Somewhere in the Skies - Meanwhile, Here on Earth

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

On episode 192 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are joined by author, UFO researcher, and Ryan's personal mentor, Peter Robbins. These two usually meet in New York City once a month at a diner to drink coffee and talk everything UFOs. But, just like most other people right now, they've brought their coffee meet ups to the digital world, chatting about everything from disclosure and where it stands, criticism of outlandish claims, the age of conspiracy theory, the UAP Task Force, and an announcement about a brand-new endeavor Robbins is embarking on. Full video interview by CLICKING HERE Visit Peter Robbins at: www.peterrobbinsny.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @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

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Welcome everyone to a very special episode of Somewhere in the Skies. I know I call every episode special, but I really, really mean it this time because I am speaking to what a lot of you may know is my mentor, the man who got me into this field, this crazy field of uphology, and I've never looked back. And on a personal note, I meet with this guy almost once a month in New York City, pre-pandemic, when we would go to a diner, drink coffee for hours on end and just chat about everything from UFOs to theater, which is another huge thing that he and I both have in common. We grew up.

in the theater world. And then we caught the UFO bug. So we kind of went the opposite way with that one. But he is a sole brother in so many ways to me. And I'm so honored to bring him on today just for a chat, as if we were in the diner having coffee in talking. So I really think you're going to enjoy this. And I'm so honored to bring back to the show once again, Peter Robbins.

How you doing, brother? Hi, Ryan. Good. As good as good as anybody, I guess. Exactly, which is what we're going to, I think, tackle first in this conversation. You know, the COVID elephant in the room. We're living in crazy times politically, health care-wise, the planet even. And it seems like everything's kind of hitting us all at once. And that's tough. It's tough. Everyone's scared. Everyone's on edge. But to find times like this, to just sit down and

talk, I think, is what really is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people. So if we can just talk today and distract people for a couple hours to talk UFOs and everything in between, I think we've provided something for the public. And I hope that people can appreciate this as much as I have having you here. So let's face that head on. How are you doing personally as an individual as a euphologist in these really, really weird times who are living in? Probably better than most people. As a native New Yorker who lived in the city most of my life, I moved out some years ago because the realtors basically won with me,

and I could no longer afford to stay in the city with a basic quality of life that I wanted, being an itinerant investigative writer, photographer, public speaker. It's a great way to live your life, but not a great way to earn a living. And I now live, as you know, in central New York just outside of the small city, a great national college town of Ithaca, home of Cornell University and Ithaca College. It's a wonderful home base. I've got a great regional airport, 10 miles away, a wonderful town with lots of culture. But for the past 11 months, basically, like so many people, I've been self-isolated. We are in this state either with friends, with family, with roommates, and some of us on their own. In my case, the only person I speak to

regularly and have my conversations with is a cat. So if every once in a while, I go, meow, or please excuse me, it's just a force of habit. But I'm doing fine, all things considered. I have a wonderful little house in farm country. I get my water from a spring under the house. I'm a good cook, have a well-stock larder, and a house full of books and art, and working on my projects.

keeping in touch with friends all over the country and all over the world regularly and irregularly, looking forward to us moving out of this lockdown next year. And that term relative normal is kind of an oxymoron. I don't think things will ever be really normal again. And for me, more than anything, this pandemic is a gentle tap on the shoulder from Mother Nature, reminding us that it is not an isolated event. We may have to deal with things like this again, possibly a third wave in the future,

mutations in the virus that will necessitate new medical ways to address this, new social ways to address this. And at the same time, in the big picture, it's really the canary in the coal mine for climate change. A lot of people choose not to connect these things, but they are shoulder to shoulder, one reflective of the other. And it's incumbent on all of us to do our best to be aware of it and do something about it.

I see the world divided into two basic groups, one group who is concerned about themselves and maybe those around them, but really is not very thoughtful about or really gives a blank about those that come after us. And for others of us, that's very important to be as good as shepherds as we can in our own lives and to, if we can't leave the world a little better than when we got here, when we leave it, to at least not damage it anymore than it is.

And God knows it is. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I understand what you're saying. There seems to be this divide. And we see it very specifically here in America, but this is happening globally. This pandemic is taking its insidious role in the political strife in every country, in every way. And for me, what troubles me most is the mistrust in science. And that's something I'd love to touch on with you, Peter, is these vaccines are rolling out right now.

and you're seeing all over every corner of the internet people being like, I'm never going to take that. Or it's all a plan to, you know, to track us. And this whole 1984 mentality that we feared for years within these, you know, early science fiction books. So that's what troubles me most is while the scientists are doing everything they can to get the right information out to the public, you have this other whole part of the world.

denying that. And that's what terrifies me more is this information age we live in where, yeah, you can question your government. You can question the scientific community because we have these platforms like you and I are on right now or Facebook or Twitter to, you know, give our reckons about not taking a vaccine. So what do you think about this interesting development in the world where we're not even trusting our doctors and scientists anymore. Yeah, I think for me it goes back to, well, the whole idea of conspiracies and conspiracies is not unnatural and it's not illogical. History is defined by conspiracies, which is by definition one or more.

or two or more people dialoguing in private to create a situation that will affect the world around them. And that's part of the way it is, and that's part of the way humanity has always been. But in the case of more extreme conspiracies and more important, conspiracies with little, if anything, to back them up. And I say that knowing as an investigative writer specializing in the subject of UFOs, we often don't have access to the kinds of evidence that would give credence to our conclusions or deductions or our feelings about what may or may not be going on. But a decade ago in uphology is a microcosm of the world, hardcore conspiracists were more on the edge of the periphery.

And that has changed dramatically over the last decade. It's now considered fairly mainstream to hold extreme views. For me, part of it has to do with the fact that this country was built on, I think a very noble and sensible notion of separating theology from government. You have the right to worship as you. please with the understanding that as long as it does not impinge on my life and my rights, you know, God bless you and good luck. But there are extremes in every area of human endeavor.

And one of them is organized religion. And it doesn't matter what the religion is. But in some cases, some people, for religious reasons, feel that what we call science, for lack of a more inclusive term, is in conflict with their religious beliefs. I think that's a problem. One can argue that God created science as well as man-created religion. But religion aside, that there is also always an American life going back to before the Republic was founded, the Democratic Republic, anti-intellectualism. And I understand it in that there are those of us who have been lucky enough for any number of reasons to complete high school,

go on to higher education, and end up perhaps with a degree or a doctorate. I happen to have a BFA, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and film history. If you speak to people who have gotten their basic bachelor's degree, it's usually a four-year course of study. Perhaps it was that with you, Ryan, when you went to University of Syracuse. For me, it took me 15 years to get my BFA. It's just the way it worked out.

I completed courses two years of university, three years of art school, a break to see some of the world, come back to New York, and then six or seven years of night school. I can't say that that degree has augmented my life financially. I'm proud to have it, and I'm proud of the knowledge that came with it. But for some people, all of a sudden, or not even all of a sudden, you're an elitist. Who do you think you are having your degree when I'm a blue-collar worker and my life has been tougher than yours? You use language in a way that I find a little effective. Anybody that talks like you do is somebody I don't trust.

You're a northeasterner. You read books. I don't have the time or the luxury of that. I've got a family to feed and a job to keep. and in the same way that politically we are driven against each other and made to see the differences and the differences are augmented and you are the other and I don't understand you, you are the enemy, so I stand against everything that I think and believe that you stand for. what it comes down to though and this is where it gets dangerous i think is my belief based on what i think

i know or that i feel i can have an opinion on even if i don't understand fully what it is i'm having an opinion on without really any evidence to back it up is worth all of your years of formal education or work in a field like law or medicine or psychology. And my opinion is just as valuable as yours. No, that's not really true. I understand where it comes from. But here we are in a country where the wildest conspiracies are often put forward by the people with the most power. And it's a way to keep us all off balance at each other's throats,

mistrusting of the people who we feel we're different from. I don't think we've been in a problem as dramatic as this in this country since the 1860s, perhaps the 1850s. And that resulted in a horrific war where a lot of Americans kills a lot of other Americans. And we need to find common ground up until 15 years ago or so. American government, no, maybe longer now, took to heart the idea that we are a nation of different people. And it wasn't about imposing our view on those whose views we opposed. It was about finding common ground and working it out as well as we could. And somewhere along the line in our lifetimes, that changed.

It became like sports. Winning is everything. Party is more important than your constituents and the Constitution. You swear allegiance to the leader rather than the Constitution of the United States. These are terrible concepts and they're fascistic in nature. And we need to get back on track. It's one of the reasons that even though for some people, it might seem disconnected, that the work that we're doing and the field that we're doing it in is so vitally important. The implications of truly anomalous UFO phenomena and the intelligences that govern them has the potential to bring people much closer together. the idea of a space force for me was not built with that idea in mind.

It's about, you know, we've gotten really good at killing each other on Earth. Let's take it to the next level. And the romance of actualizing, say, the script to the wonderfully entertaining film Independence Day, and kick ETs, but good Lord, you know. Yeah. Good luck with that. Well, Peter, you bring up so many good points. And, you know, while I don't, while I tread very lightly with politics on this show,

for one reason, and I think you already brought up the point, is that this topic of UFOs supersedes everything when it comes to politics, the lid pin. It's bigger than the rest can possibly imagine. And I think you're right in terms of something like Space Force being, you know, while it might seem exciting that we're going to go beyond the stars. Very romantic, yeah. Yeah, you know, a romantic end being something like Star Trek. But in reality, it's like you said, it's a new branch of the military.

It's a way to weaponize space. And that idea of always being at war with something, the war on drugs, the war on poverty. already gives this mentality of we're fighting against something when in reality we should be trying to solve those problems. And I think the other good point you bring up is something like this topic could bring us closer together, someone like Ronald Reagan bringing this up at the UN at one point. I, for one, have very different political beliefs from many of our viewers and listeners out there. We all do. We all have our own beliefs, our own, you know, values and principles. But I think what we need right now is a common ground, like you said, rather than

dividing, what do we have in common? And I remember having a very heated argument with a fellow colleague in the UFO field about politics to the point where, like, we refuse to talk to one another. And I think both of us took that moment to be like, wait a minute. We've been friends and colleagues for a decade. Why are we letting this one moment in time define the rest of our working relationship for presumably the rest of our lives? So we had it out. We talked about it. And now we're, you know, the best of friends again, even though we maybe didn't vote for the same person or we didn't have the same principles in mind when we voted for somebody. So, yeah. To jump in for a moment, I have to say as somebody that is as partisan as the next person,

I have a lot of admiration. This may surprise some people for our friends and colleagues in the field who have done their best to not bring their political beliefs into their public presence. I don't have that discipline. I don't. I don't. I've been. I've. I've. I've. I've. I've lost friends. I've lost people who have followed my work as a course of it. I think it's rough at the same time. I don't know anybody that works harder to maintain friendships with many people whose political views I disagree with, but who are friends and who were friends before things began to change dramatically for years ago or so. and we struggle.

But you can reduce your life to a core of people who you simply agree with and everybody else is the enemy or stay in the real world and try to keep finding common ground with your differences, argue, debate, put forward ideas to discuss. I hope I never reach a point in my life where I'm incapable of changing my mind. Uphology is a perfect example where, you know, your views change and grow, adjust with the information that you have access to and other people's ability to put forward theses and constructs that challenge your way of thinking.

I think that's incumbent on all of us, and it's a wonderful part of, of what we do. And things are growing and changing dramatically in this field over the last decade and certainly over the last few years. Absolutely. Well, let's talk about that. I mean, this new age of disclosure, I guess we'll call it, which is such a malleable word when it comes to UFOs.

But we post-2017, we had the New York Times covering UFOs unlike ever before, whether it was with the incredible work being done by Cheryl Costa from my hometown of Syracuse, New York, being highlighted in the New York Times months prior to the big bombshell article, as it were. And then that article coming out about the Secret Pentagon UFO program. I mean, Peter, I don't know about you, but for me, everything changed after those two articles hit the New York Times. And we seem to be living in a new age of acceptance of this topic like never before. I have to ask you, you know, since you've, you've seen every level of this disclosure

throughout decades and decades of this field, are we living in a new age of disclosure? Are we any closer to finding the answers we've sought for, God, centuries now at this point? Where do you stand as a UFO researcher in 2020? I guess is my way to kind of encapsulate all of that. Well, I'll start by saying that for me, one thing that grew up with the very beginnings of the advent of the modern age of flying saucers, terminology changed in 56 to unidentified flying objects, terminology changed within the past half dozen years ago or so to UAP's unidentified aerial phenomena, that, fear of ridicule was hand in hand with all information coming out and breaking. And I think I'm one of the few people in the work who ultra-focused on this to the point that starting in the late 80s, it became a really interesting question for me and an overriding one,

to some degree more so than the phenomena itself. was how did this happen, that this idea got wired up with these truly unexplained aerial phenomena that if you took them seriously and you were in any way public about it, either as a regular citizen or a researcher or a writer or scientist or a psychologist or a psychologist or whatever, that you were mentally unhinged, had, you know, psychological issues, were a lonely person looking for attention, that you wanted to fool people, that you sought as a way that you would make money or become famous. It's also counterintuitive.

If, you know, you and I grew up as neighbors, and one afternoon I'm out walking my dog and I see you mowing your lawn. I say, Ryan, the most interesting thing happened to me last night or yesterday afternoon. I was out in the yard playing with the kids or doing some work on the house or going to the museum. And I looked up and I saw this thing or things. And it or they behaved in such a manner and they had such and such an appearance that they were unlike, not just unlike anything I had ever seen in the sky before, but they were maneuvering in ways that defied my conception as a layman of every law of aerodynamics

that I could ever imagine in an intelligent, unaffected by ridicule world you might say or think, gee, that's interesting. I wonder what Peter saw too. But that's not the way it evolved. And there's a very good reason for that. and one I'm fairly schooled in, which is that in the summer of 1947, the American people were the subject, the victims of a disinformation campaign that was brilliant and so successful that were only shaking off its reins for the last few years. And it had more to do with

coverage in the popular press, because let's face it, 1947. And, for the first. for some years after, the media was print publications, primarily newspapers, and to a growing degree radio. Now it's a lot of stuff. But we bought it. Our parents bought it. Our grandparents bought it. Our grandparents bought it. And that was it. End of game. I ended up starting in the late 80s spending more and more time at the New York Times newspaper morgue. Why the New York Times? Well, arguably it was a flagship of American media in the 40s and still is a paper with a lot of cloud, whatever your feelings about its politics and they've changed over the years. And I originally started to work through these old ledgers, checking out every possibility of coverage of this subject, writing down the code numbers, bringing them to the library and getting them. microfeesh, going to the microfilm readers, finding the article, putting in my

quarter, printing out the article, putting in a notebook, set it aside, busy with other projects, came back to it some years later when everything was digitized. I'm maybe the only person in the world that has read every single article, editorial, letter to the editor, photo caption, having anything to do with UFOs since 1947 by the New York Times. I did it partly as, because that's what I do. And I wanted to see if I could find a pattern. And after several years, I had these 220 or so printouts. And I put them in chronological order, and I started to read through them, all of them, every word. And then I did it again. Then I did it again. I'm trained as an artist. My life is to come at things,

from outside of the box. I think having a background in science or psychology or criminal investigation, they're wonderful things to bring into the world of UFO studies. But being an artist has its own benefits. And at one of those epiphany, 3.30 in the morning, 15-watt bulb going off over-your-head moments, I saw the pattern. And it didn't matter whether it was a little piece that was a paragraph or front page article. It was report. This is what somebody says they said. Now let us explain to you what it really was. It was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of these pseudo-scientific things trotted out, often quotations from unnamed authorities. A psychologist of good reputation said, blum, blum, or military personnel have reported.

And we're seeing it now in American politics. You tell a lie, often enough, loud enough, and insistent enough, and you start to wear people down. It worked great for the National Socialist in Germany in the 1930s. And after a while, a percentage and then a respectable percentage of the population buys it. And you hit a critical mass. And when you get to that point, to express a view counter to that can make you a social pariah. Anyway, where we are now, in 2017, as you noted, a series of articles first in the New York Times and then spreading out into the world of broadcast media changed the mindset.

I didn't trust it. Even a year into it, I was waiting for the other shoe to fall. I've spoken about nothing but the origins of ridicule. I'm kind of a demi scholar on that little tiny area of UFO studies. And all of a sudden, giving talks like that kind of put me out of work in that department because things really had changed. You know, they're still interesting information historically, but they're no longer as relevant as they were. And the proof of it is that not only are more and more people taking the subject seriously,

people would never even give it any thought earlier or never expressed any thought for understandable reasons that you can go to Fox or CNBC or CNN and you see the same respectable, responsible reporting. Also, I think what we're seeing just this past year, if it had not been for the pandemic, government pronouncements, announcements and confirmations by we'll call the world of establishment science, has made this a banner year for confirmations by figures, organizations, agencies, so to say, an authority, that to quote the General Nathan M. Twining's memorandum from September of 1947, the phenomenon reported is real and not visionary or fictitious. This is a huge change in the landscape. At the same time, we're seeing more and more questionable information

that's hyper sensational. Most recently, pronouncements coming out of Israeli officialdom. I'm so happy you bring this up. Yeah. Who was this, Haim Assad, right? The space security chief? I'm not too clear exactly the position he held. But yeah, I'd love to get your opinions on that because that's the latest thing.

Yeah. This is only broken in the last week, two weeks. The figure that we're talking about is an official retired, as I recall. Yeah. Yeah. But who had access to the kind of information that one can argue would have given him access to some of the darker secrets of what we're talking about here. and he has made some very sensational claims. Now, for anyone who is interested in the subject, either as a serious student, casually interested or as a professional, you have to be very careful, I've learned over the decades, to understand your own dynamics. And for me, a lot of it goes back to that poster on your one. wall behind you. That simple text of I want to believe governs so much in this work. And it doesn't

matter whether or not you are a super famous euphologist with books out and in documentaries and, you know, speaking of conferences around the world and you are now a legitimate personality. You're famous, you know, at least in some macrocosm. whether it's conscious or unconscious, you may have an agenda based on what you believe, what you don't believe, what you hope is true, what you tell yourself must be true, and that's a problem. For me, the dividing line is often, as a writer and a reader and somebody that loves theater and film, I'm really conscious of the way that people deploy language.

And for somebody to say, there are 56 different alien races visiting this planet, for me, that's it. I turn you off. There is no way that you can know as an empirical fact that can be established in any rational way. I don't care how deep your contact is within the American Intelligence Agency or your alleged contact is. how can that person or that agency know for sure? If you were a combination of the head of the NSA, the president of the United States, the president of Russia,

all of the 100 most intelligent scientists studying this, and the supreme leaders of 18 alien races, all rolled into one being. You could not know that. However, if somebody says, I believe, or I think, or my best evidence points to what I feel is, I'm still listening. When you say it is, as opposed to it may be, you better have your evidence on the table for me to look at. The same thing for trying to apply moral platitudes to these other intelligences bearing in mind that when we talk about aliens,

a term I've never been very comfortable with. I, you know, I end up usually calling them other intelligences. We may well be, we were overwhelmingly likely dealing with a myriad of beings, of presences from parts unknown, from out in the cosmos, from deep space, from one dimension over, and it's all still quite theoretical. We can establish certain things as well as we can. In my case, I entered this field, focused on what happened to my sister and who was responsible for it. And early on, in my uphological life, developed some very special friendships, one with another painter, who was also becoming very interested in this subject. right around the time that I was, literally within a year, and that friendship cemented

and became a 35-year-long friendship and work relationship with Bud Hopkins. And I worked at his side as his assistant for many years privy to several hundred individual cases that he investigated that I assisted with and met many, many, many of these extraordinarily decent people from every walk of life and every kind of background. And it took me some years because I was really living in kind of my own horse-blinded world of working with him to be able to say, we seem to be dealing with one type of these beings here, the ones that are involved in this behavior and either look like or appear like to us in this kind of physical presence, more often than not in our work, the ubiquitous gray, so to say.

When we start to think in terms of good and bad, I think it's a non-starter. There are people who, this is the core of what they are about in the work. All aliens are good, and we've got to stop the negative forces on Earth from, you know, continuing to present them as a threat because they want us to join the Federation and enter into the greater world of intelligences out there. And we've just got to get past this and convince people. Kind of a contact-y sort of, you know, hippie attitude in a way. And then there are those who say, no, they're all bad. Or enough of them are bad that we have to arm ourselves against them, develop new technologies. My mind flashes back to one of my favorite classic Twilight Zone episodes

that ends with that simple sentence, it's a cookbook. Most of you know what I mean. I think, again, I think that they, as a huge group, as inclusive and as different in their ways as we human beings are, very possibly, represent a variety of views. I think some of them may certainly have our best intentions in mind. And to whatever degree they process what we'd call emotions, are very sad about the fact that we are still, even with our advances in technology,

Neolithic in dealing with each other. Here's the line drawn in the dirt. You are the other. If you cross the line, I will hit you with my stick and I will kill you. Why? Because you're on my side of the line now. And this is what we're still doing. And I don't say mankind here because...

That includes women, and it's just my view that no woman came up with this attitude. Men have run the world fairly miserably for the last 7,000 or so years, 4,000, whatever. And I'm not done a great job of it overall. I would like to see a lot more women in leadership positions here and abroad. But at the same time, it may be both things. we may be somebody's graduate experiment gone horribly wrong. And in order to get that grade corrected, things have to change here. Other ones may see the same, they may have a particular attachment to this wonderful little blue, green piece of dust floating through space that maybe even equals that of many of us human beings that love our planet and are hurting because it's a mess.

in fact, one can argue that we are the infestation on the host creature. We are the ones killing the host. My favorite heavy metal band, The Blue Oyster Cult, had a song years ago called I Am the One You Warned Me of. Nice headbanger. But that's us human beings. And this plant's going to be good for nobody if we keep going the way that we're going, although arguably if we kill ourselves off, things over time will rejuvenate and we can start again. I think there are people in the world that would like to see cataclysms come under the hand of God based on their religious beliefs

and not take responsibility for the fact that we are contributing to the disintegration of our atmosphere and our environment and just let God sort it all out. I don't think that that's a very sensible attitude. And we really join together on this. Again, I'm digressing. As far as disclosure goes, I don't see at any given point for the foreseeable future that the head representative, right now Donald Trump,

soon to be Joe Biden, is going to get to the podium and say, my fellow Americans, it's my solemn duty to inform you that we have been covering something up for, who knows, in a few years, things could change very quickly. A lot of people think it's going to be sooner. But there's one thing to take into consideration here in terms of America. This is where the cover up started. And that piece of sand, that irritant that developed an allegorical pearl around it

that became the core of our post-war national security state, consult the work of our dear friend Richard M. Dolan in UFOs in the national security state, two volumes published, a third coming at us, hopefully in the not too distant future, that the whole national security state and our mania for secret keeping didn't begin with trying to protect our nuclear secrets from the Soviets, important as that was. It began with covering this up. And that means that every single president, since and including Harry Truman, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the greatest cover-up in human history. And it doesn't matter what your party is.

Presidents, past presidents are very touchy about so labeling themselves like this. It's a very elite club. And again, as the president, our current president is fond of saying, one of my favorite quotes of of his, not that it's the most comforting, is we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. Yeah. But again, it's happening. Disclosure is happening anyway. It's happening as we speak. It's happening as these myriad of developments have come down the road at us just in the past 10 months or so. And it will continue to unravel. You have groups working out there. And it's a myriad of UFO-related organizations now, some of them old school, more in the news ones now, like

To the Stars Academy or Free, who are doing fascinating work, I think. And one of the things that they point out is that compared to 30 years ago or so when, let's say, two-thirds of people that had abduction experiences, contact experiences, reported them as troubling, to put it mildly, that two-thirds of people that are making those reports now to responsible individuals and organizations are talking about what they've learned, what they're gaining as positive experiences. Is this a shift in their way of working? Is it a shift in our perception of them based on more and more years of the subjects of UFOs, extraterrestriality, truly anomalous beings from parts unknown, embedding themselves so deeply

in the social fabric of the world, in the entertainment fabric, and advertising and popular fiction that we can't get away from them? You know, if you're a parent with a little kid, Saturday morning cartoons often include a happy little alien rather than a dancing cow. These things embed themselves. Is there an overriding agency doing their best to make it happen? Maybe, maybe not. If there was, they can basically take a nap now because it's happening on its own.

I did research years ago and presented a number of papers on it of the influence of UFO and extraterrestrial imagery in population. advertising to see if I could get to the point of saying, is this being engineered socially, or is it simply the fact that you put a flying saucer in an alien in an ad to sell a car or ice cream or computer, and people are going to look at it because they're interested in the subject, either in a matter because they want to ridicule it or because they take it seriously and ascribe meaning to it. Anyway, one thing about disclosure that hit me early this year, and I would say it was a really a moment I'll never forget about the pandemic.

And I put it out there just for you folks to think about is as somebody that's been thinking about disclosure for decades before it was called disclosure and what will be the impact on our world as we know it once it hits the fan, once there is a critical mass of people who take it seriously enough so that they, affect government industry, popular thinking, popular culture. Well, on the weekend of March 14th and 15th, Saturday and Sunday, I did my last public speaking job before self-isolating. It was a small one-day conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. I flew out there on the Friday, flew back on the Sunday, gave my talk on the Saturday.

And Saturday afternoon, I spoke with my sister, who's a registered nurse practitioner, who's been very involved in keeping track of all of the data as it's coming in. And really the first thing she said to me was, I knew you were going, but you didn't remind me. And had you called me yesterday, I would have insisted that you not go. Bearing in mind, I'm calling on the 14th, and the president declared a national emergency, I believe, on the 16th. And she said, let me give you an idea of what may be coming down the pike at us over the next three months, six months, year, two years, three years. And I got off that call really rather shaken, knowing that it was not definite, but knowing that it could be. And the next day at a five-hour

stopover at Dulles International Airport, I had a number of hours. on what would have been a busy Sunday travel day where I was the only person that I saw. In five hours, I probably saw two dozen people, most of them worked there. And then half an hour or so before my flight, you know, a couple of dozen people came into my area. And I sat there and at one point I just started to laugh because I realized sometimes in life, fate taps you on the shoulder to try to remind you of something and you don't listen and then it does it again and you better listen and I thought I flew out

to Knoxville on Friday the 13th and I'm flying back on the aides of March I got a sign I got home I made a shopping list starting in the airport I wanted to have everything in the house that I needed Monday morning, I went out, Tuesday, Wednesday. I shopped like I was Rommel's quartermaster about to invade Egypt.

And on Wednesday, the 18th of March, I self-isolated with my roommate, The Cat. And that evening, I was sitting and just thinking about everything that was spinning around us. And I thought, wait a minute, I'm in a moment where I'm realizing something I'm realizing something I've never really realized before, no matter how earth-shaking, any event that I've ever lived through, 9-11, the Kennedy assassination, anything, these were dwarfed in a way by the fact that I could reasonably expect that almost everybody in the world at that moment that was awake, more likely than not, they were thinking variations on the same thing that I was thinking. And I thought, this feeling is part of what's going to be like when disclosure is really here in no uncertain terms.

There will be those of us that said, yeah, I'm ready. I've been expecting this. I've been pushing for it. but we have to remember in our wonderful, isolated little world, oh, no, keep it on. I will be getting a professional lighting unit soon in the meantime, that we represent a very modest minority of the general population, and especially for those good folks in the work who have been pushing for disclosure

and are anxious for it and want it and angry it's not here, let's pull back for a moment and remember, as ready as you think you are, most of the people that you know that you see on the streets are not ready for it at all. And those of us that are in the work that care about people and not just getting what we want on this level, need to begin to think about how to apply what we're doing

as spokespeople, as researchers, as investigators, as broadcasters, as disseminators of responsible information to reach beyond the people we almost always are speaking to. That has preoccupied me for the last few years. How do we break out of this and reach a wider audience? There are a handful of people in the work that have or have done it for a period of time. And that, for me, is our next big assignment. We can keep talking to each other in more and more detailed and eloquent terms and with greater breakthroughs, but we're talking to ourselves. And we need to find ways to reach beyond it.

For me, one of the things that I love to see with colleagues who have been around for, you know, many years, and especially with people that are just getting in. into the work is before the pandemic and after the pandemic, contacting local libraries and giving talks there. That for me can never be understated. I grew up loving libraries. I remember getting my first library card when I was seven years old and being so proud of it, I've worked at libraries twice in my life to help me make a living, to put me through school. And they are endangered. they're adapting, but reach out to libraries, civic associations, fraternal organizations. You know, I love speaking at conferences in part because I get to see a lot of people I care about. Some of them I consider good friends that I don't see very often, go to a place that I haven't been before, I want to return to.

All nice, but we need more foot soldiers in the work, so to say, to get out there. and buss through those venues and get themselves into more conventional ones and interest a wider group of people. We live in this echo chamber in the UFO, quote unquote, field of having these conversations with one another. And then by the end, okay, that's great. You and I agree or disagree or came to a consensus on something. But what about the greater public? And I think that that speaks volumes on, let's say, that 2017 article.

You know, it was mind-blowing for us in this field. But for the overall public, I don't know how much of a impact it actually made. I mean, people texted me, emailed me, called me, wanted to meet up for coffee for maybe a couple weeks after that article came out. But then, you know, after that, it's move on to. what did Trump say or what celebrity got caught, you know, cheating on their significant other this week? And then the whole world moves on. And I do wonder, how do we keep people as UFO researchers and people trying to educate the public on this topic that we believe could change the world, ultimately? How do we get them interested? Or do we even? Does it matter? I mean, we can't force this topic on

people like that. But it does matter. But it does matter. even if we're unsuccessful at it because there will likely come a time when maybe there will be, I mean, I like a lot of us, play through my mind what will happen to make this happen. I think back to during Vietnam the so-called Daniel Ellsberg papers where a a body of knowledge was leaked, so to say, made public, published. It embarrassed the government. It helped get us out of that absolutely insane and wrong war. That it may be a Julian Assange type WikiLeak with information that is so undeniable and so well documented that.

mass media will move into it because it will sell papers in airtime, and that will begin to sway the general public. It may be that there will be a renegade in world leadership. Maybe the Chinese will do it. Maybe the Russians will do it just to embarrass us on a certain level or beat us to it. Let's remember right now as we speak, There is a little spacecraft, relatively little, somewhere between our moon and here. That's Chinese with soil and rocks from the moon on its way back. The Chinese are working very hard to establish hegemony over the world. As somebody, when I was an artist and at a very different time in New York, I lived, in Chinatown for eight years. I had a little loft down there. And over the years, observing the work

ethic of this overwhelmingly immigrant community, you know, one can make generalizations about work ethics of certain different ethnicities. But I thought, these people are working 26 hours a day, eight days a week, around the clock, so that their kids can get a good public school education, with a push toward excellence, enter schools, and in one generation, break 5,000 years of karma, and become doctors and lawyers and world leaders and teachers, these people are going to take over the world. And all these years later, they're working very hard at making that a reality. The other thing is that at a certain point, a tipping point that they or some group of them are keeping their eye on rather than us, they may decide, right. We've given the maybe five years time to make ourselves known.

How would that happen? Well, often for me, I found no real models in the real world. and I'm not a big science fiction person. A lot of people think that those of us that do this work obviously are in science fiction because our lives are science fiction, but that's not true. I've read a lot of great science fiction,

but it's not an obsession of mine, and of course great science fiction films as well. And for me, one possibility, if they want to do it, comes from a very cheesy American miniseries that was, I guess, guess from the 80s and then remade five or six years ago in an equally cheesy but more expensive version called V, as in Victor. And it's all of these, the premise that it opens with is worthy of

H.G. Wells of Jules Verne at their best. Everybody wakes up one morning and hanging over the 50 or 60 biggest cities in the world are these giant hunking mile across motherships, game, over. And then it just degenerates into kind of a World War II resistance movies with instead of Nazis, you've got these aliens who all look like porn stars and figure models, but of course they're wearing latex and they eat us and mice and stuff like that. And they're not very nice. And the folks who are like the resistance fighters are sort of, you know, the partisan Jews during World War II. Not great viewing, but the premise is brilliant. And they could do it any time they want. People say, well, why don't they just reveal themselves? And I say they've been doing it every day

for decade after decade after decade. They're just not doing it on the White House. Launer in Red Square or Tiananmen Square or wherever. They're doing it with people one, two, seven, nine at a time, either by making themselves visible or by landing or by taking you. And that critical mass is building up, often not documented. And I say that because even though there are more and more out-experiencers and abductees, the late great Stanton Friedman, one of the things that he used to bring up in stock lectures was, I've spoken at more than 600 universities and colleges early in my talk. I asked the audience,

how many people have had a UFO sighting? And I count. And it's like one in ten hands goes up. That's a pretty respectable statistic. And he says, very good. How many of you reported that to somebody, some agency, the newspaper, the cops? And nine out of ten hands go down.

Again, I describe that to, once again, fear of old-fashioned ridicule, which is changing. but it's still there, especially in a situation like that. So this is where we are right now. I think that the disclosure movement is terrific. I don't think it's going to, for the foreseeable future, and I know my dear friend Steve Bassett might disagree with me,

create that thing that's going to push world leaders over the edge, at least not quite yet. but what I love about it is there are more and more people, regular folks, educating regular folks, often kind of gotten rolling by somebody like you or me, in small groups and countries now all over the world. And that's very inspiring to me. And I encourage anybody that's doing the work to keep doing it. Yeah, I feel inspired too because, I mean, the project, I'm working on right now, Peter, is I'm working with a Navy servicemen who had five triangular UFO sightings over a naval air station. And of course, my first question is, did you report it? And he said, no, the one time I told a superior, they said, quit drinking before you go on shift. So of course, I'm not going to have reported after that. But, but we

now are seeing such a shift in the Navy particularly, maybe across the board with all the military branches of reporting these things. But the Navy especially, as you said. Yeah, which is interesting. I'd like to get your thoughts on that in a moment, why the Navy, but the fact that now soldiers and people, pilots and every type of military person you can think of from like a radar operator up to our top gun pilots are feeling empowered to come forward and say, Like I was in a cat and mouse game with something up there that I could not outmaneuver and could not explain. That's more than we've had in since I think the cover-up really started. So I think it's exciting to know that now the people that a lot of citizens look up to,

our military, who are there to protect us, are saying something's going on here. And it's not us. And we have to figure it out. that's a big shift because we didn't get that for a long time. The Pentagon is acknowledging UFOs are still, in fact, unidentified. And let's look into it. And they're creating a task force to look into it now. So, yeah, why do you think the Navy?

I want to get your opinion on that. Why the Navy? Where's the Air Force in all this? They've been very quiet, if you ask me. What are your opinions on that? I think it was kind of happenstance with one historical footnote. when James Vincent Farrissel, our first Secretary of Defense, was nominated by Harry Truman to literally dismantle the old war department, which had been in place since the Revolutionary War,

and create a new entity called the Department of Defense, which he did, and then was appropriately nominated to be the first secretary of defense and something that and current day standards would be more paranormal than anything I can think of, having every single senator in the House and in Congress, well, in both houses of Congress, vote unanimously to put him in, each service branch was asked to submit a plan for the intelligence apparatus of the new Department of defense to be basing their new intelligence aspect on. And it was the Navy's plan that was accepted. This may have had something to do with the fact that Forrestall, previous to this, was Secretary of Navy at the end of World War II.

Maybe not. More to the point, though, the articles that we've been discussing from December 2017, there was another article accompanying them. And it had to do with a series, I think it was two Navy Flyers, talking about being scrambled and getting close enough to an unknown to identify it as a genuine unknown.

Now, in euphology, we have a myriad of these reports, God knows how many, going back to the 40s. But in the New York Times, this was radical. And I think the real break came when information came to the surface that partially sparked the writing of the key article in December of 2017 about a plan that had been put forward in Congress in 2004 and very much advocated by the majority. party leader, to create a study group, in so many words, to be funded to the tune of 20 million or so dollars, to simply study seriously the question of UFOs. Again, for those of us in the field, ho-hum, we've been aware of this for, you know, since that time, and other efforts like it.

But to the general public, this was massive. And it touched on the two. The two, 2004 Navy aerial reports by Navy pilots and witnesses coming forward on the, was it the destroyer and the aircraft carrier that were involved in the incident off California, as I recall. And then those four or five of those individuals coming forward, who you and I have spent time with some of them. And just putting it on the line and saying, yeah, I was there. I was involved to one degree or another. This is what I will put on the record.

And that sort of broke the ice. I think now the climate has changed again because we are now in this seemingly post-ridicule era with military person. more willing to put their careers at risk. At the same time, I think the secret keepers, per se, those gray individuals who we don't elect, who are the ones who decide what should be kept secret, what should be declassified to a degree, who have worked many of them very hard to keep a lid

on the whole UFO situation since 1947, that it's leaking. The lid isn't fitting type. There is probably arguments going on for decades within various agencies and offices about the wisdom of starting to release information, of keeping it absolutely secret, of arguing these points back and forth, now it's just eroding. Now it's out of control. And I think what's happening is that those individuals and the organizations and groups which they front or, you know, are involved in are doing a kind of creative damage control. Again, this, what we touched on before, this distinguished retired Israeli ranking personnel talking about, you know, Mars, the moon, this kind of thing. Is this information that is absolutely authentic?

Is this what he wants to believe? Is this information that has been somewhat doctored and given to him or given access to him as a way to get more out there? there and at the same time overload the circuits of the general public. It's easier to dismiss him as a character, a crank, you know, somebody who always harbored these beliefs and now that he's retired can talk about them whether they're true or not or are they true. The subject is more and more out there and against being covered by major media. Part of the reason for that is this stuff has always sold advertising time. Make no mistake about it. There is that mercantile factor attached. And if you are, again, a right-wing Fox commentator, a left-wing

CNBC commentator, and a story like that comes in, your newswriters are going to write it up, and you're going to report it because your listenership is interested. And it breaks the normal news cycle, which is pretty depressing right now. So we're all kind of too close to see the bigger picture, although people, you know, more scholarly and more observant people are pulling back to see this dynamic that's going on right now. But with the superimposition of the pandemic, we're all feeling the wind of history in our face every single day that we wake up. And everybody's a bit on overload. And here we are coming into the most tradition-bound, poignant, emotional time of year for so many regular folks. And it ain't going to be like it ever was.

For most people, it's going to be a challenging period of time coming toward the end of some of the most challenging times in their lives, if not the most. And a lot of people are suffering, either because they are ill with this damn disease, or because they know somebody that is or because they are afraid of it, or because they're angry because they know that it's just a Chinese or a communist ploy to take our freedoms away. Everybody's got an attitude about it. Everybody is concerned. And yet we're going into Christmas.

New Year's with our backs to the wall. And so, again, if this had been what I'll laughingly call a normal year, this would have been a banner breakthrough year for the public taking UFOs more seriously. Many of them have, but many of them have been understandably too preoccupied with real world concerns. Absolutely. Of course, of course, Peter, this would all start to unravel in the middle of a pandemic. And you do have to wonder, you know, was this a strategy to maybe admit a little, yeah, yeah, UFOs are out there, pilots are seeing them,

we don't know what they are. I mean, look, the Department of Defense officially released those Navy shot UFO videos right in the middle of when lockdown started. When, you know, that could have been a historic moment in time where finally our intelligence agencies are saying, here, here, here's what we got. But no, you know, we have to worry about, you know, buying more masks for tomorrow to go out or, you know, being as careful as possible around our loved ones during a pandemic. Or just surviving. So many people are unemployed right now and just they have no idea how they're going to pay the rent next week or get a meal on the table.

of course they're not going to be thinking about, oh, finally, we're figuring out that UFOs are extraterrestrial or whatever they happen to be. You're right. It's just not, it's not out there. It's not there for the public to accept because we got more important things going on. To be completely honest, even though this topic could ultimately be the most profound thing in history. You got to wonder. But the other thing I kind of wanted to talk you with you in terms of that is where we stand now.

We have a bill being passed within Congress about information about UFOs being made public. Again, something never in my lifetime did I think I would even see the word, you know, UAP, UFO in an official bill being passed. And it's happening. And now the Pentagon is once again saying, we're creating a task force. We're looking into it. But like you mentioned, are these ways to control the information that gets out? Or, you know, because with all these UFO videos that were leaked to the public years before the Department of Defense officially released them, they were backed into a corner. And we said, boom, someone within your intelligence agency wanted this out to the public and they leaked it.

We saw that weeks ago with a new company, the debrief, releasing information about what this task force has found so forth. So is this what it takes, backing them into a corner and saying, we're going to find the information, whether you like it or not? Or is this them being like, let's handle the narrative that gets out to the public? We have what amounts to a new task force involved in keeping an eye on this dissemination of information. I'm a fairly optimistic trusting person in general, but for me, I always approach a new development like this with the understanding that it's a double-edged sword. It looks good. It may, in fact, be sincere, or it may be yet one more way to control with a certain amount of elegance and seeming openness, the flow of information or the accuracy of information.

I'm open and optimistic about it, like you will be keeping a close eye on it and what they do and what they say. But as the English say, it isn't ASPEC until it gels. Absolutely. Yeah, you could be more right on that? And I think, you know, as time goes on, we're really going to see if this task force is all it's cracked up to be. You know, there's been talk that it's just two people in a basement, you know, a la Molder X-Files style looking at this. But we honestly don't know. So I look forward to whatever comes next in that.

But Peter, before we go kind of wrapping things up, I want to know what comes next for you. This is one of the reasons I got you on today. I was so excited to hear about this. So tell us a little, if you will, about this new endeavor that you're embarking on within in the UFO world and beyond. Yeah. Well, as I mentioned earlier, for the last few years, one of the things that has really preoccupied me

more than any particular case or development in the field or new postulates put forward, different positive coverage of the subject, is this challenge of how do we reach a wider audience? And for me personally, I've been a guest on, well, going back almost 40 years, on hundreds of radio broadcasts and more recently in the past few years, dozens and dozens of podcasts. I always figure it comes with the territory, you know, for anybody that wonders, you never get paid.

The traditional understanding is I'll give you some time on the air and you give me content to let me do my show. But something happened about a year ago in my life that made me think maybe this is the direction I should go. And if so, to find a way to do it, that's a bit different than it's been done. I received a call from my old friend, Race Hobbs, who is the founder of the radio network that you have your show on, KGRA. Race is an old friend. We absolutely love each other. Two more different guys you couldn't find in the world, but, you know, like the best of us, we just keep working through our differences and have nothing but goodwill and affection each other. and he said, I've been talking to the owner of KGRA.

We've known each other for years. I know your work, your communication skills, and we'd like to offer you a live two-hour radio show every week. And my first thought was that I felt flattered. It's a nice acknowledgement when somebody gives you an opportunity like that. my second thought was gee this is going to be a lot of work and that means I've got to line up guests every week and do everything else that radio hosts do and work out questions and blah blah blah and the third thing that I talked to him and the owner about was that there are so many good people already doing this work some of them are literally institutions and been doing it for decades other ones are up-and-comers, been doing it for years. Other ones are, you know, whether it's a small podcast or a big radio show,

we've got plenty of talented hosts and producers out there. And if I accepted this opportunity, if I was just doing, I hope, what would be a good job at what they do. And, you know, having different guests on to talk about, the latest cases or the book they've written or where we can see them next, all, you know, important things that I really wasn't that interested. And I asked him if I could think about it. And they said, take as much time as you want, which again, I was very moved by, as opposed to we want to fill the slot. And if it's not you, it's going to be someone else. And I started to think about it and thought about it and thought about it. And it took me almost two months.

to come up with an idea of a format for a show and an adjacent platform with different kinds of content that I thought might be something people would want to listen to. Also, that if I did it, I'd want kind of a dual mandate, and I have to figure out how to fulfill that. Number one, that obviously I'd want it to be something I could be. proud of that would draw more and more listeners. In fact, everybody that listens to every show on KGRA, I'd like for my listener. And everybody that listens to every other paranormal and UFO-related show I'd like for a listener. And all the zillions of people that listen to coast to coast, I'd like for listeners. But I also knew that I wanted it to be a show. A show.

that equally would be a program that people who had never been interested in listening to a UFO or paranormal broadcast before in their life would start to listen to and that I could build two audiences very consciously and finding a way to have content that would appeal to serious students of the subject and, you know, new folks on board. And part of that was at this point in my life in the work, I look at all the people around us, Ryan, who have been doing this work, some of them for decades, some of them for years, some of them fairly recently, but especially the established ones, and there are an awful lot of them, people who I know I respect and admire, whose books I read and have read, who I see on television, who I listen to at conferences when I'm on the speakers line up as well,

and make a point of not missing their talks. We know who they are or who they are in their public presence, but what interested me more was how did they become the person they became? What were the factors in their lives that contributed to them, contributed to them becoming this public person in this work, the contributions they do. And so, I accepted KGRA's invitation, and over the past months have been kind of gearing myself up to do it, working on my first show, which will be just me, and the second week, we'll start with guests. But on Friday, December 28th, that quiet

couple of days between Christmas and New Year's. I'll be going on the air live at 6 o'clock in the evening to 8 o'clock in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, with the first broadcast of a show that will be called, Meanwhile, Here on Earth. And ultimately, I came up with that name because although a great deal of our attention is focused out there, a great deal of what we're talking about, searching, being involved in studying is happening here. More, I thought, can I get away with violating kind of that unwritten code of all paranormal and UFO-related shows and broaden that content to things that interest me, often a great deal, that may not specifically bear on the subject at hand with guests that I hope

people would never forget and want to hear again, even if it's not in their specific area of interest. And I'm going to leave it at that for now and just invite all of your viewers to join me on December 28th for my first broadcast, and then either through the station or directly, let me know what they think of what I want to do. I can say that I already have months of guests lined up. And I'm very excited about that. And if you're in the work, they're almost all people that you've known who they are for years. And I hope admire and follow to some degree. And I have dozens more people, many of them with an interest in UFOs, but who are not in our field.

They're painters and writers and actors. actors and filmmakers and producers and film directors and people in business, people who have had government jobs. Some of these shows, of course, will be about what they do, things that I find fascinating, but overwhelmingly, these are people with an interest in the subject, just the people in the music industry and who they are who have agreed to come on the show and talk about how This has always been a threat in their life at the same time that they've been a pop star for decades, or a successful songwriter, or involved in directing Academy Award winners in great dramatic features on television.

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Again, I'm going to rely on my colleagues and my audience to help give me guidance as the show starts to take form over the months to come. And I'm just really excited about it. And after the amount of time I've given myself to grow into getting ready to do this, I am ready to go. Ready to pull the trigger. I'm so excited for this. I remember when it was just literally a glimmer in your eye and now to see it coming to fruition. I think it's so refreshing, Peter.

I mean, you and I, like I mentioned in the intro, yeah, we connected through UFOs, but it was our love of theater. that truly brought us together as friends, you know, aside from being colleagues. And I think that's what's amazing about this field is we all have our own lives. You know, I live in New York City where you can literally hear the subway right now, overpowering my voice. And I am a playwright. I write for the stage. And that's the love and passion I've always had, aside from talking about UFOs.

So to know that you're going to be talking to people in all walks of life and what got them interested in this specific topic, but also what did they do with the other, you know, 23 of their lives is awesome. In initial interviews with upcoming guests, some things that I suspected or knew a little about has really thrown the doors open for me on, you did what?

You worked at what? You dreamt of becoming this? You had to overcome this obstacle in your life. You met this person and they inspired you and helped you to do this. It's been very humbling just to do the back work, getting ready to come into this period of time where I will be continuing my work as a public person, but in, I guess, a more public way. And I'm no stranger to broadcasting, but not in the role that I will be playing. So wish me luck and tune in on December 28th, 6 o'clock Eastern Standard. That's amazing.

And, you know, again, bringing it back to that humanistic level to all of this, you know, I think is going to bring people together again instead of dividing them. And I couldn't think of a better person than yourself to bridge that gap, to reach across the aisle and show us that we're all human. We all live and breathe for a reason. And I think it's beautiful. I can't wait. I'm going to be listening live.

All my viewers, all my listeners, please tune into that. I will have all the information about the debut show in the show notes. But other than that, Peter, I know you also have another project that is near and dear to my heart that's out on DVD. So before we go, could you tell us a little about this. incredible biography that you have compiled on the life of James Forrestall. Yeah. Again, James Forrestall was our First Secretary of Defense. He enters into the UFO story, usually more in terms of legend, myth, lore than documented fact for most folks, because he's even been treated as a character, you know, in a film and that kind of thing.

James Forrestall was sworn in as First Secretary of Defense in September of 1947, 10 weeks or so after something crashed in the deserts outside of Roswell Prairie, outside of a town called Roswell, New Mexico. The weight of the entire early UFO flood of information rested on his shoulders, not Truman's. You read the job description for Secretary of Defense. It's a very powerful position, more than most people realize you can actually make policy. In some ways, you are more powerful than anybody in the American government save the president. of the United States. And James Forrestall's life, for me, read like fiction. In fact, I found myself comparing him to the greatest creation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gadsby. He came out of nowhere, became everything. And at the point where his life was literally storybook, it began to

spiral out of control in great part because of the impact that the weight of this knowledge had on him. I will say that I was first introduced to James Farisdall's life and very suspicious death in 1987. And I started to research it then, set it aside, picked it up again, kept doing it. And the, I can't even call it a documentary. the production values are very modest. It's me and a green screen, 150 images or so, film track, a soundtrack,

a green screen, right? And a story. It's something that is scripted that I present word for word. It takes an hour. And I was very careful in putting it together to only go with the most

documentable sources I could find. There are things about James Forrestall and what he experienced, saw, or lived through that may very well be true that I did not include, because for me the standard was, I want to produce a documentary here, if that's the word for it, that I could prove in a court of law, and I think I do. It is equally about the circumstances surrounding his death, and he was murdered, make no mistake about it, although the public was, was told he took his own life after a profound and very well-documented mental breakdown. Now, the documentary was completed last year, and I'm very pleased to say it is available in a DVD that not only has word-for-word-closed captions for the hearing impaired,

but a very, very careful translation Spanish language. it will be available in a streaming form soon. But being me, in putting it together, I was hyper-focused on what I was doing and a certain technical aspect of production I completely forgot about, and I'm now paying the price for it, which is that of the images that I borrowed from God-nose-how-many sources, a number of them are owned. by archives, by individuals. If you do this kind of research,

you get familiar with the Getty Archive and this one and the next one. And there are modest fees that often need to be paid for usage, even in a small project like this. And as we were about to release it, one of my executive producers, the great Jennifer Stein, responsible for the terrific award-winning feature-length real-world documentary, Travis, the true story of Travis Walton, reminded me that I needed to chase down the possible

ownership of every single image I used. Being me, I didn't even keep a master file of them. And so I am now still in the process of going through every single image that I use, finding out if it is owned or in the public domain, and with great embarrassment, adding a great deal of time to the release of what I think is something I'm very proud of and something that will fascinate anybody interested in American history in the UFO phenomenon or a ripping good story involving a lot of extraordinary people and one of the great self-made man's of the 20th century and his tragic death. So I will let you know, Ryan, as soon as it is all kosher,

and that it is streaming on a platform. And at that point, I hope a lot of your viewers will want to see it. Absolutely. Hey, the great hunt begins, as it always does, to track down the copyrights. I know that all too well, my friend, trust me. But we did do a two-part series on Summer in the Skies where Peter walked us through the life and career of James Forrestal. highly suggest people go back in the archives, check that out. But you have to see this video

version that Peter is compiled. I saw in early screening of it and it just blew me away. So, I mean, I can't think of a better way to end this amazing conversation, Peter, than hearing all about your new endeavors and what's to come. You know, that's what we always look for. What comes next? So I will leave you with this, my man. While we continue to search for answers somewhere in the guys. Meanwhile, here on Earth, we have Peter Robbins. So I have to thank you, brother, for once again joining us on Summer on the Skies. My pleasure, Ryan. In association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network.