Somewhere in the Skies - In Plain Sight with Ross Coulthart

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

On episode 223 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan is joined by award-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author, Ross Coulthart. With an explosive new documentary that released in Australia on 7News Spotlight all about UFOs, and an upcoming book in the same vein, Coulthart walks us through some of the extraordinary information he's uncovered concerning both the United States and Australia's handling of the UFO situation. Coulthart shares several stories from his documentary and upcoming book, In Plain Sight, and also reveals some of the incredible interviews he's conducted, including a stunning admission by former Director of Science and Technology Development for the Navy, Nat Kobitz, who claims to have been read into a program to retrieve crashed UFOs and back-engineering them. Coulthart also discusses the many challenges within mainstream news to cover the UFO topic with the credibility and diligence it truly deserves. It's a jam-packed interview with one of the leading journalists covering the UFO/UAP topic today. Pre-order In Plain Sight at: https://amzn.to/3hUryG8  Follow Ross Coulthart on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosscoulthart  Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Somewhere in the Skies Coffee! https://bit.ly/3mIAq2o Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Somewhere in the Skies Subreddit: www.reddit.com/r/SomewhereSkiesPod/ Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at www.CWseed.com Episode edited by Jane Palomera Moore Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up guys, Ryan Sprague here, and I'm just dropping in to remind you about our Patreon campaign. Somewhere in the Skies is always free to consume, but it's not free to create. So if you want to help the show on a monthly basis, we have tons of rewards for you in return, including shoutouts on the show and website, bonus content and episodes, and free merge. Want to be my guest or pick a topic for the show? You can do that too. So if you'd like to learn more and to help support the show, visit Patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you and keep looking up. Today on the show, award-winning investigative reporter and best-selling author, Ross Coolthart.

I asked him about, you know, was he ever read into a crash retrieval program, you know, was he ever security briefed to be briefed on claims that the United States has recovered alien craft? And I fully expected him to go, oh, come on, Ross, it's just crazy bullshit. you know, why you were asking me that question? And there was this kind of pregnant pause after I asked the first question. And I was about to change the subject and move on out of embarrassment. And then he went, yes, but I wasn't read out of it. And for that reason, I can't say much more about it.

And I went, multiple craft or a single craft, multiple. He put me on to a series of colleagues of his who introduced me to the fact that they we're aware of the program. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Ross, thank you so much for joining me today and Somewhere in the Skies for the very first time. It's a real pleasure. Yeah, I've been waiting a while for this one.

I know you've been a very busy man, you know, with the documentary coming out, with the book coming out very soon as well, which we will definitely dive into both of those first. But my first question for first time guests always, And one I know a lot of my listeners are going to want to know is how did you first get interested in the whole UFO thing? What sort of compelled you to do the most recent work that you've been doing with the UFO phenomenon? As a journalist, Ryan, I'm very fascinated by taboos.

There are a lot of subjects. Actually, there's not a lot. There's some subjects in journalism that you're told as a journalist. It's culturally unacceptable to go near. one of them is UFOs. Another is global warming science, anything that questions the science of global warming. I won't get into that. It's too controversial.

But I'm fascinated because as a journalist, there's always been this cognitive dissonance between what I know is going on in intelligence and defence. And I have many good sources in defence and intelligence around the world, in Britain, the US, and Australia. New Zealand and Canada. And I'm aware of a lot of things that go on, including monitoring of anomalous objects. It always fascinated me. I'd read my history.

I'm a keen historian, and I'd read my history about how Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force's investigations into UFOs, had ostensibly shut down Air Force interest into the phenomenon back in the late 1960s. And it was painably obvious to me that that's completely untrue. I've spoken to people in our defense force, in your military, your intelligence services, your government, your Congress, who've told me that there is active ongoing monitoring of the phenomenon, of the anomalies that are seen in our skies, that there is a concern about it, that they do perceive it as a threat in the sense that it's a challenge, if you like, to American military hegemony.

it's a technology apparently far beyond what's known to be in the arsenal of America and indeed of any of your rivals. And that cognitive dissonance, if you like, is what's driving my interest, because it's interesting that the public are being told that this is a subject for ridicule, it's a subject for stigma, it's a subject for dismissiveness. You know, don't take an interest, it's rubbish. You know, it's just silly, crazy people. when in fact at a very high level, as I discovered when I started looking, it's being taken

very seriously indeed. I've spoken to people at a very high level, most of them on background in our intelligence services and defence force who tell me that there is active monitoring of anomalous objects, both from Australia, from the US and indeed from many of the five ice countries all around the world, there's an active interest being taken because it is a genuine mystery and why wouldn't I as a journalist be interested in a mystery? It's fascinating. I find

it absolutely fascinating and the more I delved the more it really struck me as a journal. Why aren't we looking at this subject? It's extraordinary because as you and others have been saying for quite a few years now

there is a genuine mystery there that is worthy of investigation. I think the turning point for me and other journalists was when the Pentagon finally admitted that it could not plausibly explain with prosaic explanations, the objects that were caught on video, the gimbal, the tick-tac and the go-fast, and then all the other objects that have been seen since by pilots off the coast of Virginia and the east coast and the west coast of the USA. It's obvious to me that there is a genuine mystery there, or at least that's the position that your Pentagon is taking,

that, oh, shock horror, this is a mystery. And that, I don't know why that's not on the front pages of every newspaper, that the Pentagon has formally admitted that this is an issue of concern and something that deserves to be seriously investigated. Absolutely. And I mean, well, you are one of the, you know, leading journalists in Australia and now here in the United States, who has worked with the mainstream media to cover.

this topic in a serious manner. And, you know, this wasn't just a small article that you had come out. This was both an upcoming book and a documentary. So, I mean, I'd love to get an idea of how, first and foremost, how the documentary came to be with Seven News Spotlight. An amazing organization I've had the honor of working with as well. But I will tell you, Ross, before I worked with them, I was told, you know, be careful with the news in Australia because they will try to make fun of this and they will try to, you know, ridicule you. So be ready. But I'll tell you this. That's not my experience with them at all. So yeah, how did the documentary come to me, if I might ask? One of the things, Ryan, that does give me a real annoyance is in the media in Australia, any time there is a UFO story or a UAP story. It is generally introduced by the host with a kind of a smirk. Oh, you know, we're about to do a funny story.

And then there's woo-woo music or X-Files music. And generally there's a graphic up the back of a flying saucer or a bug-eyed green man. And the public are invited to reach the conclusion that this is just a gentle piss take, that we're now at a stage in the news bulletin where we're having a bit of fun. And that's generally how the subject has been covered by the media for much of the last 50 years. And you're right. there is an issue around a lot of the media. One of the programs I used to work for was a show called 60 Minutes in Australia,

which is a sister show of the American 60 Minutes. And at one stage, I actually read that Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, was talking openly about UFOs. And it intrigued me. And this was back in when he first, started talking, I think, back 2015, 2016. And I thought, gee, that's interesting. So I contacted Chris and he agreed to be interviewed. And I used to go with 60 minutes to the United States

quite a lot, three or four times a year. And I invited him to do an interview with us and he agreed. And then I can remember the executive producer of the program pulled the interview at the very last minute because they were concerned that we were exposing ourselves to ridicule and stigma if we did this story, if we took this phenomenon seriously. And a lot of people think that there are sort of dark-faced men in black that go around media officers and say, you shall not run this story. And that's truly not the case at all. What there is, it's a much more effective thing. It's a stigma. It's a ridicule that's been attached to the phenomenon in what, What I think, and interestingly, the evidence shows this quite compellingly, there's been a deliberate disinformation campaign by intelligence services, both in my country, yours, the US, and other countries to try and stop people from taking the phenomenon seriously.

And it's been phenomenally successful through movies, television shows. You've just been invited to conclude that all stories about UFOs, flying sources, lenticular discs and nonsense. And it's been an incredibly powerful way of shutting. go in the media. And I saw this happen myself when I was working for a major newspaper here in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald. I was on the desk deciding what stories should be allocated to which reporter on a Sunday. And the phone rang and a lady rang us from a suburb of Western Sydney and said she'd just got a fantastic photograph of a disc-shaped metallic craft that was hovering over her backyard. And she sounded actually knew of her.

I'd met her through another story and I thought, well, no, she's a reputable person. She was actually involved with a refugee advocacy organization. And she told me she had 35mm film camera photographic vision of this object. And so I said to the editor, I contacted the editor and I said, hey, look, we've got a great story out at Parramatta in Western Sydney. Can we get a reporter to go out there and cover it? and it sort of came down stentorian on high, you know, we do not do bloody UFO stories, Roscoe. We're a serious newspaper.

You know, flying sources are for whack jobs. They're for the tabloid newspapers. And that's been pretty much the view all the way through my career in both television and newspapers. And yet, periodically, I would do stories as an investigative journalist. I became a reasonably prominent investigative journalist in Australia. and I was working for a public broadcaster called the ABC on a show that's very similar to your PBS Frontline, which does sort of hour-long investigative journalism programs.

The show I was working for was called Four Corners, and we had a lot of problems with young pilots from our Air Force not getting enough flying hours, and they were crashing these beautiful aircraft and killing themselves sadly in horrible circumstances. And it was becoming a scandal that we had such a disproperienced. proportionate number of crashes amongst our young pilots. And so the Air Force opened its doors to us and showed us what it was trying to do to fix the problem. And I found myself spending a lot of time while we were shooting that story with very senior wing commanders and very senior Air Force brass. Let's leave it at that. And I remember I was taken aside at one stage in the office's mess when we were having a drink at the end of a day's filming at a place called Raff, Richmond,

an air base in northwestern Sydney. And one of the very senior military brass said to me, why don't you chaps do UFOs? Why does nobody ever investigate? UFOs, flying sources, this weird stuff we see in the skies. And I said, look, it's simple. It's bullshit. It's rubbish.

You know, I've been told it. People have told me for years it's rubbish. Some of your colleagues have told me it's rubbish. and you go, no, it's not. And then it was a weird situation because journalists, and a lot of listeners may not understand how this works, but journalists have to use off-the-record or background briefings as a way of communicating with people in authority sometimes

because they don't want to compromise their position by identifying themselves on camera or on television or in a newspaper report. And so it frustrates some people sometimes that I can't name these people But suffice to say, this was very senior military officers in our Air Force. And one of them had actually served with your Top Gun Academy. And they told me that there were anomalous objects being seen all the time in Australia. And one of them said to me, go and have a look at our archives, you know. Go to the Office of Air Force Intelligence, which is the aptly named Daffy in our country, D-A-F-I.

And we dug those files up. In fact, some great work by some of my colleagues, Bill Chalker, Keith Basterfield, Paul Dean, very well-known UFO researchers in Australia who'd done some phenomenal work digging out files from the Australian archives. And in those files, it shows that our Air Force has long had an active interest in the phenomenon of anomalous objects in our skies. And that going right back to when the British, and this is again what Bob, Hastings goes on about the link between nuclear weapons and whatever these objects are, whatever they are, they seem to be taking an interest in nuclear weapons. Because a bit like your Nevada test sites for the Trinity nuclear weapon in 1945, Australia,

when the British wanted to develop their bomb, their nuclear bomb, they very kindly let us use our real estate to let off their bloody nuclear bombs. And so there was a site called Womera, where they did ICBM. missile testing and that had massive radar facilities that monitored these missiles going up into orbit and then coming back down to test the deployment of nuclear weapons for deployment for the British military. And there was another site that was within that massive area, one of the world's largest test areas called Maralinga. And I've done stories on Maralinga before. It's like something out of a science fiction movie because there are parts of this wasteland in South Australia that are still so radioactive, you can't go in there.

The British did crazy things where they even experimented with throwing plutonium around in the outback landscape. And the Aboriginal people and numerous British servicemen suffered horrific cancers as a result. But during these tests in the 1950s and the 1960s, when I started going through these files, as my friends in Australia had shown me to do, it was clear that there was just, sighting after sighting, after sighting, recorded methodically in intelligence reports and Air Force sightings reports, which showed that reputable members of the military, senior officers, civilian observers had witnessed anomalous craft objects hovering over test sites, weird lights.

It sort of ranged from weird lights to, in some places, lenticular disks that were clearly intelligently controlled craft flying at tens of thousands of miles an hour, identical to the kind of things that have long been seen in and around your Los Alamos test facility, your various test sites at the Nevada test range. And it really struck me that this was a history that whilst it had been reported in UFO circles, it had largely been ignored by mainstream media because we spend so much time giggling and tittering about UFOs, we've never looked seriously at the subject. And then I was led from that investigation into the archives to more contemporary cases where in the archives there were mentions of a place

called Northwest Cape, the Harold E. Holt Communications Station, which turns out to be an absolutely integral part of the American strategic nuclear deterrence. And as far back as the mid-1960s, Americans had Polaris nuclear missile armed submarines operating in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. And one of the difficulties was getting messages to them in the event of nuclear war as quickly and as safely as possible without betraying the position of those subs. And so the technology they use is VLF, very low frequency. And you have to transmit that VLF. You need massive masts, hundreds of meters high. And so they built this science fiction-looking facility in the middle of nowhere on the red dirt of the Australian outback

in a place called Northwest Cape in probably one of the most westerly, northwesterly parts and remote parts of Australia. And these masts rise hundreds of metres up into the air and they can transmit VLF signals to submarines underwater, quite a way underwater. and I've spoken to people who were involved in developing the technology in your country, and they've told me that you could only send to a submarine a very short message, which was basically saying, come closer to the surface so we can send you a more full message. And then when they were deploying their communications boy, or buoy, as you guys call them, they would then receive a more full message with the codes for the authorizations for the launch of nuclear weapons. And what fascinated me as somebody who's long taking an interest in Australia's role in the Cold War,

you know, we've always been used by America and Britain as kind of like a silent partner in the Five Eyes Alliance, often doing plausibly deniable work. But what fascinated me was that the political debate at the time about this particular base was negligible. You know, we were under a very conservative government at the time in the mid-1960s. and the public weren't told that what this base was all about was the deployment of nuclear weapons in the event of war. And then when I started going through the archives, my friend Keith Basterfield and Bill Chalker had pointed me to this, there was one particular sighting incident which really caught my eye, which was recorded in Air Force files that, interestingly, were no longer to be found in the Air Force files, but before.

for the formation of the Australian Freedom of Information Laws, they had legally been passed by the Air Force Public Relations Office to a UFO group and found their way to Bill Chalker, who's a very well-known and very well-respected UFO researcher. And these documents showed that during the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973, there was a moment when Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, at late at night in the White House, has had a conversation with the Soviet Premier, and he realizes that we're on the brink of the Soviets deciding to deploy their

troops into the Middle East to support their ally Syria. And Kissinger's done his level best to try to discourage the Soviet Premier from doing that, but he's worried that there's a risk that this could escalate, because if Soviet troops go into the Middle East, there's almost horrible certainty that this could escalate into a full-fledged nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the USA. And so he ordered an escalation in the level of preparedness from the peacetime level of DefCon 4 to the highest peacetime level of DefCon 3. And that instigated a whole lot of military movements and deployment of craft in and around the world as essentially the preparation for nuclear war.

And of course, instrumental in that was this base. Excuse me for a moment. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Instrumental in that was this base, the Northwest Cape Base, where signals would be deployed to the submarines in the event of conflict. And within a few hours of Henry Kissinger giving that order to go to DefCon 3 in the White House, the deputy commander of the base, a guy called Lieutenant.

Commander Moyer or Meyer, we can't be sure from the way it's risen. We're still trying to find the guy. He wrote a sightings report which observed that there was a charcoal-y black craft sphere seen hovering over or near the base just before dusk. And it was also corroborated and drawn by Bill Lynn, who was a local fire chief who was working for the Americans at the base. And he sat down and pulled out his pad and drew a picture of it, which was also in the sightings report files. And it basically shows a kind of a chubby flying saucer, a kind of a sphere with a ring around the side of it. And then as if that incident wasn't enough, I, this part of Australia, by the way, it's just God's own country. It's beautiful.

It's very remote, but it has a place called the Ningaloo Whalee Whale Shark experience, the reef. and you can literally, I've done it once and it's just awe-inspiring. You can go out on a boat and you can swim with these magnificent huge whale shark creatures that are quite harmless. And you're in this gorgeous tropical ocean full of teeming with fish

and these gigantic creatures the side of a house. You can swim reasonably close to them and just have this awesome experience with nature. And there's something about this part of the world. It is so remote, so far from nowhere. And I think a lot of the Americans couldn't believe their luck. I've spoken to a lot of people who were deployed for the Harold Holt base with America during the 1960s and the 1970s. And they've told me that it was one of

the funnest experiences of their lives because they were paid good money because it was supposedly a hardship deployment, but they found themselves literally in a tropical beach teeming with fish, beautiful Aussie girls, and they couldn't believe their luck. And anyway, what we discovered when I went up there. I went up there for another story for 60 minutes and I then went up on another occasion and the locals slowly got to know me and they knew that I was this kind of weird UFO guy who was asking questions about this October 1973 incident. And on one of my visits, it's quite late at night and I had my computer out on my desk in front of me and they walked up to me, this guy in a big yellow high vis vest said to me, are you that journal that's interested in a

UFOs and I went, you know, so I was thinking I was going to get whacked, you know, it was that sort of Australian art back pub. And I went, yeah. And he went, good, because we've all seen them. And then he sort of turned and pointed to this bunch of guys that was sort of looking from another table over at me. And I went and sat down with them and they were all road workers from a local exmouth, that's the local town nearby, the local Xsmith road gang. And just it all came out. And I was amazed. I just kept on buying them beers and they told me these amazing stories about these anomalous objects that they'd seen. And I then found a guy called Adrian Arnold, who was in an outdoor cinema in Exmouth, either on the exact night or around the time when the 1973

sighting had occurred. And he was a young boy with his mates at an outdoor cinema. And he'd seen similar objects maneuvering in the skies, just doing incredible things coming. from what he thought was orbit, screaming down towards the ocean and then stopping and then turning on a dime. And, you know, there were funny things going on around the base. And then locals started telling me all manner of sightings, you know, and numerous. I've lost count of the number. I've had some as recently as an hour ago from people up that way telling me incredible stuff.

And let's just say that there's stuff going up at Northwest Cape that bears an uncanny resemblance to what people like George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell have described going on at Skinwalker Ranch. It is a very anomalous location. And I've been blown away in the last few weeks by the volume of inquiries and messages that I've had from listeners and viewers who saw my documentary, who are aware of my book and have seen some of the pre-publicity that I've been doing and who are really wanting to engage to tell me what they've seen. And a lot of them have seen at one stage right up in a few years prior to the Americans pulling out of the base in the early 1990s. A lot of them saw this black triangular craft. And one of them was a woman called Annie, who I put into my documentary. And she very kindly agreed to be interviewed on camera.

And she's spoken at length in my book. and she told me how she was a bit sweet on an American guy at the base. He was a young officer and the Americans were slowly pulling out of X-Mouth because the incoming Labor government was concerned that Australia was a nuclear target in the event of nuclear war. And so they'd gently encouraged the Americans to let them take over the base. And that was agreed by America. and so the base was essentially resumed between 1991, 1991, 1992 by Australia,

and it still operates as a communications facility. And the Americans still have a considerable hand there, I'm told. But because the Americans were slowly pulling out, there were a lot of parties and farewells. And so Annie was invited to a party at the base in 1991. And she walks out after a love. evening at a run about 2.30 in the morning. And then she realizes there's no cabs left. There's only one or two cabs in this little country town and nobody's leaving the base at the time.

So she thinks, oh, cricky, I'm going to have to walk. And then mercifully, the two Australian security policemen who were responsible for keeping the base secure that time of night came out in their four-wheel drive truck. And they said, oh, we'll give you a lift glove. Just, you know, give us half an hour and we'll quickly do our checks and then we'll give you a lift into town. So around about three o'clock in the morning, late on a crystal clear night in this part of Australia called Northwest Cape. And just to give you a picture, it's just completely empty. It's deserted coastal roads. There's very few people up there. It's a very quiet country town that they're headed towards five or six kilometres down the road. And they're leaving this gigantic

American Communications Facility and it slowly disappears into the distance. And not long after they've driven down the road a bit all of a sudden, like something out of close encounters or something, there's this illumination on the road in front of them as they're driving along at 100

kilometres an hour. And the first reaction of the two men that Annie's with is it's back. And she goes, what's back? And they just ignore her and they reach behind her and grab a 35mm camera that they had ready because apparently they'd seen the same object the previous night.

And she still can't see what they're seeing, but one of them is shooting through the windscreen at this object that's just hovering clearly just above them. And she thinks it's a helicopter. And she goes, what is it? What is it? And one of them grabs her and pushes her forward. And she looks up through the windscreen and she screams because it's this gigantic black triangular craft, which has kind of like the end of it slightly kind of.

out of. And she just completely freaks because while she's watching, the craft jumps. It doesn't move. It just jumps in an instant. It's at a thousand feet. And then it drops to the left hand side of the car. And it's literally skirting above the shrubs, the bushes beside the road. And it's keeping pace with them. And she can see that it's a lenticular craft, the triangular shape had lights underneath it. And then on the side, she can see it's clearly some kind of looked like metallic construction. She doesn't see any doors or windows, but basically it's keeping track with them. And she's completely freaked out by this because she realizes by its movements,

it's intelligently controlled. And then as she watches, it does it again. And it just instantaneously goes to a thousand feet yet again and then drops down to the other side of the car. And it's like, frankly, somebody's having a bit of a lend with them. And they're watching, as this object is screaming along through the art back of the Australian landscape, sort of coming up as trees come and then coming down again. And it's essentially almost playing with them. And she by this stage is absolutely terrified because she thinks it's an alien spacecraft that's come to take them away or something.

And I've confirmed a large part of what I'm about to tell you with multidisprone, Paul sources and I can't tell you who they are or what I know, but basically I'm very happy that Annie is a reliable witness. She pleads with them to drop her off on the edge of town, on the edge of this little town called X-Muth, and that's what they do. But the two coppers basically scream back. They drop her off and scream back up the road because they've gone back. They've seen it landing and they want to go and get a photograph of it. Meanwhile, Annie is so terrified. she runs home two kilometers through the town of Exmouth to the other side of X-Muth, locks her door and she actually forgets about it for two days,

which is kind of weird, but she forgot about it for two days. And then her mum remembers this well as well. Basically, two days or three days later, these two American military policemen, who, by the way, had no jurisdiction in this Australian town, they'd turn up in her workplace and they'd come to her mum's house first and she'd said, I'll go to my daughter's work. And some of her work colleagues remember her being greeted by these guys as well.

And they ask her to go with them to the base. And she thinks she's got her friends in trouble, her American friends in trouble at the base, because they've clearly had a bit of fun that night when they were having a bit of a party. And she thinks, oh, God, I better go and stand up for them and speak for them. Otherwise, they're going to get into trouble. So she goes with them. It doesn't cross her mind oddly that what they've come to talk to her about.

is this anomalous object. And so they drive her in a car and she slowly begins to realize as she cracks jokes that these guys are deadly serious. You know, she's saying things like, oh, I must be in big trouble. You know, it must be really important because they've sat her in the back seat of a car and they're not saying anything to her as they're driving along the five or six kilometers to the base. And then as they arrive at the base, she knows where the top secret area is, the really, really

sensitive top secret area where all the communications are sent from. And she realizes, oh, my goodness, we're driving into this part of the base that I know is the most super secret part. And nobody stops them. Nobody asks for ID. And she's waved right in. And she's taken to this building that she knows and ushered down a corridor and into a room where there's a large number of military brass, most of whom she doesn't know. And that's significant because she knows, as a girl who's grown up in X-Muth, she knows all the Americans in town. It's a very close-knit little community. They all date each other. They're all going to school with each other. She described how she'd swear allegiance to the American flag in the morning, and it's because most of the schools

were American schools. And it was this weird base in the middle of nowhere in Australia that was actually very physically isolated from the rest of Australia. So she knew all the Americans, and she realized that whoever these people were, they'd come a long way. probably from overseas for this moment to hear what she had to say. And she sat down between what she realizes now are the two Australian policemen who had driven her that night. And they're sitting there hang dog flat, not saying anything. They look like they've been there for ages.

And they're looking scared, apprehensive. And she's sat down between them. But she's a civilian. They can't do anything to her. She's an Australian civilian. and she's also, dare one say, she's an assertive, strong Australian woman who doesn't put up with BS.

And they immediately ask her what it was she saw, and she says, I saw a UFO. And they ask her what she means. She describes what she saw as some kind of craft, some kind of intelligently controlled object that did these maneuvers that I've described to you. And then they try and tell her that what she saw was a weather balloon. And she just scoffs at that,

because she's actually a member of a family that did the Bureau of Meteorology's weather balloon launches. So she's launched weather balloons personally, and her father periodically launched weather balloons for the local bureau and filed weather reports. So she knew full well what weather balloons look like. And as she admitted to me previously, she'd seen a gigantic black triangular object over her farmer's farm, over her father's station. She'd seen objects before. And so she wasn't surprised that she'd seen this object that night. That was the really interesting thing that slowly came out as we had this conversation. And the interesting thing was they tried to bully her into shutting up about what she saw

into saying it was a weather balloon. And that's why I have a suspicion. I mean, this is 1991, and this is just a hunch on my part. throwing it out there for people to have a think about. George Knapp's done his excellent work with Lizar and exposing Area 51 and talking about alleged experimental programs involving highly sophisticated craft at Area 51. And every man in his dog has now got a camera sitting at the end of the runway or on some hill as far as, as close as possible to the Area 51 test range.

And if I was the U.S. Air Force, and hypothetically, if I was testing some of the area 51 test range, kind of new propulsion system or some kind of new technology, which we all suspect they were and are, I'd be really worried that whatever it is I'm doing is being compromised by the growing public attentiveness towards the now compromised area 51 test range. So what would you do? And I have a hunch, and this isn't just based on this incident, it's also based on conversations I've had with people in Australia. I know, for example, we've been testing hypersonic technology with the Americans for quite some years now where hypersonic drones are deployed from the US and flown towards Australia and Australian scientists have been collaborating with

them in that regard. We have a vast, empty continent in Australia that is perfect for the testing of vehicles and craft and devices. The British did the same with their nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and the 1960s. So I don't think it's in total. I don't think it's in highly out the realm of probability that the Americans were testing some kind of technology in Northwest Cape in that late 80s, early 90s period, because I've now spoken to multiple witnesses who've told me that they've seen lenticular craft, either disc-shaped or triangular shapes that were clearly intelligently controlled operating in an Iran to the Northwest Cape area, notably over the base, the Harold Holt base,

or in particular over the raft Leermonts, the local gigantic runway air base that's located nearby on Northwest Cape. And if you were to look for a remote part of the world, you wouldn't find a more remote part of the world than this area where there's just thousands of square kilometres of empty landscape and ocean. That's why we can't find MH370, because there's also the Diego Garcia base that the British took over as a principality in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And then further north there's Guam.

And so I'm just hypothesizing. I'm just throwing it out there for people to think about. Is it possible that Australia was testing some kind of technology in collaboration with the Americans or were the Americans doing it in secret? Because the evidence suggests to me very strongly that the Americans were aware of whatever this technology was. They weren't surprised by it. Their motivation was to shut it down and to try and stop public awareness of it. And so I'm, I'm, this is why a lot of people, I've noticed a lot of people are suggesting in my analysis that I'm leaning towards some kind of extraterrestrial hypothesis.

I'm not. I'm saying it's a mystery. And I'm exploring as a journalist should, what's the plausible explanation? And one thing I'm absolutely convinced about from my own sources is that my government and your government have not been entirely honest with the public about what's going on. And they are fully aware, much, much more aware than they care to admit of whatever this phenomenon is. They've been monitoring it for years. And I was led into that belief by other inquiries that I made. I'd done a story for a TV program in Australia about an extremely.

extraordinary blowout and defense expenditure on a project called Jorn, the Gindalee Over the Horizon radar network, which is a backscatter radar, which bounces electromagnetic signals off the ionosphere and was originally conceived, I think, by the Americans and the British as a way of capturing low-flying bombers coming in, doing sort of terrain-hugging attacks on the American continent. Unfortunately, backscatter for a whole variety of reasons didn't work very well as a radar, notably because during sunrise and sunset, there was a lot of EM interference. And a lot of the experts in both your country, Britain and other countries, including Russia, have told me that they've abandoned the research. It was always

inexplicable to me that Australia was continuing to pour billions of dollars into this technology. And I only recently learned that the reason why John is now so useful, and so, still continuing in Australia is because it is phenomenally good at picking up objects in low earth orbit. And it's very, very good at detecting space junk and what are euphemistically called space objects. And my attention was then drawn to the fact that the Americans have just installed a massive space telescope, which is a very secret facility in another part of Northwest Cape, not too far from the Exmouth, Harold Holt base. And I realized that there's an enormous amount of monitoring of space objects

in exactly that part of the world. What a coincidence. And all of the data streams from John, the gingerly over the horizon radar network, which I understand is primarily now looking at low Earth orbit, from John, from the Space Telescope at XMuth, but also from Pine Gap, which is by far in a way the biggest,

and most important base for the Americans outside of your continent of America. Pine Gap is also involved in monitoring both the telemetry of rival countries, missiles, missile launches, but it also brings in the data from both your defense support program, your DSP satellites and monitors, anomalous objects that are called, you for statistically fast walkers. And people started using this term to me, including Australians who had worked with, without betraying my sources,

there are Australians who have deployed with what is now your space command and done exchanges with the United States involved in monitoring space objects, who've told me that Pine Gap, John and the Space Telescope at Exmouth are very heavily involved in monitoring a non-exampton. anomalous space objects. And I was kind of working on that when I found the references to Bob Fish in the WikiLeaks

files, the leaked files of the DNC, the Democratic Party, which were essentially the files, primarily emails of John Podesta, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton. But an enormous number of emails, thousands and thousands of emails. And it shocked me that there was a guy in there called Bob Fish who'd communicated to John Podester, his concern that as a very, very highly cleared, security- cleared communications expert, he had been made privy quite a few years ago to data from DSP satellites that was coming into an aerospace facility in California. in which he had personally seen the data showing an object coming from deep space, changing course and velocity in front of the DSP sensor, the satellite sensor,

changing course again and then entering Earth's atmosphere. And I checked out with a variety of people, both in our defense and your defense forces. And I confirmed that there are numerous sightings of anomalous objects that appear to be intelligently controlled that are dubbed fast walkers coming in and out of Earth orbit, which are not explained. And I'm not saying they're little green men. I'm not saying they're aliens. But it's a mystery. It's a genuine mystery. And as a journalist, I take the view that when you hear it from the caliber of people that I've spoken to, particularly somebody's,

who was prepared to go on the record like Bob Fish, it just made me go, well, why is this much more aggressively investigated by journalists? It just baffles me. It's amazing. And I think part of the issue, Ryan, is, and I'm not dumping on my colleagues who cover defence and intelligence, but when you do investigative journalism like I do, you dip your toe into a subject area for a while and then you go out of it. whereas a lot of the journalists who cover defence, national security, foreign affairs, intelligence,

they are reliant on those sources that they engage with on a daily basis for the drip, for the feed. And a lot of the journalism that you see in the New York Times and the Washington Post, more often than not, it's a well-placed official. Often it's the, you know, somebody in the president's office or somebody just basically saying, look, this is what we know. You know, the Iranians are doing X, Y, and Z. And we want you to write a story that really help if you write a story saying X, Y, and Z. And this is the God's truth. And here's a bit of evidence that you can talk about.

Go away and write your story. And because of that dependent relationship that exists between defense correspondents, national security correspondence, particularly people who work at the Pentagon, they've been acculturated, I think, into treating the whole UFO subject, UAP subject, as we now call it, anomalous. unidentified aerial phenomena. They've been acculturated into treating that, I think, with ridicule and stigmatizing it. And I've actually challenged a number of them on this because I've had phone calls from

some very prominent American journalists who know of my work in the last few weeks. And they've been testing a few stories out on me. And it's quite exciting, actually, because there are some really interesting stories coming down the pipeline from some very reputable journalists in America. And I think it's slowly changing, but I think part of the problem here has been that if you're somebody who works that round, if you work that brief all the time, you make yourself very quickly unpopular. If you, say, hound the president's spokesperson or the Pentagon spokesperson with questions about

UAP because frankly they don't want to be asked questions about UAP. But frankly, I think they should be because we're now at a stage since April last year when the Pentagon formally admitted. And this is the point that Pentagon has formally admitted. It cannot explain the phenomena that is described on the sensor systems and the videos that were captured for the TICTAC, the gimbal and the GoFast. and other anomaly that have been seen by U.S. Navy pilots, I'm told, as recently as last week off the East Coast of Virginia. You know, these sightings are going on all the time. There are anomalous sightings happening all the time. And it's not just in America. I get tired of that lame thing you get from some skeptics who say, why do the UAPs only ever show themselves to Americans? Why do they do that? It's not true.

I'm aware of pilots and aria force here in Australia who've told me they would not. Never go public about it, but they've seen things. Commercial pilots I've spoken to from Qantas and Virgin Airlines that I've engaged with who told me they frequently see anomalous objects at high altitude that they can't explain. But there's a culture of ridicule. There's a stigma, there's a taboo that's been attached to this subject that I think is wholly unjustified. And certainly my journalistic antenna and are twindling and I'm. getting the most phenomenal information coming in the door from good people who know I'm not going to be reckless because I'm essentially, let me be very clear about this. If, as I suspect,

what was hovering over an American base in Australia in 1991 was experimental American technology, and I think that's the most plausible explanation, to be frank with you, I think that the American pilots of that craft or somebody who was flying it thought that the people in the vehicle were Americans at the base and they decided to have a bit of fun and buzz whoever it was and go, hey, let's give these guys a scare. But they didn't realize there was a civilian on board because it was a very, very serious breach of regulations for those policemen to have carried a civilian. And they got bollocks for it. They got absolutely hammered for it, I can tell you. And the most plausible explanation to me is that the Americans have been testing technology.

Now, I'm not saying that for sure. And I know a lot of people out there are frustrated that I'm not going to be declaratory and say, I know for sure. I have a suspicion based on my sources that the Americans have made a major breakthrough in some kind of advanced propulsion and energy system. They must have done. Hey, guys, Ryan Sprague here. When I'm not making podcasts, I am listening to them.

Seriously, I'm obsessed. And if there's one person and one show I turn to every week, to hear stories of the strange, the weird, and the unexplained, it's, of course, got to be Jim Harold's Campfire. With over 500 episodes, Den of Geek called Jim Harold's Campfire, the best tool we have currently in existence to hear real-life scary stories from other human beings since the actual campfire was invented. The concept is pretty simple.

Jim talks to other regular folks and strange stuff that's happened to them. And yes, that includes UFOs and UAPs, along with cryptids, ghosts, and true head-scratching mysteries. One of my all-time favorite stories is one where a woman almost ended up being absorbed by a painting in a mysterious bar that seemed like something straight out of the twilight zone. Or there's this story of a young man who encountered a spider-like creature with baby hands. Then there's the story of a woman in England who encountered what she thought was a banshee, only to suffer a horrible tragedy only moments later. Now, not all of the stories in Jim Herald's campfire are horrified.

Some are actually pretty heartwarming, like a visit from a past loved one. or a peaceful near-death experience. Regardless, there are true and fascinating stories told by ordinary people who've had extraordinary experiences. So, pull up a virtual log, get cozy, and tune in to Jim Harold's campfire. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to someone in the skies. I'd love to ask you, jumping off of that, I know, you'd be. did cover so much in the documentary in the limited time you had. And I'm sure in the book as well, but you hit it right on the head there with this technology here in the United States. You know,

our Pentagon report even said, you know, a lot of these UAP are not American tech. But I think a lot of us are kind of still suspicious of that assumption that they're making. But you actually have brought up several times. And we've spoken off the record about these patents. that the Navy had with Salvatore Paise. Is this something you've looked into? And do you think there's anything to this, that this could possibly be what some of these Navy pilots encountered out there or something that America is working on?

Look, you know, if you go on the Occam's razor principle, you always look for the simplest explanation first. You know, I err towards the simple explanation, which is that there is a technology being tested in the black. and I sure hope that's the case. I really do because frankly, I want our American ally to be the one that controls this technology, not authoritarian dictatorships like China or Russia, that scares the hell out of me if they do have mastered technology like this.

The problem is good people like Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Lua Lizondo, the guy who ran the UFO program. I think even certain former CIA officials, certain former senior defense officials, they've all said publicly and some privately, numerous have said privately to me, that this is not American military technology, that what's being seen cannot plausibly be explained by some black project. And, you know, Chris Mellon told me, I mean, it was quite funny.

I was telling him how I, one of the first stories I did on UFOs, was we interviewed way back in 1989, 90. We spoke to a very senior member of the Belgium Air Force about sightings of black triangles that at the time were being seen frequently by tens of thousands of people over Belgium. And it was this huge mystery. And the TV program I was working for at the time,

we did a live satellite interview with an Air Force official. And there was speculation at the time that there was this mysterious, aircraft called the Aurora, the Americans were testing, which was some kind of new super, possibly anti-gravitic craft that could do phenomenal maneuvers. And of course, what is that? That's 30 years later. There is no such aircraft known to be in the American military arsenal, and the Americans are formally denying that they have any such technology. And frankly, I don't know whether to believe them, to be honest. I think, you know, there are good reasons why governments lie.

They lie for strategic reasons to protect national security. And I would, frankly, if I had this technology, I would lie about it. I'd try and keep it secret as long as possible. So you can't exclude that possibility. It's not easy waiting your way through this morass. It's not easy to reach a conclusion. Because frankly, if, as the American UAP report, has said, this technology is not known to be in the United States military or anywhere, if it's not in any of their rivals, the Russians or the Chinese. The only plausible remaining explanations are not necessarily extraterrestrial, but something non-human, or, and again, I err to this because of the Occam's razor principle,

is there somebody in private aerospace? is there somebody who, as the mythical Admiral Wilson document, has speculated, is testing this stuff? And that's where the Salvatore Pay, Dr. Salvatore Pay patents come in. Every physicist that I have spoken to, and I've spoken to quite a few, have told me, just for the benefit of your listeners, there are patents that have been filed by the US Navy on behalf of a guy called Dr. Salvatore Pay. and they are for the most absurd science fiction sounding things like a transmedium craft, hybrid craft, which can basically move between air and water and presumably also orbit. And as far as we can see, it seems to be running on some kind of anti-gravitic propulsion system.

And as far as we can see, as part of that, there is also a room temperature superconductor, which is theoretically possible, but not yet acknowledged as being an existence by conventional science. There's also a, oh God, what else is there? There's a force field generator, which the scientist claims might even be able to push aside

asteroids that are headed towards Earth. I mean, this is wacky science fiction-sounding stuff. But when you go through those patents, and I go through this in some detail in my book, the U.S. Navy's research section at, I think it's on the Paxton River in Washington, D.C., when they filed these patents, one of them was initially knocked back by the patent office because patents have to go through a testing process as to whether or not they're plausible or scientifically possible. and the commander, the senior officer who was supervising R&D for the Navy, a guy called James Sheehe, wrote a letter asserting the veracity of the claims made by Dr. Pei, asserting that some of these technologies are, quote, operable.

Now, under patent law, I'm a lawyer by training, and under patent law, one of the things you learn is that if you make a false patent claim. The patent is invalid. Now, some people have suggested that what this is all about is America being worried that our strategic rivals, China and Russia, may be on the point of a technological breakthrough, particularly with anti-gravidics or energy systems, which means that America would lose an advantage and have to pay patent fees to, I mean, could you think of anything more ignominious, having to pay for the right to use this technology? that it's been developed by China and the black. And so the speculation is that what pays patents represent

is an attempt by the Americas to pre-empt that. And to say we have this technology already, therefore, when our rivals start showing it and claiming rights to it, we will be able to assert that we already have this technology, therefore we don't have to pay them for it. Now, that's a plausible explanation. And I would, as I say to you, I would keep it quiet and confidential as long as possible. The only problem with that is, I think on two occasions, Commander Shee has actually made the representation that this technology is operable in writing.

And you can find those letters on the Patent Office website. I've never seen anything like that before in my life. It's quite extraordinary. As somebody who's worked with patents myself, it is, and I've spoken to patent lawyers as part of my research. the fact that the US Navy R&D people are asserting that this technology is operable, again, for the life of me, I do not know why this is not on the front page of every major newspaper. Why are representations like that being made by the US Navy if they are not true? Because if they are not true and if they are demonstrably untrue in the washup, those patents are useless. They're a waste of time and money.

so why don't they file them? Now, one of the other things you'd know is that there's legislation, there's laws in the US that allow you to keep secret invention secret. And they could have done that. So I think there is a deliberate attempt to advertise the fact that they've developed this technology. But I err towards, even though every physicist I've spoken to tells me it's just not possible, you know,

that what's being described here is just way beyond, what conventional physics has been able to analyze and describe. I do think it's possible that the Americans are sitting on a major breakthrough. But then I balanced that, and this is the cognitive dissonance in this, I balanced that with the fact that the UAP report has actually said categorically that this ain't American technology. So I don't know where we are. What I can do is, as a journalist, I can state the dilemma, the mystery.

And that's the fun part. The fun part now is trying to figure out what this all means. We shouldn't be leaping to conclusions. You know, one in one does not make little green men. It doesn't mean necessarily extraterrestrial. Frankly, I hope, if it's not American technology, I hope it is extraterrestrial. I hope it is non-human technology. Because if it's Russian or Chinese, God help all of us.

You know, they would have used that technology, use it to control. the world. It's awesome. The implications of this technology are that, you know, you can essentially attack your enemies instantaneously by stealth. I mean, if you go through the known observables that Lou Alizondo has described so well, this is the ultimate weapon. And frankly, I have a hunch just from, I mean, I've spoken, I've spent many, many, many long hours. And I know, again, this frustrates many of your listeners that I can't talk openly about who these people are, but I've, I've had privileged briefings with people who purport to have been involved in the program in the US. Now, I'm not leaping to conclusions when they say that they've been involved in a crash retrieval

program. I'm not leaping to conclusions that that's true, because one thing you have to take into account as a journalist, and I've been on the receiving end of these before, is deliberate disinformation. A country like America might be at a strategic disadvantage, for example. It might know that, say, hypothetically, the Russians have been able to develop some kind of breakthrough in anti-gravetics, or maybe the Chinese. Maybe somebody who was working for the Americans might have defected to the Chinese, I'm told that they have. And maybe that anti-gravicts technology is now being worked on in the black by the Chinese. And maybe this behind-the-scenes, a great race going on to try and develop this technology before everyone else.

Maybe that's the reason for the Dr. Salvatorey pay patents. I simply don't know. But what I do know is that multiple sources have told me, including one on the record, Matt Kobitz, the former head of science and technology development for the US Navy, he told me he was briefed into a crash retrieval program. I almost fell off my chair when he told me This is one of the senior boffins for the U.S. Navy.

And he tells me I was briefed into a crash retrieval program where I was told that we had recovered multiple UFOs. Really? Do you have any reason to believe he would be trying to disinform you or anyone else? Or is this a source you fully, fully trust? Look, there's always, I mean, you can't exclude this possibility. The circumstances were that I wrote one of the, strategies I adopted when I did my research. I am fanatical about protecting sources. You have to be

as a journalist. You can't burn your sources. And so one of the problems we have these days, and this has been highlighted today, actually, by the Pegasus League, which shows how easy it is to hack mobile phones. There's just been a huge revelation in the last 24 hours. The London Guardian's broken a story saying how easy it is to plant tracking software that allows you to monitor a target's mobile phones. And so I know I've known for years I've done stories about it myself, how wide open telephony, email, all manner of electronic communications are to interception. And here am I trying to get a break as a journal on what is probably, if true, the biggest secret ever, you know, biggest story ever, frankly, if this is true, if we really are talking about what we're talking about being

real. And so I thought, what's the way I can contact these people? Because I was going through scientific papers and reading the names of people who'd written interesting papers and thinking, how the hell do I contact these people without compromising them? And so I literally sat down and I wrote over, I think it was over 160 letters. I just wrote letters for days, weeks. And the local post office got to know me really well. I spent an awful lot of money on stamps. And I posted good old-fashioned letters to people all over the United States because what amused me is that even former top generals, former top intelligence officials, former senior scientists, serving scientists, serving officials in your military, they all have home addresses and God knows why from the

modern age of terrorism, you can get their home addresses and their phone numbers. So I wrote to people, you know, I wrote to people like General Neil McCasland and I sent letters saying, you know, I'm a journalist, I'm investigating this issue. By the way, Neil McCaslin did not respond to my letter. But a lot did. And I was amazed because I gave my encrypted messaging systems, signal, telegram, proton mail, which, by the way, you can find on my Twitter handle. And I invited people to contact me. And about a month or so after I sent off these letters, I started getting really interesting calls and messages from people who were telling me eventually that they were involved in what some called the program. And essentially,

it was an attempt to back engineer, recovered non-human technology, craft. And look, I cheerfully admit the first couple of times that I was told about this. I, I, I, treated it as a bit of a joke. I laughed. I thought this is wacky stuff. Somebody's deliberately sowing me with disinformation. And then one day, Nat Kovitz literally rang me. I couldn't believe it. This guy from the former head of Navy Science and Technology Development, like the Chief Boffin for the U.S. Navy for decades rang me out of the blue. And it was in the middle of the Sydney bushfires. And, you know, at the time, it looked like the whole city might get wiped out. We had fires on every front and I think because he was seeing this vision on his TV

set at home and the poor fellow was very, very, very seriously ill. He had cancer, very advanced cancer. He rang me and he goes, Ross, you need to get, you need to get under your government and get the top Soviet water bomber. And he was wanting me to get the Russians to send over their big water bomber. And, you know, he was just this tech geek who wanted to share information. And So for days, I just talked to him about what he'd worked on in the Navy. And it was just such a privilege to speak to somebody who, right through the Cold War, had worked on top vehicles and technologies in the U.S. military. And it was a real insight because he was such a generous, sharing, warm guy.

And I'd made it clear in my letter that I was really interested in talking about the phenomenon, you know, UFOs, UAPs. But after about the third or fourth call, he finally, then said to me, so Ross, why don't you ask me the question? And I went, what question would that be at? And he went, you know, something like, you know, and so I did. I asked him about, you know, was he ever read into a crash retrieval program, you know, was he ever security briefed to be briefed on claims the United States has recovered alien craft? And I fully expected him to go, come on, Ross, it's just crazy bullshit.

You know, why are you asking me that question? And there was this kind of pregnant pause after I asked the first question. And I was about to change the subject and move on out of embarrassment. And then he went, yes, but I wasn't read out of it. And for that reason, I can't say much more about it. And I pushed him a little bit. And I said, so you were read into a program involving the retrieval of an alien spacecraft.

Yes. And I went, multiple craft or a single craft? Multiple. And that blew me away. I mean, I had a senior American, former official of the U.S. Navy research and development,

prepared to go on the record. I checked it with him, and he was prepared to go on the record. As he said to me, sadly, what are they going to do to me? He knew he was going to die. And it was really sad because I've had some fairly snide people say to me in the messaging I've received in the last few weeks,

oh, how convenient that this guy died, you know, you can just basically put any words you want to his mouth. And there's no way of responding to people like that. I mean, the bottom line is journals use background sources all the time. And in my book, it takes a special form of courage for any public official or former public official to agree to speak to a journalist. It's always the hardest thing to do. And the thing that I have sleepless nights about is compromising sources. So take it as read that I took steps to ensure that Nat's position was very, very clear and on the record and that its provenance cannot be challenged.

I'm not going to describe the details of how I ensured that, but I'm very confident that he was telling me what he believed to be the truth. and the nice thing about it is he put me on to a series of colleagues of his who introduced me to the fact that they were aware of the program. So the story's only just begun, right? Yeah. And look, I don't rush away. I mean, no journalist would. You don't rush away at that point and say, hey, wow, I know the US has got an alien spacecraft jacked.

up on timber blocks in the cave and area 51. You just can't. You know, that's just not evidence. It's essentially hearsay because he never saw a craft. So essentially it's hearsay at that point. But what I'm very, very confident about is that a very senior official of the US Navy was read into a program where he was told that the US had recovered multiple craft. And moreover, he told me that on a subsequent occasion after he'd gone into private business working in a very specialized form of metal bonding called electron beam welding EBM, EBW. He was rung by the Air Force, the US Air Force, and they invited him to go to Wright-Patterson

Air Force Base, the legendary what we would call the foreign technology division. And as he told me with a chuckle, we really did go under. ground and he described being taken into a very, very secure facility where he was asked to examine what he is told nothing about it, but he saw it look like a bulkhead. That's the way he described it to me. It was a large lump of metal that it looked like part of a bulkhead. And the question he was asked was, was the form by which these metals were bonded electron beam welding? because they were trying to understand how these metals had been bonded. And he looked at it both visually and under an electron microscope,

and he was absolutely perplexed by what he saw because he said it was not any known bond. Because he said even electron beam welding, which is a very, very high quality form of welding where it doesn't really leave the bead that you normally see on a weld. it normally has a microscopic bead that you can see. And he says you could see nothing like that. He said that what he saw were two metals that were connected at an atomic level.

And he said it was mind-blowing. He said it was a technology he'd never seen before. And he wanted to know what it was because it was so incredibly interesting. But as so many of these things are, it was very heavily compartmentalized. He was under a top secret national security. off and probably SCI, SAP constraints. He couldn't tell me any more about it. But he obviously knew a lot more about it.

And by not telling me more about it, it indicated that there was more there to tell. But one thing he did do was very unselfishly share with me names of people who I could talk to, who he was aware knew more about the program. And, you know, I have a suspicion. Let me put it at that. I think on the balance of probabilities, it's more likely than not that the United States is working in the black on highly advanced technology that it's recovered from somewhere.

I think the word that Lou Elizondo used is exotic technology. Dr. Eric Davis is flatly asserted that they are retrieved alien spacecraft. Senator Harry Reid came pretty close in the New York Times story to talking on a background, on an off-the-off-the-record basis, in an indirect quote, basically, he was attributed originally as saying that he thought that they were alien objects, which he's since resiled from, I noticed. But, you know, there are other officials that I've spoken to who've told me privately that the position held by the US government that it doesn't know a lot about this technology is a complete barefaced lie. that they know an awful lot. Bob Fish, for example, the former defence telecommunications expert, he's a guy who actually installed the communications system for the White House.

He had very, very high-level security classifications, worked at very, very high levels in aerospace companies for many, many years. He was happy to be quoted on the record. God bless him, you know, what a great person for doing that. As he said to me, he said, the public should know this stuff. And he was telling me, he'd seen data showing that there are frequent objects coming in and out of our orbit, aerospace, that are not able to be explained as known objects to the, you know, part of planet Earth's arsenal. But he also told me that the United States, and this is nearly 30 years ago now, what he saw, that at that time the United States was working on technologies that allowed them to trace the electromagnetic. their signature of these UAPs, that they could almost predict them when they were moving

and anticipate them and detect them and track them. And one of the things that's recorded in the WikiLeaks files, and again, I mean, it's a big bus sitting in the middle of the road begging for a national security correspondent to ask the question, you know, and I don't have the clout in the Pentagon to be able to stand up at a Pentagon briefing and say, excuse me, can you please explain what this? what this reference here in the WikiLeaks files is about you guys using electromagnetic signatures to detect UFOs. But it's there for everybody to see, like a big paintball in the middle of a bloody highway. Ask the question, you know, prod the stick and see what happens.

Because seriously, the evidence is there to start looking. And, you know, one of the things in my line of work that you look for are leads. You know, you know pretty soon whether a story is wanting to be told. Many journales get quite mystical about storytelling. You think of the story as kind of like a living creature. And if it wants to be told, it facilitates your access. You know, people suddenly agree to speak to you. You know, they're willing to engage.

Documents arrive in your inbox. That's what's happening to me right now. You know, there is a real willingness from people. wanting to engage. They're happy that somebody who takes the phenomenon seriously is interested in it. And, I mean, frankly, it's to my advantage. I should stop encouraging other mainstream media to have a dick. But the bottom line is it's such a fruitful load.

I mean, I'm totally hooked on the subject because it is blatantly clear to me that the United States knows a lot more. than it's letting on. And I need to understand. I'm still trying to understand why it's been sitting on this information for so long, because the history shows they've been monitoring this phenomenon

right back to the 1940s. And that contrary to the message that's been given to the public, it's been taken very seriously indeed. And whilst publicly, Project Blue Book and other official public investigations have avowed, you know,

we're not interested in this stuff. It's just all crazy cuck and any nonsense. That's not true. That's not true at all. The United States is continuing to monitor this phenomenon. They're taking an extremely close interest in it. And frankly, they should be because whatever it is is clearly a technology that is vastly superior to the technology represented by our known physics. And the good guys should have it. I want the free world to have it, not the crazy authoritarian nutters in China, Russia and North Korea. Thanks very much. And maybe the reason why it's being kept secret is because there are good national security imperatives for keeping it secret. Or maybe, just maybe, it's because a bunch of Pentagon generals and intelligence officials

and various people in aerospace, arrogantly out of hubris decided to keep it secret way back during the Cold War and they've been lying about it for so long now. They know they will get absolutely bollocks if they admit to their existence of a program. So they're trying to conceal it. It's just a hunch on my part that that's the explanation. We're looking at you, General McCaslin. Ross, that is so fascinating. Can I tell you, I mean, my understanding is that General McCaslin's motivations have been entirely honorable.

If you read, and this is the amazing thing about those WikiLeaks emails, I mean, they are prime source material for a journal like me because they are an unimpeachable, authenticated piece of evidence directly from the inbox of John Podesta, you know, the chief of staff, former chief of staff for the White House president. And they show that General Neil McCasland prior to the 2016 election was working with Tom DeLong of all people, a punk rocker. General Michael Kerry from Space Command, numerous other serving officers in different parts of the Air Force. Robert Weiss or Weiss, I don't know how you say his name, from Lockheed Martin, the chief executive. These are really heavy hitters. And they were collaborating on some form of disclosure

with Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Pallister. Now, it's at this point that I start thinking, my God, this is huge. Why is nobody digging into this? Hillary Clinton's campaign manager was talking to senior Pentagon generals and former generals and a senior aerospace executive that's the company that runs Skunkworks, the super secret aerospace research facility. And they were talking about disclosure. They were talking about revealing something to the American public under a Hillary Clinton presidency. what is going on in American media that that has not been investigated, that Hillary Clinton hasn't been doorstopped, that General McCasland hasn't been questioned about this? Why hasn't

Congress called hearings to ask what the hell is going on? That's to me bewildering. And, you know, it's funny, as recently as this morning I had an email from somebody who said, This is all rubbish. You know, Dr. Eric Davis, for example, who's been cited by the New York Times as knowing about a crash retrieval program, doesn't know what he's talking about. He has no inside information. And I challenged that person because they emailed me as well. They copied me in onto their email that they're sent to Lua Elizondo. I challenged that person who works at a senior level in aerospace, or at least purports to, put up or shut up.

you know, the bottom line is people like me are going to start asking very hard questions because if the public has been lied to, and that's what we're talking about here, we're talking about the American public, the world, as recently as this most recent UAP report, if it's true that this technology is actually in the U.S. and in the black, and the U.S. has lied about it, and to the Congress, no less, and probably to presidents, no less, public's got a right to know, unless there's a very good reason for, keeping it secret. And frankly, at the moment, you know, I've seen more spurious stories. I mean, I've seen certain journalists on major newspapers in the United States led by the nose by certain

administrations to run bullshit stories about claims about, oh, shall we say, dangerous weapons in Iraq and things like that. You know, why does the media allow itself to be briefed about bullshit stories about the Iraqis having nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, which lead us into a massive conflict that's cost us all trillions of dollars. Why do they allow themselves to be briefed without question about stories like that? And yet there is this giant, this bear in the room that security and national defense media just walk past where there's just overwhelming evidence now to show that there is something that is worthy of intense investigation.

There is a phenomenon out there, a technology, craft, vehicles. Those are the words being used, which are maneuvering at speeds and changes in maneuver and velocity that are far beyond known human technology. You know, apparently beyond our known physics, but they're real. And when you have the skeptics asserting that this is. there's a seagull or something like that. I know because I've spoken to people inside these investigations. They've excluded those prosaic explanations.

You know, they don't come out in the UAPTF and say, oh, we don't have an explanation for this, but, you know, it may still be a seagull or it might still be a reflection off a cockpit window. They've looked at those explanations. These things are tracked on radar. They've been tracked on multiple sensor systems. We're kind of beyond those.

arguments now. And what worries me is it will be so easy for somebody who wants this kept quiet to put it back in a black box again for another 30 or 40 years before there's another Ryan Sprague and Ross called out asking questions about it. Because the media allows itself to be led. It allowed itself to be led with a deceitful claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So maybe it's time to start asking the hard questions that good people like Tim McMillan, M.J. Benayas, oh, you know, the Politico, Brian Bender, New York Times, Leslie Keene, Elaine Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal. These people need to be supported and encouraged in their investigative journalism because they're cracking stuff open that, frankly, the rest of the media needs to start

asking questions about. Tom Rogan, another one. He wrote a great piece the other day from the Washington Examiner. It's time to start pushing and asking and needling. And, you know, part of investigative journalism, I've worked on stories in some cases for 10 years prodding, you know, collecting data. All it requires is a conscious switching on and engagement. But the current disengagement that dominates much of the media, I just think, is disgraceful. It's really dropping the ball with what I think is,

possibly the premier national security story of the moment. Because there is definitely. Right. If not of all time, Ross. I'm sorry to interrupt. And that story could take decades to fully unravel and tell. But like you said, if journalists aren't willing to go there and they continue to be led, those who don't want the story out are ultimately going to win. So I think you're right. I think the more we pressure both the mainstream media and, you know, journalists who haven't been willing to look at this topic to just look at it, question it. But I also think, and I think a lot of people in social media feel quite powerless. You know, they get frustrated with people like maybe, because I'm not immediately yelling from the rooftops that there's aliens in the White House basement

or something. But what people don't realize is the power they have, you know, everybody needs to to start writing letters to their congressman or their senator. They need to, you know, ask questions of the Air Force and the Defense Department. You as a citizen are empowered to ask these questions. The moment the military starts realizing that it's losing the capacity to suppress this story, and they are. It's the thing that amuses me about this is I've never seen such blatant attempts to shut down the story. I mean, the way the U.S. Air Force has behaved over the years in the Australian National Archives files from our Department of Defense when the Westall case happened in 1966 in Australia. Officials from our government went around probably

at the instigation of the Americans essentially shutting down and threatening people who'd seen what were clearly disc-shaped, lenticular, metallic objects doing crazy things over a school in suburban Melbourne. Now that happened 55 years ago and the secrets largely being kept for half a century plus, somebody out there is going around shutting down this story. And frankly, you can't be afraid of this stuff. I mean, I've been, I've done stories on bikey gangs and what you call them outlaw motorcycle biker gangs in the United States. And they've been threatened many, many times. If there is a genuine national security reason why this story should not be told, it's time to tell it. You know?

tell people like me why it shouldn't be covered. Because if not, we're coming after you like a dog on a bone. We really are because it's a great yarn. It's a ripping yarn. And it's funny because I think I mentioned, I've had phone calls from journal friends of mine. I'm a member of a group in Washington, D.C., called ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

And we collaborate on stories like the Panama Payser. or dirty tobacco companies. And some of the journals from that group have been contacting me because they've heard about my book. And they're not poo-pooing it. They're actually really interested. There was a Spanish journalist who contacted me last week who basically said, oh, you might want to know about this, you know. And people are really keen to know more.

And I think we're on the cusp of more revelations because national media and starting to wake up and become aware to the issue. But everybody out there, you believe you people, got to start asking questions and probing and demanding your rights. You know, you write to your congressman, shake the cage of the senator you see in the airport and basically say, Senator, the issue I want you to represent me on is what's the story with UFOs, UAPs? And if they giggle, ask them, why are they giggling?

Why are the nervous titter? It has to be taken seriously. Because, you know, the ridicule, the stigma, the taboo that's been attached to this subject for 50 years. Again, I'm sorry, I keep on jumping on things, but what I find fascinating, I'm a historian by background. And I love the history of this. Back in the 1950s, the people who were championing the transparency and the release of what the U.S. Air Force actually knew were people in the U.S. Air Force. People in the U.S. Navy, people like Admiral Ross. Helencotta, your former director of the CIA, a hero of Pearl Harbor, a former commander of the USS Missouri.

I mean, these were heavy hitters in your military speaking publicly in the 1950s and right through to the 1960s, basically agitating for more openness and transparency about what the U.S. government knew about this phenomenon, because they acknowledged it was real. And then around about 50 years ago at the end of the 1960s, I suspect for more Cold War reasons, because of the imperative of confronting authoritarian communism. We shut it down. The decision was made to shut it down. And it may very well be a well-motivated decision.

But we're 30 years on now from the end of the Cold War. And it's painfully obvious that there's an incredible story there to be told. And the genie is out of the bottle. Yeah, no putting it back in. I love that, Ross. Well, hey, I've got a few listener questions. If you're willing, I could fire these off for you. How much time do you have?

Okay. Maybe 10 or 15. I promised my wife I'd do something on this beautiful day here. I know. It looks gorgeous. I'm very jealous. We have whales in the bay at the moment. I was sitting with my last night with a gin and tonic,

and we were watching dolphins cavorting in the bay. And unfortunately, the water is very, very cold, but I'm a very keen scuba diver and snorkeler, and I wish I could get out there. Wow. Hey. Well, you're talking to the guy stuck in his little closet of an apartment in New York, so I'm definitely jealous. But I'll go ahead. I'll just fire some of these off for you here. So our first two questions come from our Patreon subscribers. They have priority to ask questions here. So Simon, actually, from Australia wanted to know, Ross. What are your thoughts on the Min Min Min-Min Lights? I know this is a big phenomenon in Australia. Is this something you've looked into heavily? or have people reported these to you personally? Yeah, look, the Min Min-Men Lights are a phenomenon that European settlers first started noticing

when they came to Australia, and they were reported in a town called Min-Men, which I think is over in far north, Queensland, or to the Northern Territory. So they became known as Min-Men-Min Lights. But basically, they've been part of the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, the oral history of our Aboriginal indigenous people for many, many thousands of years.

And I was privileged once, to be in the Gulf of Carpenteria, way, way up in far north Queensland, with a beautiful Aboriginal man who has since passed, God rest of soul, called Black Bob. And Black Bob was this fantastic, wise Aboriginal elder who was working with a mining company advising them on where they couldn't dig to protect sacred sites, Aboriginal sacred sites. And the helicopter pilot explained to me that Black Bob was incredible because he didn't need to use his GPS to navigate. He'd just sit there with Black Bob, and Black Bob, because of the oral history in his head, could navigate across the landscape because he had the map in his head, like he could feel his way

across the landscape. And we sat with him and watched him doing it. It was breathtaking. And we stopped for the day in an oasis, a beautiful, bushy area with a big pool, and we all had a swim was a very hot day. I sat by the side of the creek with Black Bob, and I asked him. I said, oh, have you ever seen the Min Min Min Min Lights? And he went, oh, all the time, all the time.

And I said, what do you make of them? I said, I know on the public broadcaster recently, there's been speculation that their truck headlights are reflecting off moisture in the air. And he laughed. He tipped his head back, and he went, oh, very funny. very funny. He said, I don't recall too many trucks around here 3,000 years ago. And, you know, one of the things that's quite awesome when you meet these Aboriginal elders is they just have a completely different sense of space and time, you know,

and their oral history really does. It goes back thousands and thousands of years. And it was quite breathtaking because the same guy who could accurately pinpoint, literally to within a meter points that were sacred sites to Aborigines. that to the fury privately of the mining company were often places that were full of minerals and special, you know, valuable metals. He knew them in his head. And he also knew the oral history. And so these Min Min Min Lights have been seen all over Australia for many, many tens of thousands of years.

And they're a long part of the Australian oral history. So, yeah, I get into that into my book quite a bit. Oh, interesting. Okay, good. That's cool. It reminds me so much of it. the spook lights here in the United States or even the, you know, the early food fighter phenomenon as well. But Michael, another one of our Australian listeners, wanted to know, does the Australian

government have any type of disclosure investigation like the U.S. is doing or anything like that, Ross? Look, I've asked at a very, very high level, both former and serving senior officials and ministers in our government. And the simple fact is that we are a bit of a loyal licksbittal to our American ally, I'm afraid, that the Americans do all the driving on this. I mean, when I found out about things that have been seen at Pine Gap, which is the super secret American joint American facility with Australia in the middle of Australia, I found out about what was going there from Americans first before I found out about it from Australians. And And then when I asked the Australians about it, they all went, oh, the Yanks told you about that, did they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that did happen, yeah. And essentially what was described to me was that were these orbs that were seen hovering around a security perimeter and indeed inside some buildings at the Pine Gap facility. And they caused a security concern. And they were never investigated. They were alerted to the Americans, but nothing ever really came on it. But the irony was I was told about that from somebody in America who said, oh, yeah, there was this incident at you're a pain gap base. And I went, oh, really? Yeah.

And then when I finally went and spoke to my defense sources about it, they went, oh, that one. Yes, yes. Now I can talk to you about that. And that often happens here in Australia is that we are possibly a little too craven in our loyalty to the Americans and I'm questioning about what is seen and what is done. And, you know, we've followed you into every war since World War I. and we're very stalwart and loyal allies. As a journalist, I've been a beneficiary of that being embedded with American and Australian troops and different war zones around the world.

But one of the problems is it sometimes means we don't ask enough questions. And I think there is a level of incuriosity in our government about this phenomenon that boils down to resources. But way back in the 1970s, and I gave this some publicity. a few weeks ago. I talked about Harry Turner, who's a former physics professor from Melbourne University, who was eventually hired by the Defence Department. And he became a very prominent defense scientist in Australia. And he, as a young man, witnessed his own UAPs, UFOs at the Maralinga and Woomera Test Rangers. And he became a staunch advocate for transparency and openness. And he was very, very skeptical. There's a J-I-O.

a joint intelligence organization, which is an Australian intelligence service report that's declassified on the Australian National Archives that I was talking about a few weeks ago and it got a bit of publicity on the web since, where Harry talks openly about the fact that he thinks the Americans aren't revealing all they know. And this is 50 years ago, you know, and he was frustratedly telling his bosses in the Defense Science Technology Organization that there should be some kind of rapid deployment unit that can go and investigate UFO sightings. And he spoke to my good friend and colleague Bill Chalker,

a prominent UFO researcher, about the frustrations that he had inside the Defense Department, about getting to the bottom of this issue and trying to encourage his masters, his superiors, to allow a more rigorous investigation of UFOs. And the analysis that he wrote basically suggested that from his sources in US intelligence and defense, he believed the US was working on secret technology in the black on anti-gravitics

and that it wasn't being entirely candid with its Australian ally. And frankly, let's be honest about it, I wouldn't be either if I was America. You know, if I've got technology which is just mind-blowing in its implications, I'd be sitting on it too. I'd be trying to develop it in the black. And, you know, maybe if they were testing it in Northwest Cape, and maybe they were doing it without the awareness of the Australians. because I've asked, believe me, I've asked.

And one very senior official from that era told me, Ross, if they were testing technology up in Northwest Cape, propulsion systems, craft, it wasn't done without permission. And the person I spoke to very, very senior, said to me, and we've had our suspicions. Yeah, again, that reminds me so much of the Rundersham Forest incident, where, you know, the United States was housing nuclear ordinance on a joint military base without Britain's knowledge. You know, these are things the U.S. does for, I would assume, a contingency of some sort.

But it frustrates me, too, Ross, because you have something like the Five Eyes Alliance that you've mentioned as well, where you would hope that this intelligence was being shared and these programs were being shared with the allies, with Australia, with Britain, and our other allies as well, yet here we are with the United States constantly still in the black and lying to these nations we're supposedly, you know, in cahoots with, if you want to put it. I've spoken to people in our defense intelligence who tell me that they have become incidentally aware of the interest that the United States has in UAPs because of the raw intelligence that they see being transmitted through our facilities. because we share, I mean, there is non-form intelligence, no foreigner intelligence that the United States doesn't share with Australia or no form.

But we are plugged into the Western Alliance in a way that I think most Australians don't realize, you know, we literally get to see the flow of raw intelligence, which pours into the NSA, the CIA. Very little of it is restricted from Australian eyes. And I've spoken to people who've told me that they're aware that. there are sightings reports which are sent routinely to Space Command, NORAD, NSA, CIA, you know, it's discussed. And it was interesting to them because they were fascinated by the fact that our Defense Department in Australia doesn't take an interest in this stuff. And when they do,

they generally just flick it on to the Americans. Give it to the Yanks, is what they say. That sounds about right. Yeah. Well, Ross, I don't want to take up any more of your time, brother. You've been very gracious with answering everything. But of course, wrapping things up, I have to ask, you know, when will the book be available? A lot of my United States listeners I know are really anxious about that. And yeah, any updates on if the doc is going to make it over here? Sure.

Okay, let's deal with the book first. The book is being released in Australia by Harper Collins, the big international publisher in two weeks, the end of July. I'm only in the last two weeks have I been assured by HarperCollins, US, that it will be published in a print form in Canada and the US sometime in August or September. But they, publishing my friend is feudal serfdom. It's another form of, you know, penal servitude, basically. We're all convicts in Australia and basically writing books as a form of penal servitude. You only get told by your publisher when a book is going to be published when they condescend to.

to tell you. So I'm told that Harper Collins US is anticipating publication of a print form of the book sometime in the next few weeks, but I have no idea when, and I've been begging them to at least allow me to put up something on my website. I have a website www.w.com. In PlainSight-hyphenbook.com. And you can just find that at rosscultart.com. And it will basically tell you when the book is being published, but it's being published in the UK, Canada, US, Europe, as well as in Australia. So that's the book.

I'm also hoping to work with the TV station, Channel 7 Spotlight, on a longer form version of the documentary that we made for Australian viewing. I've been highly amused at this bootleg versions of my documentary floating all the way around the world. But Channel 7 own the copyright to that, or at least I've got some share in it, but basically they dictate when it will be released internationally. And one of the problems we have is that unbelievably, both myself and the editors of the program that we're cutting have been locked out of the TV station because we're in a major pandemic alert in Australia at the moment where we're not allowed to leave our homes. We are literally in lockdown and there's no travel to work.

Essential workers, police, medical staff only and we are all literally confined to barracks. So I'm not in a position to be able to cut the bloody documentary until I can get back to Channel 7 and nag the editors into finishing it. But I can assure you that as quickly as I can, we will be distributing for international release a version of the documentary with extended material that didn't go into the original film. And I spent a lot of time filming with Lou Alizondo and Chris Mellon. They're very interesting people who should be taken seriously, very, very seriously. And I don't doubt for one moment their motivations. They're entirely honourable. But there's other information that we dug up in our time in the US

that I think is deserving of worthier, fuller exposition. And that will be incorporated at some stage into a fuller version of my documentary, the UFO phenomenon. sometime later this year. But again, because I'm just a feudal surf in the media world, it basically is the result of whether or not the masters who funded that film, which cost them a bomb to make. And deservedly so, because it gave them great ratings and a great audience response.

But it's really up to them as to win them and if they will fund a longer version, which I hope they will. I hope so too. We will, you know, us here in the United States are good at making those things happens. So, Ross, I have to thank you for all the work you've done on this topic and legitimizing everything we've been trying to do for, God, 70 plus years now. And for everything you've done, it's only added to, I think, this tapestry of credible information on a topic that has been incredible for so long. So I truly have to thank you for that and for coming

on somewhere in the skies today. Thank you to you and your listeners. for the opportunity to talk about it. And I love everybody if they want to read more, read my book in plain sight. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with the Entertainment One podcast network. Hi, everyone, my name is Andy, and I host That UFO podcast. That UFO podcast brings you weekly content with some of the biggest names from around the world of UFOs, UAP, and Associated Phenomena.

weekly interviews, roundtable discussions and breaking news podcasts with myself, regular co-host Dan, and sometimes special guests will drop into it. That UFO podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you can download podcasts. Already having hosted names like Louise Elizondo, Sean Cahill, George Knapp, Avi Loeb, Brandon Fugo, Ralph Blumenthal, and many more. I hope you come and check us out and as always, keep looking up. You never know what you might see.