits for you

guys to buy. All you have to do is hit the link in the description below to pre-order your mugs now, and also know that there's some new merch that's going to be coming within a month or two. We are designing all of it now. Very excited to share it with you, so make sure you go pre-order your mugs now and also know that there's some new merch that's going to be coming within a month or two. We are designing all of it now. Very excited to share it with you. So make sure you go pre-order that and also sign up for our newsletter, which you can find in that same link. Alessi, you were telling me you had just pulled up an article of one of the guys who was in the event in Britain. How do you say it again? Rendlesham.

Rendlesham. I always want to say Ramble Sham. All right. So this is one of the guys who was exposed How do you say it again? Rendlesham. Rendlesham. I always want to say Ramblesham. All right, so this is one of the guys who was exposed to radiation, you're saying? Yeah, this is a guy, it says 2015, it got made public here to the U.S. government. They actually acknowledged the health issues from that UMP counter in 1980, and they granted him the rights. So this is one I think can be public about, John Burroughs. John Burroughs.

Okay, got it. So that was just confirming one of them. Yes. And that was, I mean, I name checked some of the people involved with that. I wish I could recall Cheryl's second name because she did a lot of the heavy lifting. She worked in John McCain's office. I think Senator John Kyle was also involved at one point. Pat Fresconia, of course, the lawyer. A lot of people did a lot of good work to try and help John Burroughs and some of the other witnesses. And as far as I know, some of this is maybe still going through the system. Radioactive from a UAP is an interesting way to put it, though.

Yeah. To have it like that. Because, you know, we do hear the term radioactive referring to nuclear weapons. And if, and again, you couldn't confirm nor deny, but if there were nuclear weapons at the facility, perhaps this is out of context because maybe there are other people who had nothing to do with the sighting who were stationed there who also have health effects that could be as a result of the nukes and not necessarily this which could poke a hole in that but as you said in the declassified documents they seem to be clear or they tried to make it clear it was not from nukes it specifically uses the phrase uap radiation right i mean uap radiation stated in this highly classified intelligence assessment

as if it is an absolute tangible thing that everyone knows about uap radiation no that's a thing now let me play devil's advocate there perhaps even even though this is far in the past there's some sort of intelligence angle to try to cover up intel as to what could have been happening at those bases that they don't want foreign adversaries to know about. So they say, oh, it was this UAP as opposed to, oh, it was the most credible of the skeptical theories about a lot of this, that we are dealing with an intelligence operation or call it maybe a counterintelligence operation to promote a certain narrative, in this case the UAP one, to hide another narrative, the reality of what's going on. And we have some good historical examples of this. For example, with the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird. Yeah, and we know that on occasion commercial airline pilots would see these things. And, of course, it suited the CIA and the U.S. Air Force if those stories were then written up,

not as a surprised pilot caught a glimpse of America's latest spy plane, but a pilot seen a flying saucer. So there is historical precedent for the government sometimes, if not, well, yeah, I'll say actively promoting a UAP narrative to hide the reality of what it was, to throw an adversary off the trail. Now, I think what we're dealing with currently in Congress and NASA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and everything. I think it goes too far for that to be the explanation, or at least for it to be a definitive explanation for everything.

Yeah, and that's where it gets interesting. I was on the phone with Jesse Michaels, who has... I think the channel used to be known as American Alchemy, but now it's known as Jesse Michaels on YouTube. I was on the phone with him last night for a while. And he knew David Grush. Who's, for people out there who haven't followed this, is the whistleblower who came forward this year in America. He knew David Grush I think for a couple years before that happened.

And I was asking him about, now again this is one guy's opinion here but i was asking him about the angle that possibly grouch is completely telling the truth but that the colonels on on the trail were kind of left there for him specifically to do that as some sort of intel operation and one of the arguments that jesse made that he made a lot more eloquently than I'm going to sum it up right now was that the number of bases that would have to be covered for that to be the case is at a ridiculous amount. Like there's too much there for him to have totally been looking at fake stuff and not be not having the truthful outcome on at least something there yes i can say i mean i don't think it's definitive because of course it's always possible that yeah this is an incredibly complex and multi-faceted deception operation and he has himself been deceived i think it's more likely there's a variant of that theory where he's a willing participant in an intelligence operation to falsely promote this narrative for some reason or the other.

Maybe to hide something else. But maybe there's another reason. I mean just to cover up the fact that it's a new spy plane seems to be going a little bit far so maybe it's maybe maybe it's something else but i can't rule out the the possibility that all of this is a deception operation possibly with grush himself as as a victim or one of the victims of that but more likely as you say um more likely perhaps because of the difficulties of of of that and the complexities more likely if that's true he's he's a deliberate part of it and you know in in any of these situations he's obviously being being a patriot and and I know at least two people who know Dave Grush quite well.

I've not met him, but I know at least two people with verifiable backgrounds in all this who know him well enough to be on sort of friendly first name terms, not now that he's out, but before that when he was in the system. And they say, yeah, he's absolutely the real deal. Did what he said he did. Absolutely, he was part of the UAP task force. So- Now he says though, that he saw evidence and i don't want to misremember some things i don't want to go too far with this but he talks about that 33 crash in italy and how there were craft recovered he also then in his testimony went into how their the u.s government

is in possession of biological entities, not of this earth. I can't remember, though, if he said he claimed to have physically seen it. I don't think so. It was just he may have seen pictures of it, though. He said that he has interviewed about 40 people in the – I don't know whether they're all in the intelligence community, but, you know, military intelligence. He's interviewed about 40 people, I believe, with apparently direct knowledge of some of these programs. And these programs seem to split into two main categories, a legacy program looking at crash retrievals and a legacy program looking at reverse engineering, presumably of the materials recovered. So I don't think Dave Grush claims to have seen any of this himself.

But, you know, I use an analogy about that, which might be quite helpful here. When I was working for the Ministry of Defense in headquarters building, one of the divisions was called something like D-Nuke-Pol-Sci, and that was Directorate of Nuclear Policy and Security. These were the senior people in the Ministry of Defense with responsibility for nuclear issues. I never asked them, of course, but my common sense and my knowledge of the system tells me few, if any, of those people have probably ever touched

the side of a ballistic nuclear missile. That's something the engineers do. I understand. These are the policy people. So when Dave Grush says, well, I haven't seen any of this myself, and people go, oh, you know. I say, so what? He's a policy guy, an analyst,

and I wouldn't expect him necessarily to have hands on any more than i would expect those policy people in ministry of defense main building to have touched a bomb i'm not saying your argument's wrong i think that actually makes a lot of sense the devil's advocate there is we know nukes exist we know bombs exist this is it's human made right so there might be a part like ah yeah seen one seen one nuke seen them all don't have to go down there and actually touch it or whatever but i gotta tell you man if i were on in charge of an alien desk you know like some people in this room i'd want to go down there and touch that fucking thing i

would too i would too oh one time i one time i played a great joke on a colleague i mean this i'm just doing this for color but it illustrates that you're you're right that of course human nature is you'd want to know i think it was the not the next but the next but one job i had after the ufo, I went into security. And we got talking one day about biometric security. And I said, oh, yeah. I said, one time I went to the US. And I was completely making this up. But I just thought I'd have some fun with the moment

because there'd just been an advertisement published. This was the early 90s. This tech was really not in the public domain, but there was a retinal identification security system advertised in a sort of security industry trade magazine. And it was a great advert. I remember it to this day. It said something like like i looked deeply into

her eyes and she said access denied and it was so it was all about these retinal scans which were just coming in at the time and i said to the guy oh there's nothing i said one time i said i went to the pentagon i said and they had the the wreckage of the Roswell crash down there. And I said, they gave me the retinal scan, they gave me the palm scan, they had the thing, and you know, and I was like, all that. And as I was leaving, the guy says, Nick, Nick, he says, I gotta know, what does the craft look like? And of course, I was just kind of having some fun with him. But yeah, yeah, of course, you'd want to know. You'd want to get your hands on that craft

in a way that you wouldn't say, hey, I want to touch a nuke. In fact, I would be definitely, I don't want to touch a nuke for obvious reasons. It's like, I don't want to go anywhere near them. Yeah, I know they exist. I know they're shielded. But, you know, even so so i don't why would i but there's also like is there a danger in touching a craft from a foreign universe or galaxy i'm sorry

that you don't know what kind of tech it is it could be way worse than a nuke too that's a question which is why jim penniston the moment he touched the side of the Rendlesham thing had his kind of, oops, I shouldn't have done that moment. And it's why, yeah, with the phrase UAP radiation being put into intelligence assessments, it tells you it's a thing. And it says, yeah, I would be very cautious. And the other thing is one of the few good – let's suppose we are dealing with extraterrestrials one of the few good assumptions we could probably make is that to have viable interstellar travel that's a technology orders of magnitude above anything we have and it almost certainly involves the generation of very high levels of energy. Almost anything that does that can be weaponized. Of course.

And so I don't want to be drilling into these things and hammering at them and taking them apart until I really am sure that I'm not going to rip apart the known universe. Yeah, well, look, I heard you answer a question in this lane about that with the, it had to do with the balance of disclosure versus national security that governments deal with. It's like, of course, you have the question of, well, do our people have a right to know if we know about extraterrestrial intelligence? as a human being the quick answer is yes the second layer to though gets a little more complicated because if it involves the fact that you are in possession of Weaponry not of this earth. That's not even weaponry but technology not of this earth that could be harnessed to use as a weapon

That's insane when you are then telling the people i.e us in here that out loud you are also telling russia you're telling china you're telling countries you may view as a threat and so it gets to the point where as annoying as it is to hear just as a human who wants to know when we when we hear the words like for national security reasons we can't say that. It's annoying, but there's a good argument there. There is a good argument. But, you know, I've made that point in many interviews, but I'm now going to modify that point.

Oh, we get a lot of attention. I'm going to kind of build on it. Okay. And I'm asking this almost as a – I don't necessarily know the answer, but I think it's going to take us to an interesting place. Would it be possible to ring fence that part of the conversation? In other words, could you say, let's just assume it's the standard disclosure fantasy of the UFO community, which is the president saying, my fellow Americans, people of the world, we're not alone. Would it be possible to do that but to ring fence the tech and to say, I mean, I don't think it would be a giveaway to say that there's tech.

It would be self-evident if we're making that first statement. Would it be possible to ring fence it by saying, my fellow Americans, people of the world, we are not alone. We're being interacted with by an extraterrestrial civilization. Self-evidently, they have technology way ahead of anything we have, but we are going to release no details whatsoever of that technology because it would be helpful to an adversary and because it could be weaponized. I think the answer from a purely almost intellectual philosophical point is yes, of course. You can always say I'm going to disclose A but not B even if it's part of the story. So the question then arises, is there something fundamentally either classified or dark side about A in and of itself that stops people saying, or the president saying,

my fellow Americans, people of the world, we're not alone. Well, there's a couple things here. The first thing is if you are keeping A and not giving out B, but you're acknowledging A, which then does probably acknowledge B, okay, you don't give up details you know you now just created a blank check because all you need is one you need one person who answers to some other foreign adversary government who says what's going to take a billion dollars whatever you need to give us intelligence on this you now create a target for that because let's say you only have a hundred people read into this kind of thing you just need one you need one guy to be like you know what i'll take my boat to thailand we're good right

i accept that yeah that's one argument the other argument is the i don't know what the term you'd use for this i'm going to make one up like the collapse of meaning though because let's say that they possessed intelligence that could show definitively let's take it a step because let's say that they possessed intelligence that could show definitively, let's take it a step farther, let's say it could show definitively, A, we're not alone because we are in contact, or we are being contacted by a foreign civilization, but also B, we have therefore uncovered the fact that that civilization is responsible for basically our very short human history here on planet as we know it – on the planet as we know it with earth, which then could remove, perhaps debunk every organized religion in the world, which is where so many people get peace and meaning and beauty in life, right? So we see religion used for bad things. That does happen, obviously. But there's most people who use it are using it for good purpose, to be a good person within themselves.

And now suddenly you may have the quandary of, holy shit, it all doesn't mean anything. So what's the point of all this morality or everything we're doing on a human to human basis? Why does it even matter? Even if, I'm going to slightly disagree with you on this one. Even if more people individually use religion for good purposes, I wonder whether the net effect of religion because of wars started in its name and hatreds that spring from it,

I wonder if the net effect of religion over all of human history isn't negative I don't know that would be great question. That's more for yeah, that's for smarter people than me, but no it's it's a great question I'm gonna push back again because that's a great point I'm talking about in the immediate future. So it's announced. There's what? There's a human being shock reaction. The logic goes out the window. Is that – does a long enough time go by where that is the reaction that we don't even get to the point where people can settle in and be like, you know, maybe this isn't the worst thing ever.

You see what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, we talked about David Grash. Of course, he didn't invent, but he probably used it for the first time in relation to this specific subject, the phrase ontological shock. I think he brought to the table. There could be that. I think you can – I think in one sense it's unknowable.

You wouldn't know until the rubber hits the road which way it would go. Some people, and it would depend what truth was revealed. But here are just almost bullet pointing a few things. It is possible that if you disclose an extraterrestrial reality that there will be a groundswell of people who say, I now view myself not so much as American or Russian or Christian or Muslim, but a citizen of planet Earth. So maybe we'll see that there's more that binds us together than sets us apart. On the other hand, ontological shock, what if part of the story is they made us? And I have used before, so you're not getting exclusive here, but I've used the phrase, what if there's a secret too

terrible to be told about this? That it's not that there are extraterrestrials or a non-human intelligence that is not classified but it's so inextricably linked to the agenda or the answer to what this is that even the disclosure that we're not alone becomes impossible to make because of the baggage because of what else is part of the story and part of that story maybe they made us or You know either literally physically or in a simulation if you blame this with simulation theories, but what if it's We are being farmed farmed farmed what if what if the answer is that the government knows about every single individual on planet earth every single day is taken and

something is is taken from them and most people don't remember it and just a handful of people do but we kind of through a deception operation we call them the crazy alien abduction people but actually it happens to every single person on planet earth because on a farm every single cow gets milked and so so yeah what if what if there's a dark side what if we and and when when the farmer moves the cattle between the fields. He doesn't consult the cows. So what if that's the situation? This is why I use the phrase, is there a secret too terrible to be told? Is there a dark side to this that you can't say we're not alone without getting to somehow it gets weird it gets really weird because

It gets past that point of What we know consciousness to be or what we think it is and Why we exist in the first place and what this is like forget religion for a second. We're getting to the core of not even where it began, just where we began here. It is a, this keeps me up at night sometimes. Let me be really, well, let me be really controversial for a moment. And I think I-

What are we talking, like David Icke controversial? I tweeted, I'm mixing two subjects that perhaps shouldn't be mixed but i mix them for a reason okay people say we're ready for disclosure you know bring it on but we've just discussed just in bullet point form a couple of things i mean earlier we talked about demons and we talked about simulation theory and we talked about what if we're being farmed or what if they made us, things that would bring us to that ontological shock. You know, three or four years ago, whenever it was, news began to come out of China of a mysterious respiratory disease. Oh, you don't say.

And the rest is history. But look, the point, the reason I'm bringing this up is we had contingency plans for pandemics. And I've seen some of those contingency plans. very practical issues like, you know, if paramedics go on strike because they're too scared to go into work or they get killed off or get sick in large numbers, how do we deal with that? Or we get the military to backfill. What if a million people die? Where are you going to bury them? Air force bases. Do we have a million body bags, where are you going to bury them? Air force bases.

Do we have a million body bags? Yes, we do. Those were the global contingency plans from pandemic, those sorts of issues. Nobody predicted that, firstly, there would be a huge sort of politicization of COVID and that we would get into a situation where mandates on vaccines and lockdowns and masks would set family member against family member.

Nobody predicted that? No, I don't think they did. Not in the plans that I read. Nobody considered that there would be screaming hysteria about someone wearing a mask below the nose or above the nose that would lead to assaults we're completely ready for disclosure. Firstly, they don't know what that disclosure involves because it's not just A, it's B and C, where B and C might be some of those things that we've talked about. And you might not even know what D is. And you, exactly. And my point again is linked to that. If we had contingency plans for global pandemic, and we had, most of us, not least because we've seen some of the movies and documentaries, intellectually thought about it, and yet the world went mad, what would happen with this subject? So my question, and I don't pretend to have the answer, but my question is, are we really as ready as we think? That there would be things behind the curtain that the chief of staff at a company called eight sleep

which is unbelievable they still I still the affiliate link to this day they were my first sponsor but it's it's basically like the science way to sleep it's got they got covers they got they got a mattress whatever you want and it uses it uses different temperature liquid to study all the different variables in your body and get you the perfect REM sleep so really smart guy who's one of the early employees there and we had a wild rambling conversation that actually turned into two episodes I think it was I think it was number 17 and 18 and one of the things he said in number 17 being

someone who's very very ingrained in Silicon Valley and the tech world and how these products work and the people who are behind them, one of the things he said that I'm going to paraphrase because I won't say it as well as he did but it sticks with me and I think is one of the wilder things anyone ever said on the podcast is that these companies referring to social media companies and particularly can simulate behavior ahead of time effectively they have the tools to be able to create a matrix of an individual to decide exactly how they can pull on their strings to get them to do action a or action B or action C or action D. Some of the public ways we've seen this come forth are, for example, the digital campaign you saw with Cambridge Analytica back in the US election in 2016, where they were able to create, get into way too much data that they shouldn't have been allowed to get to and create these profiles of people to

basically like kind of prey on their fears to get them to vote in a certain way or things like that and so i might disagree with part of your point not all of it because this is so unknown this is so uncharted it gets to the meaning of life i I think part of what you say is right, but I push back on some of it and say that there has to be some ability for the powerful few, be it governments working in concert with major corporations and vice versa, that they could perhaps simulate some of that ontological shock that could occur. I don't think they'd get that perfect,

but I think they could get that perfect but i i think they could simulate some of it and what if they've simulated it and the results are such that they think geez we can't do this right and and you know it's it's interesting which brings us nicely i think in a sense to things like the schumer rounds amendment which which i think literally is being, obviously it's in the Senate past National Defense Authorization Act or the draft NDAA for next year. But now, I mean, I think literally this week, the Senate and the House get together and they're like, okay, what's going in and what's staying out? And there's always this horse trading. And, of course, UFO Twitter or UFOX is up in arms because – and they're saying, oh, look, all the most robust bits in the Schumer rounds amendment.

And what specific – just for people out there who aren't following, what does that specifically like top line points do if it were to pass? It's a 64-page amendment which will slot into the 2024 defense bill. it uses in the definitions section the phrase, well, no, it uses the phrase non-human intelligence is 22 times as if it's a thing, as if everyone knows this is a thing. And it basically, for example, there's an eminent domain provision, which will force the government to take possession of any physical or biological UAP-related materials in the hands of the private sector. Because, of course, for years, it's been alleged that some of this has been, you know, taken outside of government.

Lockheed. Put into, yeah, Lockheed, you know, Battelle. So the government would be able to come in and say, I mean, they already work hand in Wouldn't be able to, would be forced to. Yeah. Because it would then be in, so no private individual or corporation would be legally allowed to have this. No program relating to UAP, and this this is the thing always go after the money no program

would be able to be funded if it was not subject to congressional oversight and again the allegation is that some of this has been improperly and probably illegally taken outside of congressional oversight. I mean there was no congressional oversight on AATIP even. Nobody had heard of it. Even the Gang of Eight. So there's a lot of robust UAP-related material in this Schumer-Rounds amendment. Now, the good news is it's not the only UAP-related material. it would have been the law that they would have had to have seen all documents pertaining to any of this and then decide what gets made public and what doesn't. That would have introduced a level of oversight over and above Congress even because some of these people would have been independent. So, the rumors are that this week, some or all of this will get basically negotiated out and it will not go forward. current defense bill which for example mandates the DOD and the ODNI to report to Congress by

June of 2024 on all previous US government programs that related to UAP. But how could they even have oversight on it if they wouldn't even know where to look? Well, exactly. And this is why so much of this is frustrating, sort of argue yourself around in circles territory. And even Harry Reid, for example, who set up AATIP and was one of the so-called gang of eight,

who see most of the stuff, says, I asked about the material in lockheed and he said and i couldn't get to that yeah yeah harry reads an interesting one obviously he was in our mutual friend james fox's documentary the phenomenon james talked to him towards the end of his life about and there were some other people got to talk to him as well after that about what he tried to look for in this stuff i found it very fascinating that almost immediately after leaving public life he was ready to talk about that and how blunt he was about even some of the folklore kind of stuff that i i think really has something to it. And of course, I mean, perfect little segue with this as well, but we've already touched on it today with some of the history in England.

But you've had an odd pattern since World War II and particularly where nuclear bases around the world, not just in america that's something i think a lot of people forget sometimes this is in russia it's i believe it's been in china some other places you guys can check me on that but nuclear bases will have weird indiscriminate things happen and then full-blown sightings of UFOs that basically show them no no no hands off the trigger here and you know when I had James in here for a couple episodes in early 2022 or 2023 the first episode we talked a lot about the phenomenon the second one was all about moment of contact and in that first episode 138 you know he talks about that story that bob salas told him who's one of these witnesses about how it was almost like they were trying to take matches out of the hands of a baby and i used to have in my

we're in my new studio now but in my old studio i used to have two pictures on one wall one on top of the other and one picture was the bombing of that island that we did as a test nuke in 1946 i always forget bikini atoll that's it and then the other one was the famous picture of the hand of god and adam but instead of the hand of god it was it was a robot hand to kind of show like ai but i look at it and i say damn we have had this technology as a human race since effectively world war ii we all know about the two times it was used to end the war in the pacific which is certainly interesting history to look at but other than that despite all the problems this world has had with even crazy regimes run by dictators that have

their hands near a trigger sometimes we've never gone there it's only been 80 years but it's fascinating to me that it's not like all of ufo history has happened since world war ii as you said earlier there is history before that we can go we can all go look at it but the heaviest part of sightings that seem consistent have happened since world war ii and there is a large volume of them that occurs on nuclear bases so is there anything i don't know if declassified is the word but anything that you are allowed to speak to on the record that perhaps outside of what we already have that perhaps supports or goes against this narrative about the bases?

It's an interesting one. And I mean, I think you've unpacked it very well. And I'm probably maybe going to duplicate a couple of things you said, but put my own kind of take on it. And I know people like Robert Salas, and I'm certainly aware of all these cases like Malmstrom, Minot. The Ukraine one actually from 1982 is the really interesting one because – Can you talk about that one? Not in a huge amount of detail because I can't recollect it, but unlike cases where it's alleged that nuclear weapons were shut down, this 1982 case is one where it's claimed that nuclear weapons after UFO activity near the base were put into their pre-launch sequence. So it was like kind of the opposite. Yeah. those events, I guess they're as part of the UFO lobby community, whatever, who say, look,

this is the extraterrestrials saying to us, you know, if you do it, we won't let you do it. Which I think a couple of things. Firstly, let me give the very dry government argument on this. We don't really know whether UFOs and nukes is a thing because to anecdotal evidence about UAP activity near nuclear facilities, we don't know if this is a genuine thing or whether it's collection bias. In other words, they were saying nuclear facilities, whether they're power stations, missile silos, are by their nature more proportionally, much more heavily surveilled. Therefore, are we seeing a collection bias where these incidents are showing up and getting noted just because we've got eyes on that all the time. The good news is that's one of the things in the 2023 defense bill that Congress has told DOD and the ODNI to go find out. Is this a real thing? Is there a UFO nuke connection or is it just collection bias right so that's the first thing secondly is i think there's a danger of a bit of new ageism creeping in here which i think is kind of unhelpful because

there's part of the newer the the ufo community at the new age wing that are all kind of oh the space brothers and the space sisters they'll they'll'll stop us if we ever do press the button. They'll step in and they've shown us that they can deactivate our nukes. And I think that's a bad attitude to have. I mean, maybe it doesn't matter if people think it, but if anyone ever thinks, anyone in political and military leadership positions ever think, it doesn't matter if we ever press the button, because even if we did, the aliens will come and save us. I mean, it's that extremely unhelpful, you've got a safety net, when really our mindset should be there is no safety net.

Once you press that button, that's it. You're dead. Your family is dead. Agreed. So mutually assured destruction only works because if you think, if you press the button, you yourself and your family and your friends will be on the receiving end of the other side. So that's why it works and i think this idea that the space brothers and sisters are going to come and you know stop us is i i would say unhelpful i would say agree with that we should not rely on that yes as well i mean you know of course you'd love it to be true but but there's no evidence that it is and hiroshima and nagasaki suggest that it isn't. Again, though, a lot of these – I'd have to go look at the timeline.

Perhaps there was one before. I'm not remembering. But these occur – I believe the first one that's been reported I don't think was before 1947, which is ironic to me because that would mean it was after we actually showed, oh, we're going to use this stuff. And we've never used it since. There's been nuclear tests out in, you know, discrete places. We know Russia has done a ton of those. The U.S. does a ton of them.

I think China has done some. But there hasn't, it has not been used as a weapon in war at any point. That, you know, but I'm with you, though. You don't want to rely on that. It's very difficult because you could say, well, Trinity was – what was it? May 45, whenever it was? I don't know. Then there was Hiroshima and Nagasaki so could you say

well if we're being monitored by extraterrestrials they might have noticed the first test or they might not have been looking and they might have written us off as well they won't get nuclear technology for another couple of hundred years and then suddenly shoot wow they did it

oh now we need to pay attention the kids have found the matches like you say yes um or was it that that they weren't watching and they missed it or was it well even hiroshima and nagasaki are morally justified so we'll let them do that because it will end a war that if not for that will cost more lives in the long run? I don't know. You can argue this around forever. Then you can say, did the modern UFO phenomenon start in 47? But then you can say, what about the Trinity crash in 45? What about the 33 crash that David Grush talks about, the Italy one? And what about all the UFO sightings going back, arguably, if you subscribe to ancient astronaut theory, to the dawn of time?

Yeah, forever. So I don't know. You can back and forth with this forever. Yeah, you could. And like you said, it's not any one thing. There is just an odd pattern on the timeline there for that particular pocket of supposed sightings I mean look you have the famous one like in 94 in Zimbabwe which has nothing to do with that which is with the kids and the potential telepathy which you mentioned earlier with the other one in England like there are patterns to that stuff as well and and I mean the question that I had had when we were going through the ramble shim did I say that Randall shim Randall Randall

shim we were going through Randall I keep getting every time I go to say it I get afraid to say because I'm like I'm gonna mess it up we were going through the Randall something and we were talking about the the code that was decrypted as potentially like from year 8100 and getting to the concept of future humans this is where it gets really weird i put a pin in that back then but i'll come back to it now because you start to get into the multiverse theory of like the rivers of time so i had in brian keating recently who's a physicist who actually for a lot of his adult life was at the South Pole measuring what they thought was going to be

not only like a Nobel Prize winning discovery, but also something that this light that was going to basically say, I'm going to put it in layman's terms or the best i can is basically going to prove that the universe is inflationary and if they had proven that the the the wild conclusion that would have to come of that according to him is that there has to be a multiverse the universe cannot be inflationary without a multiverse now it turns out the light that they thought that they were watching over these years turned out to be universal dust so it it didn't work but he still has in the back of his mind like i think we might be able to prove the universe is inflationary what i get wrong so much when i think about this stuff though and i know a lot of us who think about it do get it wrong is that when we

think of time travel per se and what that could be or moving across dimensions in a multiverse way to use Michio Kaku's example for example if you went back in time and stopped Lincoln from being assassinated you would not be changing the reality of the of the part of the multiverse that you are coming from you would be creating an entirely different river off of that that creates a separate universe where you where lincoln was not killed so it becomes a infinite type thing yeah so if we have to go back to this if these instances are in fact future humans the fact that we're citing it or potentially citing it and seeing it means that the multiverse they're coming from is not the one that's going to exist that we know in this one because we're changed by the impetus or the event that they put in our timeline.

Yes. I mean, you know, I don't have the theoretical physics knowledge to do this. I mean, I barely know my way around grandfather paradox and all that. You're doing well. I will mention, and of course, you mentioned Michio Kaku. That's interesting because you could say under string theory, for example, one actually needs the existence of extra so-called hidden dimensions for the string theory equations to work. And I can't remember what the numbers are, but I think there are two main branches of string theory,

one of which has something like 11 dimensions and one is something like 22 or 24, whatever it is. And Michio Kaku and others are using the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator to look for evidential kind of fingerprints of these so-called hidden dimensions. But then the question of multiple infinite, I guess, parallel universes is a sort of related but arguably separate idea to the idea of different dimensions because you could have one universe that has not just the four dimensions that we experience but 11 or 24 or whatever it is, but that could still be the only universe. Then you could have a multiverse and then you could have

sort of infinite parallel universes where, to take your example, there's an infinite number of universes where Lincoln was assassinated and an infinite number where he wasn't. So all of this is a bit of a difficult one to get one's mind around, but it just shows the complexities of all this. I will mention, because it's quite a fun little kind of postscript, there's one of the very few theoretical physicists doing research into time travel is Dr. Ronald Mallett, Professor Mallett. And he got into it in quite a nice way. I think he was so upset by the death of his father, and I don't think he was conventionally religious, that he wondered, is there this idea that to send a message back in time, you could use a subatomic particle like a neutrino that had a spin state of either up or down. And what would that be? It would be a binary message that you could send back through time and of course jim peniston knew nothing of of any of this and i i i think it you know so i i don't know but it it is interesting that one of the few theoretical physicists who thought whose thought and is doing work on time travel says

the way you would send a message back through time would be using binary that is that's blowing my mind right there I want to make sure I come back to a couple things before you get out of here that I wanted to talk about for a little bit and we're definitely gonna have to have you back if you'll be back I mean this has been awesome today but I had been talking with my guy Mike Colangelo who's on ufo twitter and just kind of reports whatever's being talked about with ufos and i had asked i told him you were coming in and said is there is there anything you'd really want brought up and he said yeah and i could have brought it up earlier but you were going to the rendlesham thing and i thought that was really important so i put a pin in it.

But it's interesting timing in that you got into the office in 91. We already covered why that's interesting from a foreign policy perspective and what was going on in the world. But also what Mike wanted to ask about was the Calvert incident of 1990, which would have been right before you which i'm not sure based on what you were saying earlier if that would have classified it at that point as already a cold case file that had been closed and you guys still had to check it out or if this was an investigation that you got to actively take over so if you wouldn't mind can you just walk people through what happened there and then sure explain if you had a role in looking into that? The way that I politely put it is that my predecessor did the investigation. I inherited the fallout.

This is the Calvene incident. Calvene is a tiny little place near a town called Petlockery in Scotland. And in August 1990, two guys were out in the countryside when they witnessed a large diamond-shaped craft that was apparently being either buzzed or escorted by military jets. And this diamond-shaped, grey diamond-shaped craft apparently was hovering or moving very slowly, quite daylight sighting, quite low above the ground level and Apparently it then After the aircraft circling it a couple of times it just went up Vertically at incredible similar similar to Rendlesham. Yes

what's unusual about this is that they took six photographs of it and To cut a long complicated story very short, they then contacted a local newspaper, said we've had the most amazing sighting and we've got daylight photos clear as a bell. The newspaper then reached out to the Ministry of Defence for a comment. And the Ministry of Defence said, we can't comment until we see the photos. But if you want us to give a proper comment and do a proper analysis, you'll need to send us the photos and the negatives.

Big mistake. For whatever reason, the newspaper complied we got that material uh we we did various investigations at various different times and um the assessment was this is not a hoax, it's a real solid object. It's about, I can't remember exactly, 75 feet in diameter, perhaps. No obvious, kind of like the Telage engines flaps air alarms anything you know none of the usual stuff um we don't know what it is we don't know how it flies does seem to be real uh we when i on that first day that I went into that office, the newspaper, by the way, never got the photos or negatives back. Of course they didn't. And for whatever reason, maybe embarrassment, never ran a story on it either.

Never even ran a story saying we had. And in one sense, you can understand it. You wouldn't want the story to be we had the best UFO photo ever in the history of the world. And we got tricked into giving it up to the Ministry of Defense. Yeah, not a good case, you wouldn't run a story how to build a nuke in your basement. Here's how you do it. So, you know, there are ways of killing stories if there are genuine national security concerns. And by the way, this was, this sighting took place, which is an interesting coincidence or maybe not.

I think literally one or two days after Saddam Hussein went across the border into Kuwait. So that's the geopolitical backdrop to this. I can't remember whether the date was like August 2nd, 1990. Was it 2nd or 3rd? Whatever it was. Maybe Calvin was the 4th or 5th. All this is kind of from memory. But anyway, I had on my office wall a poster-sized,

full-color blow-up of the best of the six pictures. And I was there in that office for three years it was up there for most of the time right how big how big are we talking um so big by so big okay and uh you know it was on the wall one time i went leave. I came back from leave and the picture was missing. And I'm like, what? Hey, where's our poster? And somebody said, oh, the head of division took it. And I'm like, boss, what's going on? And he's like, well, I don't believe in aliens, so it can't be aliens.

Therefore, I'm paraphrasingasing it can only be some sort of secret prototype aircraft in which case whether it's ours or an allies or an adversaries but in any of those scenarios it shouldn't be on the office wall so he locked it in his safe along with the other ts documents i feel like I feel like that newspaper wasn't necessarily tricked into giving up those negatives. I feel like they were maybe pressured to do that. That could be the case. But however it was done, and there are a number of perfectly legal ways it could be done, but the newspaper never ran a story, and the witnesses have never come forward.

One time I went to an intelligence briefing. And of course, we didn't need people to tell us about this photo. We had it on our own wall. But the briefer pulled out one of the photos. And he said, see this picture here, he said. He said, we, you know, intelligence community imagery analysts have looked at this. They've deployed the full resources and capabilities of their trade onto this. He said, and he started gesticulating.

He said, we know it's not American. And it's not Russian. He said, so that only leaves. And he went like that. And we looked at his finger. We looked at the ceiling. We looked down. We looked at each other, me and my boss.

And it's like, OK. And that was the end of the briefing. And he could say they knew it wasn't the US and they knew it wasn't Russia, but what if they don't even know about the programs that would run it? Well, you know, you can, yeah. Even if you think you have the highest security clearance and best need to know in the world, you can never be 100% sure that there isn't some person two offices down with an even higher clearance who is right in on that program. So yeah, never say never. But you can play the percentages game and

you can be reasonably certain. And this is my recollection of a conversation over 30 years ago. So when I say he said, we know it's not Russia, we know it's not America, I'm not 100% on whether he said no, or whether he just said it's not Russia or it's... I don't know. But the point was, he said, and that only leaves. And he never articulated what that was. And it was like my boss was like, did he mean China? And I'm like, boss, boss, he did not mean China. James Fox, for example, talks about how recently a retired Royal Air Force press officer, public affairs officer called Craig Lindsay came forward and has apparently in his possession, which a number of UFO researchers in the UK have published, supposedly one of the original pictures that he kept. Now, for years, a few years ago, I was involved in a TV documentary on this. And because this poster was on my wall for years,

it was indelibly imprinted onto my memory so through a combination of that and some a poor black and white photocopy in one of the declassified files we did a recreation we did a cgi recreation of this but now about a year or so ago craig lindsey and said, hey, I was involved in this. And I know Craig. You know, I met him once. He came to our office. And so he is who he says he is.

And he has come forward and said, look, I've got one of the original pictures. So we don't need a CGI recreation anymore. Here's the real thing and This is where we we have another ncnd moment coming up The Ministry of Defense has not commented on the provenance of the Craig Lindsay photo neither confirmed Or so I'm not gonna comment on that either But you had that thing sitting I had that sitting for the best part of three years on my office wall and it was pretty darned impressive so so when when uh when when you got told hey ask nick this that's that was a good question for sure and i know james fox

is going to do a deep dive into that in his next film. Right. And well, the one after this one he's making, which you're going to be in this. No, I think this is the same one. Oh, he's doing that in this. I think in the one that he's just finished filming and that he's now it's in post-production or it's in the edit. Yeah. that one is going to cover calvin we're not we're not allowed to say the name of that yeah right that's not

yeah okay all right we he's got a sick name for it okay but that's i i was thinking of it because a lot and he's talked about this publicly but a lot of it is focusing on DC related to this. But then you're right. He did go over and he publicized this too. He went over to the UK this past summer to talk with, what's that hacker's name again? Gary McKinnon. Gary McKinnon and investigate.

And it was, yeah, it was. And you know, just to really throw something out there, and I can't remember, I've seen this speculated about, and I don't want to comment on it, but I will just throw it into the conversation because it's amazing sometimes the connections you see. I'm not commenting on it, but I have seen it put out there on social media that one of the US officials Who came over to discuss this with? UK

intelligence personnel Because there was a conversation about Calvin is this one of yours is this one of no no is this one of yours? Well, if it's not yours, it's not, whose is it? It has been put out there on social media that one of the US officials who came over to have that conversation was Christopher Mellon. Now, I'm not going to go down that road. I'm not going to comment on it, but isn't it interesting how one can, the same names crop up sometimes and there are some interesting dots to be joined. But like I say, I've seen it speculated upon. I'm not commenting on it and I don't know that he – yeah, I don't know whether he has addressed it or not.

Yeah, I'm going to be respectful and not follow that up. Yeah, if he wants to address that. Let's get him in here. One sees all sorts of things on social media. Yeah. Some of them are true and some of them are not true. Yeah, I mean, like I said on something earlier, guys have a job to do with certain things.

I'm a realist about that. But you kind of like to know which people are still working for the government or not i know you have to deal with questions like that all the time i think yours is a little different though like you're over here talking about it you live in america now you know those guys are from here they're talking about all here but oh yeah and i've saved i've faced those same accusations i i mean, there are, you know, I don't necessarily know whether we want to name names, but I think it's no secret in the UFO community that there are a number of people, one in particular, a fairly high-profile one, who says that I am still secretly working for the government or the deep state or whatever the

accusation is. And my role apparently is to ramp up the threat narrative in the media. And I think Chris and Lou and Leslie Kane and a couple of others have been subject to similar accusations. But the accusation is particularly insidious because it's very specific there's a bizarre kind of aspect to this story that apparently i have bought three properties in soho and this is kind of but but you know that's why i say insidious because if it's just oh nick's still secretly working for the government that's kind of whatever but the and he's it's so specific that it makes people go, ooh. But my response to that is, look, wait a minute.

Just apply common sense. If I was secretly working for the government, I would get my Illuminati or government or deep state salary, right? Right? I wouldn't need to be given a big bribe to buy properties in Soho. I mean, I would just get my Illuminati salary. That's your job. Now get on with it. Yeah, Greer is... Is Greer.

I don't know the guy. Sean Ryan knows him well. I haven't really talked with Sean at length about that, though. But to me, it's always been projection. That's just my take. He – like the guy who to me – and I know you know him. So not to put you on the spot or anything. You don't have to respond to this. But the guy to me who I think is very obviously still working with the government is Lou Elizondo. That's been discussed a lot on this podcast. I'm not saying I have a problem with him for that either.

I get it. Like there's jobs to do. but career is another one to me and again i don't know but it's always felt like some projection and he will say things that are patently fucking ridiculous like i think am i gonna get this quote right correct me if i'm wrong unless you you know this one but he when he was on with sean ryan the first time he's like the cia offered me two billion dollars to be quiet and or they'd kill me and i told him to fuck off is that about right okay so why are you talking about it on the fucking sean ryan show with no security 20 years later yeah you know what i mean when i When I hear shit like that, I'm like, ugh. Look, when I sit down and have a beer with somebody whose background is government, military, or intelligence, and sometimes those are kind of interchangeable, fluid, whatever. Absolutely.

We talk the same language. You get the vibe. You can kind of tell when you talk to someone that's done government work because sometimes it's the silly stories about something that happened in their, we talked about this right at the beginning, some silly story about what they had to go through in their final interview for their security clearance. Or it's just you can't, and that I've put into words. Sometimes it's something you can't even put it into words.

But if you're a cop and you walk into a cop bar, you'll spot the cops, right? And some of it is body language. Some of it is the way they look and carry themselves. Some of it is the way they look and carry themselves some of it is the the the the terminology that they use and and sometimes sometimes it's it's it's the non-verbal things and but you can just tell i get that vibe obviously and as do you from from lou lou is obviously and i'm not saying whether he is and i don't know whether he is or not still working. But what I do know is that 100%, you only have to be in this guy's company about 10 seconds to know that he's moved in those circles and he's done those things.

I do not get that vibe from Stephen Greer so I'm not one of those people that says Stephen Greer to me does not come across as government military or intelligence community it just felt like I mean again I don't I've never sat with him and I wouldn't be able to spot it like like you can because you've lived in this world but it didn't well it has always felt like it has this weird feeling of like god I feel like that's projection. That's just me. But then there's the other kind of thing that sometimes people who are want to put across that they aren't. Yeah. And then sometimes people who aren't want to imply that they are. And then sometimes people who are want to imply that they aren't so that you think that they are, but they really aren't because they are.

I lost you half a sentence ago. But yeah, I gonna nod and agree with you yeah yeah yeah that's right no but you have such a classy way of dealing with that too like apparently i'm a i'm a government informant i didn't know this like in america we're like yo fuck that guy it's like such a back and forth but one last thing before we go out and again we're gonna have to bring you back because there's a lot we didn't talk about but there's there's a story that was breaking today that i only saw like right before we went on camera involving a cia claim about potential retrieval programs do you know anything about this yes this was a story in the daily mail um and i think um josh uh josh boswell and chris sharp matt ford and yeah um and they're they're getting a lot of they they obviously do have a lot of good

sources and i think it's the cia's uh global access office uh if I have that right, which is part of their science and technology division. or at least nine crash retrievals, including two where the objects are intact or almost completely intact, which raises the question, were these... And I've seen all sorts of things put out there that some of these things are apparently almost like gifts. They landed and then left for us. I don't know. This takes us into... Yeah, that's weird.

I'm going to read this real quick just so we have it. So the title of the article is CIA Secret Office has conducted UFO retrieval missions on at least nine crash sites around the world. Whistleblowers reveal. Leslie, can you scroll down? I'm going to read the article. A secretive CIA office... Scroll up a little bit. CIA office has been conducting the retrieval of crash UFOs around the world for decades, multiple sources told Daily Mail. One source said that at least nine apparent, quote, non-human craft, unquote, have been recovered by the U.S. government, some wrecked from a crash, and two completely intact. Three sources briefed on the alleged top secretive operations told Daily Mail

that the Office of Global Access, a wing of the Central Intelligence Agency's Science and Technology Directorate, has played a central role since 2003 in orchestrating the collection of what could be alien spacecraft. The three sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals have all been briefed by individuals involved in those alleged UFO retrieval missions, so this is secondhand. Though the shocking claims sound like they come from a science fiction novel, they are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting the U.S. government could indeed be hiding advanced vehicles that were not made by humans. Well, you know, there's an old saying in the intelligence analyst community.

Fool me once, can't get fooled again. Well, not that one. The saying is interesting if true. And that's where we are with this and and you know that brings us it's it's a nice place to actually end up on because it brings us to where we are with so much of this with whether it's it's this story whether it's the david grush story whether it's the other uh whether it's carl now whether it's some of the other whistleblowers who have apparently come forward but whose stories and names we don't

yet know, but will shortly. I understand some of them. A lot of different people are investigating all this right now. And this is good news, but it's also bad news. Good news is that a lot of people have their finger in the pie. The bad news is a lot of people have their finger in the pie because it gets very confusing. So we have, for example, and people like Lou and Dave Grush have made complaints, I think one to the DOD Inspector General, one to the Intelligence Community Inspector General. Lou's complaint may now be closed. Dave's, I think, is still open. But there is confusion about whether the DOD IG and the ICIG are or are not actively investigating Grush's claims

and some of these other claims. And then, of course, we've got Arrow, who some people make out to be the bad guys here. I guess that the Pentagon's all-domain anomaly resolution office, currently directed by Sean Kirkpatrick, but he's stepping down next month. Timothy Phillips, his deputy, takes over. It's not clear whether he's going to get the job permanently or whether there's going to be a new director put in probably early 2024.

I don't know how that will play and I don't know whether this was a planned move or, you know, there are a lot of rumors flying around. Anyway, the point is that DOD IG and ICIG may or may not be looking at some of this. Arrow are looking at some of this. There's dispute over whether David Grush has or has not been invited to come in and all that. But then there's Congress, And this is where it gets really confusing because it's both in the Senate and the House. And in each part, it's the armed forces committees, the intelligence committees, the oversight committees, maybe in some cases, even the appropriations committees. So there are lots of different people, some of whom may have sufficient security clearance to be briefed on some of this, others of whom may not. And it's all a bit of a mess. So there's a lot in play right now.

And I don't know how, whether some of this is going to get resolved over the next few weeks and months, or more likely, whether more information will drop, more whistleblowers, and it's just going to confuse things even further. So interesting times. Very interesting times. As things do develop, we've got to have you back in. You live right here. So we've got no excuses not to bring you in.

This was absolutely awesome. I really appreciate you coming in on shorter notice as well, but we'll it again thank you all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you for watching this episode guys if you haven't already please smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video it is a huge huge help to getting our videos into the algorithm on youtube so thank you to everyone who does that and also if you don't already follow me on instagram you you can get me at Julian Dory podcast for daily exclusive clips that we put out from the show or on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. The links are in the description below. See you guys for the next one.