Somewhere in the Skies - Disclosure Forum 2026 | Full Broadcast

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

Here is the full unedited version of The Disclosure Forum that took place in Washington DC on June 25th. Hosted by the Disclosure Foundation, the Disclosure Forum 2026 brought together lawmakers, scientists, journalists, military officials, researchers, economists, and policy experts to discuss one of the most consequential questions of our time: how humanity should respond to increasing transparency surrounding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Rather than focusing solely on proving the existence of UAP, the event is designed to examine the broader implications of disclosure. Discussions will explored congressional oversight, national security, scientific investigation, religion, psychology, economics, technology, and the societal impact of a world in which governments and institutions may be forced to confront previously hidden realities. Featured Speakers: Christopher Mellon Mike Rounds Anna Paulina Luna Eric Burlison Suhas Subramanyam Additional Speakers & Moderators: Kirk McConnell Avi Loeb Harold Puthoff Carlos Eire Gadi Schwartz Kristin Fisher Mike Gold Pippa Malmgren Matthew Tuttle Jennice Vilhauer Timothy Gallaudet Susan Winterberg Jonathan Miller Marik von Rennenkampff Jordan Flowers Special thanks to The Disclosure Foundation and The Disclosure Fund. Learn more at: https://disclosure.org/ Join us at ANOMACON on September 12th: http://www.anomacon.com Send us a voicemail: https://www.speakpipe.com/SomewhereSkiesPod Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ Substack: https://ryansprague.substack.com/ All socials and books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Follow Suzanne on X: https://x.com/csuzannelanders Email: [e-mail] Opening theme song by Septembryo Closing song by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2026 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #Disclosure #DisclosureForum #DisclosureDay #UFOs #UAP #Alien #Aliens #NASA #Economy #Religion #NationalSecurity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spector Vision Radio How well do you know, Japan? Do you know why so many stone statues of Ogeiso and foxes wear red bibs and have pinwheels clicking softly beside them? Are you familiar with the once popular beauty recipe of mixing rusty nails and iron scraps in a tincture of vinegar and strong tea? All so you can dye your tea.

the most stunning shade of black. I'm author Teresa Matsura, and for over 35 years, I've been exploring the hidden, fascinating, and sometimes terrifying corners of a country I call home. If you too are charmed by Japan and want to learn a little more about these obscure bits of culture, or if you just want to put on your headphones, close your eyes. eyes and relax while listening to me tell you about a yokeai that licks the scum from your drain with its disturbingly long tongue. Then Uncanny Japan is for you. Now broadcasting from Spectrevision Radio. You can find and follow me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Dewa

Ma'a. Hey guys, Ryan here, and welcome to a special podcast episode of the Disclosure Forum, 2026. This is the podcast version. We actually live streamed the almost eight-hour event that took place in Washington, D.C. on June 25th. And this was a event put on by the Disclosure Foundation. And basically, it was hosted by them. And it brought together lawmakers, scientists, journalists, military officials, researchers, economists, and policy experts to discuss one of the most consequential questions of our time,

how humanity should respond to increasing transparency surrounding UAP. So right up our alley. Rather than focusing solely on proving like the existence of UAP, the event is designed to examine, and the broader implications of disclosure. Discussions that explored congressional oversight, national security, scientific investigation, religion, psychology, economics, technology, and the societal impact of a world in which governments and institutions may be forced to confront previously hidden realities of UAP. This was a monumental event put on by the Disclosure Foundation.

you had representatives there. You had Mike Rounds. You had Anna Paulina Luna, Eric Berlinson, Tim Burchett, Chris Mellon was there as well. As for speakers, you had Kirk McConnell, Avi Loeb, Harold Putoff, Gotti Schwartz, Kristen Fisher, Mike Gold, Pippa, Melgram, Matthew Tuttle, Janice Villower, Timothy Galladay, Jonathan Miller, Merrick von Renencomf, Jordan Flowers, and many, many more. This was, like I said, an eight-hour event, and we are dropping it all on you guys right now. So I'm going to give you a little forewarning before you listen to this. The audio for this event was less than favorable. In fact, I would go as far to say the...

I don't know. I don't know if it was the microphones at the venue. If it was the audio output by the Disclosure Foundation, Either way, it was horrendous. So there may be some points where you can't really hear things, things drop out. There's nothing I could really do that had nothing to do with our broadcast of the event, but it's solely on the venue and possibly the people at the Disclosure Foundation. So on behalf of them, I will apologize for any of that.

But this event was free. So I'm going to drop it with you guys right now. you got eight hours free give it a listen hop into one panel drop out come back the next day listen to a little bit more um it's it's it's big it's huge so uh i hope you enjoy let me know in the comments on spotify what you thought about it uh rate and review on apple if you can we truly appreciate that if you want to watch this event we did live stream it if you want the video to go the audio head on over to our YouTube channel. Subscribe, like, do all that YouTubey stuff. And you can watch the entire event over on our YouTube channel as well. So without further ado, here is the entire Disclosure Forum,

2026, subtitled Humanity at the Edge of Discovery. Enjoy. And today, experts that rarely occupy the same room, physicists, historians, economists, intelligence professionals, educators, journalists, and policymakers are gathered here in this room to discuss a subject that was until very recently untouchable. So we've made astonishing progress in recent years, but we believe decisive UAP data remains hidden behind a wall of classification at the Air Force, CIA, DOE, and elsewhere. The Disclosure Foundation, is vigorously seeking further breakthroughs and transparency, breakthroughs that we hope can resolve vital unanswered questions,

especially concerning evidence of a non-human intelligence. Is Pentagon video and radar evidence limited to extreme performance attributes, or does the government also possess recovered off-world technology? Indeed, I referred several reputable witnesses who made such claims regarding recovered materials to the government office charged, with investigating UAP. I also released the text of a conversation I had with the senior U.S. official

describing what he claimed to have learned about a UAP recovery program. Other whistleblowers have gone to the intelligence communities Inspector General or Congress. However, denials regarding proof of non-human intelligence continue. We know UAP's satellite data exists

because former representative Ratcliffe as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has acknowledged this, although none of that data has been released. There has been no data released regarding UAP in space, notwithstanding rigorous UAP space surveillance, or rigorous U.S. space surveillance. Similarly, we have not seen any UAP data revealed by our most powerful and advanced aerospace radar network, nor has data of submerged UAP been released. Yet despite these huge gaps in data, the volume and credibility of UAP continues to grow. Hundreds of new military sightings are occurring every year and being forwarded to the All-Demain

Anomily Resolution Office and other intelligence organizations such as the National Air and Space Intelligence Center for analysis. Yet, that analysis is usually omitted from UAP files that are released. regrettably, without more precise data involving things like distances and acceleration, it is hard to draw many firm conclusions from UAP for performance characteristics, which all too conveniently makes it impossible to demonstrate that these cases involve capabilities that surpass anything made by man. We're eager to assist government officials seeking to identify and close vital information gaps.

Our sense of urgency stems from what we already know. For example, in December 2023, UAP violated the airspace above Langley Air Force Base for more than two weeks. The intrusions were so serious that an entire squadron of F-22s was relocated. And to this day, as far as I am aware, the Air Force still does not know the origin or capability of these craft.

Since then, incursions of a similar nature struck Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. This fall, extraordinary intrusions involving fiery orbs, orbs that appeared to be intelligently controlled, were detected at one of our most sensitive and important military test ranges. Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, has said publicly, after receiving the highest-level classified briefings that the Pentagon remains, in his words, quote, mystified. This disruptive pattern has been repeated at U.S. bases at home and abroad,

as well as Navy ships at sea, ranging from U.S. military facilities in Guam, all the way across the Pacific and North America, to Europe and the Middle East. The facts are undeniable. Something gravely serious is occurring in our airspace, and in many cases our government does not understand, the origin capability or intentions of these intruders. The sooner we learn the truth, the better. The better our chances for preparing for whatever comes next.

That may be transformational, because if it turns out, as I believe the evidence increasingly suggests it will, that some of these craft are of non-human origin, the implications are not merely scientific. They ripple outward from national security, into economics, into religion and philosophy, into the deepest questions of human identity. We must urgently learn the truth for a number of reasons. First, democracy requires transparency. The American people have a right to know the truth of such a fundamentally important issue.

The alternative is the modern equivalent of suppressing Copernicus or Darwin. Concealing the truth undermines faith in government, and that faith is already fragile enough. Second, we own any discovery. If exotic materials were recovered, then they belong to the American people as their recovery was funded by our tax dollars. Third, we can handle the truth. A poll recently conducted by the Disclosure Foundation shows that 89% of Republicans and a similar number of Democrats want greater transparency around UAP.

A clear bipartisan call for the truth. 70% believe UAP are a real phenomenon. Our ancestors endured profound disruptions to their understanding of the world via, for example, Copernicus and Darwin. A Disclosure Foundation research paper recently published by Dr. Janice Villauer and other eminent psychologists found that while certain high-risk populations may experience ontological shock, most people will, in fact, handle the truth. The principal public health concern is system strain, not mass panic.

Fourth, secrecy stifles silence. If we have recovered off-world technologies, our best and brightest minds should be working on them now. Breakthroughs in propulsion, energy, and material science could be within reach. Even if there are no recovered materials, confirming the existence of non-human craft would still prove transformational, far more so, for example, than the Sputnik program that shocked the nation and eventually led to our landing on the moon. Fifth, disclosure is likely inevitable. Commercial satellite imagery is becoming ubiquitous.

The Galileo Project at Harvard, led by Dr. Avi Lobb, who will be speaking later today, is one of several civilian organizations deploying dedicated UAP sensor networks. around the world and foreign governments from Japan to France are mounting increasingly sophisticated UAP collection campaigns. The next masked UAP siting over a major city like Washington may be captured on hundreds of cameras and powerful civilian radars. Better to have disclosure on our terms than to be overtaken by events. Finally, disclosure could transform international relations for the better. Ronald Reagan, speaking before the UN General Assembly in 1987, said something that has stayed with me. Quote, in our obsession with the antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all members of humanity.

Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from our outside this world. Reagan was imagining a perceived threat. What I'm imagining is something somewhat distinct, not a threat as much as a revelation and an opportunity. If disclosure comes, and I believe it eventually will, then as former President Reagan suggested, it will force humanity to see itself differently, not primarily as Americans and Russians or Chinese and Christians or Christians and Muslims or atheists or conservatives, or other members of competing tribes, but is one people traveling together aboard a small planet sailing through an incomprehensibly vast ocean of space. With disclosure,

many of the divisions that consume us today will begin to look very small. This is crucial to our long-term survival because the most dangerous challenges we face, including weapons of mass destruction, pandemics, artificial intelligence, bioterrorism, and global warming, each required new and unprecedented levels of international cooperation. Disclosure is the only thing I can think of big enough to bring about the change of perspective required of the leading nations of this world. I suspect that someday we'll look back on this period as the closing chapter of one era and the beginning of another, an era in which humanity first began to understand that it is part of a larger reality. All of us at the Disclosure Foundation believe it is wiser to prepare for the future

than conceal it. So we need to continue asking the difficult questions and following the evidence wherever it leads. That is the spirit with which we approach this symposium, not with fear or denial, but with curiosity and integrity. At the same time, our ignorance, regarding alien life leaves room for fearful thoughts as well, admittedly. As the engineer and author Dandridge Cole wrote, space is a sea without end which washes on countless strange and exotic shores, where the conceivable forms of the living and the dead are greatly outnumbered by the inconceivable, where the known is lost in the unknown,

and where new dangers hide in undiscovered shadows in unimagined forms. fear of the unknown has always been with us. Only the truth can dispel those fears. Thank you and welcome to the first annual disclosure forum. Thank you so much, Chris. So before our next panel here, which is the Congressional Roundtable on UAP transparency, I would like to first discuss that today,

the Disclosure Foundation is, proud to honor four members of Congress who have dared to ask questions that others wouldn't. Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Tim Burchett, Eric Burleson, and Andre Carson have been relentless in their commitment to UAP transparency, pushing for access to classified programs, holding hearings that brought credible witnesses before the public record, and refusing to accept stonewalling as an answer. Their work has moved the needle in Washington, in ways that few thought possible just a few years ago. They've taken seriously what too many of their colleagues have dismissed,

and in doing so they've given a voice to a demand that millions of Americans have been making for decades. Full disclosure and no more secrets kept from the people who deserve the truth. The disclosure award exists to recognize those who have worked tirelessly in the service of this effort. So please join me in welcoming. representatives Luna, Burchett, Berluson, and Carson. Thank you.

I feel like I'm winning an Oscar. It's better than an Oscar. No, honestly, we're not the brave ones. The brave ones are the men who have come forward in our hearings. People like Sean Ryan, Jeff Nusatelli. We've had, yeah, you can, woo. you know Matthew Brown David Grush

Lou Elizondo you know yes Chief Wiggins and Dylan Borland I'm sure I'm forgetting someone but these are the brave people

that have come forward and we're you know I I'm just somebody who's just trying to do my job to honor what they've done, the brave work that these men have, and they've made these sacrifices. Their lives are not as rosy as they could have been if they had stayed quiet. So we all owe it to them and everybody else that's thinking about coming forward. The first thing that we need to do, and this is what I'm pressing on this administration,

the first thing you need to do is you need to make it right to these brave people who have come forward and spoke the truth. And so, I mean, I don't, this has been quite a journey for me. The good part of the journey is I get to meet some amazing people. And this, there's within the UAP community, there's factions, there's different personalities, but I consider you all of my family in a way. And so some of the brightest, as smartest people in the world. And so it's an honor.

I will proudly display this. in my office and the fight continues. And so thank you. Thank you very much. So as you might see several of those people who I mentioned are not here right now. So we are subject to some of the scheduling challenges and busy schedules that the Congress people have. So while we are, I believe Representative Carson will be here at 930 and certainly he will as welcome to come to the front when he arrives. But I think in the meantime, perhaps what we can do, Representative Burleson, is a part of this conversation,

a part of this panel is meant to engage with the media for them to be able to ask questions and for us to have a little bit of an interaction during this time. So if there's a few people from the Disclosure Foundation who can grab these mics. We'd be happy to take questions from the members of the media that are here, that are reporting on this topic. We are really blessed to be able to have sort of an embarrassment of riches of media coverage

today for this topic. Representatives from the Atlantic, from Time magazine, from CBS, from the New York Times, from Vice. The list goes on and on, and I know I'm leaving some people out there. Forgive my memory. So why don't we, members of the media, again, oh, and Representative Superbondent, you're here. Please come, welcome to the stage.

And Representative Edelina Luna, welcome to the stage. No worries, no worries, no need to apologize. And Representative Supermonium is here as well. So I'm happy, if you guys would like to make quick remarks, happy to do that. This is really your time. And then if you'd like to engage with questions from the media for the rest of this time slot, that's also great. We have until about 10 a.m. here.

So this is really for you guys. And these are your awards. We announced the Disclosure Award. So these are yours. So I'm just going to open it right up. And again, I think Representative Carson is going to be here at 930. But please, go ahead. I already did kind of give a little bit, but I did miss Ryan Graves and Admiral Gallaudet.

And if I miss somebody else, I really apologize. But thank you. Again, my stress is that we're just doing our role. The brave people are the ones that. that have come forward to testify. Thank you. Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you to everyone who's here, whether it's Dr. Avi Loeb,

the scientists, or whistleblowers, and then also to the members on this panel, so to kind of provide some context and background, when we first started these investigations, people, I'm sure as people have probably called you, they thought we were crazy. They said that, you know, this was made up, it wasn't true. We were also told that this was, you know,

a disinformation campaign. Some people thought that we were trying to, you know, release stuff to distract from what's really happening in Washington. But the reality is that, you know, ultimately we believe that if this information does exist, which it does, it belongs to the American people to decide, and really the world to decide and see what information is out there, pretending to the question of, are we alone in this universe? And so I could not have done this as the task force chair without these members, as well as Tim Burchett, Beggage, Jared Moskowitz, it's all the other members who put their name, their credibility, their elections on the line on this topic. And because of your help, because of everyone who's really come together, and this is really a community effort,

we now have some of the most historic disclosure, I think, in U.S. history. It can help spearhead the effort, hopefully setting the standard for members of Congress and for, you know, elected officials to come. Your turn. Hi, yeah, I'm Congressman Suhas, Suburbanium. I represent Virginia. I'm new to Congress, so I'm new to this topic and every other topic, really. But I was interested in this because as a non-congresman, I was very interested in why some federal agencies thought that they need better than the people, that the people weren't ready for full disclosure, that we needed to hide things from the people.

And so given the work that was done before me by you all and by the folks, other members on this stage, you know, I'm coming into a, much better situation than you came into with a lot less stigma, a lot more willingness to disclose. And so I look forward to joining the work and continuing the work that started and trying to make sure that we make real progress on this issue. So thanks for having me. I've got a quick question. If there's no other immediate questions from the media right now. So the Disclosure Foundation commissioned a poll recently. And the results of that poll, I think Chris Mellon mentioned in his speech, 89% of Republicans,

and 88% of Democrats want transparency with respect to the UAP topic. What is your reaction to that? What do you see on Congress in terms of this being a bicameral, bipartisan issue, and how can we use the tools of Congress to effectuate transparency and disclosure? As I'm sure you can imagine, things get polarized. and this is the one thing where we can go in and we can all say, you know, we don't like the fact that these different agencies are telling us that we know for a fact these documents exist and they're saying that they can't locate them or whatever it might be. I will say, and had it not been for, I think, President Trump doing what he did, forcing these agencies to divulge the information, we would have still been stonewalled. In fact, I think Representative Burleson, when we initially sent out that letter requesting, you know, the 20 to 40 plus documents,

anybody else would like to respond to that? I can move on if not. Absolutely, and we are delighted that you're here and that Representative Carson can still hopefully attend, but I know things change and that's D.C., right? There is, I'm often asked what's different now?

What's different about this time period? And for disclosure, I usually reference I don't think ever before have we had this amount of presidential will behind getting to the truth. Can you comment on what you have seen from the executive branch, what you're able to tell the public now about the cutting edge and the latest developments on that front? We have all of these entities now. We have Arrow, the All Domain Anomily Resolution Office. We have at the DNI, we have the DIG, the director's initiative group. We have the Pursue program.

Historically, we've had the UAP Task Force in AMSIG. Can you describe what is different about this moment with all of these entities? I think what's different is that, again, I go back to the people that came forward. You have highly credible individuals who, who have made their way through the ranks, and they're giving up so much to come forward, and you can't help but admire these men. And when you hear them talk,

you sense the genuineness and the honesty in what they're saying. And so I think that bravery is what has caused this snowball. And then I think you had this magic moment where we had, you know, members of Congress who were willing to spend the time and the effort to do it. And then you had on top of that a president who has an attitude that is very much an outsider attitude. He came in with a distrust of government. I think the fact that they went after him for so much means he has no interest in making the deep state happy at all.

And so I think that that combination is one that has this perfect moment. if you will, for disclosure. And we have seen so much success recently. When President Trump came in, I think that he quickly moved on the JFK files, on disclosure of the MK Ultra, and that, et cetera, and we kept asking, you know, Anna and I and Tim kept any time we would have that little moment with the president, you know, or his people kept prodding and asking, when are you going to do the same thing for the UAP files? And I think that it wasn't until we had that series of hearings,

and then just everything that kind of fell into place when Barack Obama made his statement, I think that that all kind of created this momentum that we're all being able to experience. And now what we're seeing is an administration who is, I mean, they are absolutely hell bit to get the information out. That was obviously kind of the low-hanging fruit. and the easy things to release at the beginning, I think as we get into this more and more, it's going to be more difficult

because you're now to get to the answers. We were talking about this last night, that as administrations have come in and left, they don't always transfer that knowledge to the next political people, appointees. And so as a result, I think we have a lot of lost information in the same way that we forgot how to go to the moon, or for a period of decades,

we forgot how to build nuclear reactors. I think the same thing happened with this topic. You have, you know, as new administrations would come in, the people that might have a little bit of knowledge about this, they kind of quietly buried it or never really shared that. And so now it's like we're rediscovering, it feels like the administration is rediscovering and digging into archives and documents

and everything they possibly can to get at the truth. And so we're at that stage. It's now going to be a little bit more, it's going to be quite a bit more difficult and it's only going to get more difficult. But I think we have an administration that is hell-bent to make it happen. Yeah, I can just add on to that too. I want to give a quick thank you to Christopher Mellon over here for everything, specifically pertaining to everything that you did

with helping us locate some of these documents. Because, you know, when we gathered our lists together, kind of our wish list, if we could ideally have everything we wanted, out declassified. We brought that list and said, where did you get this list? We said, we have friends too. And so you would be one of our friends. I just, you know, what we do is we can push, we can pull. You know, D.C. kind of operates on two things, pain and pressure. So those are our levers that we get to pull. Sometimes we do both. And on this topic specifically, it has become so enormous with the interest that now you even have people that even a year ago,

I was getting teased about it. Okay. They were like, Luna, you know, you're on Joe Rogan. This sounds a little crazy. Said, who's sounding crazy now, buddy? So, um, all that, thank you. Yeah, all that to say that, you know, this is a really big team effort. The one thing specifically, people say, we want to know where locations of craft and biologics are, right?

So, um, we know for a fact that there have been a few very credible whistleblowers that we've talked to that allege that they have information specifically pertaining to this, but they're afraid of losing their clearances. So we have talked directly to the White House. Stephen Miller is absolutely incredible on this topic. And we are providing them with a list of people that will be given immunity in that they will not have to face retribution in the future for violation of their security clearance or in some cases maybe the Espionage Act, whatever it might be.

And that will be them going to the White House divulging what information they have. And we're following up on it. I'm not saying that I have personally seen stuff I haven't. But what I am saying is that we are taking. the information that we have received, we are handing it off, we are going to get them immunity and protection so that they can divulge that information and let's see more leads. Thank you so much. And I want to point out the modesty of this man. So Representative Carson, please join us on the stage. We have a seat for you right here. This man has been a

leader in this topic and the level of leadership and modesty. He was sitting in the back, like patiently waiting. And this is your year. Oh, wow. 50. Thank you. So, Representative Supermonium needed to depart. But Representative Carson, welcome.

And thank you so much. We've had several meetings with you and your team. You're a true leader on this topic. Another question that I wanted to ask of the group is, you know, what, this sort of gets, to the issues that we're just discussed, but what asks do you have for the president, and how can organizations like ours and members of Congress and the tools available to you, how can we try to effectuate those asks? Their medical benefits, you know, et cetera.

I think that first and foremost, you've got to make it right to those people. That will demonstrate to everybody else who wants to come forward, that it's a safe place to come into. And then I think what Anna is leading on is fantastic in that making sure that the administration knows that there may be sometimes where these individuals who were promoted into a system or a program, sometimes they're now inheriting things

where they realize, well, there's crimes involved in this. And so, you know, they're kind of put in an awkward situation. Do they do their patriotic duty? What do they do? I think that providing some level of amnesty for them to be able to come forward is very, very important. And then I finally think also that they need to waive the nondisclosure agreements on this topic, particularly just waive it completely for anything related to the knowledge of life that's outside, you know, non-human intelligence.

I mean, I don't see why we possibly should even allow that to be a top secret thing. And so if there's anything that's related to that, it should be waived. I think that that's what our ask is of this administration as well as to continue digging into the private sector. I think that a lot of this information is in the hands of either the archives of these federally funded research and development centers, and then further some of the prime subs that have been working on this topic. And so I think that it's going to take making it clear that to our major companies that we do business with or do business with the United States, that it's okay to come forward. And I think that we're going to have to have a discussion if they do have,

if they're reverse engineering stuff that they got because it was from non-human intelligence, we need to make sure that we can have that conversation about intellectual. Adam Schiff was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and I approached Adam Schiff, now Senator Schiff, about this idea. And to Adam's credit, he was a good chair, he was very supportive. There was a lot of rumblings about why I wanted to have this hearing. And obviously it's a very sensitive topic. And someone said, well, why would you take this on when you have enough on you? You're black from Indiana. you're Muslim and now you're talking about UAPs. Yeah, that's true, that is true, that is true, that is true, that is true, that is true. And so my interest began as a child, time life, I'm dating myself, they had a series on mysteries of the unknown. And at the time I was 16 and I ordered the first book, which was free. And I didn't get a subscription, but the first book that came was a book about UFOs.

And so that started my interest, even though I'm a Star Wars fanatic and a bit of a Treki, I still wanted answers. And so I was a police officer. I worked for the Indiana Department of Homeland Security and counterintelligence and counterterrorism. And when I got to Congress, sitting on the Intelligence Committee, it was an opportunity. So I spoke to Adam Schiff. And I said, I would love for you since you've been supportive about me having this open hearing. and obviously there are some security concerns, I would love for you to attend.

Adam attended, and he told me, he said, Andre, a lot of folks on the Senate side are so upset and jealous because they wanted to do this, but they were fearful that they'd be attacked. A couple of folks from the administration right now. I'll give them a shout out. So when we had that hearing, the attendance wasn't as robust as it is in this room, but it did spark something. They were like, well, Andre, you're the godfather. modern UAP hearings. Well, you know, I'm just, I'm just someone who's supportive and I'm supportive of whistleblower protections and I'm supportive of making sure that folks who want to come forward

have the opportunity to come forward without hindering promotional opportunities or anything of the sort. So we appreciate many of the civilian organizations, many of the filmmakers, the Disclosure Foundation, the Disclosure Foundation, we appreciate you dearly because this is so critically important. And I want to thank Anna, my colleague, for being so bold. this is not just a bipartisan issue, this is an American issue. And this is a very serious issue. Now, the balance is that while my colleagues have had open hearings and I love it and I support them, I think on the Intelligence Committee and in the open hearings,

we always have to be very mindful because our adversaries are constantly watching and listening for context clues to see what we're working on and what we're developing. So there's the balance there. But there's also the mystery there where our Five Eyes partners and other folks in the IAC have to work together to provide comfort to the global community about what's really taking place while protecting our national security. It's a balancing act, but it must be done. But we support you and know that you have firepower in Congress as we work with the administration to protect the folks who speak out and to see what else is out there. So thank you. Thank you so much.

And apologies that we're having the, like you were saying, the suspicious audio-video issues for sure that seem to travel with this topic. It comes with it. So it sounds like what you're saying is that there is this question. Can we have transparency? Can we tell the truth to the American public while simultaneously preserve, our national security and avoiding strategic surprise. And while there may be problems to solve there,

it sounds like the answer from this panel to the American public is a resounding yes. Would you concur with that? Yeah. I think that's a really powerful statement to hear in this room, the same room that held the Iran-Contra hearings, that held the Watergate hearings, a room, a storied room that is dedicated to,

transparency and disclosure. So another question for you is what other tools exist? Sapinas have been discussed. Our organization has discussed the potentiality for a national intelligence estimate, which is, I think, not controversial. Would you comment on some of these other tools that may exist from a policy perspective there is the UAP Disclosure Act, there's other potential legislation in the works. Would you comment on that for us?

I will just say that all these members have at some point backed and been vocal advocates for the UAP Disclosure Act, whistleblower protections, FAA reporting, but the problem is is that staff and or various members in leadership then, Aber now, D&I Pulte is very good as well, but specifically to the allies that we have within the administration, the secretaries for the most part are all playing ball with us and we actually have great correspondence, but it's not the secretaries that are the issue. As you know, the federal government is a massive, massive group of people. And so if someone isn't on the same page that we are on this topic, they're going to Stonewall, they're going to

try to wait us out. And that's exactly why we kind of have to work together on that forward. And I remember someone that said, well, you know that that was potentially classified. I said, well, you know, it'd be great if you guys responded back to us because when you don't respond, this is his right as an elected, duly elected representative of Congress to provide transparency and also... The time or the next coming week, assuming that, yeah, I mean... But, again, we are facing difficulties. And, I mean, it's so frustrating because it's not members.

I don't, at least if it is members, they're not coming to me and saying, hey, I, I not allowing your amendment. It's staff. And it's like, who elected you? You were not elected. I mean, it's for you to be able to deny, you know, an elected official who's my job is to answer to the people, and you're going to deny me the ability to get this amendment, at least even offered, is unacceptable.

And so right now we're trying to get that made in order so that when it comes to the floor, at least we get an opportunity to have a vote on the UAP to say. disclosure act and then you'll know who supports it and who doesn't. But I've got to get intelligence committee to approve that. And so any help, Representative Carson would be greatly appreciated if you could lean on our chairman and others. That would be fantastic. But we've got to get it made in order. And if we can get it out of the House, I think that we're halfway there. And then I think we've got allies in the Senate, whether it's Senator Schumer and I cannot believe that I am sponsoring the language that Senator Schumer also is sponsoring.

But what's right is right, and truth is truth, and we're all Americans, and that's why this is such a common sense thing, and the only thing that's going to stop it is these staffers who are killing things behind the scenes in the cover of darkness. And so that's what we're facing right now. So your help, getting vocal on this is probably. the only way we're going to get it done. Thank you for that. I would like to open it up again to questions from the media. Yes, sir. Gentlemen, great to see you. So Matt Ford from the Good Trouble Show. Two years ago, the former police chief of Ord, Nebraska handed me over 60 pages of 911

calls from 2019 and 2020 documenting hundreds of craft, some as large as an SUV surrounding towns, hovering over public schools and shining spotlights into rancher's homes. Multiple law enforcement officers described close encounters with these craft as close as 50 feet that were completely silent, one of them exhibiting instantaneous acceleration. The FBI, the FAA, DHS, and AFOSI were called in to investigate and disappeared when the swarms did. This past February, the government shut down. all El Paso airspace and blamed cartel drones, but a source with direct knowledge of the incident

told me this was a cover story and characterized the incursion of the U.S. airspace as extremely alarming. That's one particular incident. From Nebraska to El Paso, the official story keeps changing and then disappearing. Congressional, what can be done to sort of end this cycle of obfuscation from the DOD, the IC and the National Security Council. ...dimensional. Very real sense, having more access to these files with the appropriate members of Congress

who, unlike these very brilliant folks, who won't leverage it for their own... ...and the IC, I think it'll work a lot better, but also making sure that if it is military, that it's not as close because again, the context of who matters when I have a citizen. Hello, Martin Willis from Podcast UFO. Thank you all for being here. Question that I have is when these files have been released, they keep coming out, and the people that have been around the UFO community for a long time, all saying the same thing.

Where's the good stuff? You know, there's got to be more than this. And a lot of this is military. I saw their, you know, other releases, this latest one. But a lot of people also have fear of, I heard you, Representative Burleson mentioned, private entities. You know, there's been talk about things going like crash retrieval, and I know the Schumer Rounds had the eminent domain aspect of it. You know, these things go into these private companies, and then they're gone.

There's no oversight. There's no way to see what's really happening. And so I just wondered if you could address those questions. Thank you for your time. Hearing the reports of the, like was just mentioned, of other sightings, we've had so many, you know, of those reports, but where's the photos? And I would say, if you've got the photos, let's see you, bring them forward. If the public, if there was that many people that cited it, then we want to see the footage.

We want to see the cell phone footage, right? So, but at the end of the day, when you don't have it, it's just narrative. So that's where, or I'm at, I'm like, we've had a lot of great hearings with some great witnesses. And at this point, I'm as frustrated with you as you are, I want to see the real stuff. What we're trying to do in my team is take actionable information and then request it. And so right now, I don't have subpoena power personally. I got frustrated trying to go through the committee and the length of time. that it takes and again, dealing with staff.

And so my team, my office, we're just sending direct letters, interrogatives to these, you know, whether it's MIT Lincoln Labs or Mitter, Patel, and others, I don't want to say yet, we're sending these letters. We're sending letters to the FBI saying, and we're being very specific. We're saying, we want you to investigate the details. of the Varhina incident, right? And then we're saying, for example, the MIT-Lincoln Labs, we are aware that there's a real-to-reel audio

that's from this date, with this name, and we demand that you retain that file and that you provide it to Congress. And so when you get that specific, I think that that's, A, I don't, I kind of, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think a lot of these institutions don't even know what they have.

And so, but when you all and people bring information to us, specific details and information, that helps us craft the letter, which then gives the instructions. And, you know, I'm maybe the 435th most powerful member of Congress, but at least I am a member and can write a letter that they might just listen to. And so that's what we're trying to do right now. And I think we've made some success. I mean, MIT Lincoln LADS, it did admit that they do have that reel-to-reel.

And that led us to be able to find out that there's more to that that MIDER is involved with. So now our letter to Miter contains more detailed information. So we're pulling the thread. I mean, we're seeing a softening of the soil, if you will, and we're just going to keep doing that in order to get the truth. Before we get to another question, can you inform the public? about what, I think the natural question is, what is on that real to real? Are you able to describe that or is that too sensitive to discuss? No, I can't, I don't know that it's too sensitive. I'll just give you kind of, I haven't heard it yet, so they have acknowledged that

it exists and that they're in the process of getting it to us. But what my understanding is that it is, it's, and I forget the general's name, he's an Air Force general who is briefing being MIT scientists about, I believe it's the event that happened in Washington, D.C. in in 1952. So that would be important historical information to have. There's a lot of people in this room who know what happened in Washington, D.C. in 1952 with this subject, which is an interesting tie-in to Beatrice Villarreal's work as well. Gentlemen, it is, it's 10 a.m. We've reached our time.

I just wanted to ask if you have any other comments, any other thing you, anything else that you would like to say to the audience before we close out here. Roger that. Thank you so much. And again, we couldn't do this without you, without the overwhelming groundswell of attention to this. You can tell that the, I mean, the president stepped out

made that bold move, right? And I think that your response and a billion people visiting the website has told us all that this is something everybody really cares about. And so keep it up, don't let up on the gas pedal. I'm not going to let up on the gas pedal. And I'm also, I'm right now, the last conversation I had was, look, I visited one location. I still demand to visit the other locations. And so we're going to keep doing that. We're going to go where the evidence is. And so thank you. Thank you. So next up, I've got some good news and some bad news. So constantly shifting schedules. The bad news, unfortunately, Senator Kirsten-Jillibrand will not be able to join us today. She was scheduled to give remarks

to 10. She had a last minute scheduled change, so our apologies. So instead, Christopher Mellon, would you come to the stage, please? So since we are going to miss Senator Gillibrand, we would like to, I think, now give out another award that we have. So before there was a disclosure movement, there were individuals willing to stand alone. Lou Elizondo was one of those people. Lou spent decades serving this country in some of its most sensitive national security roles. He could have walked away from government service quietly, collected no controversy, and lived in a very different life.

He chose not to. Instead, he stepped forward with his credentials intact, his documentation and order and his reputation on the line and told the American people what they had long suspected was worthy of serious attention. That decision cost him. It brought scrutiny, skepticism, and years of being dismissed by institutions he had served faithfully. He accepted that cost and kept going. That is what courage looks like when it matters most, a person willing to stand behind what they know to be true, regardless of what it takes. Please join me in welcoming our next recipient of the Disclosure Award, Lou Elizando.

Folks, forgive me. I'm a little bit short here, so I'm going to see if I can tip-tow over this podium. First of all, a huge thank you to the UAP Disclosure Foundation for putting this on. We've come a long way, haven't we, all of us, together collectively. And we We also have to recognize the brave efforts of the representatives who took time today to engage you on a topic that just 10 years ago, I never would have imagined we'd be here today collectively all of us. But certainly, last but not least, I have to thank each and every one of you, not for this award and not even necessarily for me being here today, but for you being here.

This is democracy in action. single one of you, every single one of you, your contributions have allowed us to be where we are today, your demand for the truth, the fact that you are not willing to compromise, because ultimately at the end of the day, our democracy depends on truth. Think about that for a moment. Truth and democracy go hand in hand. And what you are witnessing today in this, incredible room full of history. In my opinion, there's more history in the making. And again, that's because of you.

That's because you're having conversations around the dinner table. You're having conversations around the office water cooler. And you're not being dismissive. And you know what? Your government is listening. Politics aside, you have people from both sides of the aisle working diligently on this topic on your behalf because you demanded the truth.

So congratulations, folks. Here we are. And this award, as honored as I am and privileged to be recognized, I did not know that was going to happen today. I probably would have made a convenient excuse to be in the restroom right now. But it's really a reflection of each and every one of you. As I look around the room here, I recognize faces. Faces, some of them newer.

some of them I've known for a long time and we're all here together witnessing and being part of history so with that said I'm going to go ahead and be quiet and go back to the back of the room here because really this is your day this is not mine this is a direct reflection of you the American people

and the will of the American people to be heard by our government and our government willing to listen and then to go ahead and deliver on those promises that it made so many years before. So with no further ado, to each and every one of you, thank you, thank you, thank you for all that you continued to do and all that you have done. And really, this is yours. This award belongs to each and every one of you.

So thank you very much. God bless. So we're going to take a five-minute break. Five-minute break. We're trying to resolve some AV issues. the next panel, we're live streaming this, so we're really hoping that the people on the live stream

are getting the feed, notwithstanding the A-B issues. So we're going to figure that out, five minutes, and then we are coming back for our panel on national security, which will feature Christopher Mellon, Kirk McConnell, Mark, Ron Renancomf,

Admiral Tim Gallaudet, and moderated by NBC's Gotti Schwartz. Five minutes. Thank you. Okay, so our next panel is security and defense, national security, UAP, and emerging threats. On this panel, this panel will be moderated by Gotti Schwartz, correspondent from NB. Probably aware that there was an issue over the course of 17 days. If there is something that over and over and over again, as we have been told,

to our shifts. What happens night two, night three, night four, based on your information, Chris? Surprisingly, when they came to brief the Congress, my understanding is they said they did not have any video of these objects, even though this had been going on for 17 days. I think it's another example of the lack of preparedness that we sometimes has come to light as it did on 9-11, where we didn't have a plan for civilian airliners being hijacked. We're used to still thinking, and we need to grow from this standpoint, that the oceans give us this great protection, and we don't have to worry so much about the homeland.

Well, now we're seeing this happen. This is not a singular event. Matt Ford was talking about what happened in 2019, 2020 out west. That went on for months, and it was crazy. I mean, we're talking swarms of unidentified objects and a mothership coming in and them going inside it and that thing taking off at lightning speed. So there's a lot of very intrusive activity that is unlike what we've seen before. After World War, we had around a lot of our premier bases and facilities, particularly nuclear ones, a lot of activity. But this is really getting more sort of in your face and in more persistent in many cases.

We've had some of these things fly up in front of a Navy ship and apparently shine a light right on the bridge, right into the faces of the boat. So it's like, we're here, you can't do anything about it. And so this represents a more provocative pattern than we've seen before. I can't tell you what happened day three, day four, except that I do know they did start to reach out for other assets. They got a plane with special sensors

from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration which they deployed. They started reacting with some fighter patrols and things like that, but ultimately they were not successful. You know, I, what One of the things that I always come back to is, and I know this sounds trite, but it's the shrug. There's a shrug that happens where it's like, well, we don't know. You know, what else do you want us to do?

You were just talking about the oceans, Admiral, if something like this happens and there is a craft that is beaming a light onto the deck of one of the most powerful ships on planet Earth, where does that shrug come in? Is there a shrug, or does this go all the way to the top and to this dark? where, you know, maybe there are people that are actually in the know. Thanks, Gotti. Well, from my experience, operationally having served on an aircraft carrier and amphibious assault ship and other fleet command ship, that I never saw a shrug.

It was always reported whenever we saw something in our airspace or water space. And actually, I'd like to turn to the ocean. You had mentioned that we have a sense of security because we have these oceans that bound us. but the reality is that we're seeing these objects in the water. And I've had submarine officers come to me and talk about objects traveling at speeds in excess of 50 knots, closing with constant bearing, decreasing range, and having them to order emergency deep maneuvers to evade.

And then the objects slowed down and then trailed them for a time. And this is three submarine officers, very credible. So our oceans aren't as secure as we might think, And in all those cases, though, they are reported up to higher headquarters. Higher headquarters, though, if something like that happens, and you'd expect that to go to the TIPPITI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, I mean, that sounds like a full stop. Let's put all resources, all assets on this.

And to our knowledge, that doesn't happen for some reason. Well, this does happen. In fact, I have a friend who stands watch, stood watch, in the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. which is the watch floor for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and the President, and they take reports from all the combatant commanders. And in fact, when there was that Alaska UAP following the Chinese balloon,

that was reported up to my buddy who was on watch. Now, a lot of those comms are classified. So the President knows these are reported. What's done about it is another story. I oscillate, as one does when you grapple with this. between the possibility that, you know, the credibility of the people that have come forward is pretty impressive. But it does seem that there is some sort of conspiracy cover-up. I just don't know what the nature is. It's either the government knows a lot and doesn't

want to share how much they know, or the government knows little and wants to cover up their ignorance. And now we live in a day and age where we're starting to see. see what looks like the government saying, hey, actually we don't know. Here's a bunch of the files. You guys look for yourself. But is, what camps do you all fall in? Do you think that there are repositories within the government that actually fully understand the phenomena?

Or is this a circumstance of everybody is just out of their depth when it comes to UAP? Go ahead, Kirk. I guess what I would like to say on this topic is from my 37 years up here in national security and eight years before that for a national security consulting company is when the United States government sees, perceive something that is potentially a threat, they don't ignore it. The national security establishment goes after problems. They may not do it perfectly, they may not do it successfully, but they don't just ignore stuff.

That's my experience. So do you think that they have solved the language issue? That's a different. Two questions. I think they have taken this very seriously over decades and studied it, studied the hell out of it. Whether they've succeeded in unraveling what it is and how it works and that sort of thing is a different question. We have reports from, you know, insiders, a large number of people who say, yeah, progress has really not been very significant. But, you know, you certainly have other reporting that suggests that that's not true, that there have been some really notable successes.

I personally, it's just an opinion, but I think that these black triangles that fly around, I think they're probably ours, just for, from the circumstances of some of the eyewitness accounts, from Eglon Air Force Base, you know, from Langley Air Force Base. Dylan, Portland, was smoking a cigarette on Langley Air Force Base. And from the other side of the fence at NASA Langley,

he sees this huge black triangle rising up, seemingly out of a big building there. And we have other reports from a naval officer. I think Chris knows this gentleman who was driving to work at 5.30 in the morning right outside of Norfolk. And he's looking at his sunroof, and there's this huge black triangle flying low right above him at 50 miles an hour down the interstate. So, you know, is this a UAP, an NHI that's just cruising along at dawn? around Norfolk Air Force bases? I kind of doubt it.

But who knows? And this is part of the problem with disclosure is we don't know enough to predict at this point all of the national security ramifications until we know what the hell the government knows or doesn't know. Mark, I mean, what camp do you fall in? Does the government know a lot

or does the government know a little bit and are covering their asses? here. It's a good question. I will maybe defer to the rest of the panel on that specific question. I want to add just a couple more elements to the Langley story in this broader narrative that we're seeing of these quote-unquote drone incursions. And Langley, again, 17 nights, these objects were displaying bright flashing lights. And that's the base commander there, commander of air combat command, called it close encounters at Langley because he had bright flashing lights. that's not how you do espionage or surveillance, right?

That is, that is, that's breaking rule number one of surveillance, if this is a foreign entity. I'll add that former NORAD commander, General Glenn Van Herk, said on 60 minutes openly that they attempted to jam these objects and failed, failed. They couldn't get eyeballs, couldn't jam them, and yet they're operating over a key air defense facility right here off the East Coast.

And that's, I want to just add on the, kind of on the analytics side, we saw these bright flashing lights occurring for months off the coast of Southern California. I think that the FOIA documents show that this is going on from at least March until July of 2019. Several months, these objects swarming these naval warships, LCS ships, right, the newest ships in our, some of the most advanced ships in our inventory. And thanks to Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, we have video footage. We have radar data from the USS Omaha incident, which is very perplexing because it shows what appears to be a spherical object. And the debunkers have put up any number of nonsense theories for that.

When you actually do the analysis, it looks like a spherical object moving against the wind and going into the water. So you add in the events over the UK. There are several bases in the UK in 2024. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was shut down right. Patterson Air Force face, some folks might know that name, was shut down in 2024 because of drone activity. And thanks to John Greenwald's FOIA work, we know that at least, I think they counted at least 15 to 30 objects on radar, right? These are radar hits. So we have a major problem. I'm going to, again, defer on the, does the government know more or less about this to the rest of the panel? I just want to add some color to how extraordinary

these incidents really are. And, you know, it's not necessarily just if these things are happening as they are. But there is a thought experiment that has to be done, and again, not to trivialize this. But if these things do constitute something that is so far beyond the capabilities that humans have, there's an interdimensional elephant, I think, in the room, as we've seen over the last week, at least or so, that has now been very much introduced into the mainstream conversation, even though many people have been talking about it before then. But the question is, we're here celebrating 250 years.

Let's say, for the sake of this thought experiment, that 250 years ago, we were able to send back drones to fly over some of the battles that were happening between us and the British, right? And the Continental Army saw these drones up in the sky, and maybe one crash, and they took it to George Washington. Or actually, I think in this case, we would be the British because of our military superiority. But for the sake of the analogy, they have this drone.

There are sightings. Villagers have seen them. Some of the founding fathers have seen them. I cannot, in this thought experiment, ever see George Washington or anybody else that is involved in the military doing any sort of disclosure because of the ramifications that would come from that disclosure. They would not know whether it was the British. They would not know what they were looking at. Some people would think it was witchcraft.

And so the question is, if that is what's happening right now, what incentive does the military have in disclosing this to the public? Chris? I don't think the military has a strong incentive to disclose this to the public. To some degree, it's unfortunate. And when they created the classification guide for UAP, they sort of put down a blanket statement that essentially anything UAP related was going to be classified. And I think it was very short-sighted. It was the typical institutional desire to protect military secrets, which is understandable.

But I think what they missed was that so much of the energy, that was leading to greater support from Congress and greater funding to study the problem and take action was the result of information reaching the American people. When we look at what happened with Sputnik, for example, imagine if the intelligence agencies had kept that secret. We might not have got to the moon when we did. The military needs the public to understand what its challenges are and to build the support here. for the funding and the requirements, et cetera. So I think the rank and file, the usual sort of routine response is don't share anything,

lock everything down. And it's understandable that's the culture, but I think the seniors need to make some important exceptions to that. And if I may push back just a little bit, if, and again, we're assuming, let's just assume that interdimensional abilities or even interplanetary abilities are on the table right now.

There's a question of asymmetric technology here, and when you apply that to national security, all of a sudden, the idea of full disclosure, the idea of actually this is how we think you can travel interdimensionally or any of those things opens up a whole host of issues on, well, can I teleport this in? into here? Can I teleport this person over here? That seems to be such a massive game changer

to the point that it makes national security relatively moot. Is that something that comes into the conversation? Are there lines that maybe should not be crossed when it comes to disclosure and national security if we are dealing with that type of technology? Tim? Well, yeah, got in. First of all, I think that's been the incentive since past World War II. for our government not to disclose. Because no administration wants to admit that it's vulnerable and can't protect its citizens and that the billions of dollars we spend for the Pentagon is potentially useless to this unknown possibly adversary.

So that's true. But then there's a balance because our public deserves to know what their taxpayer dollars are being used for and how good our defense system is, for example, or not. And so that's the edge, I think, we're why. walking on here and all of us in the room are advocating for. And I see Alvi Loves here. So we have a science advisory council that has been established. And thankfully, we now have the support of the administration to go and answer some of these questions. I can't wait to see that panel and hear hopefully a little bit more about where things stand with interdimensional travel and in science

right now. Because, you know, unfalsability is really, anything that's unfalsifiable is something that you know, we try to, we try to, it doesn't mean it's necessarily true or untrue. We just have to be careful about those conversations. And yet, when it does come to thought experiments and playing things out, the idea of, this seems like if these things are true, this seems like fire. This seems like humans don't understand what fire is, have never seen fire, don't even know that they can cook, they don't know about thermal dynamics, they don't know about anything. And there is this technology that may be kept away from humans, which we all, I think, agree, should have a right to.

And yet, if that is what's behind the disclosure wall, Mark, do you think we're ever going to see that? I think, you know, if the efforts here in Congress bear fruition, and if the, you know, I think the critical mass that is building up in interest, especially with the presidentially directed releases that we've seen, I think it's possible that we'll break through in some respect. I can't tell you how far that will go. How about you, Kirk?

Do you think that if there is something as game-changing as, you know, as we can understand it, fire that is on the other side of disclosure, where it is some sort of breakthrough understanding of how the universe works, that it could render entire nations completely moot. There will be disclosure? This is, sorry. You know, this gets back to the critical question of what's behind the disclosure wall. You know, what is there?

Is it the kind of technology that you are alluding to? but more importantly, perhaps, is it technology that is easily mastered? If it's really, really hard, look, nuclear weapons are incredibly dangerous. You could devastate the whole world, but we were able to apply it to commercial uses by the sheer difficulty of engineering a huge enterprise to mine uranium, to enrich it, to build a reactor and make plutonium and, you know, tritium and heavy water plants. There's a lot of difficult engineering steps in practice to make something that is so dangerous. So how hard is it going to be?

And what are the observables? Can you control it? These are the kinds of calculations that I think the government will have to, and the public will have to wrestle with once we get on the other side and try to, and get some understanding of what's going on. But look, you know, if this is really dangerous stuff, and if it's easily proliferated or easily mastered, then, you know, you've got a problem,

given the state of humanity's level of consciousness, you know, we fight with each other, and we have lunatics in the world who will just as soon blow it up under some circumstances. So these are really, difficult questions, but you know, you can't just have it bottled up in one little place in a country and perpetuate that forever. Everybody has to share in this decision-making. Chris, I want to bring you in. As the man who opened up, Pandora's box.

I know. That's why I try to make the case. It's going to be a good thing. But what I was going to say is that, you know, if we think about, say, nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project, we kept it lit on it until we mastered the technology. If we have something that's a total gain changer, then probably at some point we're going to want our adversaries to know. It's not a deterrent if it's totally secret and they don't know about it. So there may be a point in time at which we want to do, the country makes a decision to take that out, to deter aggression against the United States as conceivable. So I don't know, I think they have to, you know, if they have some technology,

how developed is it, how reliable is it when they get to a certain point, they might actually have an incentive to want other countries to know that we possess that capability. And I'll add to that, too, one argument for disclosure, to some degree, is to harness the power of the American R&D enterprise. And so like nuclear power, once we mastered it, we then put it out to the national labs and industry, and we've been using nuclear power and industries building nuclear power ships and submarines. So I think that's an argument. And again, our science advisory council is here to make that case and open up the phenomenon to more research that we can hopefully capitalize on from a security standpoint and an economic

prosperity standpoint. So much of this overlaps, like, eerily overlaps with the issue of artificial intelligence that we now grapple with. That's non-human intelligence. It is something that was released to the public very quickly. we don't fully understand the ramifications. We see the government trying to rein it in and doing this odd dance. We're grappling with regulation.

We're grappling with all these things as a society right now. Mark, do you see a lot of overlaps between that and UAP? I absolutely do. And maybe at the risk of opening up a second Pandora's box, I think we've heard from enough whistleblowers, David Grush, Jim Lackatsky, Hal Putoff, Dr. Eric Davis, Colonel Carl Nell that have all suggested or alleged, and this is also reflected in congressional legislation,

that other nations have also potentially retrieved this technology. And I think it's the height of irresponsibility not to have a very, very nuanced discussion of what the potential ramifications of that may be. If there is someday some kind of a disclosure, we need to have a policy in place, because I don't think, and as I've emailed the group here, I don't think we're magically going to sing kumbaya

once Trump or Xi or Putin announce the existence of non-human intelligence, if that is true. And again, we have to engage in that scenario planning. I'm sure Admiral Gileadet knows that the military must, you know, plans for any possible contingency. And I think this is an incredibly important discussion. So, again, at the risk of going down a rabbit hole, let's imagine that China and Russia have retrieved craft.

Let's imagine that Xi instructs all of his scientific talent, scientific capital, or Putin does the same thing, to work on this problem. And, oh, by the way, they have mastered cheap AI technology and can reverse engineer and make sense of this technology much more rapidly than we can. What happens if one day, and Secretary Rubio has spoken openly about this? What happens if one day we wake up and the Chinese have, or the Russians have a national ballistic missile defense system based on this technology? And, oh, by the way, they also have an offensive capability. And we're stuck without that capability. That is an enormous, enormous, not only a national security risk, but a global security risk. So I'll just throw that to the group.

What happens if we are ever in that situation? I think that discussion must be had. I think the discussion also must be had about how, what it would take for a kumbaya moment. Up until now, we've seen, I don't know if it's menacing behavior, but definitely, hey, we see that you see us, or whatever it is. But has there been an aggressive intent or even a lethal intent ever detected from your all knowledge? a UAP incident in which there was some sort of aggressive intent aimed at military service members or perhaps civilians? We've had radar jamming and that kind of thing, which is a serious matter. It's a matter to humans.

I mean, the military views that as an act of aggression. That's not something that our aircraft and aircraft from other nations engage in. lightly. So there is that. Back in the 50s, there were a couple, there was one incident at least where a U.S. fighter aircraft merged on radar with the UAP. It never came back. Nobody knows what happened. This plane disappeared over the Great Lakes, but I'm not aware of any lethal hostility other than that historical event. But that's regarding U.S. platforms. I have no knowledge either. However, it's well documented in the ATIP, ASAP, and UAP task force investigations funded over tens of millions of dollars,

and Lou Elizondos in the room can speak to this, and he wrote about it, that there are individuals who have encountered UAP and had anomalous health effects, so that's real, too. And we certainly cannot claim they're all benevolent when you know that data is real. If there was such an action that was detected by one of the world's superpowers, Do you think that that might be a catalyst for Putin and Xi and President Trump to talk about this together? I mean, that gets to Chris's opening remarks about the famous Reagan comments at the UN in 1987. And fun little historical fact, when 1985, when Reagan first met the new Premier Gorbachev in Geneva,

and one of their, I think it was their first summit, Cold War tensions were really at their height. It was a very tense moment in the Cold War. And Reagan and Gorbachev had just finished a really intense series of meetings. And it's tough going. They're having a hard time. They're not getting along. They're not making any progress.

And they go for a walk, just the two of them. And Reagan asks Gorbachev, just kind of on an offhand manner, hey, you know, some aliens came around and attacked us, would you come and help us? And Gorbachev says, no doubt about it. And Reagan says, wow, cool, so would we. And they shared a little chuckle. And that, you know, that kind of broke the ice between these two leaders. And any historians of the Cold War will know that's what led to perestroika,

Glasnos. So, you know, there is precedent with Reagan's commentary. Reagan obviously viewed as the ultimate Cold Warrior, the ultimate national security mindset. But he clearly had an openness to what Chris, again, alluded to in his comments, his opening comments, that maybe there is room for some kind of negotiation discussion if there is a legitimate perceived threat from any kind of... It's so ironic that that was one of the things that started thawing this, because the entire reason why we're having this discussion is national security. It's because humans have been at war with other humans and have been worried about some sort of technological advantage. Kirk, if there was something, whether it's a direct connection between some sort of non-human intelligence and leader, governments, some sort of, something public, do you think that the world

is right now set up to be able to adapt to that type of paradigm shift? Is this on? Well, you know, there's a mixed reaction. historically on analogous kinds of situations. Certainly indigenous peoples around the world in their encounters with European colonizers, for example, always came out on the bad end of things, to say the least. And what's more that they tended to fracture or remain fractured, like we certainly saw this here in North America, where tribes, instead of coalescing and fighting a common invader, us from Europe, they would make deals.

In some areas, countries in Europe, for instance, have practiced a sort of balance of power. They see some great power emerge, and they band together to resist that great power. In the Pacific, we really don't have any tradition of that amongst the nations there. So it's really hard to build a NATO-like defense structure in the Far East. But, you know, we have examples of both things. Faced with a common foe, nations sometimes will band together, right? But that means that the perception is that this is a really hostile, hostile, aggressive foe. So is that the model that we hope is going to happen?

It has to be a dangerous situation for us to overcome our differences. Or is it possible that this is going to be a non-threatening beings and that maybe they'll just help us raise our consciousness level, our level of morality, and we'll start to get along better by the example of these intergalactic visitors or interdimensional visitors? I think that's, you know, again, not to bring the shrug back, but if there is some sort of hostile intent, all of a sudden it's very different than if something is flying around and, you know, maybe surveilling, but not necessarily acting aggressively.

But in the absence of that sort of, first of all, I mean, are we prepared if there is some sort of aggressive action, taken, Admiral? I mean, is that something that, I don't know, exists in the deep recesses of military planning? That's a great question. As far as preparedness measures and op-orders and whatnot, I know of none for the phenomena. And there, now, granted, I've been run into

compartment of programs, but not in all of them. In fact, Dave Grush would be the best one to ask. But But I don't think so. In fact, I'll share an anecdote. Chase Stratton is a friend. He worked in Naval Intelligence when I was in the Pentagon, and I'm a friend with several directors, former directors of Naval Intelligence. And I had a meeting with one of my buddies who just retired out of that office,

two-star admiral, and we were talking about business. But at the end of it, I brought up UAP, and he was honest with me, and he said, we still don't know what these are. So, and of course, ATIP and OASAP and the UAP task force, again, did research, did monitoring, but I think the government is still trying to come to grips, and that's what we're going to be doing, hopefully with some major R&D effort. If I could just calibrate, because, again, all of these conversations, everyone's on a different place in the spectrum of how we see this right now.

But just to calibrate the table here, the big question is, do you think, that there are factions of the government that truly understand the nature of what we're seeing. And I'll just yes or no all the way down. Chris? If there are, I've not encountered them. How about you're happy? Same. I don't know. I'm going to agree with the rest of the group. Unfortunately, I think that the government knows a lot. Okay. So three, probably four to one.

Again, this is one of those things. I agree with Kirk. I think the government knows a lot. The true nature. Do they have a deep understanding of where this is from, what their values might be, the culture, the origin, all of those kind of things? Not as far as I know. Yeah, and I can say this too. on Kirk and that I'm sure that it's siloed like everything else in the government.

And a good example is this. Sam Gerbis is in the room. He's done some research, and he's pulled out, I believe, verification that there's an entity called the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office. And Bobby Ray Inman, Director of National Intelligence, spoke about it. Here I was the Oceanographer of the Navy, the head oceanographer of the Navy, and high clearances, TSCI compartment of programs, and I was never read into that. So you have that kind of siloing, and I would probably help that office quite a bit with our data and knowledge.

So there's the siloing that exists in the government, and it's continually an effort for administrations to try to break those down. It was so interesting to hear. I think it was Representative Burleson who said, you know, there is, we forgot how to do this, or we forgot how to do that. and when you look back at the phenomenon on it, it seems to go back to the 1940s, 1950s. There are allegations that private contractors have come in. And that would also help explain why it seems as though there are many in the government that have no idea about any of this and are very dismissive.

In terms of active funding, though, for those things, they have to have an SAP, they have to have some sort of access to either private capital or access to our tax dollars. How does the SAP process work when it comes to protecting our national secrets and when it comes to protecting things that, you know, have been overlooked for decades and decades and decades, Chris? We actually have an, it varies by agency and department, but we do. have a very extensive system in the Defense Department for bringing all the Saps together in one place under one committee. They're all reviewed. They reported to Congress. I sat on that committee. I never saw anything related to UAP. It doesn't mean there aren't things outside

of that. There are things called alternative compensatory control mechanisms. There are other workarounds that sometimes people put into effect. Or some people may just not be compliant and not register their program with the SAP oversight system. But we actually have a pretty robust active system for accounting for all these things that monitor them. I will also tell you that people who think the government can't keep a secret are absolutely wrong. The government keeps all hundreds of these SAP programs.

And in my experience, not a single one of them leaked except for one that we used in combat, which was there for exposed to the press and the media and got a newsweek and whatever. But all those other programs remained completely under lock and key and completely unknown. And they were not things that the public would have a problem with. They were mostly just very technical things like, you know, how do you make a tank arm or tougher? How do you make a missile warhead more effective? It's that kind of stuff. So it's not really even very pressworthy necessarily, but it's stuff.

you don't want your adversaries to know. And yet, if there was truly some sort of crash retrieval program or some sort of... I mean, you're talking the amount of money you would have to hide for something like that to exist. One of the stories is they gave up, trying to redo the... One of the main sources that we had initially on crash retrieval was that they closed the program down because they were making no headway and they were spending a lot of money. Tell me more. Tell me everything about this. Well, there's some other people in the room here that

that could speak to that as well. But that's my, and then they tried to, some other folks tried to make a deal to get them to bring some of that out of, as they were closing the program down, to take another stab at trying to understand the technology. That's only one narrative. if they're competing narratives. But that was one of the original narratives. One of the people that I first brought to the Hill

to raise this issue back in 2019, that was the story that was given. If, you know, and again, this is all, for me at least, a thought experiment, a very important thought experiment that we should all participate in, but if the government is or was ever in possession of off-world or non-human craft, biologics, whatever the case may be,

again, we go back to the, there is fire that we are not privy to. There is something that is so far beyond anything we can do with our civilization that would change literally everything. If that's the case, I know the public polling suggests that people want to know, but if that's the case, do you think that we are ready for that type of disclosure? I do. I think that that's what our polling data is telling us. And by the way, I think in terms of the international impact, I don't think you have to have aggression, lethality, or hostility. I think the mere fact that there is a more powerful actor operating

in our seas and in our skies, even if nothing changed from the way it is today, that would globally raise all kinds of concerns and I think that would affect all of the major countries and I think they would probably come together to talk about it. What do you know?

What are you seeing? How can we work together on this? Unless it posed a threat to power. It was really confirmed that there is a non-human intelligence operating craft in our atmosphere. I think that would be immediately of immense concern to every major power.

Kirk, I want to bring you in here because, you know, again, if that is disclosed, the one thing that would be very vulnerable is power as humans understand it. Vulnerable. Yeah, all of a sudden, the idea of rulers or democracy or those types of things, you open up that door and there are a lot of questions about how we want to be led. do you think that, same question, do you think that if that is the case, if we're assuming that crash retrievals allegations are real and that the United States has possibly been in possession of non-human biologics, do you think that the power structures on Earth are ready for that type

of disclosure? I don't think I really have a strong, but I will say that it's, you know, bad news doesn't get better over time. And, you know, people have to buckle up and face it. And I think governments have to do that. So if that's the reality that we're facing, we're going to have to learn to deal with it. So I don't think I'm anticipating the next question is, well, if we're not ready, should we just put a lid on it?

I end up thinking, no, you can't, you shouldn't put a lid on and pretend that you're not noticing this. But I will say this, you know, if these, if we are being visited by non-human intelligent beings, interdimensional or intergalactic or whatever, they've probably been here a long time. And I think historically there's some evidence to make us think that they have been coming here a long time. You know, if they're that much superior to us, if they meant to be really aggressive, I think we'd have figured that out by now. So, you know, I think that's a data point to suggest that this will, that there's a benign aspect or something that is keeping these beings from taking over the place.

you know, either they're not interested or they're beyond that. It's like, you know, it's just not something that they engage in, or something has kept us safe. So I have some hope that we will rise to the occasion and recognize, you know, superior technology and so on. So I am hopeful that we can deal with it, but if not, that's not a reason not to face it. We live in such an interesting time. Today is a day that, and I could truly say this, there's one person that could change all of this, like right now, right?

And he's just down the street, and he has seemed to have an interest in all of this. And yet we don't see that. We see, you know, him definitely toying with the topic. But do you think that President Trump is read in on the true nature of what UAP represents or all of the dealings that the United States government has historically had with the phenomenon? Well, I can address that partially. So President Trump personally, I don't know. but when he came in office, I met with some of his appointees in the Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, I think, in development.

And they were committed to look under the hood and gain control with political appointees of the whole UAP issue. And they were very hell-bent on getting the deep state wrestling a topic from them. And I've seen them move out in every other topic area in that way. So I seem to think at least there are people in the administration who know. How far along do you think they might be? I was going to say that I spoke with someone on the White House staff about this who was an argument supporter of disclosure who worked directly in these areas on national security and intelligence,

and during his tenure there, he's no longer there, the issue never came up that he saw. And he was frustrated about it, and trying to look into it himself. But he was not privy to any briefings that touched on matters of the UAP beyond sort of meeting some Navy pilots and some more routine, nothing about crash recovery, that sort of thing.

Now, since he left, perhaps there's been other briefings, I don't know. Mark, we live in a time when also the interest in the topic of UAP has gone into some weird domains. We all think back to what happened when there was a big hype over alien.gov, and we've seen the issue somewhat politically weaponized to focus on, illegal immigration. Are you worried about that type of political weaponization of something like this? That's a really good question. I know there's a lot of disappointment when that website was rolled out. I think a lot of people perhaps rightfully view that as frankly an insult to all the whistleblowers who have come forward, testified to Congress. Some, as Senator Rounds and Secretary

Ruby, I said, at great costs to themselves. And so look, that is to so. Look, that is to At the end of the day, I think this topic is so much bigger than any kind of what I now see as a distraction. I think this, you know, with the Spielberg film and again, these trenches, these releases that are coming out. I do think that there is, I mean, look how full this room is. Look at the venue that we're in here. It's pretty extraordinary to see how this is developed and it's only growing. So I feel that a critical mass, again, is building. And I think those distractions, if you will, I don't think we'll, I hope. will not let's stop progress on this topic.

As that critical mass builds, so does the noise around all of this. For those of us who have been following this for pre-2017, even for us, it's hard to keep your eye on what we're talking about here, right? Now we have AI making things even noisier. I do wonder how all of that noise affects the operational lens of national security. If all of a sudden you are literally having to track down and trace down every single report that comes in

and you don't have the manpower, is that something that should be of concern right now? It's interesting about AI because we are going to be dealing with a super intelligence one way or another. Maybe we'll be dealing with two, but we're certainly going to be dealing with one. And that one's probably a bigger threat to your job in your career than the other one's going to be. So I think we actually probably need to change our style of government in some degrees.

I've tried to propose something in Article in Politico recognizing that, one, the average representative is not a deep technical programmer and that kind of thing. but we have a range of increasingly technologically demanding sophisticated issues. And I think there's alternative means for bringing in people on a very bipartisan basis that have deep expertise that can formulate policy. And the model that I would use is the base closure realignment commission, where Congress said, this is too hard for us. We keep failing at this. we're going to set aside, we're going to pick a group of people from both parties who are genuine experts,

and those people are not raising money, they're not running for office, they're not getting paid off by special interest groups, and they're going to actually not going to write a commission study that goes on a shelf, they're going to write legislation that's going to automatically become law unless vetoed by the president or two-thirds in Congress. And I think the first year they saved $700 million for the taxpayer. It was so successful. They did it three other times. I think it's a very interesting model for the public to think about as we increasingly face issues that are not of the kind

that the founding fathers envisioned. And as we think about how our society has evolved into one in which money plays such an overwhelming role in elections and access to our politicians. That makes me think of that weird little dream. thought experiment, George Washington holding a drone, Benjamin Franklin holding a drone, we'd have a very different society, I think. And yet, and I feel sacrilegious even bringing this up. But that was for base closures. That was for saving money.

I think that model could be used for other things, but not necessarily for AI would be good. AI, yes. Paradigm shifting technological breakthrough. We need something a little bit more drastic, which, again, very interesting conversation. I'm hoping that you guys will participate here. But do we need a different form of government? Do we need to tweak some of the way that we are governed here in America and beyond? Admiral? Well, there's a lot of room for change and improvement.

I'll say that. But I think Chris is right. I think we can look at past precedent and apply models that have been successful to this problem. But I want to go back to some of the other discussion about whether we should know or not and open this up or put a lid on it. One of my favorite quotes from Chris is, when has ignorance ever been a good national strategy? And I think, yeah. Yeah, the idea of explaining that to George Washington, and it's like, no, no, there are these things called combustible, you know, engines. And everyone's, you're going to have Uber drivers and, like, the idea of just gunpowder and those types of things in the hands of just,

everyday citizens that would boggle the mind and yet 250 years we can look back at the progress that we've made. But, Mark, the government question, do we need a different framework if this truly is what many people suspect it is? In short, no. I mean, I think democracy is what the least bad option of government, right? So I think at the end of the day, the system should be answerable to the people. If these allegations, again, that have been made under oath from a variety of whistleblowers are true, the system has failed, but that doesn't necessarily mean we overthrow or change the system entirely. Sure, again, I agree there could be many tweaks. I think we can all agree. Money and influence in politics are corrosive. But at the end of the day, I don't think

we throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don't change the entire system. Yeah, and let me point to the good that's being done. I know Representative Burleson put in, I think, a provision for the 2027 NDAA about convening, I think, a panel to review records and release records. And so that's positive. Again, we have now the White House, again, I'll make the pitch, the Science Advisory Council, so that's a positive development. And then you have various record releases under this Pursue program, which is revealing some

very interesting information that we're going to work to get more data for. So I think right now we're at a time where there is positive development, certainly when you look at go back a decade and compare the two. Most of us in this room would never believe we'd be here having this discussion 10 years ago. And so right now I think let's just monitor the progress and do the best we can. And then ideas for change will arrive. And, Kirk, I mean, again, going back to executive branch, judicial branch, Congress, states rights, do you think that that framework is adequate? Do we have enough self-correcting

mechanisms in here to be able to deal with technological advance like many people suggest? Well, I'm in agreement with Mark that for all of our flaws in the way our government functions, I think it's the best model that we have. But I would say this. What's wrong now is that we're not living up to what our structure is. The idea that Congress can go 80 years without officially and consistently being part of the making a policy in an area like this is just unconscionable. And you can't sugarcoat it. I'm an institutionalist of this institution,

and this is what offends me as much as anything about this, is keeping Congress out of the picture, out of the decision-making process is just indefensible. And all of that is done in the interest of... And it's fascinating because all of that is, or at least we believe, may have been done in the interest of national security, right? National security is the great line that is,

verboden to cross. Are you all suggesting that national security maybe, you know, when we're talking about whistleblower protections and we're talking about some of the details in the language on who can come forward and what they can say, national security once again comes right back front and center. How do you navigate that when it comes to the specific language and what people are allowed to disclose to the public to individual members of Congress and then possibly to the executive. The good news is nobody has ever been prosecuted for bringing classified information to Congress and presenting it in a secure facility to an appropriate committee.

So I would say the doors are wide open, they remain open, we're doing everything we can to encourage people to come forward. And I do think there's room for additional legislation to provide additional compensation or protections to people. Here in the Disclosure Foundation, we have a legal staff that's prepared to provide free legal advice to people that may have questions about their rights and obligations.

So we're trying to facilitate that in any way we can. But people that have come forward to date, none of them have been prosecuted. They've suffered administrative sort of blowback in some cases. And that is a more difficult thing to shield them from. But I would say right now that's the principal problem that they face if they do come to Congress. And so more can be done in that regard. Yeah, and at the end of the day,

We swore an oath to the Constitution, and we're a government by the people, for the people, and so I think the people have a right to know. Admiral, you, of all people here, I think, at the desk, you took quite a risk in coming forward and approaching this before it was very mainstream. It's so weird because I keep finding myself in conversations with, I believe, the same people that I've been arguing with throughout the years. And I'm surrounded. I'm like, wait a minute.

I thought I was the one that had to convince you guys to take this stuff seriously. And now you're all just assuming that it's aliens. Like, we have to deal with this with nuance. And they're like, wait, are you the skept? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. But so often it does seem as though, you know, the pendulum has swung. And now we have the ability to look beyond this stigma.

But now that that has happened, do you think that the whistleblower protects additional whistleblower protections that are being discussed are necessary? Or do you think that this idea of just going straight to your Congress member or going straight to an executive in the correct manner are sufficient to bring about more disclosure? Well, I think I agree completely with what Chris said is that, you know, there's no case of people even attempted to be prosecuted, much less convicted, for sharing classified information with Congress in a secure manner. Now, he also then said, yeah, but they have administrative weapons to apply. And I would, I take that, we all take that incredibly seriously. And it's, it's a real problem. Whistleblower protections are simply inadequate. They just absolutely are ridiculous, ridiculously one-sided.

And so this is a real, it is a real problem, and it is still ongoing today. You'll lose your job, you'll lose your clearance, your reputation. it's really difficult to start a new career, you know, from scratch, and you've got a family to support, you have yourself to support. The deck is really stacked against these people. And, you know, Congress has a right, you know, the way procedures have been set up in law, people can come forward and disclose to Congress.

It doesn't mean that Congress has the tools, to protect them from reprisals. If I may try to strongman the other side of that argument, let's say all of a sudden we got whistleblower protection that has specific language that has to do with UAP, and that becomes the next, well, hey, I have an HR issue, I hate my boss, guess what, I now have some language that will protect me that will let me take this all the way on my grievances,

all the way to the tippity, tippity, tipity top, and oh yeah, I definitely was abducted or something along those lines, right? That does open up the floodgates, the HR floodgates that could be out there. Again, I'm so glad that we're having these conversations because this is step two, step three, step four in trying to suss out some of the unintended consequences. But that's got to be a concern, right? I think there is a legitimate concern on the part of the executive branch. It's hard to manage, in my experience, it's challenging to manage a civilian civil service workforce because you don't have the ability to fire people. And if, you know, to some extent, they're somewhat like tenured academics.

And so you have to lead by, you know, hopefully by example or by inspiration. But they can be a management challenge for people in the executive branch. And if their subordinates are running out, you know. It makes me think, like there's no. things really two up the clock. I mean, they can take over your time and your day and sort of, it's a big deal if one of your supporters does something like that. There is no HR for UFO Twitter, as you guys probably noticed, but I don't think that's a reason not to have whistleblower protection, but I do think it needs to be carefully crafted. Go ahead. Well, I would say that

your reasoning is not, is certainly not unsound. And this has been the rationale, I think, for, that's prevented reforms to date. You know, Congress has been reluctant to open the floodgates, right? Waste, fraud, and abuse has been around forever, and people who report that should be and have been rewarded. But at the same time, you do have this problem of how do you control your workforce and

do you let them make frivolous charges and the like. So it is a problem, and you see that Congress is reluctant to really vigorously reform the whistleblower protection standards. At the same time, I think that something could be done around this specific issue. Like, you know, you could set up a set of protections for this class of whistleblower. And you could put a sunset on it. You know, you could give people three years, five years, or whatever, to come forward. I think also there's potentially a role for the private sector to raise my,

money privately to compensate a restitution fund or something like that. But at some point, I think we're going to have to face even the larger question like South Africa did with apartheid, is we're going to need some kind of truth and reconciliation process at the end of this because we've had 80 years of this kind of suppression. And there's lots of bones buried, I think. And so it's a difficult problem, but, again, it's something that we have to figure out a solution for. We also live in a day and age in which the gatekeepers are no longer the gatekeepers, from the government all the way down through the media, right?

So all of a sudden, everybody has access to, if things line up, the entire population of planet Earth, given what? social media platform you choose. And yet we so often think disclosure may come from the government and then we see things like the spher or, you know, the mummies, and again, trying to grapple with what is real, what is not real, if there is a non-human intelligence, they may not be selective of who they are disclosing their origin from if they exist. And that type of disclosure may not come from a government. It may come from just anybody on the street. I love this question because it opens up such an incredibly important aspect of this problem.

We have Avi Loeb here. We have other technical scientific people here, Hal Put-Off, that represent private efforts. Never mind the hell of the government. Let's figure this out ourselves. And we're maybe getting to the point where private sector funding and private sector acumen and the instruments that are affordable and so on, that maybe we can think about the private sector discovering things on its own without the government. I would also say that some people have brought up here today, the people who have. encountered non-human intelligent beings, either been abducted or close encounters. And they have a lot of information. They've been marginalized and ridiculed for decade upon

decade, but they are a repository of knowledge about the nature of these beings and how they communicate, what they've communicated, why they say they're here, why they say that they're behaving the way they do. So I think there is a great untapped potential for the private sector to pitch in and solve this problem. And yet with something like that, it comes the question of filter, applying any sort of filter. For myself, I mean, I've had an experience that doesn't pass the, you know, the unfalsifiable threshold there where it's like, okay, I just, you know, I don't know. But when you're dealing with that at scale, how do you apply any filter to try to suss out the signal from the noise? Merrick? That is, that's the million-dollar

question from an analytic perspective. And I just want to go back to kind of the discussion just now and kind of bring this all together. And I think with the latest batch of releases that we've gotten from the White House and the government, some of you might be familiar with a series of incidents in 2023 occurring at a series of test ranges out west, where over the course of several nights, six law enforcement officers observed fiery reddish orbs, these spheres. Fast forward to late last year, 2025. and you had quite literally senior intelligence officials flying around in a helicopter

literally hunting UFOs. They had received word intel radar tracks that there was anomalous activity at another range out west. I don't know what that is. Tonipa, China Lake, you can go up and down the list, but apparently this is around one of these sensitive facilities and they're in this helicopter flying around and all of a sudden you see these four, six observers, pilots in this helicopter see these bright reddish orange orbs right above the rotor blades lighting up in a, apparently in a T-shaped formation. They move on, they get some more radar tracks, and they ultimately see their got their night vision goggles on, and they know that fighter jets are operating in the area, and they

see these bright reddish orange orbs directly above these fighter jets flaring up and then flaring down and oh by the way the government has released 32 I think images infrared images from that second series of events that helicopter that helo series

and guess what you can see a round object black hot very black compared to its surroundings and it's a desert it's a desert background so it's not a Starlink Flair for our, you know, for our skeptic friends out there. And, oh, by the way, this is the foo fighter phenomenon. This goes back to 1945, where I find this truly fascinating. The oldest documents in these releases, 1944-45, describe precisely the same phenomenon,

the same morphology as the most perplexing recent incidents. So I think that from an analytic perspective, I see that as a form of soft disclosure. The government is saying we have this one morphology that we are seeing consistently operating in clearly intelligently controlled ways. That is out there, folks. Anybody can go on war.gov slash UFO

and look at this. This is happening live. Again, this is only people in the weeds kind of connect these dots, but we're here. This is happening right now. So I probably didn't answer your question, but I did need to highlight that incredible series of events that, you know, we see consistently, and I'll just add quickly, I'm one of the

weirdos who's gone in and read the raw case reports from Project Blue Book over the years. And guess what? Reddish, fiery orbs are ubiquitous in these reports. And I can point to several instances in the 1952 Washington, D.C. flyovers where people saw reddish orange orbs, foo fighters flying over D.C. So this is it. This is happening live, and I think this is a form of solid. disclosure.

Right. To go back to your question, though, about how do you filter the signal from the noise, scientific standards is the answer. So if we get not only private citizen scientists, which I think Kirk was alluding to, but academic institutions to mainstream this, this is a problem. The government relies on all sorts of academic institutions and labs, and getting them to accept and institutionalize the research of UAP, is going to increase our understanding

and also make it more palatable for the public and that is a movement that's occurring right now. You have it at Harvard, you have University of Albany just got funded to study UAP, you have the Seoul Foundation at Stanford University, and there are others. And so it's happening, it's growing.

I think one of the incredible telling things is that those videos have been watched now over a billion times. It's incredible, incredible the amount of public interest in this topic globally. So I find that very encouraging. And yet, when I watch those videos like a hawk, I am looking for certain characteristics, and some of them come close, and yet that smoking gun alludes us.

And if you've covered this for as long as I have, or you've been dealing with this for as long as you have, There are always rumors about things that could allegedly settle this once and for all immediately. Right outside of these doors, we have such and such, or we're going to air drop this video to everybody right now, and from here on out, we don't have to talk about whether or not this is happening anymore. Are those things real? How close are we to actually seeing things emerging from the ocean, or things from 50 feet away from a cockpit, or things with high fidelity,

a physical evidence that could just put this to bed today? Yeah. One thing I can say is that we've helped to, Eric, Representative Burleson compiled lists of specific videos, some of which some of us have seen in a classified setting. They're not necessarily going to be the perfect Hollywood quality video, but I think they're better than what's been released and more informative and could help move the needle. Of course, many of them I haven't seen myself, so I don't know.

Any of them you haven't seen, but have you seen? I have seen some that would, I think, move the needle. Move the needle or like break it? I think it would be not necessarily, the skeptics are going to be resisting anything up to the point of the president, coming out making an announcement, I don't think it is going to settle the issue. You think that would settle it for them? I think it would, I think there's certainly a video that would help move it further, much further in the direction of, wow, this is kind of crazy, and this is hard to explain.

And so, you know, we're actually specifying individual videos and helping the Congress prepare lists of those which are being requested. And the mood, the needle is already moving tremendously. So on behalf of everybody, thank you guys for this. Admiral, have you seen anything that would break that needle? No, I got it. I'm not seen with my own eyes, even though I know people who have. In fact, Chris just mentioned this now captain, by the way. He's promoted to captain in the Navy who observed a triangle over the interstate near Norfolk. And these are pretty convincing. And I'm not in the camp to think that that's our technology. So I know people, but not my own. myself. I think that is our, I think that could be our technology, but I would point out that those triangles have been observed since at least the 50s. So it's not just our technology. It might have been reverse engineered, perhaps, but it's not historically always been our

technology. It doesn't have to be us today. It could be us tomorrow. Can I quickly jump in? It's not just the four or five of us talking about black triangles. The former deputy director of the Pentagon's UFO analysis office, the All-Domain Anomily Resolution Office, Tim Phillips, has said the two morphologies that perplexed him, freaked him out, are, you guessed it, fiery spheres, and black triangles. That's the government. That is a, the deputy director, acting director of that office has specifically said, the government is perplexed by black triangles. So, you know, do with that what you will, but I think that is, again, it's not just us talking about that. That is the government.

in terms of the chain of command, when somebody sees something like this and it goes up and it goes up and it goes up, going back to who is in charge of getting to the bottom of it and who is in charge of just, you know, turn it back to the troops and being like, all right, go back to, you know, the status quo, go back to normal life. Because that right there seems to be, at least for us, with the fidelity of the sensors that we have, and the access to a lot of classified information, that seems like the choke point. Well, right now, the Office of Director of National Intelligence is the Point Office, if you will, the Point Man,

and that's who we're reporting to in the Science Advisory Council, and they're on top of it, and we're sending, we sent them basically information request for the different videos and reports to gain more, data and metadata to do the analysis I talked about. So right now that's who's running point on this. Can I quickly just chime in? I thought it was absolutely fascinating to see the FBI get involved.

Real-life X files, by the way. And they have put out some of the most intriguing products in these releases, to be honest with you. The 302 forms, the witness interview forms, and they've done composite sketches. They've created digital recreations that I think the more law and the more analytic eyeballs in the government from various entities and agencies that are on this problem, the better. The more diffuse, the better. I think that, again, I would hope that curiosity

among Agent Smith and Agent Jones grows and grows and grows and that there's, you know, kind of, again, this organic growth within the government spread out that can only lead towards hopefully more transparency and disclosure. Mark, I want to ask you, you know, what case was it that brought you into all of this. The Gimble case, which these gentlemen know very well. And I've worked very closely with legitimate, real scientists, citizen scientists. There's an enormous amount of data in that video. We know where the camera's looking.

We know where the plane is flying. And we have now found with a very high degree, and I challenge anybody, any scientist that wants to talk with me about this, I can go for days. We have a very high degree of confidence that that object was at that close range. described by the aviators, tracked on radar, observed on their fleer sensor. I think Brian's in the audience here. We picked his brain quite a bit. And we can reconstruct in 3D the flight path that that object takes. And it does extraordinary maneuvers with no wings, no engines, no exhaust plume.

Because, again, we know how close it is. We know the distance. And the range is the most important element of all of these analyses. and through multiple different methods we are able to have high confidence that we know the range at that object is at. And oh, by the way, the government, the Pentagon has said zero. There's no case resolution. They have been silent on that incident. And I just want to quickly add, sorry, I can go on for a while, but Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick,

the former director of the Pentagon's UFO analysis office, told me on two separate occasions that the gimbal object was a balloon reflecting sunlight. You can hear on the audio, the aircrew saying it's moving against 120-knott winds. I don't know any balloons that can move against hurricane force winds, number one. Number two, this was at night. A balloon reflecting the sunlight at night moving against 120-knit winds. That's Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick for you, folks. It's told me that twice, twice.

And that, oh, by the way, that is the most recognizable UFO footage of all time. And what did the taxpayers pay him to do? Study UFOs. And he's telling me that the most recognizable footage of all time is a balloon moving against hurricane force winds. I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. And Chris, again, thank you for opening Pandora's box with that video and the others. Admiral, I want to ask you.

Same question. Was there a particular case that forced you to look at this? I've spoken about this at length, but it was the GoFast video, because before it was declassified, I saw that on the Navy Secret Network, because when Ryan was flying off the East Coast from the Thedore Roosevelt, I had a bunch of what meteorologists on that ship and other ships in the strike group during the training exercise. So I was tracking the exercise, and I got the Sipper email,

and it was from the operations officer. the story a lot from Fleet Forces Command, and he asked all the subordinate commanders and staff, do you know what these are? We're having near-mid air collisions in this exercise, and we're going have to shut it down if we don't resolve this. And so, yeah, that video crossed my desk, and I know we don't experiment with technology like that in training ranges, especially if it's going to potentially hazard air crew. And then, and Jay Stratt and I have addressed this, he was involved in getting that video and the email taken from everybody's computer afterwards because at the time they were not sure if it was foreign tech or not but since they've determined

it was it was unexplained and it wasn't foreign tech just very quickly the go fast video occurred 10 minutes before gimbal and it's the same air crew same night there are people that shrug and then there are people that don't and you know that's kind of what leads you down this path so appreciate that same question was there a particular case that brought you in i think i think the case more than any other for me was uh was the tick-tac incident off southern california sitting down with dave raver and alex dittrick those pilots and they walked through carefully the sequence of events, you know, that one had everything, right? It had eight sets of eyeballs on, from experienced operators on this object.

You had radar from the E2C, the Navy's version of AWACs. You had the Aegis radar getting the thing. you had the radar on the F-18 at one point got it. You had infrared sensing of this object. All the same event. You had all these different modalities and different kinds of sensors all across the electromagnetic spectrum. And it's just an extraordinary event.

So, yeah, that was early on in our investigation. up here that it was like, okay, this is really serious. And Kirk points to something I think we should probably address in this national security panel, and that is there's been a running narrative from individuals, including the aforementioned Dr. Kirkpatrick, that the TICTAC was U.S. Tech. And so Kirk is fairly convinced that that was not our, it was unexplainable. And I've talked to Alex and David and the other pilots myself. And so what about that disinformation?

It'll be very interesting right now because with the whole Pursue UFO file drop, the Science Advisory Council, I'm waiting to see if that disinformation effort that the government has sponsored in different offices if it's going to discontinue or not. I mean, it was only very recently that Dr. Kirkpatrick, in Arlington, actually, in person, gave that narrative that it was a DARPA experiment, which I can convince you it was otherwise. Well, gosh, we have not gotten the hook yet, so since we're all, you know, since we're all here, and I think everybody in here is somewhat on a similar page or at least the same book. When we're talking about the Tick-Tac incident, there are two things that Comedda Fravor said to me

that have always just stuck in my mind. It's the description of the two-circle dog fight. right which is a very a very human thing for something to do if this truly was from a different galaxy or something the idea of you know of of of aft versus nose would not like it didn't have a front or a back based on the morphology right and so the two circle dog fight is one and then the other thing is the cap point the teleporting to a like a very specific latitude and longitude right of what this is. Both of those suggest not necessarily, I mean, again, interdimensional is difficult, and intergalactic is difficult, and our own technology is also difficult. But those things, they muddy the waters for me, not necessarily in discounting the entire thing, but being inconvenient,

inconvenient aspects of that story that don't necessarily line up with even the idea of interdimensional or even the idea of off-world technology. Have you all grappled with why? Like why a two-circle dog fight? Why this very specific cap point? Well, obviously we see intelligent control and some degree of consciousness involved. And obviously the cap point is some kind of non-local information transfer from the pilots to this phenomenon. I can't explain that.

There are many people who are grappling with this issue in different circles like Diane Hennessy Powell, who is you can look her up. She's a researcher on telepathy, of all things. So consciousness is the area of studies, I think. This is invoking. Do you have anything? I mean, we're really going on the weeds here, but the Tick-Tac encounter is interesting, and I still have, you know, a 5, 10 percent kind of thought that this might be our tech,

because Commander Fravor and Alex Dietrich, Lieutenant Dietrich, or I think she's a lieutenant, they recall observing in the video, the higher quality video that was recorded after their incident, they recall seeing what they describe as little pito tubes, right, which generally is a measurement instrument that we humans use to measure speed, you know, air, it's a sensor system that allows us to know about the environment, the aircraft's environment. That's the only thing that was kind of bizarre about that. And, you know, in recreations, you can see it.

And even the video, if you play around with it a little bit, you can actually see those little protrusions. It's perplexing. I don't know. I don't know what that means. but I think to your point, the cap point showing up there and then engaging in some kind of, you know, that two-circle dog fight, truly interesting.

I don't know what to make of it. The thing that I take from it is it's those inconveniences that to me make it all ring more true. It's not just a clean story. But there's this one thing, or there are these few things that don't necessarily fit with what your preconceived conception of this could be. And, yeah, that's...

Thank you. We haven't gotten the time the timer yet. We could go on with all of these stories. I was saving you for last on the case that brought you into this fold. Tell us how it started. Are you about the TikTok case? No, I'm talking about whatever it was that forced you to take this. And it might be the TikTok case, and how did it happen?

And where here in Washington, D.C., did it go down? And what did it look like? So I was doing some unpaid consulting and for Navy intelligence and met Lou Alessando. And Lou apprised me of these videos and others, a number of which have not been released and we're still trying to get them released and there's no reason they shouldn't be. And I just couldn't believe that nobody was doing anything about this. and nobody was taking action. Normally, for example, if we have Russian bear bombers

coming across the Bering Strait or something, you know, we react, message goes up to National Military Command Center, people are all over it. And this stuff was happening, and it wasn't being reported out through intelligence channels, et cetera. So I happen to know two people that were close to General Mattis, someone in the White House and someone on his staff and we arranged for them to get briefings

by some of the same Navy pilots and it still became obvious after several months of trying that we were not going to be able to get anybody in the five-sided Nuthouse to take action. So at that point we faced the choice between doing nothing and walking away or going and breaking the fire alarm box and going to the press and going to Congress.

And it was just unacceptable to leave this situation unaddressed in my mind. Somebody is accessing, somebody has got a technology that we don't have and they're clearly posing a potential risk to the fleet and other assets, and it was just unacceptable to, to allow that to continue and not do whatever we could to try to bring some attention to that problem.

This is the origin story that has not been told yet in the detail that I've always wanted it to be told in. So I actually contacted several different outlets to try to get some competition going among them. Not me. Didn't know you then. Yeah, I was too early on my time. And eventually the New York Times, Helene Cooper and Leslie Kane and Leslie somewhere. And their editors agreed to run the story. And then after that, actually Kirk is the person I called in Congress because the committees

weren't reacting the way I thought they would. I thought when we got this in the newspaper, the page of the New York Times were done, it didn't turn out that way. So we came down to the hill. I talked to Kirk and he set up a meeting and then that led to bringing in some of the Navy people who were very impressive to the senators had tremendous credibility and that's when we started to get traction. I think like Ryan Graves who's here as well as Amanda Craver. It's so phenomenal. It is truly something. Anybody that is in this room to have everyone in this room of all rooms it is it is a

waited for the guillotine it didn't come I don't know if you ever foresaw this I think that you you obviously hoped for something but this is surpassed my expectations and we started on this voyage I thought you know the opposition the just the intensity of the stigma was so great and the hostility was so great it was it was hard to be truly optimistic but we hoped that that we might start a little fire, and here it is. It's starting to rage now. If the stigma is behind us, what do you think happens next?

I think we're going to see continued progress in the months ahead with more data being released from the executive branch. The quality will vary. Manage our expectations here, because that's, you know, transform is coming up. So I would say, hang on. I think there's going to be more, I know there's going to be more efforts to get the president to apply more pressure to get more information out. And I think, you know, obvious science panel

will generate pressure on the inside to provide more data. And so I'm optimistic, but I would urge people to bear in mind that, you know, people want it tomorrow. You know, that's sort of our American culture. I want to, you know, don't give me excuses. Just show me the video of the aliens tomorrow. I don't predict that's going to happen tomorrow. I predict a little bit of patience is going to be required, but I think we're on the right path,

and I think more information will be coming out, and I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic over the long term, but I don't know. Is that a year? Is that two years? Is it three years? I don't know. This is a very important question. I think I would argue this is the most important question of this panel.

Is there something that you fear could totally derail the disclosure that we've seen so far? I'm not losing sleep over that. Okay. How about you, Admiral? I agree with Chris. I think there's too much momentum right now in the public and private sector and universities, as I mentioned.

I think it's unstoppable. And by the way, those are all constituents. So if not this administration, the next administration, or the next, they're going to be behind what we're calling for today. We've seen the efforts and how bipartisan it appears. Mark, do you agree or do you think that there is something out there that could potentially

derail this? Yeah, I don't think the toothpaste is going back in the tube. I think the momentum, the critical mass is there, so I agree with Chris and Tim. Kurt? I am hopeful in the way that my colleagues here are. At the same time, the history of this is, we were talking about this over dinner last night, It has been cyclical. Like you reach a certain apex of interest and attention,

and then the government sort of hunkers down and hangs in there, and then it kind of recedes from public consciousness, and then you wait again. I think that we're not in that situation this time. I think that it's going to continue to build, and lead to success. But I am mindful of the history here, and we can't take it for granted

that it's going to just keep going. People have to really continue to work, work, work. Yeah, I mean, and again, I hate to be the one on this side of the table that does have a fear, but my fear is the shrug. That shrug is very, very powerful. And the American people, as you said,

they want answers today, yesterday, tomorrow. especially for something that happened, you know, half a century ago or beyond. And so that shrug is a major concern. How do you go about continuing to keep people's eye on what's happening without actually being able to deliver a definitive answer as to what this is? I'll quickly just jump in on Kirk's comment about the history of this. And he's absolutely right. there is a reason to be pessimistic. But at the end of the day, over the last 80 years,

the government never officially acknowledged any kind of anomaly. Now, those red orb incidents are out there. That is out in the ether. That's out in the open. That has been disclosed. And I don't think there's any coming back from that. That's the fundamental difference, right? There is more data. There is more out there now. Whereas in the past, again, this is denial, ridicule, obstruction, obfuscation. Well, you know, the NIH, whoever is coming here, gets a vote too. Let's hope they, yeah, let's hope they're listening. In how they behave and how they interact with us.

And, you know, it seems like the pace of this is sort of picking up. And so, you know, that can be a source of disclosure right there is what they decide to do. Well, they let our mics work this entire panel, so sounds like they're listening. I think we've gone over on our time. So, yeah. No, we're good. Thank you so much. We have a few more minutes until Senator Rounds gets here.

and I'll selfishly butt in for a second. I think one of the things that we're doing to try and answer that question, okay, we know that with these releases, there's over, there's 1.5 billion views on the war.gov slash UFO site, right? That increases the political capital for this topic dramatically. Another thing that increases that is, like, polling work

where we're demonstrating that this is bipartisan, bicameral, believers, non-believers, people have a deep intuition that they're not being told the truth and they want transparency. I truly believe in Washington you could run as a single issue platform of transparency and get elected. People do not want to be lied to anymore and that's what our polling data reflect. So in terms of like the momentum that we have, it's not just information and releases. It's the push and the pull. It's the push from the public in terms of political capital, and it's the poll from the executive branch and having

presidential will behind this. And it really, the momentum certainly does not seem to be, it is accelerating and not decelerating. Thank you guys so very much. Indeed. Thank you so much for, the other point before, since we do have, I think, a few minutes.

Oh, Senator Rounds is here. Excellent. Okay. Well, let's move on. Thank you so much again to the panel here. Thank you, Gaudi Schwartz from NBC. Thank you. So much. It's a pleasure.

Thank you. Well, as they say, you don't want to be the last thing standing in the way before lunch, unless you're Senator. Mike Brown. So today, the Disclosure Foundation is honored to recognize a member of the United States Senate who has approached UAP transparency, the way that oversight should work,

methodically, seriously, and without grant. standing, Senator Mike Rounds has been a steady, incredible voice on this issue, using his position to ask hard questions of the intelligence community and hold the right people accountable behind closed doors and in open sessions alike. In a debate that has never lacked noise, Senator Rounds has provided something near, something rarer, rigor. His commitment to getting the facts right has made him an indispensable part of the legislative push for disclosure. The disclosure award exists to honor those who stand by this mission, and we ask the hard questions and believe the truth is worth fighting for. Please join me in welcoming Senator Mike Rounce.

I'll put this up here for you, and that is all right. Thank you. Look, I understand that I am the last thing standing between you and lunch, and so I will be brief, but I do appreciate the opportunity just to visit with you for just a few minutes. For a number of years, I've been concerned about congressional oversight of matters related to unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs. I believe Congress has the responsibility to exercise this oversight with an eye towards accountability by the executive branch. This impacts our national security and our fiscal responsibility. Most importantly, we must make sure our citizens are aware of the government.

government programs concerning UAP, but within the constraints of necessarily classified information. This concern is a bipartisan concern. I've co-sponsored legislation with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, designed to significantly increase executive branch disclosure and transparency concerning UAP-related matters. Since 2003, we've sought enactment of the UAP Disclosure Act in the National Defense Authorization Act or the NDAA. This week, Leader Schumer and I will again offer this vital legislation as an amendment to this year's NDAA, and we hope to finally bring it over the finish line.

Now, during my 11 years as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and over the last two and a half years as a member for the Select Committee on Intelligence, I've become increasingly aware of silos that adversely affect information, information sharing, coordinated action, and as a result, good national security policy suffers. These silos do not only exist between national security agencies and between elements of the intelligence community. They also exist between congressional committees with jurisdiction for national security. As one of the few members of the Senate who sits on both the armed services and intelligence committees, I am concerned about the silo between these two committees, which can create all kinds of problems.

One of these is preventing proper congressional oversight of UAP initiatives. I will continue to work with my colleagues to overcome this interagency and intercommittee issue that can really get in the way of proper UAP oversight. One aspect of required congressional oversight is making sure that we are taking a science-driven approach to UAPs. We need to make that an executive branch priority as well. Now, I will close this discussion of the UAP Disclosure Act. I want to talk about it for just a little bit. The measure is directly modeled on the legislation Congress passed in the 1990,

to set up a process to declassify and release the records in the federal government's possession relating to the Kennedy assassination. Thirty years later, some records are still withheld, but overall, the process has been deemed successful. While the measure was included in the Senate-passed NDAA in 2024, it was unfortunately dropped from the final version of the bill that was negotiated with the House who opposed, our amendment. We were able to establish a UAP record collection in the National Archives

where all records from all parts of the federal government are to be retained. However, we dropped the creation of a records review board composed of eminent experts, eminent expert citizens with clearances nominated by the president and Senate confirmed. This board would have overseen the record review in D-Class process to include identification of any conscious effort by an administration to withhold appropriate information from Congress or the public. I look forward to continuing work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to make the review board a provision of law. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to remember that UAP transparency is a marathon and not a sprint. It's a

It took many decades to result in the status quo of over-classification, and it will likely take time to find the right balance between protecting our national security and giving the public information which they have a right to know. Once again, thank you for being here today, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. We hope you have an excellent discussion for the rest of the day and enjoy your lunch. Thank you. Thank you very long.

So just so everyone knows, we're going to reconvene at 1 p.m. I should have said 1250, but sorry, let me put it this way. The science panel will begin at 1 p.m. So please be back prior to that. We are starting promptly at 1 p.m. Thank you. So our next panel is on science and investigation from anecdote to instrument data. moderating this panel is Kristen Fisher, Emmy Award-winning space journalist, founder of the Endless Void Studios, former Space and Defense correspondent for CNN. We also have Hal Putoff, President CEO, EarthTech International, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, advisory board member of the Disclosure Foundation. And then Professor Avi Loeb, he's the Frank Bair Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He's an advisory board member of the Disclosure Foundation as well.

And we are delighted to have you all today. Kristen, thank you so much for agreeing to moderate this panel, and I hand things over to you. Oh, and everyone, please push the button to talk, and we have gotten some polite feedback online that it's been difficult for people to hear. So please lean in and speak directly into the mic. Thank you.

We can figure this out, right? There we go. Jordan, thank you so much for having me. I am truly honored to moderate this panel with two such distinguished panelists. And Jordan, and the whole Disclosure Foundation, I mean, you guys did a fantastic job of picking panelists that are incredibly timely and relevant because Professor Loeb over here just two weeks ago was named to the government's new UAP Science Advisory Council. And Avi, I understand that you have a brief presentation that you want to give. So why don't you go ahead, get behind the podium. What do you say?

About five minutes? Can we get through it in five minutes? Okay. If you go a little over, that's all right. Okay, take it away, Avi. And then we'll get into the Q&A. So I'll just say a few general words. So let me start with the executive summary.

It's all about evidence. If you AP are real objects, we should be able to figure them out with better data. And that's what we should do. Now how often does the Director of National Intelligence, the White House, the FBI, the intelligence community, ask scientists to help them? very often and they sort of approached me to establish this science council for the science of unidentified anomalous phenomena presumably because they cannot figure out what these objects are and as of a couple of days ago we submitted a request for more than

50 items of information that we would like to get from those organizations and hopefully they'll deliver, because the quality of the work of this Council depends on the data that is shared with us. We will make the best lemonade of the lemons that we get. And the cooperation with the government is quite remarkable, and I think now we can work together. And that's thanks to President Trump's directive. And one thing that has to be made clear is that science is not about finding signals, as much as it sounds like what everyone is looking for. It's about distinguishing signals from noise.

There are lots of sources for noise. And we need to make sure that these objects, first of all, are real, and secondly, cannot be explained away by... known phenomena. And there are two possibilities. If these objects are technological, either they are human-made or not human-made. These are the two possibilities.

If you take the down-to-earth approach and say they are human-made, that's a serious matter, because we're dealing with objects that we don't understand and potentially are made by adversarialism. nations. So this subject needs to get a higher priority by the government. We have to figure out what these objects are. We shut down the Chinese spy balloon. There may be many drones produced by adversarial nations spying on the U.S. on strategic assets. And in that case, we are dealing with a serious matter. So definitely more research, better sensors, better AI software

to figure these things out, need to be employed, and the US government needs to pay a lot of attention to that. And I don't feel that my time as a scientist will be wasted, because in the very list, we will help the Pentagon accomplish their mission, right? So, and once we have good enough data, it will become clear whether we're dealing with human-made objects or not human-made objects.

This is not a philosophical question. it's not a religious question it's a question that can be addressed with state-of-the-art sensors and analysis tools and I should say that a lot of people are upset because the government didn't deliver information in the past

but if you look closely at history bureaucrats never get punished for cosmic mistake when the Vatican admitted in 1992 that Galileo Galileo was right, nobody requested to put the Pope in jail or any other bureaucrat in the Vatican because they lied to the public for centuries, and they did it knowingly.

And not only that, when they had a whistleblower saying, it looks like the earth is moving around the sun. They put him in house arrest. Today they would have cancelled him on social media. So what was surprising to me is that on June 12th, that's the day when Stephen Spielberg released his film A Disclosure Day. On the same day, there was a real disclosure by the U.S. government. The most interesting report in that disclosure came from John Koslowski.

Dr. John Koslowski, the director of the All-Domain Anomily Resolution Office, talking about an event that lasted two days in October 23, relatively recently, and 40% of the phenomena in that event were not resolved. And so, you know, there are two basic questions. One is, is there a there there? Okay. Is there something really that we are not understanding? And the answer I think is yes, because apparently the Pentagon cannot figure it out,

and they are sure that it's real. And if so, what is it? Is it human-made or not human-made? And the most important thing, I think, is that we should keep our eyes on the orbs, not on the audience. What do I mean by the audience? I mean social media where people express opinions, they tell stories, they are 100% confident of one interpretation or another. These are the people on the bench. But the people in the field need to collect data and evidence so that it will

become clear. And the people in the field need to put their eyes on the orbs. Study them, figure them out, come back with answers. The council that I'm leading will look at unclassified data. We will do transparent work. We will share our findings with the public because everyone deserves to know whether we are alone or not. Because if we have a neighbor, we should know about it. There is no point in hiding it.

And there is no point denying it. The neighbor will not go away for the same reason that the Earth moved around the Sun 4.5 billion times before the Vatican even existed. And by the way, the Earth did not exist in the first two-thirds of cosmic history, so it was ridiculous to even think that the Earth is at the center because it didn't exist throughout most of cosmic history. So if we have a neighbor, it will not depend on what people say on social media. And for us to find it, we need to collect data,

analyze it so that everyone will be on the same page. And that's the goal of this council. So I'll just say a few brief words about, obviously the context is Enrico's Fermi's question. Where is everybody? And the possible answer is right here. He just didn't use instruments. And potentially, if we are dealing with phenomenon,

that we are not familiar with. It may be in new physics. We will talk about that. But you have to appreciate that whenever new physics was found, it was not a violation of the physics that we know. When Einstein came up with theory of gravity, he didn't say Newton was wrong.

Newton's gravity applies to particular circumstances, and in those circumstances, he was entirely right. and Einstein just extended the theory of gravity to other circumstances. So when people say, oh, the speed of light is not a limit, or there are wormholes or extra dimensions, these are things we don't know about, or we can go back in time or all kinds of ideas that people bring.

We cannot go against the known laws of physics. We can just add additional phenomena that we are not familiar with. So that's important to keep in mind. I mean, Stephen Spielberg has the artistic freedom to give red meat to the audience by imagining things. That's completely legitimate for him to have a nice movie. But in reality, and by the way, reality is more imaginative than scriptwriters in Hollywood. And the testimony to that is that when I met Stephen Spielberg a decade ago, he said, Avi, when you find evidence for aliens, let me be the first to know.

about it because he appreciates reality is more interesting than science fiction. And so the hope of the council is, and we have altogether 15 members by now, is to ask the government for more data, more information, encourage them to release things that we know about that were not released so far and as I mentioned we submitted a request for that matter of more than 50 items and We have expertise in physics within this council in physics Oceanography Material science but also psychology because we're dealing with humans interacting with the phenomena and There is also an aspect of communication

it to the public. So we have an exceptional team. I'm really, I feel grateful to all the members that work together as a team and my hope. I mean, the real test whether, you know, we are doing our job, is that we will come up with a clear understanding of UAP, So everyone would know what we are talking about. It will not be a speculative notion that would be clear-cut evidence and we'll be able to move forward.

And as I said, if it turns out to be that all technological objects are human-made, so be it. But we improved national security in the process of figuring them out. Because right now, if these are human-made, then definitely someone else is. getting information on strategic assets within the US that we are not aware of. And so my hope is that thanks to the advice we provide to the US government, we work together, that we'll get to a better understanding of this phenomena.

And of course, the cream on top will be the biggest scientific discovery ever made if we end up finding even one object out of a million. because it's a mixed bag. It's surely a mixed bag. But even if one in a million happens to be not human made, it will bring humanity to a better place and will change the way we think about our future because I think one thing that is missing right now

is a sense of humility. and if we realize that there is a smarter kid on the block that we are not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking, we will recalculate our place in the universe. And of course the other thing it will do is to educate us about new science, new technology, and encourage us to explore space, change our priorities instead of engaging in conflicts worldwide, and I'm sure that many of you are frustrated

with everything happening around the world. Perhaps such a knock on the door by a neighbor will bring humanity to its senses because we will realize that there is much more real estate out there and that the universe is much larger than the small rock that we were born on. And going to another rock is not, very visionary, just going to Mars or the moon because they happen to be nearby. That's not

the real vision that we can pursue as the human species. It's actually becoming interstellar. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you very much, Professor Loeb. Let's kick this panel off by asking, you know, Avi, you're the chairman of this new UAP council. Why not have somebody like Dr. Hal put off on it? The first group of people that I thought about is actually a few young nerds. Some young nerds. And the reason is I would like to hear the views of people without any baggage, without any knowledge of history. But also these young people, young nerds, you know how to use the latest tools of age, and they are very technological savvy.

So that was, in terms of the composition of the team, that was my first priority to get a few of those. And then people with different expertise, we also needed a communication officer, we needed the people with expertise in physics, but I tried to get people who do not have a clear absolute opinion about the nature of UAP. And my hope is that this will bring us to a clear understanding.

I even selected a skeptic that I completely disagree with, and I have a bet that by 2030, we will know about artifacts that are extraterrestrial in origin, and I have a bet with that skeptic. And the reason I brought him in is because if he ends up being convinced, that I'm right, that will demonstrate that we have evidence beyond any reasonable doubt. And that's the best approach. It's not very common these days to bring people with different opinions to the same panel, but I thought it's really essential to have someone like that, because it will also cultivate recognition from the community of skeptics.

And all together, I think it's just like a detective's just like a detective's. just like a detective story, we just have to figure it out. But I didn't go for the historic figures that established the field, like HAL, who deserves a lot of credit for bringing this forward. And just because I want to have completely fresh approach, exactly. So Hal, do you take any offense to not being one of Avi's young nerds? You already, according to Avi, formed an opinion on the topic. So what is your opinion, if you can just state it plainly for everybody in the room?

And what advice do you have for Avi as he forms this new council? Well, first of all, I totally am behind exactly the approach that Avi is taking. Data, data, data, analyze, analyze, analyze. fresh minds brought to the issue that don't have the long history that I happen to have being involved in the issue. So I think the setup of that organization and with Abbey's leadership of it is exactly what the field needs at this point. Now, of course, I come having been a chief science advisor for the DIA's OSAP program, working in highly classified levels. You know, I come in with a wholly different viewpoint.

And actually there's a specific issue I want to raise that I'm sure that he and his panel will address, and that is as those of us on the OSCEP program for DIA interacted with various organizations, defense intelligence organizations, also aerospace contractors and so on. What we found was that what was killing this area and preventing things from moving forward

was the unbelievable amount of stovepiping and fiefdoms and lack of cross-correlation. So you'd have people sitting at desks in some of these aerospace corporations who couldn't even talk to the person in the next desk about what they were doing. Well, I have what I consider the best example of all, and that is Edward Teller, who was father of the H-bomb. He was part of the Manhattan Project, of course,

and you would think, well, if anyone were really into security, it would be Edward Teller. But after that program became revealed and so on, he gave a speech. And in his speech, he said, you know, we had the maximum security you could possibly have the maximum kind of stovepiping and fiefdoms and separations in the Manhattan Project, and we worked our way toward the atomic bomb. But basically, Russia worked its way up the ladder at about the same rate we did.

On the other hand, in electronics and circuitry, and that kind of stuff, we didn't classify anything. And we took off like a rocket and left Russia in the dust. So in fact, the truth of the matter is even if you're worried about security, I think we have a better chance at dealing with the security that we do need to be conscious of by having much more cross-correlation. And so that's a big reason that I'm basically involved in the whole idea disclosure. And I know that from having talked to people in various spots, my God, if only those two people would talk together, you know, we would move ahead a lot faster. So that's, so the idea of having transparency and a lot of people working together and sharing ideas and so on, even from

the standpoint of national security, that's going to be tantamount if we're, if we're going to move forward. Now, unfortunately, from our standpoint, our American standpoint, are two big potential adversaries, who are the Chinese and the Russians, they don't have that problem. They just take their thousand engineers or whatever, throw them in a big camp and say, okay, figure this out. So the chances of harming our security by having such compartmentalization is actually something that I'm very concerned about. So anything that opens up this area, gets more cross-correlation, I think is unbelievably significant. So you started by talking about data, data, data, and that's what this panel is all about

science and data. Not the sexiest title on surface level, but as everybody in this room knows, it's absolutely critical to get this topic from just being anecdote into potentially proving some of the things that many of the people in this room have been talking about. and I love that we have the two of you up here because the two of you approach UAPs and this phenomena from two very different data sets. You have Avi, who of course works with or works from publicly observable data with the Galileo project, and then Hal, of course, has decades of access to classified data.

And so Hal I'm wondering if you can explain what do you think is the single most important category of classified data that scientists like Avi still don't have access to. Well, as a physicist and the scientists, of course, and I'm in my own little stove pipe here, but anyway, when we got together several of the scientists that tried to figure out what could we discern about the technology. Well, we looked at all kinds of different kinds of things, you know, negative matter, you know, whatever. But basically our efforts came down to kind of a certain area, which is basically engineering general relativity. You know, all of our electronics that we're using in this room and so on,

they're all products of Maxwell's equations from the 1800s. Okay. Now it turns out that when we get all, collect all the data about what the observations are for you, AP, phenomena, it generally falls into a category that it looks like that Einstein's equations in general relativity have been engineered. Because if you make a list, in fact, I did it myself, I took a piece of paper and I said, okay, I'm going to make a list on this side of the most weird things that have been reported about UAP phenomena. And for me, for my reasons, the weirder, the better, because if somebody's making up a BS story, they want it to sound reasonable. So when they say, well, I got close to the craft and it changes its size or whatever.

Okay, I like that kind of data. And then we come over and look at general relativity equations and we say, well, if I could engineer general relativity, what would I expect to see? And it turns out that we found in our investigations that they seem to match up pretty well. So we have this hypothesis that spacetime metric, as we call it, and the properties of space-time are being engineered. So unfortunately, so, okay, well, if we understand that, you know, we have our pilots telling us, oh my God, this stuff is way beyond our physics.

Of course, to a physics nerd like myself, it's not beyond our physics, if it's alive, it's physics. But we figured, okay, we understand the physics. The problem is we can't do the engineering. We don't know how to do the engineering. So anyway, but as a result of all those kind of studies, we have a long list of things that should be pursued in the academic approach. That is, we have aspects of what's observed, for example, when people get kind of close

to a UAP, they can get radiation sunburn, they get a little too close, they get a soft x-ray and even developed cameras. and so on. Okay, well, all that correlates with the idea that for whatever reason, when these craft manipulate space and time, they happen to get a blue shift in frequency, as we say. The frequencies go up. Okay, so, well, that sets up a scientific, that's now a hypothesis, but what abelobes people could do, for example, is, okay, let's build some cameras. as they go out and look at the black body spectrum of the heat and see if that spectrum has been shifted up into the blue and the soft x-rays and so on. So we have a whole list of things

that we can pass on, but somebody has to come up with funding to examine the physics of it. And so that's exactly how I think that some of the observations in the classified programs that are just sitting idle on pieces of paper, even though the correlation looks pretty good, we need to pass that on to the academic community where people can say, okay, well, I'll grab this element of it, and I can set up a certain kind of experiment to investigate it. So that's the big thing we need to do now, and that's why those of us who have been involved inside the program are fighting so hard to push things out. And the truth of the matter is, fortunately, up till now, the people in the legacy program, so-called, have felt that they did not have the permission to be pushing things forward because they want answers too, of course.

But now that we have this new approach coming out of the White House, people behind the scenes who've always wanted to get more data out are now feel energized that they can do that. And it's not going to ruin their careers or whatever. So I think that thinking of the panel this morning as well as it just, just going to rise up and then kind of fade away. I think this time it's not going to fade away, because there are enough people on both sides

of the dividing line who actually want to move forward. And now that we have a council like this, that Avilaub is heading up with a lot of young nerds ready to attack the physics, we can give them a whole list of things that could be done that we think would probably be fruitful. So I see a great collaboration between the academic community and those that have been involved behind the scenes.

So hopefully over the next few days, weeks, months, more of that information from legacy programs, classified information, things that you know will be making its way to Avi and the council. But, you know, Avi, you've been a big proponent of open source data for a long time. Of course, classified data is important, but do you believe that there is stuff that the open source data can tell us that the classified information cannot? Definitely, because when data is open source, it allows a lot of people to think about it. And it's not just about a phenomena that is being described.

Let's say, you say, well, it may be explained as a distortion of space time. No, it's not about that, because if it's a distortion of space time, even if you imagine faster than light Al-Qabir drive moving through the atmosphere, it will generate a blast wave in the atmosphere. You can solve Einstein's equations in the presence of the atmosphere, and the fact that you distorted space-time will move the atmosphere around in such ways that there will be a fireball and you would see the fireball. If you don't see the fireball, it's something else.

And so what the scientific engagement in an open-source environment implies is that we can look for new signatures that will clarify to us what's going on. It's just like a detective going to a crime scene and trying to figure out what really happened. And we know, by the way, that in the courtroom, in the legal system, there were people testifying under oath, just like David Grush, under oath that someone has to die because they committed a crime. And then when DNA tests came to the forefront, these people were exonerated.

We are trying to look for the DNA test of the nature of UAPs. It may not be what people are talking about even if they testify under oath. The way to figure out what really happened or what really happens is by collecting high-quality data, asking additional questions

that will bring us closer to the truth. And as I said before, we should be brave. We should not always say, I believe it's this, and I don't want to hear more about it. Because if it turns out not to be this, but something else, even if it turns out that these orbs are human-made by another nation, I would not feel that my time is wasted because I was helping the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, the White House, recognize a national security threat

that they were blind to. And if they recognize it as an important task for me to help them with, we can figure it out. And if they put resources that will allow us to figure it out, just for the sake of national security, this is a down-to-earth, very realistic approach.

If they are recognizing this it's worth pursuing research, then if there is something that is not human, we will see it. It will be obvious. It will not be a matter of people arguing or commenting about on social media. It's not up to those opinions. It's up to what the evidence will guide us to. And so, you know, it's really straightforward. We just need better evidence so that we can figure out what we're dealing with.

And what would be sort of the Holy Grail evidence? Oh. What is the, what would make you go from, I don't know, to, oh, this is definitely not. Okay, so it depends what we're dealing with, but imagine that we are visited by some non-human-made technologies. Then I want to see a high-resolution image of it, maybe from a satellite, because they can resolve a few inches on the ground, right? and I want to see some materials. I can easily tell you if someone gives me more than about a tenth of a gram of material, I can easily tell you if it came from outside the solar system.

And when people talk about biological materials being in crash sites, first I should point out that it doesn't need to be biology as we know it, because it could be synthetic biology. We're all familiar with AI being the next frontier in making systems that are more capable than the human brain, but in fact, the human brain operates on 20 watts, whereas these AI systems require gigawatts. And the biggest advance that humanity will make in the future is not AI made of silicon chips. It's actually creating something like the human brain that is based on chemistry.

So when I was asked by a student in France a week ago, he said, oh, we haven't seen self-replicating probes visit us here on Earth. That means that there is no other civilization more advanced than ours, because self-replicating probes can fill up the Milky Way galaxy. And I said, That's not true. I interact with intelligent self-replicating probes every day. They are called humans. And ultimately, out of synthetic biology, we might construct a thinking machine that is more capable than the human brain, and that would be the ultimate. So if we are visited by someone who had more than a hundred years since the discovery of quantum mechanics,

let's say a thousand years, a million years, a billion years, it's possible that they sent us or ambassadors that are made of synthetic biology, and that's what we might find. It need not be robots with AI made of silicon chips. We only have about 10 minutes left, so I want to make sure we get into some other topics before we run out of time. I'd like to start by asking you, Hal, to just talk a little bit about your evolution on the disclosure topic, because correct me if I'm wrong here, but at one point you recommended against disclosure.

Now you are for it, I believe, to a certain extent, without compromising national security. Do I have that right? And if so, what exactly changed your mind? Well, that is correct. I was part of a panel three or four decades ago, actually. And I was called in to be participated in this panel. And there were a lot of people from intelligence agencies and the military and so on.

And we didn't know why this panel was being formed. We just said, we had to come. And I said, I don't have enough time to do this. And no, no, it'll be the most important panel you've ever been on. OK, fine, fine. So in fact, when I showed up, they said, OK, here's the issue. United States, Russia, and China

have evidence of non-human intelligence technologies. and we're thinking about presenting this to the general public. So what we need to do in this panel is to figure out what would be the consequences of that for the general public. Well, we all initially started out saying, oh my God, this is just really going to be great. And so we made a long list. Actually, ended up we had something like 60 items on the list.

Okay, it could affect the stock market, It could affect religious thought. It could affect, you know, whatever. And when we got down into the weeds, the time we get down into the weeds, we're saying, okay, Corporation A was given materials by the government, but Corporation B wasn't. So they're going to sue the government and sue the corporations because they were left out of the loop and so on.

So anyway, we added up a bunch of numbers for all the different 60 element items. And we all came up with negative numbers. And so we decided in that panel, you know, that this just isn't going to work. Part of it being that there's no way to deal with it piece by piece, you'd have to announce all of it and handle everything at the same time and realize that that was going to be an impossible task. But as time has gone on and just seeing how thought has changed and seeing how our technologies have changed and so on,

I just, my viewpoint slowly changed and viewpoints of other people in the panel changed as well. You say it slowly changed, but was there a moment? Was there a specific moment where, or something that happened that made you think, I'm now for disclosure to the American public, to the world? The specific moment would be being exposed to what the apparent reality was, that there really is something. going on that most human don't know about, and just recognizing that that's wrong. And how much of that reality have you been able to share publicly? Very little of it. And what would happen if you were to share some of that with just us in this room right here?

I could worry about going to jail. I mean, what we need to do is we need to restructure our process, which thank God for Chris Mellon and Lou Elizondo and others, we are doing that. That's what we need to do so that it becomes safe for, quote, potential whistleblowers to come forth and say more. That's what it's going to take. But that is what I think is the next giant step. And fortunately, I see a panel like this that Jordan Flowers has put together.

It's just exactly what we need to move the ball over the gold line to where this isn't going to go back into the ether. Avi, what are you thinking over there when you hear Hal talking about non-human intelligence over here and all that he's seen? We don't need the U.S. government to tell us what's in the sky. We can just look up. And so that's why I have been leading the Galileo project for the past four years, and we have three observatories.

We are monitoring millions of objects and using triangulation to figure out their distance so that we can tell if they are lying outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies. So my point is, just like in the story with Galileo and Copernicus, eventually the truth comes out. Someone builds a spacecraft that looks at the earth and sees, that the Earth moves around the sun and not the other way around. So the government cannot hold the cosmic secret if so. And the reason I'm engaged with government right now

is because of the potential that we're dealing with adversarial nations. So it's really the government business to make sure that we're not being spied on. You know, there aren't a thousand drones for every Chinese spy balloon that is being shut down. So that's a serious matter, and that has to be figured out. But in the process of figuring it out, we might find something that is not human-made. So we should all celebrate this moment where we cooperate, thanks to President Trump's directive,

we cooperate with government agencies and can move forward. And it's really a new time in this context. So rather than be upset about or grudgy about what has, happen in the past. Let's celebrate the future. I think it might be much better. The future, I mean, I'm always an optimist because life is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if you're not an optimist, you will never make the future better than the past. Hal, as Avi goes out and points his instruments up, be it telescopes, all of his sensors, any advice for him on where he should look,

where he should be pointing the telescopes, any clues, any hints that you can give us? I got to try, right? It's easy to say to Avi because he does have an open mind. So in fact, the answers could be practically anywhere. I mean, I've written a paper on ultra-terrestrials. I said, you know, who knows? Maybe there's some ancient civilization hiding in the sea.

bed that, you know, is behind all this. No ETs from outside or whatever. So I think just keeping an open mind to deal with the data is the most important thing. And that's the one thing I know that Avi and his group are going to do. So that's, you know, don't take out any hypothesis. We don't know what the answer is yet. So just let the data lead us to the truth. And that's That's extremely important. I have to emphasize that most of the time in science, you are in a situation of uncertainty. What you find in textbooks are rare moments

where people really converge on the answer, but most of the time in science, things are uncertain. And as much as it sounds like an open mind is easy, it's not easy at all. I get attacked from all directions. There are lots of errors send in my direction because people have their own opinions and they want me to comply with their opinions.

But sorry, the only thing I'm willing to comply with is evidence. Absolutely. I got time for one more question. And since we are on Capitol Hill, what better time to talk about funding, right? Because none of this happens without money. And so Avi, the Galileo project is mostly funded by private donations, how most of your research has been funded by,

defense and intelligence budgets over the years. The best of my knowledge, none of your major UAP efforts have been funded by entities like the National Science Foundation. So what is it going to take to get some of those grant dollars, I believe it's $9 billion a year in grants from the National Science Foundation. What is it going to take to get some of that money into the hands of what you all are doing? Well, that's relatively straightforward. Currently, the astronomy community is obsessed with looking for microbes and willing to put more than $10 billion to the search for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

And I say that when you go on a blind date, you better aim high, not low. You better look for someone who is more intelligent than you are, for the most mediocre dating partner that you can find easily on the first date. But, so it's just a question of perspective. If the astronomy community were to decide or to agree that we should allocate similar budgets to the search for mediocre dating partners in the form of microbes as to someone, a partner that is more intelligent than we are. And by the way, going for more intelligent makes a lot of sense because

the public cares so much about it, and also it will bring us to a better play. It will have a huge impact on humanity, so you multiply a small probability times a huge impact, you realize this is something we should pursue. But right now there is no funding. The other approach that I took was to have a public bet with Elon Musk. I said, I'm willing to put 1% of my net worth against 1% of his network,

which is now more than a trillion dollars. And we will check whether you, Elon Musk, were the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. So far, he didn't take the bet, but I'm completely open to that. And that's another source of funding that we could tap. I love that idea. Elon, are you listening? Another thing I would like to say in response to your question is that, in fact,

there is some motion going forward. When Anna Brady was in charge of programs at the National Science Foundation, she arranged for me and Charles Chase and from Lockheed and so on to go in and talk to NSF leaders about how they should be more open to funding technologies

that would be associated with the UAP area. And we've got a very positive response. So there are people out there that are pushing the straw in the right direction. Well, Hal, Avi, we could go on all afternoon, but I think Jordan will kill us. So thank you all so much for being here. Avi, Hal, thank you so much for your time and expertise.

It's truly been a pleasure. Thank you. Okay. So my notes are young nerds are getting mediocre dating partners. Did everybody catch that? Just kidding. Thank you so much. That was an awesome conversation. So the next talk that we have, there's a lot of discussion about what are the religious implications of disclosure? And joining us here today to discuss that is Dr. Carlos Ayer, PhD of religion at Yale University, the T. Lawrence

and Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale, I should say. And we're really excited to learn about his perspective. And when I reached out to Carlos and talked about the potential here, and we expressed our mutual affection for Jeffrey Criple as a person and for his work, and that we realized that we also live about a mile from each other. And Carlos, I promise you are still invited for Taco Tuesday at the Flowers household. So please welcome Dr. Carlos Air. Thank you, Jordan.

And thank you to the Disclosure Foundation for being so brave as to invite a humanities scholar to deal with this topic. And this is my first venture into this subject. So I'll begin with a quote from Diana Pesolka in her book, American Cosmic, where she relates how she, Also, as a scholar of religious studies, went in search of evidence for downed alien aircraft. And she says, in one sense, I feel as if I have been studying this phenomenon my whole life, but I didn't call it UFO research. I called it religious studies. And of course, religion, all religions.

No, I shouldn't say all. I should be more careful. I'll say 98% of all religions are all about encounters with non-human intelligence. And that is the foundation of religion, that there is more than is here. There are other beings and so on. But I also have a quote from Jeff Kripple at Rice University from a paper he gave a couple of years ago, titled Biological Gods. And I'd like to celebrate once again the bravery of the disclosure foundation of having me here as a speaker. Jeff says that he's reporting about his own experiences as a scholar.

Of all the secret military projects and official committees formed, both in the U.S. and in Europe, of which I am aware, not one of them has ever thought to hire a humanist, a historian or an anthropologist, much less a scholar of religion, to study the baffling phenomenon. Not one. Why? Well, and how did I get here? How did I get here? My entire career has been devoted to studying in one way or another

how humans in a very specific time period in Western Europe interpreted the relationship between the material dimension and the spiritual dimension. So, after four decades, of being very careful. I decided to publish a book on truly impossible miracles,

miracles associated with mystical ecstasy, but one might call the physical phenomena of mysticism, two miracles in particular, which are deemed impossible. Levitation, that is hovering, defying the laws of gravity, or in some cases actually going from point A to point B through the air, and the other being by location, being seen in two places simultaneously. So my book, They Flew is the title. Subtitle is A History of the Impossible. My book was dismissed as deeply unsurious by a review. you are in the New York Review of Books, deeply unsurious. Yet, that very same year that the

review appeared, I received an award from the American Academy of Religion for the best book in the history of religion for that year. So something is amiss, something is weird. Yes, it's a weird subject. So, just like you WAP's, UFOs, levitation and bilocation are deemed impossible by dogmatic materialists and also by our dominant culture here in the Western. Yet, there are, in my time period, which is about 1,400 to 1700, there are hundreds, and in some cases if you add them all up thousands of testimonies of people who swear that they have seen someone up in the air or they have seen someone here who was actually there. And in my case, I was very lucky because in my time period, everything changed around mid-16th century in the reporting of miracles, which is,

The Catholic Church set up a system for investigating the truth or falsehood of miracle claims. And beatification inquests and canonization inquests had a questionnaire for every so-called eyewitness. And the questionnaire had a section on miracles. And everyone who testified in one of these inquests swore, as we do, in courts of law to this day to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. But the difference that made this testimony special is that every eyewitness had to swear under oath that they were telling the truth. And the penalty was not some time behind bars or some fine. The penalty was hell or a long stint in purgatory. And most of the

these eyewitnesses, the vast majority of them, believed in hell and purgatory. So I have a little kind of buffer there as a historian. What makes this testimony credible? And actually on the flip side of the coin, over on the Protestant side during this period, Protestants denied that God was behind all these miracles. But Protestants, as a rule, continued to believe that these Miracles actually did happen, except what they believed was that they were caused by the devil. So, another testimony that I found very compelling and very hard to dismiss as a historian was 1693 Boston, just after the Salem witch trials. A teenage girl is considered to be possessed by the devil.

and she levitates. And great Puritan, theologian, and churchman, Cotton Mather, gathers several men in the room with this girl, and just like Linda Blair in the first Exorcist film, up she goes above the bed. But Mather tells his men to hold her down or pull her down, and they can't. And he makes them all sign,

legal affidavits. And we have them. So it's a little harder to dismiss that than somebody writing the life of a saint where they want to portray them as a saint who might be making things up. So anyway, arguing that this testimony is difficult to dismiss, I don't argue in my book that I'm convinced. I just say these are things that are hard to dismiss and we should be a little more open-minded, the book comes out and all of a sudden I find myself on the paranormal spectrum. And I'm interviewed by podcasters and all other sorts of public persona who deal with the paranormal, which includes, of course, UAPs, UFOs, and HIs. And there I am. So this is why a historian of late medieval and early modern religious history is here speaking to you.

But I'm not here as an expert on encounters with UAPs or NHIs or retrieved extraterrestrial stuff, be it biological or non-biological or synthetic. I really have no clue what to make of the evidence in recent disclosure dumps or about the testimonies of experiencers. And I'll come back to that term, experiencer. As far as I can tell, my own take on what is out there is shaped by my study of religion and of miracle accounts. And when all is said and done, I am more convinced by the opinion voiced by

astronomer Alan Heineck and also in charge of Project Blue Book. He made this statement in 1982. And Jacques Ballet and others make similar statements. And I'm quoting from Heineck, I would not be prepared to defend the thesis that UFOs represent visitors from outer space. Indeed, I think the answer may be even more interesting than that.

I think the answer will be very exotic beyond our imagination, possibly something that we should call paranormal. So here I am. And here's what I'm going to do over the next 15 to 20 minutes. Divide my talk into three areas. The first is the background to the fear that full disclosure of the existence of extraterrestrial non-human intelligences. The fear that it will cause widespread panic, the end of Western civilization, the end of religion. The second part will be a brief history of religious beliefs concerning non-human intelligence and extraterrestrial beings.

And the third will be an exploration of the subject of why we really need to get over such fears. And the fear of making full disclosure. So the first point, the background to the fear. If we do have undeniable evidence of visitation by non-human intelligences, the world will be shocked for sure. It will be a major rupture in our understanding of reality. A rupture, as I'm using it, is a deep break with past worldviews and a deeper break than a paradigm shift. Paradigmuchus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and others brought about paradigm shifts. A full revelation that we are actually not alone will be much, much bigger.

And it will affect the whole world. Paradigm shifts in science take root gradually. And they begin taking root with scientists, and then eventually it comes out. It might take a while. Full disclosure of the existence of non-human intelligence that have been visiting us who might have craft, that will create a rupture globally, regardless of where you live on Earth.

Well, except for maybe that island can't be visited because the people who've been living there kill anyone who approaches their shores. Maybe there they won't be affected. So, as far as far as, As far as religion is concerned, the impact will be unpredictable. Religion is unpredictable. Religion is all about disagreements.

Social scientists began to argue in the early part of the 20th century that religion, especially symbols and rituals, were social glue. Something that held secular culture together. But it's also true that religion can be social dynamite. Disagreements are the stuff of religion. So how can one predict what effect will this disclosure have? We don't know. I am reminded of a joke I heard a long time ago in reference to only one religion, but it applies to all religions. Someone is marooned on a deserted island for 30 years. At the end of the 30 years, the rescuers show up, and there are

astonished, defined, two equally elaborate houses of worship on the island, while the castaway lives in a very crude hut. So they ask, what's going on? Why these two houses of worship? And he wheels around and points with utter disgust at one of them and says, you don't think I would set foot in that one, do you? So who knows what will happen? But most religions, are all about belief in non-human intelligences. So religion could be argued, at least some believers, might actually lessen the shock of full disclosure.

So what about religions? I'll go through them quickly, and I will begin with Western religions because this is our dominant culture still in this country, and also in other parts of the world. In Judaism, in Christianity, and in Islam, the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions, belief is shared in non-human intelligent beings.

Angels, demons, gins, or even before the Christian religion took over parts of Europe, leprechauns, duendis, and all other sorts of fauns, all other sorts of non-human intelligences. But Judaism specifically, Genesis 6, 1 to 4, speaks about angels who could mate with humans and create giant hybrids, the Nephilim, whose existence, by the way, was wiped off the earth by the flood. the subject of other planets and extraterrestrial life is not brought up in the Hebrew scriptures. But come down time, 12th century,

some medieval Jewish thinkers such as Moses Maimonides argued that the cosmos is vastly larger and more complex than humanity tends to imagine. And just about the same time, Kabbalistic mystics spoke of multiple worlds and realms of existence. However, these were usually, and are still usually, understood in Kabbalah, as spiritual dimensions rather than physical planets inhabited by biological beings. And to this day, in all the various branches of the Jewish religion,

many contemporary, orthodox conservative, reformed Jewish thinkers, Hold that. Number one, God could create life elsewhere if he wished. Two, that the Torah was given to humanity and does not need to describe every aspect of the universe. And number three, that the existence of extraterrestials would raise interesting theological questions but would not invalidate Jewish belief. Then, moving on down in time, Christian religion. History of Christian thinking about intelligent beings beyond Earth is much older and more diverse than many people assume. There has never been a single official Christian position, and views have ranged from humans are uniquely rational creatures to God may have created many intelligent races throughout the cosmos. But the central issue in the Christian religion has been and remains. Salvation by Jesus Christ.

If there are other beings, how do they relate to this? How does salvation relate to other beings? It has never, not even into the 20th century, the existence of inhabited worlds beyond earth has never been. a major theological question in the Christian religion. But as I said before, Christians have believed in angels and demons. In the early centuries of the Christian religion, one thinker, origin of Alexandria,

developed a highly speculative Christian cosmology. And among other things, origin said that God created a vast spiritual order populated by rational beings and that angels, humans, and demons were all part of a larger family of rational creatures and that the material world served as a setting for the education and restoration of these rational beings. Origin is credited with coming up with the method, the interpretation of scripture carried out by Christians from the third century forward, three different levels of meaning. So he's very important for that reason. But some of his

teachings were condemned as heretical, including this one I just mentioned, that there might be other worlds with other creatures. Very complex thinker, who was once described in the 13th century by a churchman in Constantinople in the following way. Where origin was good, no one was better. Where origin was bad, no one has been worse. So again, we were facing this complexity. My favorite quote on this topic from origin is the following, and it concerns the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. And I quote, the altar was at Jerusalem,

but the blood of the victim bathed the universe. Universal cosmic application of this. Of course, there are disagreements. Throughout the Middle Ages,

various Christian theologians took up the issue of why, not why, but could, other planets exist, other worlds with intelligent life. The debate went something like this. Well, if God is omnipotent, of course he has the power to create as many worlds as he wants and as many different kinds of beings as he wants. And in scholastic theology, which was all about debating and disagreement, of course

there was disagreement on this issue. there was never any kind of final answer to the question, are there other human, not human beings, but non-human intelligence is out there. It's not until the early modern period, 15th through 17th centuries, when the discovery is made that the earth is not the center of the universe, that theological discussion changes.

Figures such as Caperthicus and Galilee, transformed Christian understandings of the cosmos. And among early thinkers that pop up during this period who argue for the existence of other worlds is a Dominican friar

Giordano Bruno who ended up being burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome. For many issues, not just this one, But Bruno is among the first early modern thinkers to argue that the universe is infinite and that therefore there must be life, intelligent life elsewhere.

And I quote from Giordano Bruno, God is infinite, so his universe must be two. Thus the greatness of God is magnified, the greatness of his kingdom made manifest. He is glorified not in one but in countless sons, not in a single earth, but in a thousand, I say, no, an infinity of worlds. After Bruno, others began to pop up with more regularity in the 18th century. The Enlightenment changes everything. Belief in inhabited planets became increasingly common among educated Europeans in the 1700s.

Writers and theologians often assumed that a creator who made a vast universe would populate it with intelligent life. And among these was a Lutheran scientist, Emmanuel Swedenborg, 18th century, who believed that countless worlds were inhabited and contributed to the fullness of heaven, and that in the spiritual world, distance was determined by states of mind and spirit rather than physical space.

And he received visitors from Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and the moon, which of course now makes him seem very silly by our current knowledge. But he had an impact and others followed. And it all speeds up in the 19th century and it speeds up even more in the 20th century. notable Christian thinkers in the 20th century who took up the issue or the question of whether there are other intelligent beings out there with C.S. Lewis, Catholic theologian Karl Ronner, and Protestant theologian Wolf Panenberg. What about contemporary Christian views? Well, I've already read at least a dozen articles where some pastor or minister or evangelist, where it says, oh, if there are non-human intelligences and then this becomes known,

many Christians will lose their faith. And it's probably true. Yeah, it is, but not necessarily all Christians. Contemporary Christian views are all over the place, all over the spectrum. But the main question remains for Christians. What is Christ's role? concerning these other beings. So there might be some shock,

but there might also be plenty of acceptance of whatever is revealed. What about Islam? Several Quranic passages have been interpreted by some Muslim scholars as leaving room for life beyond Earth. God is repeatedly described as the Lord of the Worlds, suggesting a cosmos that contains many realms or worlds,

And the Quran also states that God created whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth and that his creative power is not limited to humanity. But of course, it's also the case with every religion. There are different branches of Islam, different opinions on subjects. So the question there, the central question, is the role of the Prophet Muhammad and of his revelation, all these other creatures. So no one knows how that's going to play out. When it comes to Asian religions,

and of course I'm only dealing with major world religions, in which believers are counted in millions or in some cases billions. In Buddhism, early Buddhist texts describe a vast cosmos containing innumerable world systems that include humans, animals, spirits, hell beings, various classes of gods, and powerful celestial beings called Brahmas. So how is that going to play out this full disclosure among Buddhists?

There's no telling. But the shock will not be as deep as it might be in the West. because most contemporary Buddhist thinkers would likely ask not these questions. Do extraterrestials exist? What is their relationship to our relationship? I am. Former a subject of the Soviet empire. I am. But all this lying in high earth does your mind and mind and may.

And in my session, you have all of us. And experiences. And then I saw the link between the Mississippi studying, who are under the disease, and human beings known as experiences, exorgesal, non-human people. Same problem. Belieability.

Belie ability. It's very difficult. One man to make a presentation at this conference in which for 45 minutes he related with us is personal experiences. With various studies of not human health, my first exposure was having personal in people. But let me close with another role. Households over the experience that the experience is first called mistake or the experience. I've been covered another now and I'm only believe. I quote,

so what do you do with something like this and I experienced someone else, so disbanded, with normal life you share with other people, that you can't even figure out how to talk about. I was also having to advance. I'm afraid of something crazy. Try inserting an account of mystical experience in no conversation and you'll likely get the same response as you would

if you invited that you had been in there have been and then I went in with a personal life who was in my class and my assistant for my and my assistants in the class. You know these texts were going to be in every year for people in the world them are paired. They're probably the matter of person who loves to sit an institute in my must.

They see things that others most. The student had already taken two of my courses that she knew me and I knew. She came out after a lecture. And this was a straight-based student. He loved by her faculty and heard who had talked at a university at a university. I see things other people don't see all the time. If she wasn't missing, he used to sit back in the census. mistakes. So the world is old

mysteries. Mistakes are experiences, have other things are experiences, people who see the holes are experiences. The moraineful of the mistakes are impossible. Full disclosure the more beneficial

in my audience. Of course it will be better. Yes, it is possible that this will usher in this disclosure disclosure and the accounts and utterly will be able to be done. I'm going to write the university gathering out of five

at least in the federal psychology at the university of the year and in France so the academic place is a statement and it's a true honor to be able to work with them on the president's directive we know that disclosure is already a number of in the government who have made statements to the public indicating that based on their review of classified data, they believe that non-reduce may be involved in advance that we begin to get ahead about what the possible consequences of that disclosure could be. We also want to think about what is possible preparedness measures that we need to take to society due late. Today, the UAP exposure is about people as much as it is about science. We all want to know when the UAPR, but information at the end of the day is relevant and

messages interpreted through the minds of human being who makes meaning out of this. That's important as what we discover. ...any barriers to the public may be unable to handle the style of destruction. ...did not support that conclusion. Those people will be able to adapt to the fact. closure in terms of interest, outlasts, including the revelation of non-human intelligence. That is, communicated, matters as much as the information itself.

There may find that people adapt best when communication goes trustworthy and the reason for most poorly and they experience more psychological distress, when communication is untrustworthy are managed in such a way that they feel and they are being received. Ultimately, it's going to be determined by institutional choices that have not yet been made. I took their brief overview of the report which should all have a not-so-grade briefing in your folders. I'm the same way interested in the 60-page docking and online on the disclosure by the website. But effectively, the design is laid out to match how a human process of various events. Two, passes through the internal psychological financing.

It is made a very complex level of processing where people have passed through all their lead systems, their body revises, their limitations in terms of of how to detention in the future. Citiably, they are processing in the external environment and factors in the ability to mediate how they are seeing the world. From that, you get a site idea. we get a psychological response, generally behavioral or emotional.

To define the disclosure process, we had to delineate stages. The first stage, different stages have different threshold events, different psychological impact. The first stage, limited disclosure, is the stage that U.S. government is currently engaged in. We know that information is legal needs, the position that the government takes, that you are real and they do not know what they are. There are at least 12 other evidence that have engaged in this type of limit of disclosure because the impact to the public

is generally to raise interest, to ask a question, and to reduce the state fund. However, at the internal societal has the act has been up quite well. The affirmative order disclosure, which is stage number two, would go to the threshold that no other government had found before. This would be where the official government as well as scientists can confer that the EAP are not of human origin

and that they are acting beyond the capability in the human cap. We believe at this stage it would increase the number of questions that people have. It would certainly raise interest. For some people, it may raise anxiety, But generally, unless the UAP are personal relevance to them, or there are some indications that they are actually dangerous and threatening, we don't believe that would have a very significant stage. Number three, which is application disclosure,

is a stage at which the government would actually confirm that there are, in fact, non-human intelligence associated with those UAP. This is a stage that would be unprecedented in human history, This is a stage at which we believe that there would, in fact, be more psychological impact, and we believe that this is actually the stage that we focused our assessment in terms of the response pattern. The next two stages, reconciliation disclosure and full integrated disclosure are obviously quite speculative. We don't have enough data to be able to assess how people respond in those stages, but effectively reconciliation disclosure would really just be people finding out more of the

information, the government releasing more of what has been known, what are the interactions that have taken place over time. Full integrated disclosure would be more as people are adapting to the new information and how that becomes a part of their day-to-day life. The important thing to know here is that the past will not predict the future. Confirmation of non-human intelligence is a threshold event to which there is no historical precedent. The risk is being unprepared for the response surge, which I'll talk about in just a moment. It's also possible that there could be uncontrolled disclosure, and yes, thank you, Mr. Spielberg, for making that point for us. It is possible that there are other countries or third parties that may have

UAP or NHA information, disclosure events as we know are global, and there certainly is an increased potential for negative outcome if this were to occur. So we need to be prepared for uncontrolled data release. The second part of our study looks very in-depth at what are the psychological mechanisms that people engage in as they are processing disclosure information. There's tremendous complexity, certainly an enormous variety of beliefs and cognitive biases. There's also, again, limited amount of resources that people can dedicate to this information based on just general everyday. priorities. The two factors that we know have the most impact are going to be perceived threat and personal relevance. As those go up, obviously those are going to make people have a greater

emotional impact. What we know from the current state in the first stage of disclosure is really that most people do not perceive UAB to be relevant to their daily life. And from survey data, we know that most people also do not perceive them to be threatening. The important takeaway from this section is that interpretation determines outcome, not information. Interpretation without guidance creates confusion, anxiety, stress, susceptibility to emotional contagion, polarization in viewpoints, distressed of institutions and others, a lack of compliance with government directives,

compulsive information seeking, and a breeding ground for misinformation, poor psychological outcomes, and it increases the need for public services. Providing information with guidance is warranted. Which brings us to our next section, which is on communication, well, actually it's on media.

factors, but the two biggest mediating factors that come up over and over in the research and disaster research and trauma research are that communication and institutional trust are going to shape the way that people interpret this information the most. Communication influences institutional trust. Trust influences the way that communication is received. Both of these two factors increase and influence resiliency. see. The takeaway message here is that the delivery matters as much as what is disclosed. Now, in our report, we go into sort of extreme detail about all of the different sort of mechanisms of communication that can be utilized, what works, what harms, what's counterintuitive,

but we know is effectively established the research, what are various audience-specific communications that need to be established. There's not a one-size visual. The one piece that I want to spend a tiny bit on today is understanding that the media environment is preparedness infrastructure. We know that the media is an enormous communication system, but we also know that the media is made up of individual people with individual beliefs and cognitive biases that they bring as they report on UAP data. So I want to play for you a news clip. This was from the very very very. first data drop that was back in May. The first ever batch of UFO files today. So were there actually little green men or something else?

Let's bring in our pair of extraterrestrial aficionados. ABC News, Senior Pentagon reporter Louis Martinez and Capitol Hill correspondent Jay O'Brien. Hmm. Yeah, I love how you're both looking at me. Like, are we really sitting here about to talk about little? green men. This is his favorite topic. Yeah, it is, Louis. So, Louie, are there aliens out there?

Poor Louis. So basically we know that this effect, I'm sorry, we call it the giggle effect, but it's a very, very common way that people behave when they talk about UAP data. I'm sure all of you have seen it, perhaps some of you have done it yourselves. the reason that people do this, sorry, is that it, okay, the reason that people do this is that it protects, it protects their reputation, okay?

So essentially, the UAP subject has been treated as non-serious for such a long period of time, that people feel that if they engage with it in a serious way, it's actually going to make themselves be perceived as non-serious. So this is a form of social conformity. The really interesting thing about social conformity is that oftentimes people have a belief that others do not think it is serious, when in fact they don't really know what other people are thinking, and so they will conform to that anyway. The other big thing that contributes to this is institutional silence. We all know that people who, or I'm sorry, institutions that have a tremendous amount of influence, when they don't know. challenge the idea that UAP are not serious. This creates a framework that reinforces itself

and becomes very hard to challenge. What I don't think most people recognize is that stigma is profoundly harmful. Over the years, it has limited scientific research and funding. It limits witness reporting. That poor data is then used as evidence to say that this is a subject that isn't worth studying. The lack of scientific data contributes to misinformation. It limits clinical care and provider training, which means that there is an entire group of medical providers out there that have absolutely no idea how to work with

or treat somebody that may have a UAP experience. It increases social isolation, and it creates a very big disclosure barrier. We believe that applying journalistic integrity standards in the same way that you would apply them to any other subject is what is crucial for UAP and for increasing positive outcomes. Okay, so in the fourth section of our report, we get into the psychological response. So we believe that psychological response in general is going to happen across a spectrum. There will be people who respond to it in a very positive way. There will be a large number of people who actually respond to it in a very sort of neutral way unless it becomes something that is more threatening to them or more personally relevant.

There will be a number of people who do have some anxiety and adjustment-related types of issues as they try to process what does this information mean for them and for their lives and their own belief systems. And then as we go down into the smaller end of the tail, this is where we get in. into more vulnerable populations that are likely to have more significant psychological reaction. So the vulnerable populations that are most at risk are going to be people who have a high tolerance for uncertainty. This is a transdiagnostic factor that tends to cross over multiple mental health issues, people who have high anxiety and other mental health conditions, marginalized or under-resourced communities,

and those who carry catastrophic or end-of-time beliefs. Now, what I am not saying here is that everybody in these categories is going to have a negative psychological response. So what I am saying is that we actually believe that a lot of people who may fall into these categories actually will have quite adequate coping resources. But what I am saying is that these people who fall into these groups tend to be people who may have a higher psychological response.

The thing to keep in mind is that small numbers, in a concentrated period, as would happen under a disclosure circumstance, can create system surge beyond capacity, right? So mental health systems in general and often other public health systems already operate at capacity or close to capacity. So even a small number of people that are reaching out for services, can push that to exceeding capacity and meeting the definition of a public health crisis. It's also really worth knowing that this potential surge could last over a period of time as

more and more information becomes revealed. So again, planning and preparation are much needed to reduce surge risk and improve outcomes. Okay, so our key recommendations, number one, would be to develop a National Psychological and Resilience Preparedness Task Force. This would be a of people that would be able to oversee behavioral health coordination, help to develop a scalable mental health surge capacity, people who engage in clinical and workforce preparedness training, public psychoeducation, build community support systems, and crisis intervention systems. The other recommendation would be to build an evidence-based communication preparedness infrastructure. This would help with cross-agency coordination, crisis communication,

environment monitoring, developing audience-specific communication, and engaging with the media. The mystery of UAP will eventually be resolved. The scientists are going to continue to collect the data, they will analyze it, and they will come to conclusions. But ultimately, how we treat people will be our legacy. The time to prepare is now. All right. Thank you. Can I get a thumbs up in the back if you can hear if the audio is working. Thank goodness. Okay. So, let's turn this off. Okay. So our next panel

is technology and innovation, research, industry, and what comes next. So for this panel, we have our moderator, Mike Gold, who's an advisory board member of the Disclosure Foundation. He's the president and civil and space, President Civil and International Space, at Redwire Space.

he's a former member of the NASA UAP independent study team as well. Also are Jonathan Miller, a program engineer at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, lead instructor for Confronting Unknown's program at MIT, and Susan Winterberg, the former inaugural fellow of technology and public purpose project at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center

for Science and International Affairs. Thank you all so much for being here, and I know we're delayed a little bit because of what happened there. So why don't we, I'm looking at the time here. Is it okay if you guys go until 3.40? Okay, all right. And please do lean in close to the mics.

Thank you. Let's have a round of applause for Jordan Flowers and all he and the Disclosure Foundation team have done. Just being in this venue, being on campus, Hill pushes back against the stigma, the pernicious stigma. So even just being here, I think, is important. Again, I applaud all of you and Disclosure Foundation for bringing us. So without any further ado, let me introduce our two panelists, Susan Winterberg, who's a senior fellow for dual use defense and deep-tech funds at reframe venture, a network of 500 venture capital funds, over 100 institutional

investors. Be careful. I may ask you for money. We're always fundraising. Redwater. She was previously the inaugural fellow for the technology and public purpose project at Harvard, Belfare Center, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter's initiative to advance research and policy to ensure frontier technologies develop in ways to protect the public. Good, let's have a round applause for Susan. And then my friend from Boston, Red Sox Nation, much struggling these days. Jay Mill, Jonathan Miller, leads the confronting unknowns program at MIT, where he is a program engineer and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Growing up in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania,

Jonathan performed applied research and development for the U.S. Army and Navy and then became a venture founder, investor, and educator. He's the publisher of the End Effector and co-host of Tough Tech Today. Every day is Tough Tech for me. The premier podcast featuring Tech Blazers. We talk about the stigma. Having MIT at the table is critical. Let's have a round of applause and a big thank you to.

Jonathan, we're coming. Now, we're going to try and coordinate the questions with the presentation. Can we go to the first slide, if that makes sense? We'll take it for a spin here. Let's see. There we go. So, first question, you know, obviously UAP is something extraordinary when it comes to science, when it comes to our understanding of who we are as humanity,

but it is a national security issue. military issue. And my first question is, what are the challenges that military and security operators face when encountering anomalous phenomena? Jonathan. There's a lot to it. And first, this is a personal opinion. It's not the official position of MIT, but thank you for the shout-out. And so something, I guess, is a little bit preamble to that, and we have on the screen there, is a recent publication, collaboratively authored by members, many of whom are here and guest speakers as well. And so we'll encourage you to take a look through that and we'll speak more on that.

But part of the motivation for creating an independent activity that we convened at MIT earlier this year was focused on sense making. We call it confronting of unknowns with the motivating factor that a lot of frontline operators of various kinds of experiences that we learned about a lot today have getting in positions of high uncertainty, which are pretty well trained at, but also positions of concern. And I know I think we could all agree that we want to have safe aerospace, safe things going on above our heads. And so to that, that's sort of the wedge that we use for this program to help start to get toward the grander challenge of unidentified anomalous phenomena.

So how do we get better as sense makers so that our frontline folks from startup entrepreneurs to military folks, to intelligence community members, to someone who's working in an observatory, how do they, if they see something they don't recognize or are not sure how to like frame it out, how can we try to help them be better as sense makers

because then we'll all be able to be better sense makers in our respective lines of work? Susan, I'm sure you have much more on that. Yeah, so on the course it met over two days back in January. I think we're about 55 people there representing probably the most diverse group of people I've ever worked with. Everything from former operators in the Navy, in the Air Force, CIA, NASA. We had journalists there. We had disinformation specialists there, people that did get content moderation at Twitter.

So such a diverse group of people all working together on this problem. intensely and including a big wargaming exercise that the MIT Wargaming Lab Center put for us kind of modeled on like the New Jersey drones incident if you remember from a few years ago absolute pandemonium chaos we were running around yelling at each other we didn't know which agency had authorization all the data coming in we didn't know if it was deepfixed so really just trying to model out what it's like to be a frontline operator whether you're operating a 911 call center or you know you're the person from the FBI on the front lines that has to like make a decision whether to engage something or send surveillance out. So yeah, it really, I think for all of us, really exposed, like, where the gaps are in our homeland security infrastructure in the United States.

The fact that people from all these different backgrounds in national security, we didn't know the answer. And it really would set the stage for us for this project and this framework that we built over the last six months collaboratively as a cohort and a team. And I may take the privilege as sort of moderator panelists,

that we are not just in the age of disclosure, although shout out Dan Farah for that wonderful age of disclosure film better than disclosure day in my opinion I'll take Lou Elizondo if the effort the star was that any day but we are in the age of drones of drone warfare and let's learn the lessons that are being taught in blood in Ukraine right now where they had thousands of drones in sea containers and cars sheds that were released and devastated the Russian military billions and billions of damage was caused by that. And my fear with the UAP phenomena and the pernicious stigma that still surrounds this issue is that we are creating a loophole that adversary nations are leveraging because we ignore,

we sweep under the rug, any anomalous sighting that we can't explain it. I guarantee you that many, if not most, of those sites, sightings, Langley Air Force Base, for example, that we're seeing are likely Chinese adversarial drones with China getting prepared to do to us what Ukraine has done to Russia, which would devastate our critical infrastructure, devastate our military facilities. And this is why that stigma is so pernicious, not just to transparency and accountability, but to our very lives. So let's take UAPC, seriously, let's not allow a lack of imagination to turn into a lack of freedom. And I think that's a, I mean, the battle lab of Ukraine has certainly taught us a lot and

the lessons learned in blood, unfortunately, but it's also, we're seeing some of the most active innovating and live testing of new kinds of technologies and capabilities, not always for the better. It's just to try that out. And that's something that, I think is where we're seeing a shortening of the feedback loop, so to say, on legislation or sort of governmental work. U.S. and other, say, allies abroad that have been trying to get better at if someone has an idea, say, I'll take a step back. It used to be that maybe the radio operator would have been the most feared person on the battlefield, but it's becoming a 20-year-old with a really good idea because of the speed of deployment. So that puts a lot of stress, not necessarily undo stress,

on also like the, how might we be able to fund and meaningfully, safely deploy these in, like, say, civilian uses too. And so we can get into some of those kind of dual-use elements that there's some sort of sister program work to confronting a known at MIT that is about that dual-use element of, say, military or government use, whether it's probably, you know, could be a weapon system that's not usually dual use, though,

but more like on defensive or even like medical systems that can be funded and useful for government work, and also, of course, that kind of commercial or even open source elements in the pursuit of UAP as a grand challenge is that it's not a sector, it touches all of it. I mean, it's like AI like 100 million X in terms of its potential impact, but the pursuit of that from a technological, scientific, and other humanities as well, we can have a lot of great sort of off-ramps of success in terms of discoveries along the way. Let's talk about one of those dual-use technologies, which is, of course, sensors. And Susan, maybe if you want to kick us off, what are the technological innovations that could realistically support operators? What capabilities need to be fielded first in this cause?

Yeah, so in the class, after we went through that exercise, we got together as a team and said, well, what do we need to help better support front line operators? You know, we started with a really interesting technical question. This was MIT. And the question was, why is it that we know more about an object 500 light years away from us than one that's 500 feet away? To us, that just seemed absurd. So we really went deep into like the sensor capabilities and like where the gaps are.

And I think like what we learned is that what we have to. to detect things in aerospace are really designed to find three things. They're looking for missiles, they're looking for other aircraft, and they're looking now for drones. So it's not really designed to be able to distinguish what is the difference between a balloon and a drone or what's the difference between like a ball of plasma or a ball of light. We know this if it's way out somewhere in the cosmos. We don't have that information when it's up close currently.

So we began to just really break down these different kinds of sensors. like most of what we have now are like the visual and kinematic sensors, which is telling us, you know, what does it look like or how is it moving, which is what you do need in the aerospace domain. But to be able to distinguish UAP, there's a couple other kinds of sensors that front brine operators would actually need. So propulsion signatures or composition, what is it made up? So like hyper spectral imagers, that's what they use to like tell you like up close yet because we haven't deployed these kinds of sensing technologies. So I think that will. This is sort of our starting point as a team is to say, okay, what would it take for us to build multi-sensor fusion?

That could be easily deployable for frontline operators that have to make these quick decisions. Like, do we need to engage whatever this ball of light is? Do we need to shut down the airport because this is a physical drone or is it something on a sensor error or something else? So we really just started that was really our starting point into the deeper analysis that we built from this. I think something that on as a aspirational sense maker is if we if we get comfortable with saying I don't know, that's not where the, that's not where the, ideally, that's not where the thinking stops. That's actually where things begin is if we say I don't know, then what comes after that. And we take inspiration or, you know, from, from colleague like Tim Lamas and others who have been part of the convening this program on saying, well, we may take inspiration. from how a forensic investigator looks at a crime scene.

He or she does not know going in what it may be. They may have a hunch, but they're working through an approach to systematically, in many ways, not necessarily rule in something, but to rule out other elements. And in my experience, that's something that we can get better at. But it really helps, for example, if we're looking at whatever the next UAP flap may be,

how might we be better at kind of like just saying, okay, it's not an Airbus H-135 helicopter. Okay, we got that out of the way. Now let's look at what else it could be. And we can start to sort of back ourselves in by removing 90% of the normal stuff and figure out that last trailing 10%. We could then explore some of the other hypotheses

she's a little bit more, a little more sharpened arrow, so to say. Yeah, the most powerful words in science, I don't know. Yet, it's so difficult for academic orthodoxy to get those three words out of their mouths. It shocks me, the academic community. And sorry to go back to this old chestnut, but I can't stop repeating it because I think it gets worse and worse as time goes on. on the NASA UAP Independence Study Team that I served on, it was primarily comprised of academics.

Those academics were attacked. They were threatened in terms of their career. They were told that they wouldn't be able to publish. They would told that they would lose opportunities. They're just fired outright. Not for saying that UAP was real. Not for saying that there's non-human intelligence, but just for having the temerity to ask the question.

What state is science in? We're simply asking the question results in termination. That's not science. That's not the scientific method. That's the antithesis of science. I should know I'm a lawyer. So, and let me say, too, you know, you can't spell UAV without UAP. At least not if you're a bad speller like me.

But again, this is where we see the great crossover on the issue with the censors. And it's so important that we take these issues seriously. And that's why I applaud the Trump administration and all of our bipartisan members of Congress for pushing this issue, not just because of UAP, but if you're good on UAP, you're going to be good on drones. There's such ancillary benefits to taking this issue seriously. And relative to the censors, when I did testify before Congress, I noted that at NASA, We would study black holes. We study nebulas.

If you used military cockpit cameras to study black holes, we wouldn't know a lot about black holes, would we? Not ideal. We need dedicated sensors to be able to look at the phenomena, to create standardized information. You know, information, and I can't help a note, Avi Lope over there, who has been pushing this for a round of applause for us. and Hal put off. He's sitting next to him, Hal, and your wife, pushing that we get dedicated

resources like Galileo, uniform resources, standardized resources, so that we can really look at this phenomena, create data, and move forward. And something to add on that is that I think that it's not just, ideally that like an institution or like big dollar kind of endeavor. I think there's very much a part to play for, say, the aspirational citizen scientist, you know, the backyard, commonly a backyard astronomer, but someone who may also set up their own weather station at home. And why not add some, as we see, the price and capability curves, starting to get more affordable for more exquisite sensors. It's not going to be military grade, and it shouldn't be military grade. But we can start to get better at positioning the,

What does that like Galileo project kit look like? And is there are there startup opportunities for new companies to help be able to engage the wheels of capitalism in the way that the United States and others are quite good at? Because then we can get so much more wood behind the arrow if that flywheel is engaged so that we get commercial interests with some safeguards, well aligned with also advancing the kind of scientific and engineering capability development that will kind of help all ships float a little bit higher, I think. What a wonderful opportunity this is for citizen science.

And the citizen science don't come with the bias that I'm seeing from the professional scientists. Again, data, then you study, then you come to a conclusion. Not the opposite, which we see far too often. And we have good analogs for this. In the medical community, it's common to have, say, get a radiological image, an x-ray or something. and that physician or that technician will then send it to someone else, some other experts somewhere else who doesn't have the context of what that image is, and how might he or she that receiving physician assess it?

If we get sort of that double trigger of, hey, yeah, this looks weird, and it looks weird because it's whatever kind of cancer or something, then you have that kind of inherent sort of arm's length kind of analysis that will, I think, really help move things. forward much better. Absolutely. Yeah, the citizen science work in this field is absolutely amazing. Like we went out and just mapped all of it, all the different ones like Skywatcher and Skinwalker and UAPX. There's Nobel Prize stuff coming out of this. I'd be willing to bet in the next 20 to 30 years. Like the discoveries that they're seeing is so cool. Where is academic science? Where's the

National Science Foundation? This is like such exciting stuff. And yeah, but you can go into our report and take a look at like all the different sensors they're using and the methods. And yeah, it's such interesting, to me it's one of those interesting things happening in Science Day, like outside the, you know, the drones and the national security stuff. Like, it's, it's, this is such an exciting field. You're so spot on. There's this chasm between citizen science and then the orthodox science that we're seeing. And you've got to like the price of citizen science as well. I like that price tag that we get from people volunteering their time. Let's go to the really interesting question here. What are the applied

sciences or breakthrough technologies that could someday come from the discoveries of UAP. Susan, do you have some? Yeah, so this was a tough one. We spent a lot of time digging around in various LLMs trying to figure out what people like Howl have been up to over the decades. Here's what's in the public domain. You can go on to the Defense Intelligence Agency's FOIA reading room and kind of geek out if you really like exotic technology.

but there's a whole bunch of different things that, you know, the government's been studying on sort of frontier physics and materials and really interesting stuff in like neuroscience and consciousness. And so there's a whole range of different kinds of science. And I'm really curious, Mike, because I know you have some connection to this, that what do you think is most exciting or interesting from this? Well, I'm biased, right? So my grandfather worked on the Apollo program. My mother is still a STEM contractor education for NASA. We spend so much time on chemical propulsion and rocketry. It's slow.

It's expensive. It's dangerous. It's dirty. Something we can just be water. It can be okay. But if there is a better technology out there that we're missing that could help us explore the universe in a much more robust, safe way, it's such a shame that, we would be unable to use it to say nothing of the national security.

If you're able to replicate what you are doing, we kick up from New York to London in 15 minutes. Yeah, although I'm convinced United Airlines would still find a way to delay it. Oh yeah, they will, for sure. We'll still have to pay the baggage fee. Yeah, absolutely. So that propulsion technology is the most exciting to me.

And then we do talk about warp drive and, you know, the warm holes, etc. But when I was at NASA, Sunny White was doing some of the, you know, real warp drive work. Elon Musk often talks about being interplanetary, right, going to Mars so there's something happened on Earth. We could survive. I'm a fan of SpaceX and all that they're doing, did not participate

in the IPO. But I think we need a technology, a breakthrough technology like that, to truly be an interplanetary species because I'm concerned it would take hundreds of years, if not thousands, for humanity to be able to survive independently on Mars.

And we can, we look I mean, it's not a great proxy, but it's kind of the best we have, like looking at, like, say, the patent records to see what might have been disclosed in some ways. And there's, for example, the so-called UFO patents and, like, Salvatore Pais, and others that have developed. And it's interesting to read. I'm not vouching for, you know, veracity or authenticity or anything. But it's that, you know, how can we get better at using things and systems like the patent.

patent system, which is, in my opinion, very nicely designed for saying, here, put it out there what you have, and you get very clear rights to use what you define and reduction to method. With the bigger vision is that it entices everybody else who's like, oh, well, that's how you do it, I'm going to innovate something around that. that's where the patent system works really nice because it engages more people to explore something. So I'm not saying that like say zero point energy as a line of physics or something does exist or does not, but that as we get better with some of the openness of what has been discovered,

there's going to be a lot of happy accidents along the way. The kind of penicillin kind of moments that are like, oh, you know, when a scientist or engineer or someone in their garage, like, that's weird and they're gonna you know pull that thread figuratively or literally further we have these these useful discoveries and and it's you know that's why we have things like synthetic biology it's it's not just lab grade I mean you can start to industrialize the production of complex molecules because our living

world is that's what it is doing all the time is producing very amazing molecules how might we turn those into little bio robots. I have colleagues that are doing just that. And if we keep pursuing that, there will be uses. A lot of it will be still on the shelf because it's weird, but others will be incredibly changing for us. Can I ask you, the relative to the UAP-derived technology? So at Redwire, we've got the rollout solar arrays that are powering the International Space Station as we speak. We're the first companies who have manufactured a meniscus on the I. Who needs a meniscus? I know I could use one.

Manufactured heart tissue, cardiovascular tissue, liver tissue. We're doing all these wonderful things. We would love to have some UAP-derived technology. We're talking about the benefits of it. For anyone who's interested or companies, how would one go about getting access to such innovations or technologies? Curious, any thoughts there? Susan, if you... I think...

Slightly different take is that with something, one of the problem sets that is not directly UAP related, but it's challenging is how to, how do you make the United States and its allies manufacturing better and better with sort of AI everywhere, what do some of the next sort of end states look like with that. An anomaly detection is very important in that. But also, if we have very good artificial machines that are able to ingest all sorts of kinds of, kinds of, of data in, say, in manufacturing context, it can, it reduces down to assuming everything is a reverse engineering challenge. We have like nuclear submarines that are old now

and we're trying to figure out, I have this like part, but the people who knew how to make it are basically long gone or retiring soon. Or I have blueprints, I'm not sure how to actually machine the thing. So you start to assume, view every widget or exquisite UAP thing as

a reverse engineering problem. That's going to, it might help us to develop the better algorithms, the better computational resources, the better tolerance for in management of uncertainty so that we can start to not only make stuff better in manufacturing context, but also hopefully start to continue to triangulate around the many flavors of UAP. So I haven't been at NASA and now at Redwire, we're very concerned about losing the space race to China in Earth orbit, on the moon.

I believe that it is inevitable that the Chinese will outspend us in space. The only recourse we have is to out-entrepreneur the Chinese, which is why public partnerships are so important. It's why the SpaceX IPO was so important, generate cash. For UAP-derived technologies, how would you suggest that we engage investors, financing, and even the government to help support these technologies? Yeah, for private investors and private companies, When I bring up that this is something I'm working on,

they're first confused, and they say, oh, that sounds interesting. And there's always the same three questions that I get from them. The first one is, does the government have any actual intention of making this something available that the private sector can collaborate with them on if you're not in one of these special access programs?

And is it on a dual-use pathway? So is the only customer of this technology intended to be the United States government for military asset purposes only? Or is this something that, you know, we do want to have some of these propulsion technologies available to commercial space and to commercial aerospace and airlines. And, you know, is there a bigger market?

That's kind of their first question. It's like, is there actually going to be an actual project or product we could build out of this? The second thing they ask us, back one slide, what is the technology readiness level? Where is this? Is this just an idea that's sitting in a lab somewhere and some physics equations on a page? Or, you know, have you actually gone deeper and started doing prototyping? because in order to bring the private sector in,

there has to be a clear pathway to revenue generation. They're not going to sit on a piece of technology that's going to take 50 years to develop and keep pouring their capital in. I think somebody on the national security panel this morning sort of, I think, hit the nail on the head is that the problem with engaging for-profit companies in really deep R&D like this

is that if it's not generating revenue fast enough, they're going to take their engineers off it, put them somewhere else on a more immediate contract coming in from the Pentagon they need to respond to. And the project is just going to sit there and die and whether the expertise is going to move on with their careers. And you're going to lose your capabilities

to be able to work on these technologies over time. So I think we have to be very careful when we say we want the private sector to take on this and kind of be clear, you know, if we're higher up the TRL level or, you know, some of the technologies we looked at, like the material sciences, I think in particular, there is a good pathway to, you know,

transfer this over earlier in the technology readiness process. But some of the other things, other stuff, you know, it may actually need to go all the way to, like, level nine to where it's operational for the military before you can start thinking about the dual use. Part of that is, again, like, derisking it financially for the investors, but it's also, as we'll talk about in a minute, it's a national security concern to be moving some of these technologies outside of a very controlled environment, like our military too early. We'll talk about that more in a minute. Yeah, and my concern, too, is if there is exotic technology out there that was shared,

with certain companies and not others, I have a strong suspicion that federal acquisition regulations were not applied fully. And this could result in litigation that would be very interesting. It might be a reason people don't want this issue to come out or move forward. You mentioned national security. Why don't we move to that? So, you know, Susan May we can continue with you. What are the national security concerns around studying UAP of the six observables, which do you think are the most dangerous national security? Because we're always trying to hit this balance, and that's what's so challenging with the UAP topic,

that we want transparency, we want accountability. At the same time, many of us are national security professionals, and we don't want to threaten national security or put our friends, brothers, and sisters in any danger. So what do you see like that? I'll just review for people that are sort of new to this topic what the six observables are. So these are basically what do you just observe

when you look at what we're calling a UAP? So how do we know this is not a plane, not a helicopter, a drone, not a ball of plasma light or whatever in the sky or ball lightning, all these different things. So it's anti-gravity and positive lift, instantaneous acceleration, so it can just take off and just go vertical straight up, or it can just come, stop, turn at very high speeds. Yeah, hypersonic velocity. Yeah, and and so on. Yeah, basically, it's these six observable. and then biological effects, which I think they talked about earlier today,

where, you know, there's impacts to either the people that get too close to these or to, like, plants and animals nearby, where you can document those effects to sort of suggest that you were sort of in contact with something exotic. So that's where, you know, this does overlap, obviously, with national security, because things that are in that highest level of classification would be things like signature management and visibility cloaking or hypersonics where we don't have the capability

to be able to intercept if someone was to put a missile or something on one of these things. So I think that's really kind of the biggest concern of that is like where does this intersect with, you know, the most serious national security capabilities. And sometimes that's why this can't sort of go out into dual use earlier because you do have to protect that capability first,

at least until the point that there's an effective countermeasure that you're able to mitigate against that, which we can talk about if we have time later. We have done this successfully with other frontier technologies that the military has developed historically. So there is precedent for doing that, but I think we're just not there yet with this.

Jamil, thoughts? Yeah, I mean, for each of these observables, individually, they're incredible. If more than one occurs, that's really astounding. And so they're all kind of like, huh, now, what do we do about it? Well, I think that it's, it's, we have to, we have to, it's helpful. If we, there's, there's, there's like, say, the, very rigid skeptic that's like,

oh, like kind of like, kind of pooh-poo's the thing like, oh, that doesn't make sense. And discounts, it kind of mental shutdown or mental foreclosure. There's others. And, you know, that, then I think like Albi Loeb and helped with off also being in this camp of saying, well, what would need to be true for this to occur? and so, for example, you may not be self-fashioned as a science or engineer, but maybe you're a welder, or you play with lasers or something. I've literally asked folks who are incredible welders or incredible optics experts and said,

well, what would it take, let's say, hypothetically, there's some sort of like tic-tac-shaped object, and there's no seams on it, but seemingly with some sort of command, it's able to open up a doorway or a window or something. what would need to be true for that to happen? And these kind of, my opinion, these kind of healthy thought experiments, with folks who know their respective domains very well, can start to say, well, okay,

this needs to be like, you know, how do we get the items aligned and then sort of partition those out? Well, we might need to have some form of perfect control, like electromagnetic control, to be able to position those at the atomic level. Is it impossible? We don't, I can't say for sure that it's impossible.

We have no idea of how to do that. but that starts to put in like a little dashed line of possibilities of where if we start to engage more of the the research and development community then we can start to again have a potential happy accident that some welder is somewhere like thinking hmm you know 10 years later how maybe I don't know how to make the Tick-Tac thing but I know how to do something else that has that idea of this kind of like perfect control mechanism and then we would have the benefit as a nation and as a society Can I pick it a word that you're using we? I think the UAP issue redefines what we means. Really two issues on Capitol Hill that can be by bars and I think bring us together in a unique way, space exploration and UAP. The only issues where you're going to see Tim Burchett

and AOC working together. And it goes beyond uniting us as Americans. This should unite the world. And when I was at NASA, It was the privilege, really of my lifetime to develop, lead, implement the Artemis Accords, which now has 67, excuse me, 68 countries as of this morning with Botswana joining. And it's so important that we push back against this myth that I know no one in this room believes, but that UAP is an American phenomenon that it only occurs here.

When I was a member of the UAP independent study team, we had Kness, the French Space Agency, briefing us. They were actually taking it seriously. This is a phenomenon that occurs globally, and I think it would be wonderful as we talk about sensors that we go out to all Artemis Corps signatories and ask them to share UAP with us. We're not just talking about national security. We're talking about global security for us as a species,

and I hope we reach out in that fashion. Let's move over to implementation. So we've talked about a lot of ideas, a lot of hopes, a lot of actions. we think should be taken, but what has to happen to make this progress real? Yeah, so if you look at the slide that's up there now, this is what we've been talking about all morning, is how do we get this out of these special access programs

and bring more people into this conversation? And I think what's great about this is that we already have that architecture in place. We have an amazing dual-use, finance, and entrepreneurship ecosystem here in the United States and across our allies. And if you think about security, really, it's a spectrum. So at the highest level are these wave special access programs where only a few people in Congress may even know about it. And a few hundred scientists maybe, you know, all the way down to what we talked about earlier, like full open innovation science where you just take information out there, you do prizes and challenges

and anybody from anywhere in the world can contribute. And, you know, maybe if we put X numbers of billions towards this, we could crack this thing in 10 years. But we're going to completely lose control of the technology if we do that. So you have to find this nice middle ground, and I think it's really great that we have all these other levels where we can really customize this. And, you know, as we get, as I mentioned before, as we get more the safeguarding in place, we can open it up to even lower, sort of lower down the chain, going from, you know, the classified to the controlled unclassified, to sort of the blended models. Like DARPA has a really good blended model where you can bring people in in some parts and not in others, to just sort of like academic labs where it's just being restricted to U.S. citizens in a basic background check. depending on the sensitivity level, the technology, there are so many different ways

that we could structure this going forward. And there's something with, like on the dual use aspects. And in this case, dual use that as like, so the government oriented, usually like sort of military oriented and like a commercial kind of thing, that anything could be considered dual use. Scissors, you know, a set of scissors could be considered dual use.

If you ask random people, like, hey, what do you think if we gave that person on the street a set of scissors? Good, bad, don't care, how should regulate it? There's a lot of, like, it depends, elements to that. And I think that's something that we are getting better at sort of appreciating how complex that can be. Why I just say full open of, you know, here's all the patents and research papers that have been classified for decades and decades, why that could be problematic. I think we can appreciate that.

But also it makes it so that we, that yes, a set of scissors can save lives. It can do a lot of good too. So how do we get better at that? We have some ways. You know, Jamie and I talked about the stigma a little bit, particularly in academia. And we talk about getting new institutions engaged

and getting existing institutions engaged the topic. I'm just curious your personal experience sitting there at MIT, have you faced pushback for engaging this topic? Have there been threats? Have they been open? Because my concern is over-classification and over-compartmentalization.

And by the way, we see this far beyond the UAP issue as a defense contractor. Nothing hurts our national security like the over-breath, over-use of classification. it's counterproductive to national security, and UAP is a great example of that. And the concern is we don't have MIT engaged. We don't have Harvard,

we don't have MIT engaged. And how do we get those institutions to take the issue seriously? And what was your own personal experience in this? And then we'll go to Susan. Yeah, thank you for asking. And Susan, Susan, and I could lodge you list all the names. Victoria and Sri, Ryan, Tim,

like, et cetera, who have helped to make our confronting and independent activity a thing, and so much appreciated. But in terms of my experience and sort of interest and receptive to openness to things we don't know and recognizing that and how to approach that decades long, but over the past year or so, looking at how might we, and the time is right, in my opinion, to run a program within the Institute during a special period called independent activity. period it's in January at MIT and it's a way to try something new in in my opinion in a crucible of research and innovation and deployment of new

technologies so we're very good at working on interdisciplinary problems and multidisciplinary you know and so how do we phrase that having we're not like and I'm we positioned it's like well it's not like saying can I try to figure out the origins this is China this little Green men, these are like future humans or from another dimension. Maybe, I don't know. But the focus then is on something we can all care about, national security, advanced technology development, and safe aerospace,

knowing that the big Kahuna target areas, like the challenge area is UAP, but walking that back, what do I do tomorrow to start to make headways on that? And it's to look at how do we broadly, and we as individuals, experts in our respective fields start to do sense-making because in my opinion that's a teachable leadership skill whether you want to go build an e-commerce company or create a dog-walking app or you want to figure out where the aliens are or how you AP can do multiple different kinds of observables observables either way you're doing the the exercise the practice of sense-making i think that's teachable and uh to use a line that we we have from the program is um

your mind is a critical system. So use it. Learn how to improve the mind thinking. Everybody can do that. And in your own expertise, it'll play out. It's kind of an empowerment thing. Susan? Yeah, and I think the best way to engage academia,

especially in the current science funding landscape, is create named funds for studying the biggest mysteries, the biggest anomalies in these fields. And this touches so many different fields. Physics is obviously the big one. But you know what the other big one is? It's Earth science. Oh, my God, we're going to learn so much about this planet

and the other life that's here today that's always been here that was here in the past. There's so many amazing things that are going to come out of this research. Consciousness, neuroscience. The world is going to change so much after disclosure. And we need scientists to be involved because, you know, our current president or whoever is next,

whenever this or the next one, whoever comes up to the stage someday, and says it, no one's going to believe it until, you know, they see the peer-reviewed science, and it's going to come out of that community that, you know, this is real, it's been validated. So, you know, we need to start just by saying that this is a valid area of science, and we are going to fund it. And there's lots of different models also quickly that you can do besides just academia. There's one called focused research organizations where basically it's almost like a DARPA-style

challenge. You set up a nonprofit, and then over like five to seven years with maybe $20 to $70 million in funding, you tackle a really big problem. So that could be like mapping the connectome of the brain, or they have one now called Echo Labs, which is looking at like multi-sensor fusion monitoring forests. So there's different kinds of ways you could organize this, that rather than it being stuck in some, you know,

SAP program or in a corporate silo that's going to get cut next time there's a quarterly downsizing. You know, we have dedicated funding to specifically solve these problems with scientists that want to devote themselves full-time for five to seven years to really tackle some of the big challenges that we put up here today. So I think that really is the call to action, is that this needs to be a priority, you know, for the United States government and our science funders that this is the greatest, you know, scientific discovery of our lifetimes, maybe of all time, and we need to fund it, support it appropriately.

Well said. And speaking of science, and with apologies in advance for running a few minutes over, I am from the space industry blowing up schedules is what we do. It's funny because it's true. I do want to take a moment to talk about an extraordinary project that's being done in the auspices of the Disclosure Foundation, where it's my pleasure to lead an effort where we are going to go through the NASA Archives to conduct a review for UAP.

Thank you. Thank you so much. This was a recommendation that was made explicitly by the NASA UAP Independent Study Team. It was later supported by the research director for UAP at NASA, but has not been implemented. We are going to solve that issue and conduct a comprehensive review of what we've got open source. Now, look, we all spend a lot of time declassifying data going after things that are hidden in secrets, but there is a treasure trove of open, available data that could help us unlock this mystery. In the first tranche of material that was released by the Department of War, there was the image of a triangular craft or lights in a triangular formation that was released. That image had been sitting in the archives for decades, almost a half century, but goes ignored.

And this is why it's so important for us to delve in what's likely a treasure trove of data in what's just publicly available. And to leverage new technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning to be able to conduct a comprehensive review. what's the worst that happens here? We discover some sort of incredible new scientific phenomena. We discover adversarial spacecraft. And boy, do we ever have a murderous road, the Avengers of UAP science, beginning with Dr. Monali, Derek Shawnee, who's here. Let's have a round of applause. There he is. Standing up. And by the way, you talk about the scientific stigma. There is someone who loves.

lost their job, again, not for saying that UAP is extraterrestrial. I watched the interview that Monali did. He was almost lawyer-like in avoiding coming to a conclusion, but they fired him anyway. And I am so grateful to him and his courage and people like him who are willing to stand up to academic orthodoxy to fight for the truth, to fight for accountability, and to fight for the scientific method. Begin with study. Get the conclusion. And he's done some tremendous work,

looking at anomalies on the moon. Second, unfortunately, she's not here, but here in spirit is Dr. Beatrice for your real. Let's have a round of applause for Beatrice. Now, I talk about the struggles with academia. Beatrice got peer-reviewed research on UAP. How often do we ever see that?

And by going through the NASA archives, we can help bolster. the work that she's done, look at more anomalies, and, you know, more than anything, what we've got in the archives now, that's about to increase exponentially. We have a terrific, young, energetic, dynamic, new administrator of NASA and Jared Isaacman, and if anyone has been following, he has said, we are going to land on the moon monthly, monthly, every month. and with the sensors and the cameras that we have in those spacecraft,

we will be able to gather data in cis lunar space on the moon, the likes of which we have never seen before. So I am so excited of working with Beatrice, of working with Monali, Dr. Travis Taylor, where are your Travis Taylor fans out there? Travis, we held our first organizational meeting. Travis was telling me about finding Saturn blueprints in Friends Barnes in Huntsville. Like this is the state, unfortunately, sometimes of the archives. But we're so excited to implement this very important recommendation of the UAP Task Force

and to collaborate with our friends at NASA who have been just wonderful. And to brief the FBI, the UAP Task Force here in Congress, the public and to leverage citizen science. that I'm just describing the leadership team. The real work will be done by the citizen scientists, as well as corporations that will be volunteering their capabilities with AI and ML. We are so, so excited to beginning this effort. So with that, I want to thank again the Disclosure Foundation. I want to thank our two fantastic panelists. Thanks to everyone here in the room.

Let's make every day Disclosure Day. All right. We are moving into our final panel. We're going to talk about financial impacts, risks, and opportunities. Joining me as moderator are Pippa Malmgren, economist, I would say geopolitical macro strategist, former special assistant to the president for economic policy at the National Economic Council, and Matthew Tuttle, the CEO of Tuttle Capital Management. Thank you so much for joining us today.

I am really excited, even though Apologies were running a little bit. shorter on time that we were hoping for, such as life. Let's talk about the narrative out there that, oh, if we were to disclose what we know about non-human intelligence, that the markets would crash, the riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together. You know, when I've been interviewed about this as having a background in finance and investments, I try to counterbalance the narrative by saying, okay, let's look at some facts. How much did the markets crash when Trump issued his executive order about releasing everything we have on alien intelligence?

They were flat to up. what happened in each of the latest releases of data, they were flat to up. What's happened since 2017 or 2023, if we had had our money in the S&P 500, you would have done quite well. Those are facts. I'm not sure what the R squared, if you will, is on that, how much explanatory power those facts have, but those are still facts that have to be contended with. not dealing with a circular narrative that, oh, this is disruptive, therefore there will be financial calamity and there will be financial calamity because it's disruptive.

This sort of circular reasoning drives me bananas. So PIPA, what I'd like to do is discuss you have an incredible, I first learned about you actually through the Grant Williams podcast because I'm a huge finance nerd and I subscribe to that, your conversations with him about the global macro strategies are wonderful. Feel free to invite Grant also to be a part of the Disclosure Foundation. And, you know, so can you, I'd like you to tee up sort of the global macro perspective on this and maybe explain for the audience what that means. And then, Matt, I'm super interested with you as a market practitioner with an ETF, which

stands for exchange traded fund, which is a financial product you can invest in. Anybody in this room can invest in that. How you're tactically approaching this subject with your firm. So please, Pippa, thank you. Thank you. And thank you for bringing us all together. This is quite an extraordinary gathering. Look, humanity is at this extraordinary moment where we are expanding our scientific discovery, our technological innovation at a speed and scale that hasn't really been experienced, perhaps since the Industrial Revolution. We are effectively putting prosthetics deep into space that will extend the capacity of our eyes to see far into the galaxy and also deep into subspace to see what is happening at the level of atoms, a large,

electrons and even subatomic particles. Naturally, as we expand our spectrum of perception, we are seeing more things that we didn't either acknowledge before or know about before. And so there's a kind of ontological issue arising just from this discovery process. In markets, in financial markets and indeed for civilization, it is a this process of scientific discovery and technological innovation that raises standards of living, that allows us to solve problems, and therefore it is civilizationally critical that we do this. If we look at the issue this way, then the problem we have is not that the markets panic. It is the obstacles to the discovery process. It is perhaps

harsh to say, but maybe important to say, as a financial market person and as someone who's worked in the national security world, as was mentioned earlier in the day, the congressional staffer who is the obstacle to progress is the national security problem. The scientists who refuses to allow science to be used to address these matters is the national security problem. The scientists, who refuses to allow scientists, science to be used to address these matters, is the national security problem. And in fact, these attitudes and people are a civilizational drag. So this is critical for markets, because if we're going to maintain the pace of discovery and innovation, we have to remove these obstacles to progress. We have to stop allowing the people with the greatest skepticism to define the speed at which we proceed. And,

instead allow those making the greatest advances to define the speed at which we proceed. As someone who's worked in geopolitics as well, it's quite extraordinary that we look at something like the current geopolitical stress over the Strait of Pormuz. We think that's a serious problem, which it is. But here we have a world where it seems that we're perhaps firing on phenomena that we don't understand. And as the daughter of an American ambassador who was long involved in the dialogue with the Soviet Union, we usually talk to our opponents. Firing on something we don't fully understand might not be the best way to begin a conversation with something that might

possibly be intelligent or maybe even more intelligent than us. But not only that, this comes to a bigger issue, which is central to the markets right now, which is the definition of what is intelligence. And of course, we are finding that extraordinary things from slime to mushrooms have intelligence. We're surrounded by non-human intelligence. We've just used artificial intelligence to crack one of the whale languages. And what was so amazing is that we found out these whales have a nickname for the marine biologists that study them. And those marine biologists were so excited about their nickname. They're like, what's the nickname for me?

And I'm like, did anyone ask the whale what it has to say? No. Because our ego is in the way. So if we can't even recognize that we are living an environment that is teeming with non-human intelligence, how can we begin the discussion of what constitutes the kind of non-human human, intelligence that might be a national security risk, very difficult. So this is why I say the issue for the markets is not the sudden discovery that all of this is real.

And when I talked to my daughter, she said to me, when I said, I'm first going to start writing about this issue, some serious things are happening in the U.S. Congress, she said, mom everybody already knows i said what do you mean they already know she said it's your generation that doesn't have a clue young people have an iphone in their pocket that has more computational power than we needed to get a human on the moon they are using artificial intelligence and they're making discoveries at an extraordinary pace it's perhaps a generational issue that the older generation is still stuck in ways of thinking that are no longer applicable. So I just put that on the table that we need this pace of scientific discovery and technological

innovation to continue. We are discovering new materials that we never knew about before. We are discovering new definitions of what is sentient, what is life. Artificial intelligence is fascinating because we are racing towards artificial and general intelligence and putting massive sums of money behind it, while at the same time trying to pretend there's no other non-human intelligence. That does seem ironic. And that is the central issue right now in the financial markets.

As we know, day to day, we're all looking at, you know, have the markets overbought artificial intelligence, but not able to discuss non-human intelligence. How interesting. Do you, so there's this, people use the term petro dollar, right? Oh, it would be the end of the petro dollar regime if we were to come out with this technology. They would have, whatever, boundless energy, for example. But we're already, it appears we're already moving towards that with artificial intelligence, which you mentioned, which everyone, you know, on balance seems to be fine with,

and we're doing it, let's put it that way, regardless of if people seem to be fine with it. How does that also have a, as we move into a post, do you think that moves into a post-petro-dollar situation where we have to rethink the economics of scarcity? And how do you relate these two things? These words are kind of used together in AI, UAP, and finance land. So I'm curious how you think about that and differentiate it. Yeah, let me just give you an example. In Austin, Texas, we have already a company that I won't say the name because, well, no, it doesn't matter. We're not on a financial market context here.

Anyway, Akloatomics, very interesting. They have created a small modular reactor with fewer than 300 engineers in less than 365 days. So the traditional view that to create a new nuclear power plant is $30 billion in 30 years has just been completely, decimated by what they're doing. That's happened in part because the governor of the state just said, go. So that's already here. Then we already are seeing other companies, Valor Atomics in California, that have created small modular reactors using trisof fuel that are movable. So now you can have a nuclear power plant wherever you want it. You can put it in a plane and shift it to some other location. Nuclear fusion, which everyone has said is 50 years away, is no longer 50 years away,

and as artificial intelligence does millions, if not billions of simulations, and we create the new materials necessary for containment, that's making immense progress too. So the old argument that the UAP technology is potentially so destabilizing to society because it might drop the price of energy to nothing is already happening anyway. And honestly, as an economist, if you're going to give me elements to play with, very inexpensive energy is a gift. It is a massive driver of growth and productivity, so wonderful for the markets. And for those that are in traditional energy sources, there are a bunch of other competitors too. We're starting to see space-based solar power as something, you know, already we have Google saying in three years we'll be doing that

for data centers that are off-earth. So this is no longer science fiction. These are happening in real time. So a lot of the old excuses why, oh my gosh, markets will panic are just literally disintegrating before our eyes. So, Matt, how does this translate into actionable opportunity for you as a market practitioner? I am assuming that your ETF isn't just 100% allocated to naked puts on the market and betting on complete and utter failure. How do you translate that? How do you think about what are the, what are the opportunities? opportunities, the risks, what are the, I think about this in terms of a lot in terms of

off-balance sheet liabilities, as well as off-balance sheet assets. So, and maybe you can help the audience understand what that means and how that's integrated into your market philosophy. Yeah, so, you know, first off, we don't believe that disclosure leads to a market sell-off. We do teach people you should always have tail-risk protection. This is not a tail-risk as I see it unless disclosure is, you know, hey, they're here and oh, remember Independence Day. That's a different story. But I don't see that. So we're looking at this as thematic investors. And the best way to make money on a theme is you've got to be early. You've got to be in it when nobody else is thinking about it. So, you know, coming from where I said, I look at the

TikTok video where everyone else is who's flying that thing, which is really interesting, and it's an important question. For me, it's what's the power source? Because it's nothing like anything that we know of that exists. And that could create the biggest investment opportunity that I've ever seen. And I've been doing this since 1981. I've seen the Internet. we're seeing what's going on with AI right now, but when you look at the potential of cheap,

free, whatever it is, energy, that is entirely transformational. And so what we teach investors is something we call the thematic investment hierarchy. So you start off with, all right, what is the theme? So if I look at it, all right, the theme is free or near free energy. propulsion is also interesting to me. And I'm sure there are a bunch of other technologies as well. But the free energy one, or the near free energy, is the one that's really transformational. So we start off with who are the obvious winners?

And the obvious winners, you know, barring lawsuits, people going to jail, the defense primes. But then you've got to look at it beyond that. So, you know, if this technology does get surfaced, If it gets made available for commercial use, what other companies are going to have to be brought in? So who are the suppliers to the winners? Who are the suppliers to the suppliers? And you keep peeling that onion down and down and down.

And that's how we look at it in our UFOD ETF. And, you know, again, I'm looking at this as potentially the most explosive opportunity that I've ever seen. so I'm excited about it. Thank you. And, you know, yeah. So at the Disclosure Foundation, I've tried to leverage my background on Wall Street to really, like, penetrate the street with this conversation. So we have, we've gone to very large investment banks.

We've gone to very large investment managers to try and have this conversation. Part of our mission is education and advocacy. And so we want to be able to go into the centers of power in New York City and say, hey, you really should be paying attention to this. It is in your own best interest to pay attention to this. So what conversations have you been having, if any, with these asset managers, what would you say to them? And, well, yeah, let's just leave it there.

Yeah, look, asset managers are already on this, and briefings are already. happening. They, I mean, it was at the Salt hedge fund conference that, you know, Carl Nell made his sort of initial announcement. The key thing is, again, investors are trying to figure out exactly what you're doing. Where is that performance opportunity? So a major question is, number one, will China announce it first? So we may have our hangups. We may have our view that the U.S. government has the answers, which actually, I'm not so convinced. I think they may have a lot of data. They may have a lot of insight, but do they have answers? And maybe we actually already

have a lot of answers in the general public, as was discussed in the previous session, citizen scientists to just people who have had experience with this phenomena. I find it very interesting and strange that here in the United States we have based our entire legal and justice system on the importance of the witness except on this subject, in which case all the witnesses are crazy. Right. And the market doesn't care how you define evidence or how you define data. The market doesn't care.

So they're just looking for who's got the answer to this thing, and that may come out of the Middle East, where they do not have the hang up that we do have in the United States. either from a National Security perspective or from a kind of religious theological perspective as well. There's a greater openness, and frankly, the rest of the world did not have a Cartesian split. So they didn't separate mysticism from science. They can see the world in a more holistic way and therefore study it more comprehensively. So financial markets are just looking for what you're looking for, which is who's got the answer to this? and that's where we want to invest the dollars behind it.

And I think that here in the U.S., we may be getting too hung up in this idea that government is to disclose to us, especially since, by the way, we've already had at least four press conferences, one from the White House saying it's real. But somehow people haven't clocked it, right? And you're like, how many times you have to be told?

They're looking for something more. so I think the more likely source of the answer is going to be crowdsourcing I wish I was talking to the people you're talking to because everyone I talk to to think I'm crazy I'll need to introduce you everybody please yeah no I see the the asset management industry is one really where people don't take risks and I mean except for like you know the hedge funds but you know they want to stick around the consensus. So they'll get into this once it's already out and once a lot of the opportunity has passed them by, I mean, they'll be forced to. But, you know, the people I'm

talking to by and large are just looking at kind of what's in front of them. You know, it's AI, it's memory, it's photonics. They're not looking three to five years out, unfortunately, which, again, creates opportunities for those of us who do. You know, there is an issue with, um, compression of time. So it used to be that fund managers waited until an idea was commercialized, it had cash flows, it had profits, it had customers, and they left venture capital to a different group would do deep tech when you didn't know whether it would ever actually work. But now, the time from an idea or a discovery to commercialization is so compressed that even the big fund managers no longer can wait. They're having to jump in earlier. And we're talking about paradigm

changing ways of thinking here. So even if they're not investing, they have to understand the world in a different way than they did before. So this is why I think a conversation is absolutely happening in the financial sector, but maybe perhaps always gently, quietly, just making sure everybody's kind of on board with the conversation, so they don't think you're crazy. I think... Go ahead. Sorry. I think I'm the only one who's out there being loud about it. No,

not at all. Not at all. But then again, I've done like Inverse Kramer, inverse Kathy Wood. I don't mind I don't mind ruffling feathers. I love the fact that you are the inventor of the inverse Kramer at ETF. I'm a like value investor by training

and that just delights me to no end that our paths have overlapped So let's talk about actionable steps. You know, I've tried to take these ideas and think about how to leverage them in those conversations with the large financial institutions. And I've tried to, in doing so, like appeal to their interest. One example of that for me is, hey, you know, you've got this 500-page credit agreement. You've got this, you know, 100-page insurance agreement.

in these agreements, you've got your SEC filings where you have to enumerate your risks, right? It seems to me it would be so easy, such low-hanging fruit, given the fact base we have from the disclosures that have already happened, it would be so easy to just add in extra protections into your risk section. It would be an insurance policy. Insurance policies have these, you know, these language in there about protection against war, against acts of God. You know, my joke in these meetings is like, I think you should add language about, like, acts of gods into, like, these insurance documents.

So, because you know that if someone, if this happens, someone is going to file a claim in court that says that this contract is no one void because of this, because of this sort of acts of God type of risk. That's an example of, like, how do you take something actionable and do it in the market? What do you guys think are specific actionable steps or catalysts, if you will, for thinking about this? Yeah, I mean, two things. First off, as I said before, I think you should always have tail risk protection in your portfolio, regardless of what's going on, how you do that beyond the scope of what we're talking about,

but you should always have that. The second piece is, you know, if I'm wrong about zero point energy and this being an investment opportunity, you've still got the theme of the convergence trade, where old kind of military was big tanks, big ships, fast planes, You know, now that's being replaced by drones, anti-drones, lasers, eventually robots, all integrated with AI. So you're seeing this convergence between traditional military and all the different aspects of AI. So I do think that is something that should be in your portfolio as well. I think markets, too, are trying desperately to discount.

Markets are very good at discounting the future. There's no question about that. But maybe having a hard time with simple problems, like, are these drones earthly peer competitors? If yes, then our inability to do anything about it presents a different risk scenario for how geopolitics may play out than if we're dealing with something that's not our peer adversaries. One has to think about that piece of this puzzle. I think as well, in financial markets, you mentioned sort of the money side of it. And one of the interesting things happening right now, which has been announced by the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, who was my deputy in the White House, is we are shifting the entire economy onto digital rails, onto accounting systems, where we have full transparency and clarity.

of what transactions happened when and where. The way the American budget has been managed for many decades is through incredible obscurity, incredible opacity, an incredible lack of explanation as to where has the money gone. If a lot of the money has gone into these sorts of issues, then how will we manage as that becomes more transparent?

Can we continue to have the investment, in this kind of cutting-edge technology without having to have black budgets, black programs, saps, et cetera, because those are going to become infinitely more difficult in a totally transparent environment. Yeah, I really, I'm enjoying trying to integrate what each of you were saying.

It's reminding me of conversations that I've had with Anna Brady Estevez, so Anna Brady is sitting in the audience somewhere, and she has a... background in this. She has a firm called American Deep Tech. She's on the advisory board of the Disclosure Foundation. And your thoughts about, as Anna and I have talked, it echoes those conversations because I think what's currently being underestimated is the technology development cycle. So you have the rapid compression of going from scientific research to R&D to developing a

beta or an MVP, a minimum viable product, and then scaling. Like, In the conversations I've had with Anna and what's going on in her world, it's like people are, you know, concerned about that we're way far out on the curve. And because of these updates, that curve is really compressing in terms of, like, you know, what we would call, like, the J curve of that investment. Does that resonate with you? Yeah, no, completely. And what's very concerning, and I think two elements of this. What's very concerning is it's hard for markets to discount information if information is not being put in front of them. So I thought it was interesting here earlier today when we had members of the mainstream media here,

and they were given the opportunity to ask questions, and there was total silence. And I thought, you know, if the President of the United States walked in and his socks didn't match, they would be leaping over each other to ask him questions. about his mental well-being, but faced with something that is extraordinarily consequential for the course of human history, not a single question. And contrast that with what was happening outside the room, just for the audience that, for the folks that aren't here today, quite the contrast. Right. So the thing is, media needs to report what is happening. We have, for the first time in history, the President of the United States has ordered the declassification of

of many, many decades of history. This is very consequential. To have it not reported is also consequential. And I would like to just shout out to Leslie Keene, who wrote an article that totally changed our understanding. So this is a problem for markets if the media will not report what is actually happening. Number one. Number two, we have extremely senior.

scientists with extremely high-level security clearances, both in the United States and in China, who seem to be going missing. They, statistically, it seems highly unlikely that all these people disappear all at once under strange circumstances. For people in markets, the concern is, okay, are we in a situation where there's an obstacle to the technological process that's so severe that, people are being removed. That's a serious problem for civilization, for financial markets. The fact that it took a long time to even get any investigation is a problem for the ability of markets to discount the future. And honestly, when we talked earlier about the obstacles,

I would just leave on the table that every time someone blocks progress, whether it's refusing to process paperwork or whether it's by making threats and doing intimidation. This should be traceable. One should be able to go back and ask who pulled the pension from the whistleblower. Who asked for a particular outcome? Who organized either the character assassination or the actual assassination? These are not small issues in a world where the technology that is being, being invented by humans may challenge wherever this technology came from from non-humans.

And maybe the last thing to say to draw people's attention to is the Genesis mission. I think very few people even know about it, but fundamentally it's all about the White House effectively ordering that all of the national labs were so much of the research and work at the cutting edge of technology as happened to the Second World War. They have never had that data open to review internally. People don't talk to each other, let alone across the labs. But the Genesis mission is about bringing artificial intelligence, connecting the data within the labs and across the labs. And I think in that process, we're going to discover a whole bunch of new technologies.

But against the backdrop of are we also seeing a whole bunch of our most important scientists suddenly disappear? this is a national security issue. It is a civilizational issue. Thank you. Matt, we're a little over time. We have this room until 4.30, but I wanted to give you any final thoughts you have for the audience. Yeah, just to what Pippa said, you know, analysts can't model what they don't know. And there's so much out there that is unknown. And again, that's, that's, That's where, in my mind, we've got a massive opportunity, you know, if you were a thematic investor. Roger that. Thank you so much for having this conversation, and I hope we could have many more about

this. Thank you. So we have just a few minutes left here. We have this room until about 4.30 before we get kicked out. I want to dedicate my closing remarks here to... discussing something we haven't talked about much yet today and something I wish was talked about more here and more broadly, which is whistleblower support and whistleblower protection. So our organization, we've had a wonderful team of volunteers who has done this work.

We have had extremely limited resources, and we are finally coming with events like this, to try and make a difference, to try and advance the conversation. And now that we are in a position to do so, we are very excited to, you know, the three parts of our mission are there's policy research, right? There's legal, there's litigation for FOIA, there's whistleblower support, pro bonoer representation, and then education and advocacy.

So on the whistleblower support portion of that, That is something we take seriously and take broadly. And we are very excited to announce and fortunate to announce now that we're in a position to do so. The first ever disclosure grant. And so please welcome to the stage. Dylan Borland, Matthew Brown, and Jeff Nucatelli. The Disclosure Foundation believes in leading from the front on this topic. these gentlemen and being collaborative these gentlemen have created an

organization called the Vanguard Enterprise and we are incredibly excited to announce our first grant from the Disclosure Foundation for $10,000 to the Vanguard Enterprise. Gentlemen thank you. Thank you everyone I'll be brief. It's been a long day and very informative but first just have to say thank you to Jordan and the entire of UAP Disclosure Foundation, not just for your generous donation to Vanguard, which I'm proud to say you're the first organization to support us and hope there'll be many more, but also for putting on this historic event.

UFO, UAP, NHI, disclosure, government transparency, it's no longer fringe, it's no longer outside. It is here quite literally in the halls of power or in the Kennedy caucus room, and I just cannot express how exciting that is for me to see and be a part of. Vanguard was founded based on the direct experience of Dylan, myself, and others, some who are public and others who are not, which is that there's a critical and urgent need to support whistleblowers on the UAP topic who come forward, really risk it all, and continue to pay the price,

and cannot afford to wait for government to catch up. We have families where we want to start families. The need is now and urgent, and that is why civic society, I'm proud to say, is stepping up and here to help. So we're building an organization that not just will help us, but I think empower voices to go out there and spread the good word. As they go out to their communities, they feel stable and respected and welcomed. That can only do good for the movement as a whole. You know, one of the bright spots in this journey has been the outflowing of support from people who want to help, whether that's, you know, offering their time, their expertise, or just wanting to get involved. It's frankly too much.

And what Vanguard will hopefully do in the coming months and years is channeled out support in an organized way so that it goes to where it's needed most. the legal, financial, medical, psychological, and community needs of UAP whistleblowers and their families. So thank you again to the UAP Disclosure Foundation for helping that dream to start to come true. And thank you to all our supporters here and out there who have been with us and will continue to be with us. And to close, I just want to end with an old adage, which is that the flame of knowledge is kept alight. and passed on generation by generation by a relatively thankless, small few who are warriors for the truth in their time

and make sure that that truth goes forward into the next cycle of humanity. And, you know, the lesson I take away from that is that at the center of all this is the human factor. Disclosure is about us. It's not just the science, it's not just the wonder or the institution, organization, conspiracies and competition.

It's very human, it's very personal. And at the center of that are the experiencers, the abductees, the people at the fringe of society who experience this whether they want to or not and have for far too long been marginalized and silenced. And I think that is starting to change culturally, but it took a lot of work to get here. And while it's before my time,

I can only imagine the sort of darkness and isolation others went through dealing with those sort of extraordinary experiences in a sometimes cruel and unbelieving world. So I just want to take a moment to thank one of those people, and there are many, but one person who gave a voice in a platform and more than that, counsel and comfort to experiences and abductees, and he's here today, and that's Mr. Striber. Thank you, Whitley. rather long journey. I can remember the beginning of it, staring into the face of a jeering

host on a television set under the bright lights alone, and then going home in the night and coming face to face with the very thing that they were laughing about. But you're not laughing, and I'm so glad you are here keep up the good work, we will become a cosmic species. Now receiving frequency transmission. So if you take tarot the way that pop culture portrays it, which is that the cards themselves have some kind of hidden power to predict your future, the jury is very much out.

However, if I were to do my own tarot and have such a connection with my own subconscious that when I see these symbols, I could apply any meaning to it, and I basically use it as a way to explore my unconscious and subconscious mind. There's a lot of things that you don't know that you know, that are buried deep inside of you. Through things like meditation and therapy and all of that, you get these epiphanies that bring it out.

And I think that symbols are another, method to do that, these kinds of internal excavations. And so it actually doesn't require a belief in the supernatural, although it totally helps. Stay tuned to Spectovision Radio.