Somewhere in the Skies - OMNIBUS 05 | Richard Dolan: Media Bias, Global Secrecy, USOs and the Leak of the Century

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

In this Omnibus, we bring you our collected interviews with historian and author, Richard Dolan. From the premiere episode of Somewhere in the Skies to about a month ago, these conversations took place over the span of eight years and over the course of 400 episodes. Join us as we continue to navigate the delicate conversation of UFOs throughout history and the secret keepers who may hold some of the keys to the UFO mystery and beyond. Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved 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

You are now Somewhere in the Skies with your host, Ryan Spray. Welcome to the premiere episode of Somewhere in the Skies, and thank you so much for joining me. For those of you who may have no clue who the hell I am, let me bring you up to speed. I had a UFO sighting over the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York when I was 12 years old. It was what we would classify as a triangular UFO. It hovered silently over my head. and then headed north to the Canadian border. This sighting terrified me,

and that terror led to an obsession, and I'd been searching for answers ever since. I spent half my life researching the UFO phenomenon, and this culminated into my book, somewhere in the skies, a human approach to an alien phenomenon. I'm hoping this podcast will pick up where the book left off, and I'm hoping you'll continue to join me

As I discuss UFO cases old and new, discuss current UFO events from around the world, and hear from guests in various fields of study, bringing us one step closer to asking new questions, and possibly even getting some answers. I have to thank a few people who really help me get this off the ground. To Micah Hanks, Andrew Sanford, Nick Westmeyer, Jason McClellan, Maureen, Maureen Ellsbury, Shannon Legerow, and Sam Shearin. You all guided me on this journey, and I'm honored to continue working with all of you. My sincere thanks also goes out to author and illustrator, Mike Cleland, for creating the logo image you see for the show and the Facebook banner. Thank you so much, Mike. You're truly a talented individual.

And I have to thank you, the listener. I want to hear your thoughts on what you think of the show. If you have any guest or topic suggestions or a personal story of your own you'd like to share, you can reach me directly by emailing Spreg at somewhere in the skies.com or visit the website, somewhere in the skies.com. Before we get started, I want to share this audio clip with you from a favorite film of mine. Take a listen. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes.

if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radios,

and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. You've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being. God damn it! My life has value.

That was the voice of Peter Finch from the 1976 film Network, where his character, news anchor Howard Beale, proclaims the control and the decay of the mainstream news. Meant to be satire, the film rings eerily true now more than ever. As 24-hour news cycles bombard our eyes and ears with biased ideologies and corporate corruption, there seems to be no end in sight. But how does this deeply troubling issue connect with the UFO topic?

How has the perception of this elusive mystery changed and ultimately influenced our opinions and beliefs on it? And where may we be heading as a society, as the media bias and power structures wage a war for our hearts, minds, and our money? My guest today is noted author, and historian Richard Dolan. Dolan is best known for his two volumes of history, UFOs and the national security state,

both groundbreaking works, which together provide the most factually complete and accessible narrative on the UFO subject. He also co-authored a speculative book about the future, A.D. after disclosure, the first-ever analysis, not only of how UFO secrecy might end, but of the all-important question,

what happens next? His most recent book, UFOs for the 21st Century Mind, provides a fresh treatment of the entire subject. It asks fresh questions and offers new insights to further our understanding of the UFO mystery. So, without further ado, let's get to our interview with Richard Dolan. Guys, I'm super excited and honored to have, as my first guest on the podcast, author and historian, Richard Dolan. I thought it appropriate. He published my book to have him on the actual. podcast based around that. So Rich, thank you so much for joining me today, man.

Hi, Ryan. Oh, it's so, I'm so happy to be your guest, and I didn't realize I was going to be your first guest, so that's even, that's even nicer for me. But it's an honor, and I'm happy to be here with you. Well, thanks, man. So, well, the real reason I wanted to have you on as the first guest to talk to you today was because recently I attended a presentation you gave. And I don't really want to discuss the UFO reality or question. I think we're past that at this point in some ways, but to really kind of get a sense of the perception of the topic from the mainstream media. And you recently had a talk called media bias in UFO coverage, culture, policy, or something else. Do you sort of run us through that talk in what it entailed?

Absolutely. You know, I was inspired to do this. First of all, I've always, has been interested in the relationship of media, mainstream media to the UFO subject. I'm interested in mainstream media in general. Years ago, when I broke into this field, my first book was published at around the same time as another book by a man who became a very good friend of mine, Terry Hanson, who has since deceased. Terry wrote a very excellent book, a classic, I would say, called The Missing Times, subtitled media complicity in the UFO cover. Our books were sort of like bookends with each other. I wrote UFOs in the national security state. He wrote that.

I was dealing with the political aspects of the cover-up, and he was dealing with the media aspects of the cover-up. We had a very similar approach, and we became friends. And Terry didn't write any other books in this field, but he did some lectures and presentations, and we always stayed in touch until he died. And I miss him. He's an old friend of mine, and I realized, you know, his work and my work, and my work, are so compatible and there really was no one to my knowledge doing detailed media analysis of the UFO subject.

I thought I would like to do one for the Phoenix Conference, the International UFO Congress that we did. And so that's why I did it. When you look at media, and I really wanted to bring that whole approach up to date incidentally, and that's what I tried to do with this. A couple of things that you notice about mainstream. media, before we even get into UFOs, it's interesting because we went through the whole election in 2016 and now in 2017, and media itself is a story. We hear everyone talking about so-called fake news.

And, you know, there's lots of ways to look at this fake news phenomenon. My perspective on it is that the corporate mainstream media itself is the primary conveyor and purveyor of fake news. And I say this not siding with any one particular political party here, but I have been looking at CNN and MSNBC and Fox and PBS and really all of these large corporate dominated, intelligence community dominated sources of news as purveyors of fake news. And I don't think that I'm simply speaking hyperbole. I think that there's a lot of facts to back this up.

and I tried to present some of those during my talk. One of the things that was important for me is just to mention to people that not only is the mainstream media, not your friend or my friend. I mean, it lies, it spins, it censors. It's owned by just a few very powerful corporations. It is merged with the popular culture entertainment industry. It co-operates with the intelligence community. All of this is known. People often don't recognize this.

They don't pay attention. They don't know their history. but the mainstream media has cooperated with U.S. intelligence for decades and generations still does. But it also makes us sick, and I mean physically it makes us sick, and intellectually, emotionally it makes us sick. And this is not just me saying it. I mean, there are mainstream articles themselves saying that the selection is making us sick, literally making us sick. I have a BuzzFeed article. I remembered reading and articles in The Guardian and elsewhere to talk about how news is bad for you.

truly news is bad for you and I thought to myself why would it be that being an informed person is bad for you and of course it's not bad for you or for me or for listeners to be informed it's not bad at all I just because there's an article this is making you know news is making you sick so what I what I realize is that it's how our mainstream corporate media delivers news how it packages news, how it gives the news to us, that is actually unhealthy for us. And of course it is because all any intelligent person has to do when looking at the news is realize how trivial it is, how sensational it is, how it focuses on one bad thing

after another bad thing, without context, without understanding. There have been study after study that have shown that the more television news a person watches, the less likely they are to be informed about key issues. in the world the less is it an inverse relationship so that's right this the first time i learned this was over a quarter of a century ago during the first uh the persian gulf war and there was a study study i believe it was done out of the university of colorado pretty sure that uh came to that conclusion it said the more cnn you watched and it was explicitly cnn the less likely you were to know where for example syria was on a map or you know like basic things about the middle east

So there's that. And back then they said this is a great failure of our journalistic profession. I'm thinking, no, actually, it's a great success. The whole point, see, of TV news and of television in general, is to sell you, the viewer, to the advertiser. And that is the sole point. Anything else is just gravy. So they'll lure you in by letting you think you are being informed, because people do want to think they're being informed. They lure you in by entertainment, which, of course, they do much more than,

information and toward that end they sell you to the advertisers and once we realize that's the point of TV I think it's a little easier understand so I I would start by saying the mainstream makes us sick but I think mainstream media also makes societies sick I think it destabilizes an entire societies if we really look at the one of the things that I'm very interested in these days is the phenomenon of color revolution that is constructed revolution by intelligence communities in conjunction with corporate media to destabilize entire societies. We've seen this going on currently in Venezuela.

We've seen it a year or two ago in Brazil where we had what was called a soft coup against a perfectly elected government. And they brought in Goldman Sachs and the IMF and they're running the place. There's one going on currently in Macedonia. And I personally believe that one has been going on in the United States in opposition

to the election of Trump And again, I say this not as a supporter of Trump. He's said a lot of things, particularly in the last month that I'm very strongly opposed to. But the point is that mainstream corporate media has helped to organize in conjunction with the U.S. intelligence a social movement. And what it has done is destabilized a society. What we've really seen, in other words, is an effort by what people are now calling the deep state, what I've often called the national security state as a way to corroborate. a politician that they don't think is kind of in their pen.

But anyway, that's an overview of mainstream. Now, this is a mainstream media that has also dealt with the UFO subject. And when we look at that, what I try doing is to see through the beginning from the 1940s onward, mainstream media has consistently been incredibly hostile to the UFO subject. What you find is that smaller media, local media, then and now, today the equivalent would be alternative media. But back in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, we're talking newspapers and radio, primarily some TV, the local media would always be more inquisitive and more honest in covering stories

about UFOs and flying saucers. Anyone who goes through newspaper clippings of the UFO phenomenon over the 40s and 50s will find that 90% of the best stories are local newspapers, local sources, but mainstream New York Times, Washington Post, no, almost never. And that has never changed. So you have an established media and established culture that for whatever reason we can get into this has decided UFOs are not going to exist on their pages. And they have effectively then, right up to the present day, kept UFOs off to the fringe. So it's an interesting thing.

So, yeah, and I think what we're looking at, my basic analysis, my conclusion, is that it's very obvious to see that the UFO phenomenon has been an important part of national security and an important concern. And in that lecture and in my career, I've often like to quote a few particular documents. One of my favorite ones is a CIA document from 1952 in which the director of science. scientific intelligence writes to the director of the CIA that these sightings must have immediate attention, that there are sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds, near major U.S. defense installations. He said that are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles. So you have a one of a number of statements during the Cold War that are very,

highly classified in which this phenomenon clearly is being taken seriously and yet our media which is supposed to be the watchdog the guardian of the republic really um completely dropping the ball so then the question arises are they doing this because of their own journalistic biases and they're just biased as human beings or is there something else going on and what i what i would say is that there's something more going on the media has explicitly been working in conjunction with the intelligence community. We know this in the UFO field through something known as the Robertson panel

where in early 1953, the last weekend of the Truman White House, the CIA did its own study and debunking of the UFO phenomenon. It was already a rigged game even then. Right. And they made it as one of their conclusions

to work with major media to debunk the phenomenon to the public. And we also know outside of the UFO subject of something known Operation Mockingbird, which I believe I talked about that a little bit in the lecture. Mockingbird was a CIA coordinated media control program. It went all through the Cold War, 1980s, 50s, 60s, 70s, where the CIA would have journalists on its payroll, who would report the news in a way that the CIA liked, who would sometimes make up fake stories.

The CIA would do this. they normally would make up fake stories internationally and let them come to the U.S. That was their way of doing it safely, but they controlled spin, they controlled editorial policy. We're talking New York Times, Washington Post, particularly, and they're always their leaders. But also television, CBS did a UFO special in the 60s featuring Walter Cronkite, the Great American Anchorman. It was a UFO debunking piece. That was part of the Robertson panel. I would say part of the whole Operation Mockingbird.

I think I'll look at it all as one thing, one piece. So, in other words, what I'm saying to you and to listeners is that mainstream media has never been an honest player relating to the UFO phenomenon, and it's not an honest player relating really to anything political in our society. And I think no matter what one's one thinks that their political orientation is, I think if you do an objective study of the media, you see they are, they're working for an agenda. It's an elite agenda. It's an intelligence community-dominated agenda. It's a financial community agenda as well. And that these all really work together as a control system. Back in the six, I just wrapped this part up here, back in the 60s and 70s and 80s,

Noam Chomsky, who's still around, he's getting up there, but Chomsky really pioneered this idea of Western media and Western propaganda having to be superior to Soviet propaganda. Back then it was the Cold War. and the Russians, the communists, had this very prominent propaganda system. But Chomsky said, look, you know, there's may be a little more obvious, but ours is better. He said, Western propaganda really is better because it has to be better. You know, the elites in the Soviet Union, if you were to challenge that system back in the olden days, fine, you just get a 3 a.m. knock on the door, and they'd take you off to one of the prisons and you wouldn't be seen for a while.

In the U.S., we didn't have, they didn't have that luxury. And so persuasion had to be much more insidious, much better. And indeed, as Chomsky argued for years, it was and is. And part of that included this illusion of a free press, this illusion of freedom, which in fact is much more of a control system than anything else. And that does include UFOs. Right. And what's interesting about that, too, Rich, is that, you know,

I recently spoke to another journalist who covered the, you know, the psychokinetic and ESP aspect of what the CIA was doing back during the Cold War. And this too was an illusion as well. While these phenomena and abilities may be real, it wasn't even that that they were studying. It was the impact it had on the enemy and their perception of, oh, the U.S. is this far ahead in this, quote-unquote, psychic warfare. We have to up the ante as well. Meanwhile, they're still trying to even figure out if this stuff is real while pushing another agenda of, oh, we're already bend in spoons. We're able to shut off missiles if we so choose to through someone's mind.

It's fascinated, and this could correlate to the UFO phenomenon as well. Absolutely. And the technology that each country or nation has. Well, I would add a couple of things to that. So I've been interested, very interested, from the beginning. of my study of UFOs in the remote viewing phenomenon. The reason I became interested way back, even in the 90s, was because I learned that there was this thing called remote viewing,

the CIA and U.S. intelligence was doing it, and that these remote viewers seem to be, in addition to other things, seeing UFOs all the time. And I noticed this, this was a regular thing. So I thought, well, what's going on here? So I took some time to really study remote viewing, and I got to know some of the leading remote viewers of that program. I knew Ingo Swan.

I know Joe McMonigle and Lynn Buchanan and some of these other famous remote viewers. And I'm not a remote viewer myself, but I have studied this. I can say, I would say confidently, that there's a lot of things going on in that remote viewing program. Part of it was definitely propagandizing against the Russians, the Soviets, thinking, you know, wanting them to know that what are they, American capabilities, but part of it really was to develop genuine espionage capabilities with remote viewing. And some of these guys were off the charts amazing.

So they were doing things that there was and is something genuine and powerful about capabilities relating to remote viewing. This is a real thing. And it's not always 100% accurate. And the real problem with the remote viewing isn't even getting the signal. Often it's interpreting it. So like you'll get a vision of something that turns out to be quite accurate. But if you don't really have a context for what you're looking at, you will interpret it often in the wrong way.

So from an intelligence point of view, it's not always useful information and it's a hit or miss thing. Scientifically, it's fascinating. But certainly within the intelligence community, these people were doing unbelievable work, through the 70s and 80s and into the 90s. And then, of course, the whole reason we know about it, I can tell you, frankly, is that the journalist Jim Mars was writing an expose on it in the mid-90s. Jim Mars was going to be the first author to break the story about remote viewing. And I've spoken to him about this at length, and his book got stymied by his publisher

for several years. It was just stuck. And in the meantime, and they said, well, we just, I can't remember the excuses they gave him, but they effectively put the book on hold. And in the meantime, a guy who, many of us, I think, has CIA connections, trying to remember his name now, golly, it'll come to me. He wrote the book, he wrote the first remote viewing book. And it was in the mid-90s, it'll come to me before the end of this. And in that book, what he did was he said he really played the party line very well. He later did a book that debunk crop circles too, round in round in circles.

But anyway, what he said was, yeah, you know, they did a little bit of this. They didn't really know what they were getting. They got a couple of hits. Seems interesting, but they didn't really have much success with it. And that was the CIA's official story when they came out in the mid-90s. basically they declassified it because Jim Mars was I mean other researchers were about to blow the lid on it it's the only reason I think we really know about remote viewing officially and they decided to get out ahead of the story and control the spin and in that case I mean we're talking about media here actually

the I think it was nightline with Ted Cople they did a thing on remote viewing and it was completely in line with the CIA's party line and that's what the mainstream media does they work hand in glove with the U.S. intelligence community. And now, I mean, my goodness, something like the Washington Post on by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon. We know Amazon does all cloud computing and storage for the CIA. They've got a multi, multi, multi, multi, multi billion dollar contract. And it's not just CIA anymore.

Bezos does the work for the entire U.S. intelligence community, my understanding is. So the Washington Post is owned by a guy who is deeply independent. bed with the U.S. intelligence community. That's just, this is one connection. So anything, I didn't mean to turn this around from the remote viewing, but to get back to the media, people need to understand anything that comes through U.S. dominated establishment media has to be suspect, every single thing. And people will often ask me, well, Justice Great Dolan, so you don't want people

listen to CNN or read in New York Times or Time magazine or what the heck are we supposed to read how are we supposed to get our information right and um I I would the first thing that I would say is that we are in a difficult position every one of us who is a thinking person with some intellectual interest in this world and we all have to realize there's no way around us that we are surrounded by a very powerful media mind control system. End of story it is. And this is not an easy task for us to be educated, aware citizens of the world. But one thing that I would encourage people to do is to go to some truly independent

alternative media sources. The kind of thing that you're doing is one good source. You know, anything that takes us out of the core. corporate establishment mainstream is a good thing. Now, there's alternative media. That's actually not that alternative media. Like BuzzFeed is certainly not alternative media. They'll pander to, you know, generation, the millennials, but that doesn't make them

alternatives. Sorry, they're actually totally part of the establishment. But there are alternative. They're smaller media. And we need to find them. I go outside the U.S. And I have to go to the media that are demonized as so-called fake news because the fact is that these are the only places that I find are generally providing information that are useful. I do read my New York Times headlines on my iPhone.

All the headlines that everyone else gets, I get CNN headlines every day. And I do read CNN stories. So I know I feel as part of my job to know what they're saying. I read the Washington Post every day. or at least I read some of it every day. So I'm very aware of what mainstream is saying, but I will also read RT, that is formerly Russia today, discussed by the current CIA director as a tool of Putin's propaganda.

Nonsense, I don't believe that in the least. I don't say that they're right about everything, of course, but for news around the world, I will always want to know what they have to say, always, every time. And I simply go by the quality of analysis. It's always superior. I also go to a Canadian website that's my favorite website for history and politics, and that's called global research. com.

And that's run by a man named Michelle Shosadovsky, who is doing what I think Noam Chomsky should be doing but isn't doing. So Shostadovsky is doing it. He's kind of like the, I think the modern day, the true successor to the Chomsky tradition of. of media analysis and political analysis. And so the website he runs, global research.ca, it's run out of Montreal, he has superb commentators, in my opinion.

You know, like any of these alternative sites, I don't agree with everything that I see on global research. dot CA, and I don't agree with everything I read or see or the take of things in RT, but what I find is that they are a different perspective and usually a much more correct perspective and a more honest one, typically.

Right, yeah. And I mean... I'm not in the mainstream. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, do your research people. I mean, it sort of brings me back to another journalist friend of mine who introduced me to the lyrics of a Dead Kennedy song. And it's, quote, don't hate the media, become the media.

So things like... I love the Dead Kennedys. Isn't that awesome? And how long ago was that, you know? 1980. So, 1989. Yeah. Long time ago.

So this idea of, you know, not only disinformation. but media bias and everything that follows has been going on for a while, guys. Absolutely. The other thing that I do, and this is just a lifelong advantage I've given myself, is that I've just studied history nonstop. I still study history nonstop. I'm my Kindle reader in my downtime. I'm reading some old history book from 100 years ago.

So, I mean, for me, in other words, I've developed a good perspective on history and politics. and so I mean, I just know that there are certain patterns that have existed in our world and I've developed a good historical foundation I don't know how to tell someone there's no way to get these things quickly right and if someone's living the CNN reality

if they have that on their TV the first thing I would tell people is just turn that stuff off it's like someone who's drinking cans of coke every day or Pepsi and they want to be healthy I'd say the first thing you have to do is stop drinking that stuff because you're toxifying your body, your system, all that sugar. It will literally kill you.

I know a man who actually, I'm convinced, died of this. I think it gave him MS. He drank 10 plus cans of Coke a day. I mean, it was just absurd. And it's the same with news. You know, we talk about we have fake, we have more than fake news in our world. We have fake food. Fake politics.

We have fake everything that we, honestly, I think when we look at, around we have a almost a fake environment in many ways but we definitely have fake food and fake news and so the first thing

you have to do is you have to stop bringing the poison in that's rule number ones you have to stop with CNN you have to stop with New York Times

I mean truly stop and I'll just I'll just do this as an aside I don't want to get into a whole Hillary Trump thing I mean we're getting kind of past that anyway

but I will say this I was a fan of neither of those candidates I was one of the people had a Bernie sign in front of my house so that's me We might lose or gain some listeners, but that's okay.

I would say to people, I was not a fan of either of the candidates. I used to joke and say I felt like I'm in the Wild West with two gunslingers shooting at me, wherever I go, they're shooting. But what I noticed objectively is simply that the establishment media was very, very clear as to who they wanted in. It was obvious. It was 95% plus. literally 95% plus of media establishments wanted Hillary Clinton in the White House. And the reason was obvious to me. It was obvious because she was basically a continuation of the neoconservative, neoliberal doctrine,

where Trump, who is now fulfilling all of those things that Hillary talked about, by the way, he's completely switched over. But as a candidate, Trump was not on board with that, and Hillary was. So she was the establishment candidate, and it was obvious. you know she's the one who went to the Bilderberg meeting in 2008 that was her she's the one who's worked with this system her whole career and she was a team player and so all corporate media wanted her on board and knowing that was the biggest mark against her in my book my book personally that there was this lying mainstream I mean it astonished me or all of my friends I'm someone who I guess would identify as having been on the left my whole life until this last year i i don't know what to think of the left but um my friends on the left none of them trusts the cia none of them tell me they trust the media until this last year when they all trust the cia yeah and i'm like what what happened to you people

what happened to my friends they they all believe that uh trump was an agent of putin and saturnat live did the whole thing the trump puttin thing seriously um anyway um i i feel like the media does create sickness in our society. This actually might be a further study of mine. I learned from a close friend of mine who, when people go into therapy, one of the first things a good therapist will say to them if they're dealing with anxiety and stress and so on is, are you watching television news or are you reading news? And if you are, stop.

Wow. Yeah. And again, this goes back to the idea that the media does kind of make us sick. But it's not all news. I feel that being an informed person does not make us sick. It hasn't made me sick. I feel great. Last thing I want to say in the media, and I know you probably want to switch gears,

is for people who are not still believing this, I would tell them to get knowledgeable of a couple of really prominent recent media whistleblowers. There's later than I'm a big fan of named Amber Lyon, three-time Emmy Award winner, journalist. She was with CNN for years. Back in 2011, she reported on the Arab Spring, and then she just got sick of it. She said, I can't do this anymore. And she just says, look, governments are paying us to create fake news.

And when she did the Arab Spring back in 2011, she just said CNN was routinely paid by the U.S. government and by foreign governments to selectively report on certain events and to make up fake news stories. and anyone who's gone into this at all with fake CNN news I mean there's a wealth of information to look for there's another man who I'm a big big fan of who recently died is a German German journalist named Dr. Udo Ulfkata and he's on YouTube you can find him he talks about how you know we all lie for the CIA

he was doing stories back 2010 2011 he said the CIA would write this is he said all European news is controlled by the CIA they would literally write stories that he would have to put his byline to on Libya on Moa Mark Gaddafi in that case and he said if I if I didn't comply

I would have just lost my job but they would write the stories my name would be on it and it would be these all these hit pieces propaganda pieces that that was European journalism and then I'm a big fan of a lady named Cheryl Atkisson former CBS news and she's out there

she's given TED talks I believe and she talks about like astroturfing, which is a very important phenomenon, basically faking your data to promote yourself. Astro-Turfing happens on Wikipedia. She calls it AstroTurfers dream come true as Wikipedia. But how the news around us is very deliberately falsified. Right.

So there's a lot of information on this out there. Too much, to be honest. But I'm so happy you were able to. steer us towards some sources that we can actually take credence in. Thank you. Nothing is certain in no source. I talked about RT and global research. Look, I like them very much.

I find that they give me a leg up against people who follow the mainstream. That's for sure. But that nothing is certain. I mean, what we all have to do is we have to use our brain. we have to think and it's you know there's no magic formula i'm sorry to say this to people there's no sure shot way to say oh for sure read this site don't go there uh what we have to do though is understand first and foremost that we are part of a control system and i think once we get that we can begin a process and it can take years for some people depending on how far into the

system they are you know it's not as easy like in the matrix where you just take the red pill and all is revealed. I wish it were that easy. We are peeling the deception away by layer after layer after layer and it does take time. And it's emotionally difficult. You know, I'm doing research on false flags these days. And what I've definitely learned is that one reason false flags are so successful is because they combine our emotion with our mind.

So the trauma of a false flag, which is always horrible. you know, tears at us emotionally and and then what makes them effective is that the authorities will come in immediately with a narrative that appeals to our intellect. And so the intellect is kind of married to the emotion, the mind and the heart become one. And once we accept that explanation from the authorities, it becomes wedded to the trauma and it becomes very, very difficult, if not impossible for most people, to question that intellectual explanation. So I think false flags work on this.

It's a very devious way that they use this manipulation. It's very effective. And it doesn't work simply with false flags. It works with all forms of propaganda. People buy into something. And the longer and longer you buy into something, the harder and harder it is to buy out. Absolutely.

I couldn't put it better myself. Well, in terms of love it or hate it, Rich, a lot of people are into this movement, and that's the idea of disclosure, getting back to the UFO topic. Oh, yes, Nate. And you recently looked into, you came out with a small publication

about UFOs and disclosure in the Trump era. Now, I just want to briefly touch on this, because we could talk about this forever. But this idea that, you know, we have a POTUS who is not afraid to tweet at 3 a.m. in the morning, something about anything. So in terms of the UFO question, some people think that this may be the time that we get a tweet in the morning about what happened in Roswell. I mean, that's going a little far, but. I was one of the first people, I think,

to just put that little idea out there. And I almost did it whimsically. I wrote a piece on Trump and disclosure the day after he got elected. I remember when, yeah, when the war. when most of the I guess the liberal the left world was going into some serious serious trauma over that election and certainly in the UFO fields there were a lot of folks you know our friend Stephen Bassett and Grant Cameron for two of them really believed that Hillary Clinton was the disclosure candidate I mean Bass Bass Bassett absolutely believed it actually he believed furthermore that Obama would do it before the end of

his term. For my part, I publicly stated many times that I did not believe that that would happen. But we all thought Hillary Clinton would win. I certainly thought she was going to go. I thought it was a done deal. Frankly, the whole system was just rigged on her behalf. That was my opinion. Anyway, so when Trump got elected, I thought, well, let's just take a look at this situation.

This was a guy who at least particularly at that time. There's been a struggle going on since then, and we didn't need to talk about this. but Trump seems like a guy who he's not he's a disruptor he's a disruptor and no matter how one looks at him he's staring up the pot a bit and he was saying things this whole as a candidate you know let's make friends with Russia this is a big thing and he got reamed for this by all sides of the political spectrum it was astonishing to watch and then his anti-globalist thing was was very clearly against the main current. So I thought this is a guy who's become an enemy of big parts of the national security

apparatus. It's obvious. And, you know, I never thought Hillary Clinton would be a disclosure candidate because I saw her as the consummate insider. Trump is not the same type of insider. And I thought, I said you're still more likely to win getting a lottery ticket than waiting for a Trump disclosure. And I think even more strongly that now.

But I thought actually, this man's personality is such that he actually might do a 3 a.m. tweet. You could just imagine him saying something like everyone knows, UFOs are real. And the funny thing about Trump is like, could you imagine, unlike with Obama, like if Obama were to do a disclosure of UFOs had he done so, I think there would have been a much higher, like people would have been like, oh my God, I can't believe it. Trump, who's going to believe him? Like, I really think there's a lot of folks who would just say this man is, you know, certifiably insane and people think that already. So to do a disclosure of UFOs, seriously, this would be a real problem. I don't, I think it would be very difficult for him. And when I, when I publish this booklet, it's about 100 pages long, it's just under, you know, it was already evident to me.

I wrote, I published it in March about a month. ago. It was already clear that he was losing his, if it was a battle with the deep state, he was losing it, even by mid-March, like it was obvious to me that he was on the, he had been out-maneuvered, completely out-maneuvered, so that any reform of the intelligence community was not going to happen because they took out Michael Flynn like immediately. He was the only person who could have done a reform of the intelligence community. He was the first one out in that kind of a specious Russia thing there. So all of the loyal people around him, he's basically surrounded by counsel on foreign

relations people, globalists, they've taken over, they've got him. So by mid-March it was evident to me that it's unlikely. But nonetheless, we're in a situation where there's a kind of covert war going on, a war of leaks, for example, all of these leaks that we're seeing against and against Trump and against other people are signs that the intelligence community is fighting itself. So in that type of a situation, it just seemed to me there's enough instability that there could be some accidental. Or who knows, someone might say, what the heck, just an intentional putting this information out there. I don't think that that's likely.

but I will say in my own observation over political history over the past 50 plus years, during times of great instability in many nations, it can happen that UFO data leaks out and comes out, particularly when there's regime changed. When Mao died in China, this happened over there, when the Soviet Union broke apart. It happened very much so there. After Watergate in our own society, we strengthen our Freedom of Information Act, which led to a great release of UFO information. In Spain, after the dictator Franco died in the 70s, it led to a release of UFO data there. So when there's instability in the system, things come out, and that includes UFO data. We are in a very unstable political situation here in the United States. and so for that reason

I could see something unexpected something accidental happening I don't say bet on it I don't think there's ever a year where it's a good bet but there are some years where it might be better than others absolutely

the harder you shake the more that's going to come out but who knows who knows what's going to happen the thing that I try to look at in this booklet of mine is the international situation you know people for years years what would ask me, well, sure, there's a UF cover-up in the United States, but what about other countries? What about Britain? What about Brazil? What about Russia? What about India? And it's true, you know, we're in a big world.

So what is it about these other nations that allows for this phenomenon to be secret? And I really do try in this booklet to deal with that issue. And one of the things that I point out is, excuse me, is that you know, although the United States isn't the only nation in the world, it is still the dominant nation in the world by far. And there are only a handful of nations that are outside of predominant, preeminent U.S. influence. All right. There's only a few. So the U.S. runs all of the NATO countries, which are very powerful.

the U.S. has dominant influence over most of Central and South America. The U.S. has a very strong influence over most of the significant nations in the Far East. We're talking Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia, obviously. There are only a few significant nations that are still outside U.S. control. We're talking Russia, first and foremost, China. those two big ones. Iran, North Korea, Syria, although Syria is, you know, the whole point is to make Syria a cave. But those are some of the key nations.

And really, of those, the two big ones obviously are Russia and China. Because of the 200 or so sovereign nations that exist on this planet, only a handful, maybe 20, have a military intelligence community that's significant enough that would allow them to have a real capability in dealing with UFO data in a significant way. This is my opinion. I mean, most nations, you know, 90% of global military spending is wrapped up with the top 15, 20 nations. And so it's those nations that really we have to look at in terms of UFO secrecy. The other nations, I think, I don't really think they have enough knowledge or data or ability. to have any, like they wouldn't be able to disclose the UFO reality.

And of the top 20, the U.S. controls, you know, 17, 18 of them. Only Russia and China are not in there. So we really are looking at Russia and China for the international scene as far as the wildcards go. And I see them as very conservative, generally speaking. They're conservative nations. They don't want, they're not interested in shaking things up in a dramatic way. And plus, they're both heavily dependent on a high. hydrocarbons, gas, and oil.

To me, I've looked at UFO disclosure always is something that has energy implications. I feel that it has to. Because once an acknowledgement of UFOs is made, how long will it take people to realize, oh, wow. So wait a minute. If they're real, I assume they're not using high-octane petroleum. Right. Whatever it is, it's better than what we're using.

And so implicit in the UFO disclosure, I've always felt, is a post-petroleum society. And I can't think of anything more revolutionary in our infrastructure than that. And I don't think Russia and China are any more interested in rocking that boat than the U.S. power structure, at least right now. So I see a great deal of stability coming from those countries. Although I would actually, if there was to be a disclosure, I would probably almost prefer that. the Chinese or Russians do it ahead of the Americans. Right. And I said this because I think the Americans are just, they've been lying for so long,

and they've been running this for so long. I've got to get over the idea. I mean, I'm American. I love America. I study American history every day. But America is not the good guy in this battle. Right. And, you know, capitalization is always an issue with this,

even if, you know, the reality of UFOs were to be given to the public. and then that, you know, let's say free energy or whatever, whatever the hell these things uses propulsion. You know, how long will it take for the government, which is a very broad term, to control and contain that to capitalize off of it? You know what I mean? Switching from crude oil to free energy. I'm sure there's some sort of plan or agenda in action to when, if and when, that day comes, say our oil resources completely deplete, how will they make the most money off of this new form of energy?

Let's stay with this thought for a minute. It's really an interesting thought. So there's monetizing the technology, which I agree with you completely, has got to be key. And then the other concern, as far as monetizing, I wonder if it's possible that they haven't figured out an accurate good way to monetize this. and that might be the real problem for example there are stories and rumors

and I don't really know if this is the truth but you know back when Tesla was working on his energy transmitter at Wycliffe and Wardencliff hitting it right and it and

and J.P. Morgan was financing him and Tesla's lab was burned down and everyone suspected that J.P. Morgan had a hand in it. Probably did. Morgan was the devious master of the universe in his day. And the real creator, by the way, of the modern military industrial complex, incidentally, he did it during World War I. And he ran the whole thing. But the point is Morgan could very well have destroyed Tesla's work because he couldn't see how to monetize it.

I mean, you know, we're all working off of oil and gas back then, especially oil. So, and today, how would you monetize free energy if it's literally or nearly literally free? You know, to give people a tremendous amount of energy, you're not going to make as much money off of it. You just won't. And so that's a real problem. And we are living in a world that is dominated by the extraction of hydrocarbons from the ground. And that's the physical control over the oil and natural gas is what does. dominates U.S. policy.

That is what it is all about. That's 98, 99% of U.S. policy is control over oil and natural gas. And not just physical oil, but the sale of oil through petro dollars. The whole petro dollar system is the foundation of U.S. policy. That is forcing oil producing regions to sell their oil in U.S. dollars. The petro dollar system is starting to break down. Russia and China are breaking it down. Saddam broke out of it in 2000, and that's why.

the US invaded Iraq back then. But the system is inevitably breaking. But with free energy, you know, monetizing this oil and gas would be, excuse me, monetizing the new form of energy would be very problematic. And then the other aspect of free energy that might be possibly even more problematic is energy gives you and me and all the listeners a tremendous amount of power figuratively and literally, if we had a free energy device, right? Not only could you be independent of your electrical, you know, you go off the grid essentially,

you don't need your utility company and you're not dependent on that critically important thing for your survival. It would be possible if someone had an independent source of energy, literally to go off the grid and to go out into the desert somewhere. And you could create your own house and you could create your own energy system. You could, you could, you know, synthesize your own water through from the air. I mean, with energy, everything is solvable. Everything is fixable with sufficient energy.

And so what that does is it gives people freedom, a lot of freedom from the system, from authority. And I've got to assume people at the top are not interested. The other problem with free energy is that there is a danger. human beings are dangerous. We're not nice people. We're dangerous people. And if, I mean, individually, you and I on a good day, we're nice. But overall, if you give people infinite freedom, we often become very, very dangerous and very awful.

And so what if with this free energy, not only could you heat your house forever for free, but you can make a really nifty bomb? What if we're using something like zero point energy, if that's a solution. You know, I remember reading a statement by Dr. Hal Putoff, who I know how, physicist, who was very much in the forefront of zero point energy research. And he once speculated, you know, what if there's enough energy in this cup of coffee to blow up half the Pacific Ocean? And he wasn't joking. Like he doesn't know that there is, but theoretically it could be the amount of energy

and zero point could be insignificant or it could be unbelievably vast. And what if a free energy solution allows for tremendous extraction of energy or production of energy that would be very destructive? And so now we're letting loose this genie out of the bottle that could be a very dangerous one.

And so this is one area where I might have sympathy, right? With the secret keepers, I mean anyone thinking this through would think, oh my God. The problem is, A, we don't know the energy implications. B, I do know that secrecy has become a very destructive thing for our society that, for those idealists left, who believe in freedom and liberty and freedom of inquiry. It's been very dangerous for that. It's been very destructive.

And we've moved into a kind of neo-fascist oligarchy. I don't know how else to call it. So for those things, I'm not a fan. of that and I believe in the sunshine of truth. So for that reason, I'll always believe in disclosure. I have to believe in the truth. Because if I can't believe in the truth, then there's nothing else really for me to believe in. And I think that it's still the most proper foundation for a stable society is truth, not

falsehood. But if the truth is that we can't control this energy, then our world will have to find out ways of creating the control. And are we moving then toward a completely inclusive system where everyone is monitored, where everything is being checked by, you know, centralized artificial intelligence, for example, to make sure that no one's building the world's biggest bomb. Right. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what the solution is. We're moving into a very – you know, the UFO subject is one of several key issues that are.

going to drive our future. It's only one of them. It's a big one, but it's not the only one. And we're moving into a very, very different world in the next 20 years. I don't even know who could predict what our world is going to look like in 20 years. Right. It's never been more uncertain, I feel. And that's either going to be an extremely exciting time to live in or scary or exciting

or all the above. Who knows the only time we'll do? I agree. One of the things that I did that I've been thinking. through this whole disclosure scenario is different scenarios of disclosure right um when I wrote it after disclosure six years ago um seven wow um we really had one fundamental disclosure scenario and it's what I would now call premature disclosure so in other words something accidental happens a citing a leak something unexpected because we're in a very tumultuous

era where things are unexpected and I've often said disclosure is impossible but inevitable like that that paradox and that is indeed a real possible way that the disclosure will happen it won't be a plan but it will happen as a result of some accident you know WikiLeaks or sighting or something like that but there are other scenarios of disclosure and actually it occurred to me after we wrote after disclosure that maybe the leading candidate isn't that one but rather a kind of fascist form of disclosure in other words we're moving toward we're moving into towards some version of a neo-fascism I say neo-fascism because fascism in 2017 is not going to look like 1937 right with hitler's brown shirts I mean nothing's ever the same in history we're in a different

era but but a new iteration a version um and it seems to me that once complete control over the spin over the propaganda system, total control is assured, then maybe we might be moving into a system where there'll be a disclosure of some sort. But I don't think that that era has arisen yet where there's total control over the spin. There's still enough independence out there. So if there's a disclosure, it's not clear to me that the government or the intelligence community would be able to maintain full control over the spin. They control spin from so much, and they might for this.

But this is a big topic. This is a tough one. So I think once they get to a point where they're convinced that, yes, we control the news, we're surveilling people 24-7, we've got everyone chip, we got everyone drugged, we've got everyone basically zoned out when watching, dancing with the stars. Now we can roll this out because no one knows anything anymore. I mean, we've erased. And really, all you have to do is look around you. And it's distressing to me. I see so few people with even the most bare bones understanding of history and politics.

I don't know if it was any better when I was a younger guy, but I think it was better. I don't know. There's a few people nowadays who are kind of awake, but there's an enormous mass of people who I just think are as asleep at the switch as ever. Maybe I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. But anyway, I think we're moving toward a fascist kind of disclosure. I think that's the preferred method of disclosure.

But there's other ways. There's an accident can happen, a leak can happen, or the best case scenario, the people themselves. We can drive this process. And I think that's the healthiest way because it helps us to reclaim our power, help reclaim the helplessness to get rid of that, which has been encroaching on our lives from the last generation or more. Right. Well, you know, Rich, I do have to.

to bring this up, the black sheep in uphology at this moment in terms of disclosure. And that's Tom DeLong. Oh, indeed. What do you make of this entire thing going on? Is this guy for real? Is he actually

being fed disinformation, information, probably a mixture of both, or is this all complete bullshit? Like, what do you make of this? Yeah, that's a very good question. I met Tom DeLange once back in 2014. He was, I liked him.

You know, he's, for anyone who's living in a cave, he's the head lead singer, Blink 182. My daughter, who's now 18, you know, when she was a few years ago, she loved Blink 182. And so he's into UFOs. I met him in 2014. He was really into it then. This was before he wrote his book, Secret Machines. And I, I'm very cautious. some very, actually I don't take what he's saying at face value.

I haven't from the beginning and I will not. It seems to me it's way too convenient. The leakers coming to him have convinced him that they're the white hats, that the secrecy exists for a good reason, and he has said this, and that they're protecting us. They're working on our behalf. And I just think that that's a very self-serving way to promote the information. When I look at the history of secrecy, I do not see that.

I see secrecy as a very self-serving profit-driven, control-driven type of situation where there may very well be people on the inside who believe that they'll rationalize anything. You know, we're doing this for the people, but in reality, I don't believe that that is the case. I think there's way too much profit and power involved in the UFO secret. But having said that, are these people for real? Are they giving them genuine information? Bottom line is this. None of this is really going to make much headway until genuine confirmable data is released.

Otherwise, it's just people talking. And even if they're head of Lockheed, Skunkworks, even if they run the lab at Wright-Patterson, where we believe alien tech was being studied. I mean, and those are two of his leaguers, two of his people. It doesn't matter. These people, none of them, have made a public statement that can be directly attributable to them that they will publicly support. All right. So when the head of Boeing Skunk Works, oh, excuse me, Lockheek Skunk Works comes out and says, yes, I've been meeting with Tom DeLange. We talked about this.

This is real. if the head of Wright Pat's laboratory comes out, McCaslin, I think his name is, comes out and says this, then yes, if the major general over at Cheyenne Mountain comes out and states, we're doing this. Right now these people are hiding way in the background and Tom DeLange is their front man and he's putting himself out there. But the problem with that strategy is that Tom DeLange is a rock star. And I believe he's a good guy, but that's not enough. to give credibility to this phenomenon. While these guys are hanging out in the background, no public statements,

and absolutely no data. No confirmable information is coming out. So all this is is talk, talk, talk. It's talk. And to add, I mean, their names were never supposed to be given until the Podesta emails were leaked. So, I mean, right there,

they're even further back. in the corner not willing to come forward or make a public statement. I agree with you. And I think the Podesta angle has been really overplayed and played up. Again, this is where I have to strongly disagree with my friend, colleague, Stephen Bassett. I think he got this whole thing wrong. And Grant, Cameron, and I respect them both tremendously, but I've never agreed with him on this, where they think Podesta is genuinely pushing for disclosure.

I've never seen this. It's one thing to have an interest in UFOs, which, okay, he does. And yes, yes, Podesta made a couple of statements about UFOs in his career. He did this. He did the press conference back in 2002, and he made the tweets, the one tweet, hashtag disclosure. However, John Podesta is one of the most savvy political operators in the world. Right. All right.

And I firmly believe that he has made a recognition that the UFO subject in 2014, 2015, 2016, and today, this is not where it was at in the 1990s. In the 1990s, you talk about UFOs, it's a career ender. You're done. Hell, even in 2008, it torpedoed the career of Dennis Kucinich for his presidential candidacy when they just, tore him to pieces over the fact that he'd been a UFO witness. He didn't even talk about it. And by the way, he was corroborated by two other people who said, oh, yes, absolutely. It was a triangle.

It was unbelievable. We were on the property of Shirley McLean when it happened. I mean, it was a really good sighting back in the 80s. And Kassinich got reamed in 2008 for that. But even since 2008, we've gone through a dramatic transformation of the culture with YouTube and Facebook, social media. and I think Podesta as a savvy political operator has recognized that there are votes to be one, that UFOs are kind of cool. They actually are kind of cool. People are into it.

There's a tremendous market. UFOs, in other words, are a brand. Yes. They're a brand. And Podesta realizes that this brand can be tapped as long as you're careful. And he's been very careful. He's very smart about this. And Hillary was very smart about this.

She let Podesta do the talking. for the most part, a little bit. Then she did her thing on Jimmy Kimmel, but she never overplayed the UFO part. They did it just enough to get people into UFOs to think, oh, wow, wow, they're into UFOs. I'm going to vote for her. And I believe that's exactly and 100% of what it was all about,

was simply to get the vote. And I would, I mean, we'll never know because she didn't win the election, but had she won, I would absolutely never have expected her. to do anything like a disclosure. Never. Yeah. Well, in terms of civilian research into the UFO topic, Rich, I want to touch on, you know, the big one, let's say, move on. This is a listener question from, I believe, a field investigator.

What are your thoughts on the functionality and the behavior of research organizations looking into the UFO topic? That's a great question. And I'm a strong supporter in the idea of Mufon. I think we need organizations like Mufon. I get a little frustrated when people say, oh, we're done with UFO reports. Now let's talk about the implications. Well, yes and no, we're not really done with UFO reports. And the reason we're not done with them is because what we absolutely need are well-research,

solid, investigated cases. This strengthens the cause for all of us. and Mufon above any other organization that I can think of is really best suited to do this. In other words, a very strong Mufon investigation that goes to the process properly, that interviews witnesses. It gets any kind of evidence that it can put forth and a proper analysis to show that such and such a UFO incident is genuine and doesn't seem to be explainable conventionally. We need this. We need this in 2017 as much as ever. Because a lot of times people think about UFOs and they think, oh, well, that's back, you know, there were UFO settings in the 50s.

So we need this today. And we need Mufon to be at the top of its game to do this. Now, the problem has always been that Mufon, look, there's never been money in Mufon. The investigators who are involved in this do this on their own dime, their own energy, their own time commitment. And some of them do a fantastic job with all of those obstacles and they still do a great job. But it's very difficult. It's very difficult. For years, I was a little bit of a gadfly, I think I'd like to say, with Mufon.

And one of the things that I've always said is that Mufon needed to put together an annual report. If nothing else, Mufon, I said, stop sucking in the information and not giving anything back. We need to have data. What are you investigating? What are the results of your investigation? And Jan Harzan, and I say this to his credit, has been attempting to do these. annual reports. I have one of them.

I think he's been doing them every year to put out, you know, bare bones. Like, these are the number of cases we have. These are what we've investigated. These are our unknowns. And these are our top unknowns of the year. And I said, this is what you need to do, move on. And so I think they're still doing that. But there's so much more to go.

And we're only talking to United States. Right. The United States has 5%, 4% of the world's population. There's a whole big world out there. And as bad as it is in the U.S., it's vastly worse in every other country in terms of generating UFO data. I mean, it's frightening to say that the U.S. is the best at this, U.S. and Canada, but really U.S. Brazil, they have got good UFO researchers, but is there a national database of sightings? No, there isn't. Not to my knowledge. It's all sporadic.

We have the Mufon database and we have the National UFO Reporting Center here in North America. So if someone sees what they think is a UFO, at the very least they can report it. Elsewhere in the world, they got nothing. Europe, nothing, Britain, no, nothing really. Germany, Russia, to my knowledge, China, these countries all have good UFO researchers in them. But we need data. And beyond that, we need data that's been investigated and that approach some level of scientific data because that's really the only way we're going to make a breakthrough.

We need a good sledgehammer to break through this wall of secrecy, and we can only do it with scientific data, well-investigated data. And that's what Mufon should be doing and can do. I'm speaking at this year's Mufon Symposium for the first time in years. I feel that I was unofficially banned for six years. years. I mean, honestly, I think I was. That's fine. But I'm a little bit, this is all about they're doing a thing on the secret space program. And I'm going to say here and now, the individuals that I'm going to be on a panel with on this are individuals that I don't all consider reputable. And I will be making it very clear when I'm at this panel that I'm not starting a war with anyone, but I will be, I will be, I will be, speaking very candidly about the failure of a number of these other individuals to provide any kind of confirmable or reasonable or even logical data behind them.

And I'm going to call them out. But what I'm a little bit distressed by is that this is the main feature of Mufon because it's popular. People love to talk about the Secret Space Program. If you go to the UFO subject, those types of books are the top selling books these days. and so it's a matter of giving the people what they want. However, this is not going to be done in a scientific detached way. And my fear, you know, Mufon, I participated in Mufon show Hanger 1 on TV,

but which was a good idea and which had his own problems to be perfectly candid. Yeah. And so my fear is that Mufon, Mufon's got to be very careful here about going going into an area where they're just dealing more with public relations and less with scientific inquiry. I mean, they need PR. They need to get the word out there. Absolutely. Mufant all through the 80s and 90s utterly failed at that.

Mufant's website for most of its history has been absolute junk. They're only now just making it something nice. But they still have to remain scientific. and if they don't do that, that's their core. That is their strength. Their strength is not in pretending to have underground-based files on Hanger 1 or presidential files of UFOs like they did in Hanger 1. That's not their strength. Their strength is in doing field investigations.

And when they move away from that, that is their core. That's their core business, as it were. And if they move away from that, they are going to endanger themselves, and they'll just be just another. the PR company selling their brand. Exactly. And if that happens, then we're all worse off. So, I'll say, yeah, it's a delicate balance too, Rich. I mean, in the last week, I've spoken to several Mufon investigators who off the top of their head could give me the amount of reports from this year on cigar-shaped craft or these orbs or these disks, what have you.

So that core work, like you mentioned, is being done, but it is not at the forefront. And that is a delicate balance between wanting to get something like hang on a cable network to get this organization out to the public. But then, again, it's a risky game because the more sensational you become with these underground files, it's tricky. I get it. I totally. They need to make their money. we can all appreciate that. You can't run a decent organization if you're not getting some cash flow.

So they have to do that. The way that they've been doing it in the past, I think, was really, really questionable. And in fact, I think they still do. It's like the board members of Mufant are on the board because they pay a lot of money to move on. Right. They basically buy their way in. I think that's not a good way to do it. I don't think I support this at all.

but but they um on the other hand they need to find to find a way to make the money and now they're doing it through tv and through getting their brand out there which is not the worst way to do it but they've just got to be very careful with how they do it exactly and when you go into tv you're making a deal with the devil mufon did this back in the 70s with the national inquirer by the way um and talk about media national inquire is and was at least was a CIA outfit. I don't know if it still is. Back in the 70s, it was absolutely doing work for the CIA. It was run by a guy named Gene Pope, who was CIA, ex-Mafioso too, but definitely CIA. And Mufon was actually very close with the National Enquirer through the 70s. And a lot of people back then

thought, why are we doing this? And because it's really hurting our reputation. And Mufon leadership's answer, it was Walter Andres running Mufon at the time, said, look, we, you know, any publicity is better than no publicity. I think that was essentially his answer. Until he, eventually he got overruled and Mufon pulled its relationship away from the Inquirer, but for the mid-70s, they were very much in bed with the National Enquirer. And now you've got the situation with Hangar 1. It's a similar kind of a thing where the problem with that show, and I'll just say this,

because I was on it for both of the seasons, that was a very, very. heavily scripted show. Yes. To my knowledge, I might have been the only person in all of season two, to my knowledge, who refused to read from a script. They wanted me to, both seasons. And I said, are you kidding? I said, look, I'll work with you. Just ask me your questions and I'll do my best to answer them relevantly.

Yes. I mean, I just read any of the TV shows. But I'm not going to read your script. I mean, goodness gracious. But they had everyone else doing this. And they had actual voice actors pretending to be UFO researchers on there. And they had producers on there who were not researchers. And they really harmed them.

And then the whole pretense, the false pretense that Mufon had these, there are files in this place called Hanger 1. My mother. My mother, when she's always excited when I'm on television. And she got excited about Hanger 1. And at the beginning she said, so where is this Hanger 1? And I said, look, Mom, it's just a convenient fiction. And my mother got so angry being lied to, right?

Yeah. And I think her instincts are good, you know. You don't want to be lied to on TV. Yeah. The idea was when Dave McDonald was running Mufon, he's an aviator, and he did store Mufon files in a hangar. And when they were doing the creating, when they were developing the show, that was where the Mufon files were stored in a hangar. And they said, let's call it Hanger 1. Of course, the images of the building were all fictional.

I mean, in that part, I mean, all right, you want to like give them this enabling fiction fine. But then what they would do is move on, you know, we've got our files on this and on that. And they don't. They don't have their files on those cases. Right. But they have a tremendous number of case files. Yeah. And they don't have files dealing with underground bases.

Right. They don't have files dealing with the president. That's Grant Cameron. He's got those files. That's his research. And a few of us other researchers. You know, so, I mean, they were kind of making these. It was getting down this slippery road of, I think the producers really had a good intention.

I honestly do believe it. I met, I talked with the producers. And I think they overall wanted to do a good, reliable show that dealt with genuine issues. And some of the shows did deal very well with these issues. I want to give them some credit, but they hampered themselves. And Mufon hampered itself by going down this road. That is, they're talking about things that are not accurate. And this is the danger with television.

Anytime you do TV work, and I don't know, I've done enough of it. And it's very hard, these TV producers, they're not UFO people. They don't care. They want good ratings. Yes. And some of them might care a little bit about the subject. Some of them do get interested, but they don't have a lot of knowledge generally. speaking and and they're out there to get good ratings.

And that's their job. Their job is to get good ratings. Their job isn't to be truthful about UFOs. So I'm not faulting them. It's the nature of the beast. But Mufon has got to be careful. Yep. And they really, I would just say to Mufon, I would say to Jan and I will say when I see

him again, don't lose sight of your core reason to be. Your core reason to be is to have and trained. and encourage and inspire good investigators to do good work in the field to produce good analyses of UFO cases. Yes. That's what you do. And don't lose sight of that, Mufo. Stick to the mission, guys.

No, I have hope for the future of Mufon. I really do. Rich, in terms of a – this may piss off some of our more skeptical listeners. But in closing, I've got one more listener question for you. And that's, what do you think is the best evidence we have that UFOs have anything to do with an extraterrestrial intelligence? I know that's a very loaded question. I would answer it in two stages. All right.

So stage one is I look at confirmed government documents. I always start with that. Why? Because I know they're real. I know there's a paper trail. And I know that the national security community has taken this subject. very seriously. Among documents in the paper trail are radar trackings and visuals of objects that are described as disc shaped, this is back in the 1940s and 50s, sometimes zigzagging,

sometimes instant acceleration, always incredible maneuverability, silent, in other words, extraordinary. So we know that part's real. We know this. It leaves us a couple of options. Extraterrestrial, right, black budget classified U.S., black budget classified Soviet, Russian, and the like. So on that level alone, we go through process of elimination, and we know, by the way, that within the U.S. intelligence community that the glimpses that we have of their analyses that we are permitted to see, many of them have concluded extraterrestrial interplanetary was the most likely scenario because there was an evidence of a U.S.-based or Soviet-based technology program that could do it. And indeed, to this day, there isn't.

On top of that, we have non-military evidence. So we have evidence of people who have had encounters. And here's the thing that a skeptic will argue against, which is that the evidence for these encounters is not of a high level of scientific credibility, in their opinion. I would be inclined to agree with that, except I would have one caveat. The amount of that evidence is so vast at this point. And to call it non-scientific is a little bit problematic anyway. There have been some very detailed investigations of individual cases.

From back to the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case, to even the Vios-Boas case in Brazil from 1957, to more recent cases in the 70s and then 80s and 90s that have gone through detailed analysis. The Betty Andreas and Luca case, investigated by Ray Fowler, is a very, very interesting case. Hard for me to dismiss this

as anything other than dealing with extraterrestrial or non-human entities. The work of Bud Hopkins and John Mack and Dave Jacobs and nowadays people like Kathleen Martin and Yvonne Smith, you know the um these people do regressive hypnosis barbara lamb i don't even agree with all of the conclusions that they have about the nature of the phenomenon itself but all of these people are meeting with large numbers of individuals who've had what they believe are abduction

experience or encounter experiences and the quantity of these individuals is so vast and these are not psychologically disturbed people now is there an explanation that could account for the tremendous consistency of what most of these people are saying. They're having experiences with non-human entities who are doing things to their body. Is there some kind of psychological manifestation of something that's causing this?

Well, in theory, I suppose it's possible. We don't know what that is. No one's identified it. On the other hand, knowing that there's a UFO phenomenon that is real, and we know it's real, because we have the documentation to prove it's real, and we have the reasons to believe that it may indeed be not of our civilization. So when I combine that evidence with the very large amount of personal testimony that people have

of encounters with non-human beings in connection with the UFO subjects, sightings, excuse me, then I have to think that's the most, by far, really, it's the most logical conclusion. And it doesn't all come down to evidence from regressive hippoccurts. By the way, there's a lot of people who've had encounters with UFOs and or or occupants inside that have not revealed this information through hypnosis. I mean, there's an enormous number of accounts from around the world. Not just America where this is the case. So I think that's the most likely scenario.

That's not the same as scientific laboratory proof, but it's a messy world out there. It's a messy world out there. This is what I think we're looking at. I think it's the best hypothesis by far. Yes. And that's why I say I think that's why we are dealing with the presence of an other. Are they from another planet? Well, I would say probably, but they could be from some other portion of reality that I don't quite understand because I'm not smart enough because my brain doesn't work in the way that I wish it could.

Yeah. Well, and I mean, Rich, you and I both know as all the listeners that this topic in general, is not so black and white. So there is no one core answer to any of this. I had a conversation. I've been interrupted. You've been so nice to me this whole interview, Ryan. Are you kidding?

Once with a researcher named Chris O'Brien. Yeah. I like Chris. He's done great work on cattle mutilations. And not just that, though. He's done work on really a lot of the high strangeness of this whole subject. And Chris, we were talking about this once. And he said to me, I said, I think, you know, there's no one theory that seems to explain all of UFOs.

And he said, I would go further. I'd say a lot of the theories fight against each other. In other words, the idea of extraterrestrial or time travelers or interdimensional entities or black budget. But they are. There's all of these competing theories when we ask ourselves, what is the United States? the core, what's causing this phenomenon? Is it some psychosocial phenomenon? Is the earth itself, is reality itself getting inside our heads to make us see these things in a way that comports with our own cultural and psychological expectations? I mean, if you go through UFO sightings over the

centuries, people in medieval times, bad sightings of things. They didn't describe the most spacemen in flying saucers because, well, they didn't have that concept. So they described things differently. So is there a phenomenon that's causing us to see things the way we expect to see them? And does that mean that they're physically real or not? That's a psychosocial type of explanation. And then there's the whole idea that are we living in a constructed matrix type of reality, a kind of simulation hypothesis. But then I think the extraterrestrial hypothesis is a, is still probably the frontrunner, in my opinion. When I look at our own future tech, our own ability in the next generation or two to get some part of our civilization out to the stars, I mean, you and I may not make it, but next gen artificial intelligence, next generation 3D printing, next generation propulsion.

Yeah, I could see it happening. We could send something out there. And so has another civilization that already done that for us? Are they sending their own artificially created beings, their own avatars? who knows. I think that's probably the most likely scenario and I think that's what we're dealing with. I agree. It is an extremely enticing future to live in. And I look forward to seeing where that goes. Rich, what do you got coming up, my man? What can we expect from you in the near future? Well, I just shot a, I had a reshoot, but we did a full season episode of false flags on Gaya TV.

So I've had a show on Gaias coming out. It'll be a show. out this early summer, I think, on the history of false flag operations. This is not a UFO-oriented program at all. It's all politics. It's something very different for Gaia. This is not anything like what they do is they're taking a chance on me. So I'm hoping it doesn't fall flat. I think it's a good show. It deals with the phenomenon of false flags as it has occurred throughout human history, particularly in the last century and focusing really on a lot of the U.S. false flags of the last 50 years. It's only scratching the surface. There's so much more to do.

But I've written and hosted that. That'll be out soon. I'll keep people posted on that as we approach airing. And then in terms of my own writing and researching, I'm working on my own publishing projects right now. I've published a bunch of other people's books, including yours over the last year. I've got some of my own things. I've done this little lecture series, these booklets that I'm putting out. But fundamentally, I want to finish my false flag book.

I'll be doing a number of appearances. I'll be in Joshua Tree, California in late May with my fiancé, Tracy, who you met a few months ago in Phoenix. Yes, I did. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. It's a very wonderful thing. And I will be in Roswell, New Mexico. Oh, and before that, I'll be in Greece with our good buddy, Peter Robbins, to a group in Athens. That is, I encourage people.

It's called Contact with Space. If you are in Europe, if you can get to Athens. We will be there in early June. You could go to my website. I've got this link to Richard Dolanpress.com. And I'll be in Roswell after that, and I'll be at Mufon in Las Vegas at the end of late July. And I imagine that'll be an interesting panel. I can only imagine.

Well, Rich, I couldn't have asked for a better first interview. We really ran the gamut. I hope people enjoyed it. And I can't thank you enough for coming on with me today for somewhere in the skies. Ryan, you were really nice to me. You just let me roll. Hey, man, you do the work with this. That was the plan from the beginning.

It was really nice being on your show, and I think it's going to be really successful. And I just want to say on your behalf, the book you wrote somewhere in the skies, I consider one of the best books of the decade in this field. What I like what you did is you – I think there was a real lack of books about – Experiences, direct sightings and experiences of the UFO phenomenon. You know, the people who did abduction books had been doing this, but my sense is that there's a lack of these books out there. And you don't have to do this through abduction research or hypnotic regression. You can do it as a journalist, as you have done.

And so you're getting people's stories. And this is really valuable because it's so important for, you're so important for, you're, you're getting people's stories. And this is really valuable because it's so important for you, for us to understand the human aspects of this phenomenon, how it affects us the inexplicable nature of what people are dealing with. And I really like the way you did this book. It's a very well-written book.

It's engaging and it's filled with interesting ideas, which is what makes any book interesting. If it doesn't have interesting ideas, then why bother? Yours is interesting in that way. And I really feel it's a great service. That's why I was proud to publish it. And I want everyone to know that this is an excellent book and they should buy it and read it.

Well, thank you. I was not expecting that, but I highly appreciate that coming from you. And yeah, I hope everyone can someday realize that no matter what's at the core of these phenomena, it's the humans that matter most. So thank you. We're humans, and yeah, we should be interested.

How does it affect us? And I like the way you go about it in your book. Thank you so much. And again, thank you for joining us. My pleasure, Ryan. All right, guys, that is it for the first episode of Somewhere in the Skies. If you like today's show, please consider sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever you see fit, please also consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show on iTunes.

It really does help. So thank you once again for joining me, and I'll see you here next Monday. Remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching Somewhere in the Skies. Greetings, everyone, Ryan Sprague, our host of Somewhere in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Sky's podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available.

Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, add-free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Skies H.Q. And help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support.

And keep looking out. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan's bread. When I first launched the podcast, I wasn't sure how it was all going to go, obviously. Who would want to hear a podcast about UFOs on a weekly basis? I decided to give it a try, but knew I had to get a guest that would really up the stakes and bring not only insight on the topic, but a knowledge of the history of UFOs, the present state of UFO studies, and the foresight of where we may be able to be. heading with this mystery and how it's handled by both the public and those who seek to control

the information. That guest was none other than my publisher, Richard Dolan. And right out of the gate, the premiere episode of Somewhere in the skies skyrocketed into the stratosphere of downloads. And that's when I knew people did want to hear about UFOs on a weekly basis. So, after 60 main episodes and a handful of bonus episodes. I'm excited and honored to bring back the man who helped put somewhere in the skies on the podcast map. Fresh off the plane, Dolan sits down with me to talk all about his recent trip to Indian Wells, California, for contact in the desert, one of the largest UFO conferences in North America. With speakers from all over the world in every field of study, it remains one of the most well-attended gatherings of those who seek answers to the UFO phenomenon.

and possibility of extraterrestrial visitation. Richard Dolan has been invited to speak every single year of the event, with good reason, as you'll hear today. We run through three vastly different lectures he gave at the event, ranging from false flag operations to the new age derailment of UFO studies. We then tackle UFO secrecy through the lens of the recent Pentagon UFO program story, to the Stars Academy, and the never-ending battle between corporate and alternative media coverage of the UFO topic.

This is a jam-packed interview with one of the most well-respected historians and UFO researchers out there today. So, without further ado, let's make contact with Richard Dolan. Rich, thank you so much for joining me today on Summer in the Skies again. Hi, Ryan. Oh, it's a pleasure to be on with you. I'm glad it's been too long, so I'm glad to be doing it now. Way too long, man. You were my premier guest for the show, and it is still, to this day, my most highly downloaded episode. So full circle, man, you're back and fresh off the heels of contact in the desert. Am I correct? Oh, yes, Tracy and I just got married, by the way, a month ago to my love Tracy Garbut. Right, right. She's traveling with me. We did contact in the desert just last weekend. And yes, it was interesting. I did three lectures, one of which was a brand new lecture.

two of which I've been tweaking and updating over the last year or so. So, yeah, there's a lot of new information I had to present. Right. First, congratulations on the marriage. You know, I was, I was there when you pop the question. Well, in the same vicinity, I should say. So that was quite a memorable experience to say the least. That was at the International Congress in 2017. That's right. Yep, yep, yeah. Someone took a picture of the moment that I asked her from a distance, and put it on Twitter. You can't ask for more than that. It's insane.

God bless the Internet, yeah. So thank you, yes. So, yeah, so we're sort of going to run through your three intensive lectures, workshops, talks that you gave this week, all very different. The first was Friday. You spoke about, this was called Down the Rabbit Hole of False Flags. You talked all about what they are, how they happen, the evolution. So, yeah, if you wouldn't mind giving us sort of a primer on what this was all about.

This is kind of a new venture you've been diving into and been working on. It is. I've been deeply involved in the research now for a couple of years. So what I did is really presented my current, I guess, thinking on what false flags are and why they are such a big part of our world today. For anyone who just doesn't know what the phrase mean, a false flag is simply an event or an action that is done by a party, usually a government or not always a government. It could be an intelligence agency. It could be anyone. that is then blamed on somebody else.

And that event is usually something traumatic or awful, something that is designed to elicit emotional reaction, blamed on someone else, and that is then used to justify something that would be very hard to justify otherwise. So, you know, I think people have really gotten into talking about false flags, particularly since 9-11. There's been, I think as you and many listeners, realized a great deal of research done on 9-11 that more than just show suspicious actions of the United States government about many things, but really lead people to believe that the U.S. elements of the U.S. government deliberately made the events of that data happen,

blamed it on al-Qaeda, and then used that to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and really the imposition of a homeland security state, which we are living into to this day. So 9-11, you know, and I think in anyone's analysis is really the centerpiece of false flags of the modern era, but it's not the first and not the last. One of the things that I have done with false flags, at least conceptually, is to point out that this really is a distinctively modern phenomenon. False flags, you'll often read on the web, people will say it's ancient phenomenon. People have been doing false flags since ancient times. that's kind of it's really not true i mean there are events in the ancient world that could well qualify as false flags in my study of ancient history i have found a number of events that i would

say are false flaggy um that are like false flags but they're not really quite what you'd expect out of a false flag like a covert op that's you know just deliberately perniciously you know engaging in act of what might be called perfidy, you know, like a really devious sort of a lie. And that's really a specifically modern 19th, really 20th century phenomenon in our own era. And the reason that this is a modern phenomenon, in my own opinion, is because it's only in the 20th century, particularly after the bloody carnage of the First World War, which was kind of, I mean, a horrible meat grinder of human humanity, to be honest, it's just something that, utterly traumatized Europe in particular because they just convulsed upon themselves and millions of dead young men.

So as a result of that, there was the development of what you would say specific international law that made wars of aggression illegal and definitely immoral. It's hard to remember and easy to forget that before the First World War, which was just 100 years ago, nations that traips off to war as if it was a great, wonderful, glorious, glorious thing to do. And after the First World War, no, it is not. And so what happened is that nations still

perceived a need to engage in warfare. Elites still perceived a need to steal things from other parts of the world. I mean, that never goes away. But increasingly, what you'd find is a need to hide and mask that because, again, wars of aggression were really after 1918 considered absolutely wrong.

The other thing about the World War I era is that after World War I, you'd get the growth in the modern world of a wide range of nations that were ostensibly democratic. You know, prior to World War I, democracy was very much in a minority type of a government. There were very few nations in the world that were openly democratic. after World War I, very, very different. And it seemed like every nation in the world was like, oh, yes, we're a democracy to do. And we're a democracy and we're a democracy. So with that attitude, nations and governments and elites still needed to, they felt the need to do the kind of aggression and all the things they need to do. But they had to corral the public more and more.

So the public increasingly felt that they were part of the process of making decisions. and so as a result, it became necessary to fool the public more and more. Like I say to people, if you're in North Korea today, Kim Jong-un doesn't need to false flag you. He'll do what he wants to do, and that's all there is to it. Saudi Arabia, same thing. Like false flags are not really necessary in a completely, openly authoritarian government. But in a government where the people at least have a pretense of ruling, it's more and more important for elites to be able to, fake out to do a head fake on the people and false flags are one of those ways to do it along with the

growth of major media is the last piece of the puzzle really the last big piece where um governments now have the ability if they dominate major media to get their messaging out there and then of course the development of of good covert ops teams which also comes really out of world war one and then world war two so it's really the 20th century you get the real need and ability for false flags to perpetrated on the public in a significant way. And it's really in the 1930s, honestly, where you start seeing real false flags like Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, all during that era did false flags, like the Rajstag fire, which many people have heard of. That was Germany's 9-11. That was, with near certainty, we can say, the Nazis planned and orchestrated this. Even today, 80-plus

years later, historians argue about the Reichstag. But generally speaking, I think there's a reasonable consensus that Hermann Goering and other Nazis planned and did this as a way to blame it on communists and as a way to give Hitler extreme powers, which really led to his dictatorship. Prior to that, he was just a chancellor, just a prime minister, basically. So you get it in the 1930s and then after World War II, it's America's game. And I do want to ask you this, Rich, just for a moment here. This is a very hot button issue as of late, is this idea of these mass shootings that have gone in the United States.

Is this anything you've looked at in terms of the false flag? Not phenomenon, but the whole theory of this. Does this play any role in that? Or do you find this politically motivated in some way? What do you think about that whole thing? Yeah, that's a really, really good question, Ryan. And to be honest with you, shootings are a tricky one with false flags. I do believe that some of the shootings, the mass shootings, which have been done, are, I mean, false flags, not in the sense that they didn't happen.

I mean, I think that they did happen and that the shooters involved may well have been involved. But in the sense of some other things that are, I mean, I think that there are things that are wrong with some of these events and that it is entirely possible that some of the shooters who have been arrested and incarcerated were innocent of what they did. You know, I do believe this, this is not a shooting, but a bombing. I believe this is the case of the Boston Marathon bombing event of 2013. I think that those brothers, the Sarnia brothers, were almost certainly unjustly convicted. Well, one of them was murdered, but the other one was convicted. But in some of the shootings, it's tricky. And honestly, some of them I think it may be impossible to know with certainty.

What you have to look for with any of these events is are inconsistencies in the narratives. So where, in other words, you see a number of people will say, I saw multiple shooters at such and such a shooting event. And this did happen in a number of them, like the Aurora, Colorado shooting with James Holmes. You had a number of witnesses that said they saw multiple shooters. You can't always do the same thing when people say they hear multiple shots because there is an echo effect. I just had a long discussion with someone about the Las Vegas shooting, you know, which was just recent, which involves Stephen Paddock. And there are definitely oddities about the Las Vegas shooting.

and I personally want to look more deeply into them. I think that there's very definitely something wrong about that. But some of the things that people talk about, I just, I try to be careful of. What you do find with a lot of these is with shootings or any of the other false flags is, if you find that the Patsy is typically killed off quickly, or the suspect, I should say, is typically killed off quickly, you really have to wonder. And then when even if they're alive, they're convicted in a secret kangaroo court, which basically happened to the Zokar Sarniav, the younger Sarniav brother in Boston.

But with the shootings, you know, people ask me about Sandy Hook like all the time. Sandy Hook is one of those shootings that is dreadful to look into because it just seems like an utterly unsatisfying investigative experience. People have tried looking into Sandy Hook and have had very little success. And that's the reality. Now, that doesn't mean that a shooting didn't happen. It doesn't mean that we haven't even heard that we may very well have heard the truth about Sandy Hook from the official establishment. Maybe it's true. But the truth is that there have been investigators who've tried to look into that and they have not been able to get very far.

And with a lot of these modern shootings, that seems to be the case. Like the doors just close shut. And I do wonder. With a lot of them, you do see, whether they're false flags or not, you see a highly politicized results. coming out of them. For example, with Sandy Hook, not simply gun control calls for that, but even more significantly, calls for psychological profiling the mentally ill. It was a big issue out of Sandy Hook. Out of the recent Florida shooting and the school shooting a horrible thing, you now get a movement to basically turn our schools into open-air prisons or closed prisons

with to make students feel safe, metal detectors and, you know, random locker searches and all of that. In fact, you find a lot of the students in the front row calling to be safe. I'm like, okay, great. If you want to be saved, that's what's going to happen. You're going to have metal detectors and random locker searches for the rest of all time, so get used to it. So there's definitely political actions that come out of these. But whether the shootings are all false flags, it's a real tough one. What I would like to emphasize is that that's not really where the true action is, in my view, with false flags today.

I think the real action is typically United States organize activities in nations abroad. For example, Syria has been subjected to many, many false flags by the United States over the last few years. I could talk at great length about some of that. There was one just quite recently, and I'm very, very strongly of the opinion that the last chemical weapons attack attributed to the Bashar al-Assad government, just like a month and a half ago, was a false flag against them. We believe it was false flag for one reason and simple reason. if there was gas, leakage or attack, and you talk about 60 dead in that city,

how could the city continue its life normally? They didn't evacuate the city. No one left the city. Life continued as normal, and this is mass destruction. The other day they attacked Shwairat, where they said there was the gas depots, and they attacked all the depots, and there was no gas coming up with that airport.

No one of our army officers or staff, military staff, was affected by any gas. So for us, there was no gas attack and no gas airport. It was false flag play just to justify the attack on the Cheyarat base. This was one day before that government was going to, excuse me, one day before there was a chemical weapons inspection scheduled to take place. place and then boom a day before there's a chemical weapons attack anyone who's looked into this has seen that there is actually nothing linking the Assad government to that and in previous chemical weapons attacks you see that it's it's the jihadists that were organized and trained

and funded by the united states that are predominantly behind these false these chemical weapons attacks yeah it always seems to circle back to us somehow well in the world of false flags the United States is the Olympic champion every year. Gold medal we don't want. One thing I would mention in terms of regime changing false flags, the United States is really the expert at influencing elections, rigging elections, and switching out governments. It never ceases to amuse me when I hear about people talking about how Russia supposedly influenced our last election.

I'm like, are you kidding me? That's our job. That's what the U.S. does is rig elections. Russians, you've got to be kidding me. The United States went through a very, very sophisticated transformation in the 1980s and 90s, by which they switched out the responsibility for doing false flag regime changes from the CIA, which previously years before just did one coup, organized the military of one nation, military of another nation, to do a coup against the government, whether it's Brazil or Laos,

like a million times, or Greece or Cambodia or Bolivia or Chile, famously, the Allende government switched out for the torturous Pinoje government in Chile. I mean, this has gone on. This is all part of the U.S. history. But by the mid and late 70s, there was a backlash against that. It was after Watergate, after Vietnam. And people were like, you know, maybe we shouldn't be using the CIA to throw out governments that often are elected by their people and putting in military dictatorships.

So what the U.S. did is in 1983, this is in the Reagan years, created something known as the national Endowment for Democracy, the NED. It's an NGOs, a non-governmental organization, which just happens to get all of its money from the U.S. government to function. A lot of CIA money, State Department. But what the NED does is it funds international NGOs like Freedom House, oh my goodness, the National Democratic Institute for International Fears, NDI, the International Republican Institute and all these others. They're international NGOs and are called Ingos. And what they do is they will fund the local NGOs of target nations to create revolutionary movements. So like the so-called color revolutions of the early 2000 in Eastern Europe or the Arab Spring of 2011 is a perfect example where you have U.S. money through the CIA and through the State Department funneling through these various organizations to start up public revolution organized.

all times by U.S. hand-picked leaders of those local revolutions. And all those revolutions, of course, end up being pro-Western corporate, pro-Western finance, pro-U.S., like every last one of them. So that's how the CIA does it now. It's through the National Endowment for Democracy. It's a whole NGO structure that's very, very effective because it really keeps the U.S. fingerprints much farther removed from the scene of the crime. And, you know, there are a lot of analysts who are right on this, and they know exactly how the whole thing works through these NGOs.

But it's really an amazing thing. Just in a few steps, you can, you know, start with a few million dollars. You can overthrow your own government. You fund your core leaders. They hire the key workers and trainers. They create the social media and news infrastructure, you know, YouTube, Facebook, all the web pages, Twitter. They create a physical infrastructure like shanty towns and bandstands and back. and signage, then the one thing they have to do is create an event that sparks the movement.

That could be an election that you decide, you're going to say, is fraudulent even before it's happened, or it can be someone who's in prison. Or it could be a violent protest that generates a police response, and you've got social media ready to record it, and you put it on your Facebook, and that's the event, or whatever, it could be a lot of things. want to give the appearance of an actual movement that generates interest by the public, then you get the local politicians to support it, and then you get the U.S. to support it. You get the U.S. to support you. You're on your way to running your own little country. The thing is, like,

when people see the stuff in the news, they're like, oh, well, good for the people. They're protesting against the evil government. But you got to understand, like, this happens time and again now. In the last 20 years, it's happened so many times. And it's not. It's not. It's not a that people don't have a right to have a better life. Of course they do. But we really are, we would be wise to investigate us, who is paying for these revolutions and for these rebellions? And frequently when you really trace the finances, it goes right back to Washington, D.C. Follow the money. The rabbit hole aspect of your title is all right there. Moving to your second, Doc Rich, this was, I can only imagine this was a little,

controversial like contact in the desert we have all these connotations that this is a big you know outside event with a lot of new age aspects to it and your talk was called the new age sci up how it has derailed the study of UFOs how did this one go over did you get a did you get lynch for this one i have to ask this is something of an in your face kind of a lecture in that kind of a conference and here's the thing like i've contact in the desert has been going for i believe six years and someone just said to me that I was invited every single year and I thought wow that's I have gone many times I enjoy contact in the desert it's a fun experience for me it always has been good people it is very new agey it's not as new agey as some of the new life expos in New York or

LA but it's it's still definitely right out there and as such I have often felt a little bit like a fish out of water that's the truth and I'll always agree to go it's always a nice time but there's a very, very strong element of new age philosophy that is there. It's not that I'm against all forms of strange ways of getting information. My goodness, my wife, Tracy is a very, very excellent remote viewer, and she's been professionally trained by a man who actually has taught for many years at the Monroe Institute. He's very good, and she's excellent. That's real.

And I've studied remote viewing long before I knew Tracy. I've been, I never need any convincing on that. And there's a lot of other strange things about our world. I've studied UFOs long enough to know that things like consciousness actually are important in this. There is some kind of mind-to-mind connection that many experiences have with this UFO phenomenon. That's all real. And what it means is that there's a very big part of our reality that's not being explained by contemporary physics in my view. for these things to be true, for a remote viewer, for instance,

to be able to see something on the other side of the world or in another time, tells me that space and time are a little bit different than how we typically understand it. And that's a whole in our understanding that can leave the door open for what we might call paranormal or new age philosophy or consciousness. So I'm not here, I'm not like Michael Shermer. I'm not, I'm not Sam Harris. I'm not trying to debunk all of this. I come from a perspective where I know there's a lot of strange things. Having said that, I gave a lecture here that looks at New Age philosophy in euphology as a sciop, whether it is or isn't is another issue.

But one thing I would point out to people is when you look at the birth of the hippie generation, that has been argued very effectively to be a psychological operation by Navy intelligence and CIA. and the good work on that's been done by the late Dave McGowan. And I would encourage anyone to go read his analysis of the 1960s and the hippies called the strange but mostly true story of Laurel Canyon and the birth of the hippie generation. Long title. It's on the web. Anyone can read it. It's outstanding.

And what McGowan does is he paints a picture of this sleepy little town, Laurel Canyon, outside of L.A. in the mid-60s that at one point around then didn't even have its own zip code. And suddenly every major future rock stars seem to descend on the area. Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, a young rock star wannabe named Charlie Manson, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Pappas, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and people with talent, people without talent. Jim Morrison, if I didn't mention him. And what he finds is that a large number of these people come from families of the U.S. military intelligence, Navy intelligence, particularly, or CIA. connections like a large number so that made McGowan go hmm what's this all about what does this mean anything he went further he found that Laurel Canyon for 20 years prior had had a um

a U.S. classified Navy propaganda film studio there so that U.S. Navy had a presence in Laurel Canyon since the 1940s he found that Laurel Canyon was right where LSD began to spring out of American culture to the nation at large. Yes, LSD had been around before then, but it was in Laurel Canyon in 1965 that it starts to explode. 1965 was when you'd get the first real hippies with the long hair and the crazy clothing

with the emphasis on sex and drugs and rock and roll, a strong occult emphasis out of Laurel Canyon. A lot of young psychopaths like Manson go there. And what McGowan starts to argue is that this really looks like it was an operation by the U.S. intelligence community to derail the then viable peace movement that was spreading across the U.S. Not by hippies, but by young people with, you know, wearing the pocket protectors and their plaid pants and holding hands and marching for civil rights or against the war. And they were very, you know, principled young people.

And that became the Woodstock experience of free love and getting high and doing LSD and really getting out of political. activism and I think McGowan made a very strong argument that the hippie culture was a was an operation now that's not proof but what I would say is that the CIA has a long history of cultural manipulation of media manipulation of mind control through mk ultra and follow-up programs of infiltration of UFO organizations all of this is documented going back to the 1950s then you've got the FBI example of co-intel pro where the FBI explicitly infiltrated active U.S. groups for social change and undermine them and destroyed them, like the Black Panthers or students for democratic society. So there's this example in American history of

U.S. intelligence actively working to control our culture. It's not very well known, but it's true that the CIA promoted abstract expressionism in art by funding it like people like Jackson Pollock and the like through the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s and 60s. And you might think, well, that's cool. You might think that's weird. It's probably both. The CIA funded, you know, the craziest of the crazy abstract expression is art as a tool in the cultural Cold War. And all that means is that there's a long history, actually, of the CIA involved and engage in U.S. culture.

And then there's a CIA's connection to the new age. Is there? Answer, yes. There's a book called The Course in Miracles, which was one of the early sort of, New Age statements in American culture. Well, the man who was the boss of the woman who channeled Jesus, which is what that was, he was a long time M.K. Ultra and mind control scientists with the CIA. His name was William Thetford or Bill Thetford.

And he might have been a nice guy, but he worked with MK Ultra for years, years and years. It just so happens. Does it mean something? Well, it might. I looked into early, odd connections with intelligence with the Esselin Institute, which is out in California, or its connections to the famous Tavistock Institute, which is in London, and was a collaboration of British military intelligence and the psychiatric community. And the whole CIA possible connection of creation of cults. There's a long study of the CIA connection to the Jim Jones cult known as the People's Temple, which resulted in a mass suicide in the South American nation of Guyana. And I think the claim that that's a CIA operation and experiment in social control and mind control is a good argument.

It's not open and shut, but it's a good one. There are a number of these others that I've looked into that make me think the CIA may indeed have an interest in creating cults. When I look at New Age movement, how it exploded into UFOs really during the 1990s, I see something that has done one thing in particular. A couple of things, actually. One is it's brought in a lot of self-described profits and predictors who give claims that, I mean, are impossible to check. Like, it's not, you know, when someone says that they met with Andromedans and make one prediction after another, that's always. wrong. You have to wonder, this just, and this is true, this was, you know, one such person, and they're always wrong. You have to wonder, what is the purpose here? Is it someone just

self-aggrandizing, just working off of people's gullibility? That could very well be the case. But you've got a lot of examples of new age mentality. There's a lady who's with Zeta talker, her name is Nancy Leder. And, I mean, she's really one of the more out there of all of them, admittedly, but she would talk about how, this is back in 2003, I believe. She had a prediction for a collision with Nibir, you know, the planet, supposedly, that Sitchin wrote about. And aliens in Zeta reticuli told her through messages via a brain implant of this planet, which would enter our solar system and cause a pole shift that would destroy most of

humanity. These people just keep coming and coming and coming. And then, of course, everything leading up to ascension 2012, which I think, think was one of the most pernicious of all of the of the new age intrusions in uphology it was just horrible that this thing really gained the momentum it did it was very damaging to i think the critical thinking skills of of anyone loosely connected with the UFO field the idea that planet earth was shifting from a third dimensional to a fourth and fifth dimensional vibrational frequency you hear this all one would hear this all the time and extraterrestrials along with angels or

or spiritual hierarchies or whatever would be the catalyst to usher in great changes. And this is all predicted for 2012. And of course, it did not happen. So my point about this is that these types of predictions are based on evidence-free assertions. And it's as if because they come from a supposedly intuitive point of knowledge that it's impossible to check it with anything like evidence. And how dare you for thinking that you should ask for evidence for some of these things? So, I mean, that's really how it went.

And what ended up happening is that a certain portion of the culture that follows UFOs basically lost their mind. I mean, just lost their mind. And they haven't regained it because you still hear talk about ascension to this day. I'm like, what is what do you need to understand that ascension is nothing other than a mass cultural death wish? That is what it is. Pure escapism. I mean, and then there's all the rest, like all of the supposed disclosure events that were going to happen. That's not necessarily a new age thing.

But these happen because people get used to, they get used to claims without evidence through a kind of new age-oriented mentality. And it leads the door open for all these other charlatans to come along and say, I've got inside sources that say there's going to be disclosure this year or this year or this year. There was a claim about a decade ago

when Obama was just elected that he was the reincarnation of the Egyptian god Horus. And if people want to know who made, the prediction, go Google it. I'll let you do the work. But it's an embarrassment and that these things get traction the way that they do. And it never seems to stop. So I thought, you know, I don't know that this is a CIA operation. But here's the thing. If I were trying to hide evidence of a secret space program or some other really advanced thing that I don't want the public to know about, I would make sure that I litter the field with as much unprovable, nonsensical

data as I could to turn the whole field into like a Where's Waldo cartoon, like where, you know, the real thing is there, but it's surrounded by all this other stuff. Good luck finding it. One of the elements of this mentality that I think is very dangerous is this idea about avoiding negativity because the concept is that you create your own reality. Therefore, by emphasizing anything negative, the theory is that you're giving power to negativity. And this is a very incorrect and dangerous idea. It is, I believe, and I have believed in my whole life that the way that I think affects my behavior and affects my character and my future. And so that the way that we think is very important indeed, and you want to talk to yourself in the right way to have a healthy life.

But I would say at the same time, by avoiding looking at the difficult things in this world, which is really easy to do. for someone who's a true, died in the world new age mentality type of a person, by avoiding things that they feel are negative, they are setting themselves up to be dominated and controlled by a power structure that is relentless by the smallest number of people now who want to own everything that is worth owning in this world. That is a war. And it doesn't help to fight that or if one lives inside a mental bubble, that gives them a reason to avoid evidence-based claims in favor of heart-centeredness or whatever, what have you.

It impedes clear thinking and what we need more than ever is clear thinking because this is not fun in games that we're involved in. This is a really serious situation, not just in uphology, but the world in general. So I just want to mention that. And I think, and again, it's not to deny that we live in a strange world, and it's not to deny that even things like psychics are all invalid. I don't say that. But we have to be able to recognize BS when it comes our way,

and we've got to be able to be willing to ask for evidence when we receive claims of any sort whatsoever, and we just have to be in that mindset. It's the only way to win is by seeing what the other guy is actually doing, and you can't do that if you are living in a mental bubble. I couldn't agree more. I mean, mindset is, it's necessary, and it's the most powerful tool I think we have that can be wielded for good and bad. You make a really good point with that, Rich.

Thanks. Well, in terms of your last talk, now this is where it got a little bit more nuts and bolts for us euphologists out there. Right. And very current. This has a lot to do with to the stars, bass, atip, all of it, disclosure. This was the global UFO secrecy new revelations. Now, I know you're not a big fan of the New York Times, but they were the first to bring this story to the mainstream public. So I would love to hear your thoughts on all of this, all of the revelations we're having.

Let's dive in. So I did have a lot to say about Tom DeLong to the Stars and ATIP. Prior to that, I just, I always like to set the stage for what I think is the general scenario of what's going on in this world. But there's a definite phenomenon of UFOs that's really. that is here, that is represented by beings that are not us. They came here from wherever they came with incredibly advanced technology and even beyond that, space-time manipulation, incredible powers of the mind. They're doing some contact, some abductions.

They've been here a long time. I think probably a lot of them are artificially created organisms, but that's just my own opinion. Our response to that has been obtained as much of the technology as possible, to create a breakaway civilization, secret space program, desperately trying to catch up, weaponizing the technology is hiding the breakthroughs. All of it, I think, is what's going on. And in that context, you know, we have the latest kind of outing of information,

which was the New York Times Revelation starting December 16, 2017. And for someone who just wants a quick recap, it's real simple. On that date, the New York Times posted two, not one, two, halfway decent articles of validating the UFO phenomenon, which is that's actually world historical because the New York Times has never done this before. Never. The New York Times from its beginning, from the beginning of the flying saucer UFO phenomenon in 1947, since this has become a thing in our culture, has always debunked. And not just debunked a little bit, but like hardcore, vicious, just throwing it, you know, kicking it to the curb debunking. and that has always been the New York Times style.

And yet suddenly, you have two reasonably decent articles that describe the UFO phenomenon as something legitimate. And, you know, the revelations, I mean, I'll just recap. One thing that they stated is that the Pentagon spent $22 million on UFO research for at least five years from 2007 to 2012. It's not that long ago. It's recent history with a program known as a... the ATIP Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Interesting title, managed by Louise Elizondo, a career intelligence officer. And by the way, Elizondo's statements have been very interesting. I'm sure you're very familiar with it. I'm sure your listeners are,

but he would say things, we've never seen anything like these sightings or the technology beyond next generation. That's heavy duty. Mr. Elzando joins us tonight. Luke, good to see it. Thank you for having you. So did I overstate that? Is there a growing corpus of evidence, It's not drunk people on a lonely rural road at 3 in the morning, but sober military pilots saying something that we can't explain is happening. That is correct. You're talking about individuals who have very high security clearances. They are trained observers. We've actually paid them and put them through schools to be trained and very keen observers to scrutinize what they're seeing.

These are individuals who we trust to fly weapons platforms, sometimes with live munitions, over U.S. cities, and to fight and win wars on our behalf. and they're reporting to us that they're seeing something that they can't explain. And it's also being backed up by the video evidence and the radar data. And then talking about recovered materials, which they described as metal alloys, from objects that were being studied by Bigelow Aerospace, which is the contractor to the Pentagon for this. And then the other thing that came out, or at least that was confirmed by the New York Times, was the extraordinary UFO encounter by Commander David Fravor,

known as the Tic Tac encounter from those. November of 04. Honestly, I wanted to fly it. You know, there's, you know, talking to some physicists, they don't think the human body could handle that kind of force without that acceleration. Yeah, it doesn't sound, it doesn't like the human body could. So bottom line, what do you think this was? I believe, as do the other folks that were on the flight that we visually saw it, that

it was something not from this world. When presumably you expressed that belief to your superiors, what did they say? Actually, we caught a lot of grief getting back to the boat. and it got passed off as an event that no one could explain. Now, keep in mind, they had been tracking these for two weeks prior to us seeing it, and this was the first time that manned airplanes had been airborne when the objects appeared. So those are the big revelations, and that's a lot. So this is something where people who follow the UFO field would read these two articles

and say, aha, this is validation of what we've been interested at all this time. And absolutely, like, you know, came out just before Christmas. I'm sure there were a lot of Christmas discussions of family get-togethers that December, seriously, where people were like, I told you, this is real Uncle Jimmy. See that? You think it was all nonsense? It isn't. I'm sure a lot of that happened.

And I think that's a very good thing. It was this acknowledgement by the corporate media that this phenomenon has legitimacy. Now, I would point out a few things. One is that even in the New York Times pieces, like they give you a little bit, then they take away. at the same moment. In the New York Times piece, for example, the main one called glowing oras in black money, the Pentagon's mysterious UFO program, even the title is very like sensationalistic. But in the article, you've got gratuitous skeptical statements by James Oberg, long-time skeptic debunker, and this astronomer from Yale totally unrelated to anything

in the article, why include it? Included just to give you the reader the idea, don't get excited. You can still be skeptical. So there was that hesitancy that they had. But really what you find is that other than the initial follow-up coverage in the establishment media, so you had CNN and Fox doing interviews with Elizondo and Fravor and some of the others. And most of that was fairly positive coverage. It's definitely slowed down and you definitely see no real follow-up from the establishment media, from the corporate media, on any of these claims, like nothing.

there's no self-examination on why the media was so dismissive of UFOs. No follow-up on Bigelow's possession of these recovered materials. Like, how do they just let it go? No follow-up on Elizando's points. Like, Elizondo said these sightings are unbelievable and we had no interest in the higher-ups. Why? Like, they're incredible. No one bothering to ask about the implications of a cover-up. In other words, all the work that's been done since then has been done by private researchers. So it just tells me that the establishment or corporate media's treatment is not serious. And I asked myself why, and I just think, well, to the Stars Academy was already going as full speed ahead as they were able to. They just got Elizondo on board.

And my opinion, and no one has debunked me of this opinion so far yet, is that the New York Times got ahead of this because someone had to. And if they weren't going to cauterize the wound, then it could just continue and continue. In other words, the New York Times, you pretend to give up a secret by giving up some of it and concealing the rest. And I think that's what they did. And like one of the examples is that the New York Times said, well, yeah, the program for five years, but it's done. They don't do it anymore. Like that was the story. Like it ended in 2012.

But in fact, every analysis that's gone in depth to this has said, it's still good. going. But the New York Times says, no, seems to have been ended 2012. So I think it's, until I am persuaded otherwise, my feeling is that this is an example of a drip, drip of disclosure, but also really an example of just giving up as much as you need to and then get the story to go away for as long as possible. You've interviewed individuals who work for alternative media outlets, who are still digging into this and even found a different name for the program. So, I mean, right there is showing that the mainstream is kind of done with this. You know, they did, they said their piece for their own agenda,

but, but we know that there are adamant researchers out there who will dig deeper and maybe they weren't expecting that. I don't know. What do you think? No, that's exactly right. In fact, the researcher that I've, I've talked about his name Paul Dean out of Australia and he's an amazing document research. You're really one of the best in the world. and he argued in one of his blog pieces, and I spoke with Paul, that the main name or the other name for this program is known as Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program, A-A-W-S-A-P. And there's a couple of variations of that that are out there, but it's A-A-W-S-A-P, and that's added a little bit of confusion to the mix as well. But you don't get this from the mainstream establishment or the corporate medium. So now there is some good news that came out.

I mentioned this in my lecture over at KLAAS in Las Vegas, and of course, Nap's been very, very good on UFOs for a long time. Just less than a month ago, I think on May 18th, his team obtained an in-depth report, which they said was prepared by the military and for the military, which analyzes the Tick-TAC UFO, stating that this is like way, way beyond anything that we or any of the nation have. Basically, that it was so advanced. It made U.S. capabilities ineffective.

which is true that the TikTok UFO from what we are learning about it, this object, the key thing about it is that Fravor and his other pilot were told to vector into a particular rendezvous point. The UFO was not there at the time that they were told to go there. When they arrived, the object was there as if waiting for them. And this is significant because the Navy communications are highly encrypted. So being able to defeat highly encrypted communications by the U.S. Navy is important. aside from the fact that they changed the encryption every 15 minutes, this is really major.

And of course, it was able to outperform their top-of-the-line fighter jet, the F-18A Super Hornet. So whatever this was. Now, the one critique of NAP's finding is that people have argued it wasn't a military report. It might have been a Bass report that is Bigelow, Advanced Aerospace Systems. But even so, it's a very interesting, a very, very interesting report. And I would assume, you know, in terms of the Tick-Tac UFO event as well, that the videos we're getting from to the stars are only a portion of what actually was recorded that day, right? I mean, there's no way it was only three, four, five seconds long. No, no, you're exactly right, Ryan.

And so I just was this weekend at the conference, one of the people there was Peter Levenda. And Peter Levenda co-authored the book with Tom DeLong, and he's associated with to the, the stars and let me just say i've known peter levenda personally for the last seven years and have only the highest respect for him he's an outstanding researcher with with nothing but integrity and that's a fact and um so i asked peter about about this and his answer was very simple he said yeah that's true um to the stars has no control over what gets declassified or not that's pentagon's decision so the pentagon did have does have longer versions of all of those videos and and of others as well that have not yet been released,

but longer versions of what we have seen, and their logic, and we can accept or not accept that logic, is they withheld it because longer sections would give up the infamous sources and methods of how they get their intelligence. And that's what they say. Now, that's not always true, in my opinion.

I think sometimes they're holding back content, but I don't think this is a feature up to the stars. I don't get the idea that to the stars are being coy with their day, data. For a while I wasn't sure. I mean, honestly, I'd heard a couple of different things and wondered if to the stars was just holding things back. But according to Peter, LeVenda, and I'm just going to say I'm believing him on this, they are doing everything they can to get the videos declassified from the Pentagon. So that's their story. And it's worth

asking follow-up of Peter or Tom DeLong will ever do an interview. That would be great. but I cannot speak for these guys. Yeah, I don't think we're going to see Tom anytime soon after that Joe Rogan interview, but that's another story. Yeah, yeah, it really did. Unfortunately, yeah, we've seen him sort of go back into the shadows, which is okay. You know, he's going to be working on the entertainment aspect of all this. So that's okay.

You know, there's a lot of people. Everyone has been beating up onto the stars, and I don't know where I stand on this right now. I mean, I know I'm going to get hell for this in the YouTube comments below. But my attitude is I don't know for sure that they're a sci-op. I just don't know. Now, it's possible Tom DeLong has been manipulated in various ways. What I definitely believe is, like, his attitude that the military are the real white hats in all of this is just not realistic. It's not true also.

I mentioned this to Peter LeVenda, by the way, and his answer was, look, what do you expect? He's trying to cultivate these guys. You're not going to cultivate them by calling them, you know, evil incarnate. You want them to work with you. I get that. What I will definitely say is that the establishment media part of it, New York Times, Washington Post, all of the integration. And that really happened. Christopher Mellon, who's one of the TTSA guys, he's the former CIA, was, I am told, instrumental in getting,

Leslie Kane and the New York Times on board. So now, if that's true, then you've got a direct connection to the stars with establishment media. And that's always questionable to me because the media has not left the Mockingbird system. In other words, Operation Mockingbird CIA's media control program, that's stronger than ever. But again, I was just listening again to Peter Levin, and I want to be fair to him. His attitude is he says, look, we know the mainstream media is a corporate tool. and it's an establishment tool. His attitude is, look, if you want to change public discussion on UFOs, you have to go through the corporate media.

So, all right, that's his position. So relating to the stars, you know, I'm just waiting for them to come up with something that makes sense to me. As a business model, that has never made sense. Oh, yeah, I mean, they weren't even able to raise a portion of what they were expecting, which is unfortunate. But, yeah, I agree with you. I think, you know, I look forward to where it goes. Maybe DeLong will get his dream of building a spaceship of some sort to rival Elon Musk. But maybe not.

In the meantime, we might get some really cool UFO docs and books and everything in between. I don't know. I want to say this. I met Tom DeLong a couple of years ago, and I found him to be very gracious and sincere. And I have no reason to think it's otherwise. So I think that he's really doing what he feels has been his best to move this issue forward. So they made a lot of gaffs coming out of the gate with the, you know, displaying the image of the Mylar balloon as a genuine UFO. I'm like, how did you do that?

I've looked into this and I believe that it was a total Bush League mistake. I absolutely believe. I don't think it was disinfo. I think they actually really genuinely screwed up big time and got really embarrassed over it. They got excited. Yeah, I agree. I think they, you know, they were ready and rearing to go. And it just, but you know what, if anything, they'll learn from their mistakes. We'll see. We'll see. Well, in terms of, you know, what the future may hold, Rich, I know we don't have much time here left.

But I did want to talk about a couple other things before we wrap it up. Your new website. I mean, this. Yeah, you sprung this on us a few months ago with exclusive content. So tell us a little about Richard Dolan members before we go. Thanks, Ryan. Yes, Richard Dolemmembers.com. This is a site now that it's about two months old. It's really quite new. And I have put a great deal of energy and effort into it. I've got, at this point, actually dozens of video and unique audio and blog entries that are up there for members. There's free content. I mean, there's things that I put up that I want the whole world to see. But I've decided, look, I want to create something, an exclusive web-based content of someone. If someone's interested, they can join up for a month or a year and become a member and see what's in it for them. I found it to be a very, very positive experience. I could not have done this without Tracy. She's been instrumental in helping me organize this.

This is just a lesson in the fact that you can't do things alone. You really need really good positive support from people who are close to you. And thankfully, I have that now. So as a result of that, the Richard Olin member site is, I just put up two new posts today. including a lot of video and a 1,300 word blog entry. So I'm creating a lot of content. I'm trying to tweak this and figure out what's the best way to give free content to the world while making it worthwhile for members.

And I think we're striking that balance. One of the things that I'm doing is all my radio shows, so the Richard Olin Show, I'm taking control and putting them up on my YouTube channel every week. So that's something for everyone. And a lot of the articles that I write I put up free of charge. But I would encourage anyone who's interested, go to Richard Olin members. And it's actually turning out better, better than I had hoped it would be. And believe me, I wanted it to be excellent from the beginning.

And I actually will say that I think it's exceeded my expectations. So I'm going to have more of that going in the future. That's awesome. And I mean, the other website, Richard Dolan Press, is where you house your own publication. and the publication of other authors as well. You exist on Richard Lohen Press, right? I do.

I have you to thank for putting me on the map. Somewhere in the skies is there and is really one of the best, most unique books that I published with Richard Lund Press over the last five years, without a doubt. I love your book. And your work is exactly the kind of work that I like to promote. It's innovative, original content

that does things that other books haven't done. And in your case, you did something that, as far as I can tell, is an utterly unique effort, you know, a journalistic exploration of a range of experiencers of the UFO phenomenon and how what they experienced and how it affected them. I think, my God, you know, what a need there is in our culture for a work like that. And I'm so grateful that you did it and that I was honored to be able to publish your book. Well, thank you so much. I mean, yeah, I mean, if you can't contribute something new, what's the point? So that's the way I look at it. But, no, I can't thank you enough for those very kind words.

Well, and, yeah, but Richard Allen Press has a lot of other very interesting authors, without a doubt. And it's got a lot of my older essays and articles that I've written over the years. They're kind of legacy there. So, yeah, I mean, those are the two. And any time there's a new book published, booklet publish, whatever, that's listed on Richard Olin Press website as well. Perfect. And do you have any upcoming events or anything you'd like to give us before we go? Well, you are just so, so considerate of all of that. Yes, I've got a few that are coming up.

So I just came back from, we did almost a month in Australia and contact in the desert. But in the near future, I will be in Toronto, or near Toronto, what is called the Alien Cosmic Expo. That's the Toronto Airport, Marriott Hotel. In fact, if you go to richardole members.com, the events is freely available, people can just go check it out, get the events tab. A week after that, I'll be still in Canada and Vancouver for the conference owners, Architects of the New Paradigm. And my very good friend Jordan Pease has organized that. That's always interesting. Danny Sheehan will be there, Stephen Bassett will be there and a number of other very interesting post-disclosure world type event. And beyond that, my goodness, we have the summer and who knows what. I'll have things

I'll have things going on in September, but that's so far away. Exactly. Yeah, let's not rush anything. Rich, your insight, your historical knowledge, your intuition on what we can expect as we move forward with the future of UFO studies and beyond. It's always amazed me. So I have to thank you for coming on somewhere in the skies. It was such a pleasure. And Ryan, you were so nice.

We're just letting me ramble. Thank you. That's it for this week's episode. Again, if you'd like exclusive content from Richard Dolan, be sure to check out Richard Dolan members.com. To check out his latest work and to find all the books he's written and published, visit Richard Dolanpress.com. Be sure to follow Somewhere in the Skies on Twitter at SomewhereSkies, where I post up-to-date announcements, news articles of interest, and even some exclusive contests for followers. Same goes for our very active Facebook group. Just search for

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To learn more and to subscribe, visit patreon.com backslash somewhere skies. Thank you for your support. I'll see you here next Monday. And remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. Where In the Skies is produced by third kind productions in association with the Entertainment One podcast network. To learn more, visit Entertainment One Podcast.com. My new book, Atlas of Unidentified Flying Objects, is now available to pre-enetainmentment. order wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Waterstones.

Explore the UFO phenomenon through 34 cases from throughout the world, with accompanying pictures and maps in a beautiful hardback edition or download for your Kindle. Links available in the podcast description below. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Hi, guys, Ryan Sprague here from Somewhere in the Skies, and we have so much to cover tonight with. our guest. You know him very well in the UFO field. In fact, he was the first guest on somewhere in the skies, and it's just taken off from there. So I will be forever grateful to him for that.

Let's bring him in. He's going to be answering your listener questions tonight. This is sort of a ask me anything of our guest historian and researcher Richard Dolan. Rich. Oh, it's so nice to be back here. I'm very happy to be here with you again. What a pleasure. It has been a crazy few years since you and I last spoke about UFOs. A lot has happened. And I kind of want to cover a lot of that with you tonight, but I want to go as current as possible. It's the only thing being talked about right now in the news cycle. And that's the balloon. And I don't know your thoughts on all of this, but I would love to get your perspective about what's going on because it does sort of tie in to a lot of what's going on in the UFO world now

and Arrow and all of that stuff. So I'm just going to flat out ask the question. What do you make of this whole China spy balloon thing? Where do you think it's heading? And does this have absolutely anything to do with the UFO and government conversation going on? Well, I'll answer your last question first. I'm going to think no.

I don't think this is strictly speaking UFO. related matter. However, it is interesting and it's important when you look at the contemporary geopolitical realignment that's happening in the world right now. What we're seeing, obviously, is that the United States is essentially sort of fumbled away its geopolitical dominance over the world. I mean, it was inevitable that that would happen, but I certainly think that things have happened in the last year and more that have accelerated that. So with China, So China has said that this balloon was for commercial purposes only. I don't know who really believes that at all.

In fact, this morning, I believe the U.S. has made the claim that they have proof or what have you, that this is an espionage balloon. Now, having said, you know, I will never ever take anything the United States says as it's word. The U.S. does not have good record of honesty. But it's probably true. I would say this is probably a spy balloon. it's not an unusual thing that China would do that. The real question is, like, is there significance to this? I mean, first of all, the U.S. is acting like it's shocked and offended that its sovereignty

has been invaded by a spy balloon, when, in fact, the United States is of all nations the number one that violates the sovereignty of other countries. The U.S. has always done that, and the U.S. will always do that as long as it has the capability. And that includes all kinds of espionage, it includes all kinds of, you know, color revolution shenanigans and the like. I mean, this is what the U.S. does better than anyone else in the world. China can't compete with that in the least. So I love how, you know, the U.S. is all offended about this. The real problem is that I think with China, they're still fuming.

They're furious over the visit of a few months ago by Nancy Pelosi when she was, leader of the house, she makes that trip to Taiwan, which really infuriated the Chinese. I don't think Americans and people in the West appreciated just how angry the Chinese were. And a lot of Americans are like, well, screw you, China. You don't own Taiwan. Who do you think you are? But in China's position, they've been very clear about this, that Taiwan is part of China. And so this was a direct offense, particularly since Pelosi was the same member of the same party as the U.S. President Biden.

So it was taken as very much kind of an official thing. So the Chinese, I think, were angry about that. I think maybe it made them a little more willing to just piss off the Americans on this. And then I think what sealed the deal in my mind about this is the Chinese in the aftermath of this, after the U.S. shot down the balloon with an F-22, no less. Amazing. The Chinese said, well, the next time a U.S. aircraft comes near Chinese airspace, maybe we'll do something. So that was a definite ratcheting up of hostilities between U.S. and China. And this is very unlike China, by the way. And if you look at Chinese history, China is not a truly expansion, like a geographically expansionist power.

It really never has been. China has an empire within China. That's it. They've got Tibet. Okay, you can argue about that. But China doesn't go around the world trying to switch out governments and conquer them. They don't have wars. China's last real war was in 1979 against the Vietnamese. And they didn't do well, by the way. So China is not a militaristic power in the sense that the United States is. But I think China is now feeling their oats. They are definitely quite powerful now. Everyone knows it. They've got. the world's strongest or second strongest economy. And they have a military that is a very substantial military now. So I think China is, I think it's their, I would say their fury over the recent Taiwan thing. And they are now coming up with reasons to ratchet. And also the other reason is that who's afraid of the United States anymore? Let's get real. The United States has shown that U.S. funded.

And NATO-trained troops, for example, the Ukrainians, are not a match for the Russians. And that's just the reality. Ukraine had the strongest military in all of Europe other than Russia itself. People don't realize Ukraine was extremely well-trained up to NATO standards. They're not NATO officially, but they were – there's no question that the Ukrainian military was maybe the only of the Europe military in NATO that was as good as it would be turkeys. But Ukraine's was very well trained, and they have been ground into a fine paste. by the Russians. So that's kind of a reflection, I think, of the actual weakness of U.S. military, Western doctrine, strategy, and even equipment. All the West has been used to fighting for the last

20 years or wars in the desert against jihadists armed with AK-47s. They're not used to fighting actual peer-level militaries. And when you get one such as the Russians are, I think there's no question. The U.S. would never, ever win a ground war against Russia. And I think the Chinese have now seen this. I think the rest of the world is seeing this. And maybe they're not so afraid of the Americans anymore. It does seem to be performance, performative, if I can use that word. It seems to be a very, a game. And we're now learning that there's more balloons that have been spotted that the US has known about for a while. And that kind of plays into, I guess, the second half of that question.

We have this new office arrow that's supposed to be in, you know, a resolution office, figure out what these things are and if they're a threat. And even in this recent Pentagon report, we learned the term balloon-like entities. And that could not be more telling than what we're seeing play out right now. So what, if anything, does this have to do, Rich, with UFOs? Anything? What's striking about the conversation coming out of the military on UFOs or UAP now, as they like to say, is how utterly tepid it is and how they still have this pretense of saying things like, well, we're trying to understand what this is. We're looking into it.

And when we find something out, we'll let you people know. Like, what are you talking about? You've been dealing with this in highly dramatic, shockingly dramatic ways for 80 years, minimum. We know this. We have a detailed historical record of it. We have a very good case for crash retrievals of UFOs on multiple occasions within the U.S. and beyond the U.S. And I was just reviewing the old classic case from 1957 in Brazil, the Uba Tuba case, where an object was seen by beachgoers at the Brazilian Atlanta coast coming in, looking like it was going to crash. It's shooting straight up and then exploding into hundreds of shards and pieces looking like fireworks. In the aftermath of that, the United States, the U.S. military came in. I think it was like two or three days later.

The U.S. has been on top of this situation since the beginning. And so what we have from the Pentagon are this pretense, this game of pretend that they like to play, which is, okay, well, yeah, we're looking into this. and maybe there is something there. This is kind of where we were in the 1950s. So that I guess what I'm saying is never, ever expect honesty or good faith from the United States government on anything having to do with the matter of UFOs. You may, from time to time, get a member of Congress who gets worked up and interested about this.

That can happen. That is certainly possible. But that's a whole bit different from the institutional apparatus of the military. the national security state to do anything honest about this subject in terms of actually reporting to the public. They're just, they're never going to do it. They'll never do this honestly. I don't think you should ever expect anything out of them unless they are pushed to the wall by either a leak or some kind of information that comes out that's unexpected that forces a statement from them, in which case the pattern has always been that.

they will give as absolutely little as they have to before they can just run away from the subject. And that's what, even in the last five years, we've seen this. We may want to get into this if you want, but I'm not one of these people who believes that the two original New York Times stories were an initiated deep state operation. I think that that was a reflective reaction to something that was going to come out. You had TTSA back in October of 2017, making their announcement that they're an organization. You had Elizondo and Mellon in the background getting the three of the videos declassified. That was a real score, by the way.

They had friends and they had enemies within the Pentagon, and they used their friends to get that declassified. My point is that the New York Times article, in my view, was something that Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal lobby to get done. That is true. But I think the New York Times leadership decided, you know what, the story is going to come out. Why don't we be the ones who break it? We'll get out in front of it. And I think that's what happened.

And I think what you've seen since then is the deep state or the national security state very effectively, very effectively responding to this. And slowly but surely taking control over the narrative once again, as they are used to doing. So they've given up a little bit. They've now, you know, more than five years ago, they would play this other game or pretend. like there's no UFOs. We don't notice anything. There's nothing. Remember, you know, 10 years ago, Steve Bassett did his, what the hell was that called a disclosure petition to the Obama White House back then?

Right. And the answer that he got was a classic lie right out of the Obama White House, which is that we've seen no evidence whatsoever of any UFOs that are anything unusual. When at the same time, they had the ATIP office that was running at that very time. that was investigating UFOs, but they lie. They lie at every opportunity they can. And when that lie no longer is tenable, they come to a different position. And I think that's all that we're seeing. So with Arrow, there are people who say, well, you know, there's witness protection measures that are inside there, which is true.

There are these measures that are in place. So will that make a difference? We'll have to wait and see. It's possible. It's also possible that this will be a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. So I'm not at a point where I will ever trust these government bureaucracies until they actually show otherwise and they haven't yet. So, I mean, think of all of the so-called reports that we've had up until now in the last couple of years.

First was 144 UAP sitings. Then last year it was, well, we were up to over 400. Have we gotten any details about any single one of them? a single case. Not one. Not one. So this is how they operate and they obviously know that they have sufficient control and cooperation with the mainstream media. They're not getting pushed on this. They're not getting pressured. No one in Congress is really pushing back. Here and there, a couple of Congress members are, you know, pushing just mildly, but nothing significant. So I don't I don't expect anything out of the,

of Arrow. I would have to be, I'd love to be wrong. So let us wait and see. But so far, they are unfortunately fulfilling my prophecies. You and me both. I know. It's been, it's been an interesting journey since that article came out. I don't know what to make of any of it, but you're right. We'll have to wait and see. Well, that kind of brings us up to current day. The other current day thing I wanted to touch on before I moved to our amazing listener questions that I had to narrow down profusely

is UFOs for the 21st Century Mind the updated, expanded edition of the book. Over 70 new pages, right? Let us know what's new in it. What have you learned since the original came out? And what can people expect

in the updated version, if you don't mind? Oh, yeah, thanks for asking. That was a nice surprise. It's, as you just said, it's about 70 new pages that the original did not have. Nearly all of that is to update the last decade or so of UFO history. So I wrote a very, very long chapter. It's actually the longest chapter of the book now, I believe, covering the entire UFO subject from 2013 through the very end of 2022. So just a month and a half ago. So it takes a story fully, I think very well up to date, to be honest. It covered where the UFO field was in 2013, 2014, just before things really started to change a bit in the public realm. I had a lot to say about the events of 2017 and the coverage that transformed the public debate on UFOs. And covered a lot of that in a lot of detail, actually. the politics event and so forth, talked about some interesting

recent UFO sightings in the last decade that some of which, most of which are really not well known, but are interesting, and I wanted to just discuss to talk about, you know, how is the phenomenon continuing today? And then I did a kind of revised look

at our trajectory as a society and where I think we're headed as opposed to a decade ago when I wrote the first edition of that book. So one of the main things that I have argued, I put this actually in my other recent book, The Alien Agendas, I firmly believe we are in the middle of a global revolution that's going on right now. And that has an effect on the UFO subject. By global revolution, I simply mean a, how do I put it,

a centrally organized, coordinated international revolution, mostly against the people, against traditional rights that we've had. You know, I don't know, how do I need to explain this anymore? Basically a 24-7 panopticon surveillance state is one aspect of it. And there's a lot of other aspects going on there. I think we're looking at the advent of very strong AI. That is a component of it. But what we're seeing is an intentional reorganization of human society in a very different way,

essentially turning this into kind of a big, technological antil. And so that being the case, massive global changes have to happen to the social structure, to the intellectual, to our psychology, to our politics, to our rights. And you see this happening. You know, COVID was a very perfect opportunity for them to do that. But they'll take any opportunity they can. The current war in Ukraine and Russia, I think will offer, offer its own opportunities to further this revolution. And the reason that I'm bringing it up here, I talk about it in the revised UFOs of the 21st century mind, but it's important because when you are moving into a very potentially dark,

quasi-totalitarian global society, you have to ask yourself, how does that affect the UFO conversation? And I think it does have an effect on the UFO conversation. So why I think we're seeing is in the public establishment domain, it is now okay to ask, you know, the basic tepid questions. So like, hmm, is there something out there? Maybe there is something out there. Let's look into it.

You know, that level, that's okay. That's okay. What's not okay is to go over the red line into conspiracy accusations and cover-up accusations. And so into a deep analysis. And the reason that that's not permitted, and you can see that this is still all these years now into this new era. or in 2023, and we are still, it is impossible to have an open discussion on the structure of the UFO cover-up and conspiracy, international conspiracy of silence. And the reason for that is that because we are now in an era in which you and I are not supposed to believe in conspiracy theories. We all know this.

What is a bigger conspiracy theory, frankly, than the UFO cover-up? I ask you. Probably not anything, or it's right up there. So could you imagine President Joe Biden saying, well, yeah, the UFO thing, that's real. But don't believe in the other conspiracy theories, even though we lied to you on this, like, massive one. Yeah, that's kind of true. But don't believe in the others. They cannot do that.

It's absolutely not tenable. So the UFO conspiracy angle must be suppressed at all costs. And you can see this is continuing what's happening. There's been some tension along those lines. If you go back to 2020, one of the New York Times articles that Leslie and Ralph put out was in July of 2020. They came this close to, in that one admission they had by Dr. Eric Davis, very close to admitting that there were actual crash retrievals of UFOs. But they didn't step over the line and you've noticed nobody has approached that line since, not within the establishment culture anyway. So that's, I think, is a red line.

I think the global revolution that we are going through is in the process of attempting to transform human society at a very fundamental level into one of very tight control. We're moving into an era of great, great control. So that it's going to be the real interesting thing to see from moving here forward is how will attention resolve itself? Will the hammer come down fully? Will the lid come down fully and be screwed down so that there will never. be a genuine conversation about the UFO conspiracy, or will there be a breakthrough somehow?

That is really the question we need to be looking at, because all signs point to the attempts by the national security, international security apparatus to keep this subject safe and defanged for as long as humanly possible. If they can keep it going for another five years, they'll do that. If they can keep it going for 50 years, for 100 years or more, they will do that. as well. They will keep this, they will keep the fundamental truths away from the public for as long as absolutely possible. That's what I believe. Interesting. Well, I look forward to reading the updated edition to learn more about that for sure, Rich. Thank you. Well, let's move to these listener questions because we've got a lot, a lot to cover. Sort of every aspect of uphology. I tried to condense

into these questions for you. So this should be pretty fun. Our first few questions come from our patrons who get priority to ask you questions. And then you are kind enough to stick around over on Patreon to answer a few more of their questions.

So I appreciate you doing that too. But our first one here comes from Meadow Matt on Patreon and Anthony actually on Twitter. They had a very similar question. What do you think about the details of the Nimitz case? and what do you think the tick tax may have been?

I mean, still, to this day, we're wondering, do you have any personal thoughts or observations of what these objects might have been, this case that we've kind of held up to such high esteem for the past five years or so? Yes, yeah, I do. So the first thing is to recognize the year in which this event occurred.

So it was November of 2004. So let's just do a little bit of, checking off the list and checking off who could be a suspect and who could not. So let's look at international powers first. Russia and China come to mind. You know, the U.S. and Russia and the U.S. and China are essentially enemies. We're not even adversaries anymore. But in 2004, this was not the case.

In 2004, Russia was trying actively to join NATO. This is kind of a forgotten thing. And the U.S. basically made sure that did not happen. Russia under Putin at that time was very much trying to work with the West on a whole range of issues. And furthermore, Russia's military was probably at the lowest point it had ever been around that time. They were not, they're much, much more potent now, but not in 2004. So I think it's absolutely out of the question that Russia would have had anything to do with that. And I would say the same regarding China.

China in 2004 was a growing power. They were growing economically. They were working on their military. But to say that they had TikTok UFO technology, I think, would be absurd. And there's absolutely nothing to support that. So I would leave out foreign adversaries. And there's no other nation that you could really imagine that would possibly have done that. So then you ask about U.S. black budget capabilities.

And this is something that people have wondered. I wonder sometimes. I don't think so. I don't believe that this is part of like a breakaway civilization or advanced black budget for a few reasons. One, that, you know, as we know the details of this story, you have Kevin Day who ran radar over the U.S. Princeton, as part of the Nimitz battle group there, had been tracking these UAP, UFOs in the atmosphere for several weeks. Multiple ones, not just one object. There's large numbers of them. They were hanging around, if we could say, in the area where the U.S. was conducting war exercises in the Pacific. So it seems to have been a kind of observational thing, kind of a monitoring thing.

I mean, we're guessing here, but there was certainly a lot of activity. The other thing that you want to keep in mind is that when Fravers' team were vectored in to, examine this unknown object that, you know, now we're on November 14th. Kevin Day sees him again. He's like, ah, they're out there. We've got a couple of FAA 18 super hornets. Let's see if we can vector them in. So the two aircraft get there. And they didn't just see one object above the water, the Tick-TAC UFO. There was a larger object below the water, according to the accounts that have come to us. So we're talking an explicit U.S.O that was there as well as this other object. So if we're talking very advanced black budget, this is beyond anything that I've even had any reason to think that we can do in terms of U.S.O technology and the like.

And then, you know, the entire confrontational attitude that happened in pursuit, at ensued, excuse me, it just doesn't look like a black budget operation to me because frankly the the capabilities of the tick-tech UFO are absolutely in line with capabilities that the U.S. military has been recording explicitly since the 1940s. The speed with which the Tick-Tac departed, I estimate, to be in the neighborhood of 10,000 miles per hour, maybe more. But guess what? We have documents from the 1940s that are military documents that discuss the tracking of these objects at comparable speeds way back then 70 to almost 80 years ago. So in other words, the Tick-Tac encounter is part of a long-standing

pattern of encounters that the United States military has had with these objects. And let's remember, not just the United States military, but militaries of other nations, the old Soviet Union, and all of the Western allies you can think of have had these types of encounters with objects of comparable performance capabilities. So what does that leave us? That leaves me thinking we are dealing with a technology that does not come from our civilization. That is what I believe. I think the Tic Tac UFO was not made by us, whether American, Russian, Chinese, or any other civilization that we know of on Earth, and was, in fact, is the product of a civilization that is more advanced, and that presumably is not from here.

That's what I think. Okay. Thank you. Well, you did mention the term breakaway civilization, which is basically a term that you coined in your early research and work. And Mark on Patreon asks, you used to have quite a strong belief about breakaway civilization. Is it something you still believe in? or have you altered your thinking on that subject at all? That's a great question.

No, I still believe that there is something along these lines. Maybe what's altered is, or maybe what's become a little more, where I become a little more cautious is in drawing conclusions as to just how advanced I think it is. So what I think is that, yes, there is very deeply classified science. a lot of which has to do with the recovery of these crashed or downed or landed UFOs. And what that means is, you know, the possession of something so utterly advanced, in the opinion of the people controlling the secret, is of such paramount secrecy that there is just no way this can be allowed to seep out.

And so you have essentially a secret scientific effort going on to understand this. And so a secret science can lead to secret breakthroughs of understanding, which themselves may have to be kept secret unless you can find a safe way to kind of segue them into the public. So it's very easy to lead to very highly advanced capabilities within a classified world and that's really the foundation of what I call a breakaway civilization. So I still think that that is true. The thing that I will be a little more careful about are relating to some of the more exotic capabilities that might exist. So we talk about portals, we talk about time travel, we talk about, you know, zipping across the galaxy instantly and this type of thing. I've heard people making these types of claims, and I'm a bit dubious about them, particularly. I mean, look, over the last five years and beyond that, there are a number of people making some,

irresponsible and fraudulent, I would say, claims that were related to a breakaway civilization. I think it did a lot of damage to the concept itself, frankly. When you have people talking about time traveling and this type of thing, fighting aliens on Mars and the like, I think did serious damage to our field for a few years. Fortunately, I think we've kind of gotten over that little crazy party. So I feel like, no, it's a legitimate concept. I absolutely think that there is something along these lines. The real question is how far does it go?

How far does it go? But yes, I think that there is something along these lines. I will continue to believe that. Okay. Well, in terms of concepts, you know, when you and Bryce Aple co-authored your book, 80 after disclosure, really, it's crazy to think of where we were then and where we are now.

And this is one of our most popular questions. Amy on Patreon and Brandon through Facebook, has your concept or idea of what disclosure may look like changed since the publishing of the original book? And if so, how? That's a good question. Well, when we wrote that book, so Bryce and I, and I love Bryce,

I respect him tremendously, but our attitudes are a little different. They were different then, and I suspect that they're probably a little bit different today, which is fine. You know, we all have our perspective. So among the two of us, I would say he was always a bit more of an optimist than I was. I think that's fair to say. I think he would agree with that. That doesn't mean that I was a total peasantist about disclosure.

You know, we wrote that book in the year 2010. Yeah, 2010. Wow. So that's 12, 13 years ago. just about that was before the big tech revolution against freedom of expression became obvious when we believed when it was true that there was this alternate media as it were that could be kind of a lever against the legacy media at least this is how I saw it so my reasoning at the time was we're in an era where WikiLeaks was still going the national governments had not really

brought the hammer down against WikiLeaks the way they did shortly after that. And that we were in an era where the flow of information, to me, seemed like it was going in one direction, and that at a certain point, there would be an inevitable breakthrough in terms of a leak and unexpected disclosure and the like. So there are a couple of things that are different between then and now. And one, I would say miscalculation on my part. So the things that are different are, well, we've had a definite digital revolution since then. We've seen, you know, remember in Star Wars the empire strikes back? Well, the empire has struck back since that time and has gone a long, long way toward consolidating its control over big tech and over populations in general.

So that's one thing. and so that took away the whole leverage that I think was available on social media, like YouTube, for example, or Facebook. You know, my attitude was if something big happens, it will spread like wildfire on YouTube. It'll spread like wildfire on Facebook because they can't control that. Well, so much for that idea. That absolutely has been and is controlled. Social media is very carefully curated, as they love to put,

That's their favorite word for that. So social media is no panacea any longer. And then the thing where I miscalculated, and this really became clear since 2017, is I would have to say I believed that if the public were presented with a statement by the establishment to the effect that UFOs are real, that this would likely trigger some kind of avalanche of a, energized public that would say, hey, wait, you've been lying about this for so many years. We want to know everything about this. And by the way, what else have you been lying about? This was definitely how I thought the public reaction would be. And in fact, it hasn't turned out to be the case.

I was dead wrong on this because what we've seen in 2017 is that the national security apparatus is very, very astute at managing its process of disclosure or managing any kind of undesirable leaks. So I look at the creation of atyp and the TicTAC UFO is undesirable leaks on their part. I don't think the national security apparatus wanted that information out. But once it came out, they're masters at managing the public perceptions. And so what's happened? There's kind of this tacit acknowledgement that UFOs are real.

But they've done it genius level by which they're not stating UFOs are real. They're like kind of sitting back and saying, yeah, yeah, it looks like there's something there. And where's the public on this? Where is the public? As Elizondo said in the early days, it sounds nothing, I hear nothing but crickets. And that is, that's what it is. The public is not energized by this. The public doesn't seem to give a damn, frankly.

They're going about with their lives. And they don't care because the fact is that there is no major media that is taking this narrative and pushing it. maybe the only one in America might be occasionally Tucker Carlson over at Fox. He is literally the only major media voice that seems to care about this subject. I cannot identify any others. And so, you know, people, unfortunately, are very passive. They eat the food that's been pre-chewed and served to them by the national security apparatus. And so there's not a lot of curiosity about it or there's not a lot of knowledge and there doesn't seem to be much of a push.

So that's where I think I would say I miscalculated in 80 after disclosure. It wasn't just me. I mean, I think Bryce, and I think probably if you had asked any other UFO researcher back in 2010, if the government were to give an acknowledgement that UFOs are real, I think we all would have said, wow, that would be an amazing thing. That would be such a shock. And yet they've actually managed it exceedingly well. You know, one phrase that I used to repeat all the time that I coined,

was disclosure is impossible and inevitable. I always put it out as a paradox. It's impossible because there's no motivation for the powers that be to promote it, and that is still absolutely true. And I always said, but it's inevitable nonetheless, for the reasons that I kind of outlined a little earlier. I don't know if it's inevitable.

I'm not so sure it said that if it's a done deal at all, which I used to think it would be. I would say it is possible. But it is also possible that a genuine disclosure could be withheld from us for a very long time. I mean, so long that it makes a subject irrelevant. That's possible. Right. Right. Interesting. Well, I mean, kind of staying, I guess, in that same vein.

Congress got involved with this topic for the first time since, you know, the Gerald Ford days when we had semi-congessional hearings on this topic. And it was, you know, it was depressing. It was sobering when those congressional hearings happened. I think a lot of people expected, you know, they'd pull out the alien and bring it on the Congress floor. And that clearly did not happen. But, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, before I actually move on to the question asked, what did you make of the congressional hearing, Rich, on a personal level? Did that help hurt the topic, the subject?

Did it hurt the government? that it hurts? I will say it was almost exactly what I was expecting. I mean, I just say that. Oh, you're talking about the one that was almost a year ago, so from May of 2022. Yeah. So that's Donald Moultrie and Scott Bray when they spoke to Congress. The open part is what we saw, and that was, I think about an hour. It wasn't that very long. You know, obviously neither of those men know much of anything about the UFO subject.

It was quite obvious that they were both out of their depth. Moultrie was funny because he sounded almost exactly like John Samford from 1952 at the famous press conference in D.C. Moultrie is saying, well, yeah, there's objects out there, but we are confident, he said, that with enough information we can identify and mitigate all of them. That was the word that I loved, mitigate. And I watched that. I'm like, dude, you're not mitigating anything here. You haven't mitigated this for 80 years.

You're not going to mitigate it now. That's just a lot of brave talk there. But I suppose what I would say is that the one interesting thing that came out of it were some of the questions by Representative Mike Gallagher, who did bring up the Davis-Wilson memo. I thought, hey, okay, that's a nice little win. We got that in there. And I think it was, oh, he asked a question about UFOs and nukes, which, okay, good.

let's bring some of these things up. But really, there was, I would say, little to nothing of genuine substance that came out of it. And very little in terms of a promise for further information. I mean, they're just going through the motions here. So it was, if there was someone who was actually waiting for a kind of disclosure moment, I think they would have been very disappointed, obviously. And for me, I'm at the George Carlin phase of life. you know, 30 years ago, George Carlin's in his last stand-up phase.

And he's like, look, I didn't vote for these guys. I'm just here to watch the shit show. I've got a front row seat. And he's like, I'm loving it. I used to listen to that years ago. And I'm like, wow, he's funny, but he's a little harsh. I look at it now and I think, not harsh enough. So how did I get to the point where I'm channeling this ghost, the shade of George Carlin?

but I do, I definitely see where he's coming from. So my attitude is I don't expect, I'm just not expecting anything to come out of these congressional initiatives. I'm not saying things are impossible, and I'm not saying nothing will come out, but a genuine recognition, disclosure. Look, I know that there are some efforts behind the scenes toward this, and I have spoken to some people who,

have connections with that we're like, no, no, we're making this happen. This is going to happen. So my attitude is good. If you make it happen, wonderful. I think you have more confidence in that system than I do. But I can't pretend that I have the full answer. All I have is my perspective.

And looking at years of historical obfuscation and also understanding what the stakes are for these people. That is, giving up a genuine admission on this, I don't see how they win because there's a lot to be lost. The only way that I can see them doing it is if they are pushed, as I said before, to the wall,

and there's something even worse that will happen if they don't give up some of the truth, a sliver of the truth, which is all that we can ever expect, by the way. In other words, you think of UFO information as a mountain and the people who have control over the information, if they give up something.

If they give up anything, they're going to give up a sliver of that mountain, just a sliver. And it'll be the sliver that puts them in the best possible light. But even giving up a sliver is a dangerous game because if you wet the appetite of the public on this too much and you give them the public the opportunity to ask difficult questions,

then that's no good either. You know, government says, yeah, yeah, we actually have known about this for a little while. or this appears to be real. People are going to be like, really? So what does this say about crash retrievals? Is this a question that will come up at a press conference? Have there been crash retrievals?

And is anyone going to believe the denials? Maybe that will happen and there will be denials and maybe no one will believe them. But even if that's the case, will anything come out of that? Who believes that we have a functioning democratic system here? I mean, let's get real. Does anyone actually believe that the United States, or for that matter, the European system,

You're in Scotland there. Does anyone actually believe that anywhere in any society, Western society or anywhere, that governments at this point are amenable to the will of the people. In my view, the last two plus years, they've just taken the mask off and they're like, we don't give a crap. And what are you going to do about it?

Look what Trudeau did to the Canadian truckers a little over a year ago, which I think was a reprehensible crime by the Canadian government against their people. They don't care. they don't care they don't care you look at the EU leadership none of them care they're all every one of them are hated by the public and they don't care because they know they don't need to care so and it's the same with the United States so we're in a different situation than we were a couple of generations ago where there was at least the pretense of public officials that actually were supposed to care about

public opinion and would answer it that's not the case anymore Yeah. It's the same everywhere. I hate to say it. Well, okay, you mentioned a buzzword in there, Rich. So I'm going to fast forward to our most popular question. Literally dozens and dozens of people wanted to get your most updated thoughts on this. You mentioned Wilson Davis. Yes. Where are you on this? I mean, this is probably one of the most contentious things to, come out of euphology in a while, you know, if you believe it, uh, people want to wring your neck. If you don't believe it, people want to wring your neck too. Um, are we any closer to finding out? Is any of this real? Did it happen? I mean, it happened. I think everyone can sort of agree on that. The meeting happened. But, uh, what are your thoughts and perspectives on this? Yeah. The summer in the sky's podcast is free to listen to you every week. But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active

Patreon page, where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow. So, to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. I think a few months ago, I did a YouTube program, which I called No More Excuses. That's what it was. And it was all about the Wilson Davis or Davis-Wilson notes. And essentially I said, there are no more excuses for people to be wavering on this

and to doubt the authenticity of this document written by Dr. Eric Davis. You've had many people now have confirmed its authenticity, not just me. You know, I've been on the record since they came out in 2019. I said, look, I was shown several pages of those notes in 2006. In fact, I went on the public record a number of times back then discussing. The one thing I didn't say back in 07, 08, 09 was that I had seen the notes. And the only reason I didn't say that it was out of respect to the man who showed me those notes. This is a man who's, I'd never given up his name.

And while he's alive, I won't. But because he doesn't want me to. But Lell just say he is extremely close to the situation. So he showed me these notes in 06. I started talking about Thomas Wilson in 2007. I talked about Thomas Wilson being denied access to a reverse engineering program in 2007 and 2008 and 2009. How the hell am I going to get that information if it didn't come from those notes? obviously I was shown those notes

and in fact in one interview back in 2007 with the paracast hosted by Gene Steinberg I was on July 1st of 2007 on that podcast which can be found online I actually

very coyly quoted the notes themselves I didn't say that but I said in contacts with Wilson I said yeah he came across He learned that there was technology not made by man, not by human hands. I said it on the podcast because I had read those words in 2006. So the notes have existed for all this time.

And the person who showed me those notes, as I said, was very, very, very intimately close in that entire circle. This is obvious that Eric Davis was set on a mission by the Bigelow team, the Nids people, essentially. to meet with Thomas Wilson, who had just gone into retirement in 2003 out of the Joint Chiefs, or 2002, excuse me, those two, yeah. And met with them and took detailed notes. Those are Davis's notes. That's his style. And who else has confirmed it? Well, Leslie Kane has confirmed that she'd known about the notes.

And I can say this now. I mean, when those notes came out and I went public about this, defending them, Leslie wrote to me privately. She said, I'm so glad you're doing that. She said, unfortunately, I can't right now. It's a little too sensitive for me. And I'm like, okay, well, great. But she did publicly confirm them in 2022. As did Jacques Valet, as have, I think, George Knapp also.

They all have. All these people are intimately close to the situation. Davis can't do it. He can't. And Wilson can't. Obviously not. I was kind of amazed that people like Billy Cox, a journalist, and how, you know, I mean, he's done good work, but.

How dense can you be? Because Wilson denies it to take that denial at face value. Really? Is that what you call journalism? You know, obviously they can't admit to this because it's way too sensitive. But there is literally no excuse anymore for someone to say, gee, I don't think they're legit. I think it's a hoax. Like, it's get real.

Let's just get real. And the information in those notes is too explicit. And it's, you know, frankly, there's a tremendous. amount of very valuable information for researchers who are interested in trying to understand the structure of UFO secrecy, at least the Pendavgans component of it. You know, there are probably other government components. You've probably got the DOE and you've got the CIA, both of which I have been told have similar black budget SAP structures within those organizations that are equally impervious to outside review. But within the

Pentagon, we know. It's under the the Outstead office, the office of the undersecretary for acquisitions in scientific technology. And within that, they have you know, other departments that are departments within departments that

within those, you've got these special access programs that Thomas Wilson was able to find. On the tips, by the way, given him by Stephen Greer in April 1997. It's a crazy story, but it's, I knew all about this when it happened. In fact, I talked about when I did the one ambush interview probably of my life when I called Thomas Wilson.

At the end of 2006, I called Wilson. And, you know, he got very upset and hung up on, hung up the phone on me. So, no, this is, there is no more excuse. The document's real. And the thing we really need to be talking about is not. is it real? It's like, let's like, please get past that because it's just cringe-worthy when people do this. But what we need to do is analyze a document and understand the implications. The implication of that document is the important thing, which is that you have, first of all,

Wilson's being told, now you could say, did the, I assume these were Lockheed guys, but whoever told him, were they telling him the truth? So the truth, you know, presumably Wilson's sitting down with the gatekeepers of the program, who he identified as the security manager, the corporate attorney, and the program manager. And, you know, what he said was that they told him we have an intact craft and we're trying to figure it out and we're really kind of outmatched by this thing. We can't really, we haven't made much progress, painfully slow progress. That's not a thing.

The real question to ask is, were they telling him the truth? That is the question. I don't I have and you know the other part you can ask is pardon me was Wilson telling Davis the full truth now I think that question the answer is probably yes I don't think we can assume he told him the full truth in fact I'm pretty certain he did not tell Davis everything but he told Davis a lot and the reason is in the notes themselves

Wilson checked into Davis's bona fides Wilson was very very careful He was very nervous about talking to anyone, but he trusted Davis because of the bona fides that he'd been given about Eric Davis. And so I think it's safe to say that Wilson was truthful, for the most part, with Davis. He may have held some things back. The real question to ask is, let's say, the Lockheed guys, were they truthful to Thomas Wilson when they gave him their briefing? And that's a fair question to ask. And it could be that they were or were not truthful to him. Or they were partly truthful.

I think that they were truthful insofar as there was an ET UFO program. And I believe this because that is the entire reason Wilson looked for them. He found them. He was working off of the lead that Greer had given him specifically about ET reverse engineering tech that was being worked at privately away from the auspices of U.S. Pentagon control. And so Wilson had this information. he found not one but four actually such programs and only met with the managers of this one, who then said, you know, yeah, this is E.T. Wilson was funny when he's talking to Davis in those notes because he's giving this pretense of asking them, well, is this Russian? Is this some adversary?

I'm thinking when I read these notes, I don't think you believe that for an instant, Wilson, but I think he was just saying that to follow the old C-Y-A rule. You got to cover your, you know, line up your dogs and be careful. And I think that was the only reason. I think he knew full well what this was about. And to that extent, I think that they told him the truth that there was a program. They did show him what was called the big out list. That's simply the list of the people who are in the program.

Wilson said it was between four and 800 names. and that they were almost all corporate private, almost a only small handful of DOD personnel were part of this. It was all a private contractor. I see no reason to doubt that at all. And the only thing you can ask that they might doubt, that you might doubt is the question of painfully slow progress.

That is the question. And I don't know the answer to that. It could be that they were telling them the truth. It could be that they were just blowing smoke up is behind because they wanted to get him off their back. Who really knows? I think the attitude would be, we can assume they told him as much as they felt they had to,

and they did have to tell him something. This is the other thing we have to realize. Wilson found them and really pissed them off. And what we learned in those notes is that that group had nearly been outed a few years earlier by a Pentagon audit that found them. And what they said to Wilson was, yeah, we were nearly outed,

and we had to bring that auditor into the security to shut him up. That was the only solution we had. So, you know, would you have a guy like Wilson who's blustering in there trying to throw his weight around and saying, it's your mistake that you did not have me in his oversight over your group? Their attitude had to be. Let's just think logically here. Their attitude was, all right, we don't have to let him in, but we do have to deal with him. He is vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Intelligence.

He's not a nobody that we can just kick around like a little puppy dog. We have to respect him enough and deal with him. So the answer I think was exactly the right one from their point of view. They gave him a little bit of information and basically said, now go away. And Wilson said, this is not right. You should, I need to be in here. I'm going to talk to my superiors. And their answer was, oh, go ahead.

If you want to talk to your boss. They clearly were not frightened. Wilson goes back to D.C. Does complain. And what happens? He's threatened with his career. So I think that's what happened. These are important implications.

You know, let's just stop and think. We are so used to the creeping fascism, essentially, that has just spread over the Western world. It's like we've given up on the idea of expecting our government to be responsive to us. It's like, yeah, we know they're corrupt. Well, you know what? maybe we shouldn't be so complacent. This is a very important thing.

I don't agree with Stephen Greer on everything. Let me just say that, but I agree with him 100% on his attitude back then, which was that this must not be a program that is dominated by private contractors who do not have sufficient government oversight, who get what they want because when the proper government liaisons retire, they get brought into the program and they make a lot of money as gatekeepers themselves,

which is how the whole system works. It's utterly corrupt. And that's not a good system. And Greer was right for critiquing it back then. He was right to bring this to Wilson's attention back then. And, you know, but it's just like we're in a world where people, are they willfully incapable of looking at the implications here? Some of them are, and some just,

I just don't think they pay attention enough to understand the stakes that are involved in when you look at everything involved in the will, Wilson Davis notes. We are talking, as I stand by what I called it a few years ago, the UFO leak of the century, which it remains to the stay. It is the UFO leak of the century. Yeah. Unfolding story. We need to find at least one of those four to 500 people, like you mentioned, who may have worked in this program. Like you said, leaks are the only, and they're a natural process of any government in terms of like how we get any transparency seems to be when they're backed into a corner and leaks happen. If there were any leaks to happen, I personally hope it's on a crash retrieval program. You know, with all the research I've done the past 20-something years of my life, that for me

would be it, not of blurry video from the Navy, you know, not even any photo or video. it's the admittance of some sort of program and that we actually have a craft of unknown origin in our possession in any country, not just in the United States too. So if this is it, if this truly is the leak of the century, it would change everything. It honestly would. And I don't know where I stand down the Wilson Davis thing to be up front. But hearing you talk about the implication is enough to be like, we need to keep looking at this in my opinion. Well, let me just say this. So back in 06, when I was preparing to phone Thomas Wilson,

I was in touch with the man who showed me the notes to begin with. He's famous. It's a great guy. I like him. I was writing to him and I said, well, I am going to contact Wilson about this. And his attitude was, well, good luck with that. And after I called Wilson, I wrote back and I said, yeah, Wilson just denied everything. And this guy said, well, what do you expect?

Everything is on the line with him, which I knew as well. Like, obviously, I knew all of this going into it. Like if Wilson were to give an acknowledgement to me on the phone, he knew that I would publicize that. And it's like, you know, a little house of cards or a little house of toothpicks coming crashing down all at once. It would be a huge admission coming from a very important person back in 0-607 of the existence of a UFO program. I mean, you just remember where we were back then. There was no admission from the government about anything like this whatsoever. And no, I mean, it would blow all of his security clearances for the rest of all time, first of all, right?

and it would also be a real explosive danger to UFO secrecy in general. And there would be no way that he could. But I figured, look, I learned Wilson's name. I knew all about this. And I thought I'm just going to give a guy a phone call, see what happens. And, you know, so I guess what I'm saying is it was very clearly understood between myself and the individual who had shown me the notes to begin with, what the implications were.

This is heavy-duty stuff. And no, it's not an official government document, but it doesn't matter. You're talking about a senior government official, senior government defense official, acknowledging the reality of this phenomenon and how he got shut out of it by essentially a corporation. How are the implications of that not profound? So it's been very obvious all this time that this is a very serious matter. And I really, I will just, the last thing I'll say here is I think those individuals who went on the record to try to throw cold water on this, to try to debunk it. And like, I think it did a real disservice, a true disservice to euphology.

They, it was the biggest disappointment to me, to me professionally to see some colleagues of mine go out of their way, it seems to debunk. this critically important leak and really hinder our ability as a community to move forward with this to have an opportunity to get this into a broader conversation publicly. And it didn't happen because a number of key people very prominently. And really, I think some of them with malintent went out of their way to debunk this publicly. It was a real misfortune for euphology. Yeah, well, hey, if it's of any consolation, the book's still open for me, and I closed it. I was one of those people, Rich.

I never spoke publicly or privately to you about it, but I kind of was like, I don't know, but the more I hear you talk about it, the more it sounds like this is a authentic occurrence. And this was an actual program. and he is a hundred percent genuine in what he was told. Like you said, the big question is, who told him this and was that true? There's every reason to wonder about the truth of what Wilson was told. Yeah. To wonder.

But you have to, even if we go on that road, we have to ask, okay, is 100% of what they told him false? Is 50% of what they told him false? is 0% of what they told him false or some other number in there. We have to ask that. I think 100% is highly unrealistic. I think even 50% is unrealistic, frankly, to tell someone who's essentially running intelligence for the Joint Chiefs. Like, you're going to really lie that much to this guy?

You're really going to make up a story and give him a big BS tell? Really? Even if you're a contractor with highest-level security, you're just going to lie flat out. you got Cojones that big? You're going to lie flat out to this guy who does have some power. No, I think what you will do is you will tell him what, as much as you need to tell him, you might hedge a little bit here and there.

That's possible. But to assume that they lied to him, I think is also not realistic. Not realistic. So that's where I stand on it. And I can definitely tell you that Eric Tafis, wrote those notes. Everyone close to Davis knows this and has privately said so, by the way.

They may not all go on the record, but they all know this. So Davis wrote the notes, and people who know Davis, no, he is fanatically, like I've heard people say, he's incapable of lying. Well, I don't know if that's actually true. Is anyone truly incapable?

But we get the idea. Davis is scrupulously, openly honest about, and you've listened to the guy. You know, he essentially said this as much. There was now a censored interview that he did with Stephen Green Street of the basement office where Green Street asked him flat out, and Davis talked about those notices from Edgar Mitchell's estate, which they were. They were from Ed Mitchell's estate. And he never denied it.

He spoke of them as totally real. And they all know it's real. But these people are all afraid of losing security clearances. That's number one. This isn't a classified document, but it does not matter. It's a document that deals with very classified goings-on within the national security structure. And all of those people, whether you're talking about Davis or Put-Off or Kit Green or Comkeller or any of the other people associated with that crowd. they've all had long-standing security clearances,

and they're not willing to lose that by having loose lips on this matter and saying, oh, yeah, it's real. You know, they've got the fig leaf still covering them just enough where they can say, no, I didn't say anything. Yeah. And that's where they're leaving it because they're all about preserving their access, because all of those people are on a quest. The quest is to get to the center of the labyrinth.

All of them. None of them are at the exact center. Maybe Davis, I don't know, but I doubt it. I don't think they're where they want to be. They all want more information. And back 20 years ago, I know this for a fact, all of those people wanted to get more information than what they had. And so when Wilson finally retired, because they knew about this right from the beginning.

In 97, Mitchell was part of the Greer team to meet with Wilson. Edgar Mitchell. And Mitchell was part of the whole Nid's crowd. He was friends with Davis and Putoff and Green and Bigelow and Comte-Kalahur and John Alexander. Like all of these people worked together on the National Institute of Discovery Science. So Mitchell learned about Wilson being shut out of his meeting with the contractors through Navy Commander Will Miller. So he, Willard Miller. He was with them.

He was the one who found from Wilson. that Wilson got locked out in June of 97, three months later, and he tells Greer and he tells Mitchell, because they were all together. Grere goes on all for the subsequent years. Grere openly talked about this. Greer openly talked about this. In fact, in his book, Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge in 2006, he mentioned the meeting. He mentioned Wilson. Talked about it. And Mitchell also, learned about it and he told his entire crew at Nids. One of those people said to me, oh yeah, I've known about that document since day two.

All right, they've all known. All right, so they're all interested in getting to the center of the secret. They coveted that. And it's possible in the interim years that some of them may have gotten there. It's possible. But in 2002, when they sent Davis on his mission, and Davis basically had a home run interview with that, when they sent him off, that was their goal.

They wanted information. They wanted confirmation from Wilson. And they got it. And it was only supposed to be for themselves. This wasn't for the rest of the world. They weren't interested in publicizing this anywhere. So that's the meeting. That's how it worked.

That's why it matters. that's why it's true. All right. There, keep on it into it, guys. Yeah, I'm, I'm,

I'm, I'm back in. You pulled me back in. I love it. I can't try to go out and they pull me back in. Every damn time, Rich.

Last two questions for you before we move over to Patreon, if that's all right with you. Okay, cool. You've been gracious with your time. I'm happy to do it. This isn't, thank you. A academic question,

actually. Amen. through email asks, I'm an academic and I'm considering formulating a degree level course on the phenomenon. What areas would Rich want to include in the modules that would make up such a course? I mean, we are hearing more and more these days of universities taking this topic seriously, whether from a historical aspect or sociological, everything. But yeah, what would you do if you had that? I actually already did this. I wrote a book called UFOs for the 21st century mind that is politically, I'm serious. This is explicitly the answer to that individual's question.

I designed this. Actually, originally, I was asked by what was then an online university of sorts. What do they call themselves? International metaphysical University. I don't even know if they're around. Back in, I forget what year, 2011 or thereabouts, they said, hey, we would like for you to teach a course on UFOs, like a UFOs 101 type thing. They had originally asked Stanton Friedman, but I guess Stan didn't want to do it. And they asked me, and I thought, ah, I'll design something. And I wrote what really became UFOs for the 21st century mine. And what I looked at were, I mean, I will just say, you know, I looked at the first chapter is, what are UFOs?

So I asked a series of philosophical questions, scientific questions. How do we understand what even a UFO is? how are UFOs easily misidentified and so on and on. And then I talk about the, in that chapter, the implications of what UFOs might mean to society. I have a chapter talking about theories of ancient visitation, you know, the whole ancient aliens phenomenon. And I try to dip my toe into that and get into it. And then there are several chapters that deal with a, I think, a proper, concise analysis of the history of the UFO phenomenon from early. modern times to the present.

I get into the political implications, which are very important for any kind of academic understanding of this. You want to understand how does the cover-up work? What are the politics of the UFO phenomenon? You need to understand that. And so I try to do that both at the surface level and then

at the deeper level, what I call the breakaway civilization level. And then the other things I did with are contact and abduction, you know, where the rubber meets the road. It's like what is actually happening here when you have individuals who allege that they have had encounters, direct encounters with alien beings. How do we make sense out of this? And, you know, I tried to deal with that. Another thing that academicians need to understand, and I haven't seen anyone in the academic

world or in the world of euphology deal with this other than myself, which is to track the growth of euphology against the backdrop of our changing society in general, including the birth of the internet, including just cultural and social changes and the back and forth interaction that uphology has had with our society at large and how UFO research has evolved over the years. Like, these are important things. And I don't hear, I don't really hear anything from anywhere else about that. And then I have one chapter on the science of UFOs, which is, you know, weird science, whether it's propulsion technology or space time or consciousness itself.

That is the science of the UFO phenomenon is extremely important to understand. And then the other things is just looking at them and looking at our future. Who are they? What do they want? I don't know if you can study this academically precisely, but I think you can get into things like comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology. You can start asking what might these other beings be interested in in terms of their reasons for coming here? Is there a reason that they might be here? Well, I have a lot of thoughts on that. And then the final chapter of that book is attempt to look into the future. Where are we going? What is our trajectory? What is the trajectory of this phenomenon within the context of our civilization?

So that book literally is the textbook. That was explicitly my intention. So to the individual who wrote that question, I would just say, hey, go buy the new and expanded edition of UFOs for the 21st century mind. And I think it will give you a very good foundation for further academic analysis of this subject. That was my intention. Yeah, required reading. There you go. These were the questions that kind of really, I think, are going to stretch our muscles when it comes to theory and aliens and UFOs. You know, a lot of government talk, but this is the fun stuff, I think, where we can really have some cool conversations.

So, this question here is from Ariel. And she asked this over on Twitter, how much of the phenomenon do you think is physical nuts and bolts and how much is interdimensional? Is this something you tackled in your book? Yeah, yeah, I think about this a lot. I would say, I do not think that those are exclusive answers. Yeah. So I think, in other words, something can be, if we know how to understand what interdimensional is, first of all, that's a question of itself. But that doesn't preclude them being physical. So if you think of something like the Skinwalker Ranch, where there are, you know, there's some allegations of a portal type of activity, for example, out of the Skinwalker. Does that mean these objects, these beings are not physical, when they are here in our reality. When you have a, I'm thinking of Skinwalker once again,

when you have one of the animal mutilations that occur that seem to happen like so rapidly within the space of minutes where you don't understand, does that mean that it's not a physical event? Like, it is a physical event. There's something physical happening. So I think I would say these are definitely physical manifestations, at least most of the time they appear to be to me. But that doesn't preclude that they have a way of manipulating space and time in ways that we don't quite understand that might make them seem interdimensional.

That might be actually part of the answer. In other words, there are telepathic elements of this phenomenon. Does that preclude that they're physical or could there be a technology that's involved in the telepathy? Or could you have telepathy from a purely biological standpoint? Is that possible? I think the answer is yes, you probably could. So that's not mutually exclusive. When you have objects that are sometimes described as entering out of nothingness,

what does that mean? I was just, I was chatting with some local folks about the UFO subject last night. We have a local UFO meetup in Rochester. And someone described a craft that seemed to come out of a slit in the sky. sky. So what does that mean? Does it mean that they came in from another dimension? It could, or does it mean that they're just using some kind of cloaking technology that we actually are developing that now in our military? So there's a lot of things that we still don't know in terms of, you know, is this interdimensional or is this extraterrestrial or what? And I'll just furthermore

say that I don't really think most of us, certainly include myself, but I think most of us do not, when we talk about interdimensional, I'm not sure we really understand what that means. Which is, it's fair. It's fair not to understand. Because our brains only go to a certain level. Like, we're very intelligent creatures, but we're not infinitely intelligent.

There are things that have to do with the nature and fabric of reality that we probably just don't get. It's like, do you expect your dog to know where you drive when you go to work when you leave the house in the morning? The dog has no idea because it's a dog. They're wonderful, smart creatures, but there are things that they don't know. It's the same with us.

There are things that we probably structurally in our brains, we lack the ability to know certain elements of this reality, and we may forever not be able to know. So I'm not really sure. It's something that I try to be careful about. But I do think that additional dimensions is a real possibility with this. In fact, it's likely. It's likely that we're not really understanding something.

very, very big about this whole reality that we find ourselves in. And it's very possible that these beings are able to navigate through these elements of reality in a way that we can't. But does that mean they're not physical? I wouldn't go that far. I think that they, I would say, yes, of course they are physical. The question is, what is the nature of the physics that they partake in? There's a physical nature to them. And the question that I want to ask is, what is that physical nature. That's what I'm saying. I love that, yeah.

Really good point. That actually kind of bleeds in to our next question here. This comes from YouTube. Joseph on YouTube asks, do the changes in UFO-UAP experience over the last 75-plus years match cultural changes in the world, or are they a progression of experiences

from advancing alien tech or an agenda a little two-prong question there. Yeah, that's an outstanding question. It really, in a lot of ways, gets to the heart of, I guess, what you can call the psychosocial interpretation of the UFO subject. And it's a really good argument. So let's just be real about it. You have a transformation, even from prior to the 1950s and 40s.

I mean, there was sci-fi back in the 30s and 20s. There was Buck Rogers and, you know, before they had H.G. Wells. I mean, we always had ideas. about men from Mars or from other planets and what aliens would be like. And it's an absolutely critical question to ask, how have those cultural expectations influenced our interpretation of the UFO subject? And in fact, is the UFO subject nothing other than a kind of cultural fantasy based on our interest in sci-fi? Is that possible? There are people who say, yes, that's what it is. That's all that it is.

There are people who got, you know, they misinterpret, unusual atmospheric things and they assume, oh, it's aliens. Or there are people who have a mental derangement of some sort or another and they think that they've had an alien deduction. Like that's the explanation that some of these people would have that this phenomenon is interpreted through a cultural lens. Now, I would have to say in some measure, this is true. we do interpret the UFO phenomenon through a cultural lens. We can't help it. That's absolutely the case. When you look at, you know, old photographs like the George Adamski photographs of UFOs,

I mean, a lot of people say, well, those are fake photographs, and they could be fake. But they don't look as some of them don't look particularly sleek the way that we would think. So what's up with this? Well, a couple of things are possible here. So one thing is I guess that I would say I am quite satisfied that there is a genuine UFO phenomenon. And I am satisfied for that because I simply read too many hundreds of declassified U.S. military encounters with UFOs too many. And also from other nations as well. And those objects typically have been described as disk shaped in military documents.

And you know that in those documents, these guys are not playing games. They have to tell the truth. They're reporting these things accurately as accurately as they can. And you have an absolute pattern of saucer-shaped objects that have been reported again and again and again and again. So I think that is a consistent element. What you do see is a variety of shapes and descriptions of these objects. What causes that? Well, one thing that might cause it is the fact that they may have different groups that have different variations of how they build the craft.

That is entirely possible. And it's also possible that they have gone through redesigns of their craft based on human society's increasing capabilities over the last 70, 80 years. we're vastly more sophisticated electronically in many other ways of detection than we were in the 1940s and 50s. So it's possible that they too have gone through their evolution and upgrading their, I mean, you may think, well, why would they? They're so far ahead of us. But I don't know. I don't know where they are. They could very well be adapting to changes in our society. In terms of alien encounters, this sometimes is tricky.

You have descriptions in the 1950s of small aliens, sometimes wearing spacesuits, sometimes described as small aliens without spacesuits, but big heads, but not the big black wraparound eyes. Why not? I don't know why not. Why are they not described as big wraparound black eyes in 1950s,

but then they are in the 1970s, in the 1970s and 80s and beyond? Why are some of the beings described by leaks to people like Leonard Stringfield from the 1970s and 60s? Why are those beings described as short gray aliens but without the black wraparound eyes? They have everything that you get with gray aliens except those, basically. Why do we not get the big black eyes until the late 1970s? This is a cultural thing. And I mean, I wonder about this. I don't know, but it's possible that there are reasons that I just can't think of.

Maybe there's variations in grades. Maybe these beings are genetically modified and enhanced. Maybe the black element of their eyes are lenses that can be removed. There's a couple of different things. So I guess it's a good question. I mean, certainly our understanding of the UFO phenomenon has gone through a lot of changes since the 1950s. A lot of changes. we're not thinking of men from another planet from Mars

men from Mars coming to Earth to Greece you know all right so we're a little bit past that but I suspect that what's happened is that this phenomenon has been so far out ahead of us that it has taken us a very long time culturally to kind of catch up and to get to a point where we are even able to begin to appreciate just how strange it probably is

that's a possibility. So I don't know if I really fully answered that question, but I did my best just there, so I hope that's okay. No, I appreciate it. Well, you know, and you ask a lot of these theoretical questions in your book, Alien Agendas. And I think that the person who asked that I should definitely check that book out because you do brooks a lot of that in there as well.

Yeah, thank you. There are different alien types that I try to list in that book. And I only dealt with a few of the, the alien types in that book. I mean, if you really want it to get into throwing in the kitchen sink, there's a lot of variety that's been described. I discuss it a little bit. I focus in on the human-looking ones, and then the different types of grays, and then you get some of the insectoid mantid type descriptions and some of the reptilian types. And I try to treat those. And in that book, I did try to kind of hypothesize and try to make some sense out of it,

purely from a theoretical point of view. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is theoretical too, Rich, in terms of not the beings themselves, but our ability to possibly make contact with them. Joe on YouTube asks, does Richard think it may be possible to directly interact with intelligent beings, whether through consciousness, altered states? You know, this big CE5 thing is a huge movement that's been going on the past decade or so, I'd say, maybe longer. It's pretty big. You hear a lot of celebrities get involved with it and musicians and stuff like that. And I get asked every day, like, have you ever tried it? And no, I personally haven't, so I can't really speak on it.

I'm almost afraid to, to be completely honest, from a personal level. But, yeah, do you think it's possible that we can communicate with these intelligences? Yeah, I do. I think it's definitely possible. And I think some of the CE5 initiatives have probably done that. Although I'm going to emphasize, I think some of them are totally fraudulent and fake. But I think some have been real. Excuse me.

I've spoken to, I actually attended a couple of CE5s here in Rochester. We had some folks, friends of mine, did. And I hung out for some of them. And nothing happened while I was there. I didn't detect anything that I thought was unusual at all. And by the way, no one else did when we were there. But that's not to say that some people don't. I will just say, you know, you've got to be careful because there are a lot of known instances of so-called CE-5s that are satellites.

And I have recently come to understand that there are some definite, explicitly fraudulent CE5 events that have happened. And that's all I'm going to say about it. But I don't know if it's true, but I've heard it. And it seemed legit to me from that particular source. That doesn't mean that they all are. but I think some of them, you've got to be careful. But having said that, I think that my personal pet theory is that human consciousness is just at the cusp of what we can call genuine significant sigh ability.

I mean, look, I'm married to a remote viewer who is really good at remote viewing. Like she's, I'm not saying she's the greatest remote viewer in the world, but she's a good remote viewer. and I've met many other remote viewers, and I don't need to be convinced of the reality of psychic capabilities in human beings. And when you ask yourself, like, what does that mean? What does that say about the nature of reality? What does that say about the nature of human beings? Like, it really does cause you to think very carefully about all of those things. What I would say is, we human beings have achieved some level of size.

ability. And this is through natural evolution of the human brain. It's almost certainly the result of the brain complexity and size that we have achieved in our evolution as a species at this time. So whereas I can assume that earlier versions of human like Homo erectus or earlier may not have had those capabilities because their brains just weren't large enough. If that theory is true, then you could assume like larger brain beings like the grays, let's say, might have this capability even greater than we do. And so if that's the case, you know, we have to ask, what is the nature of their reality? Do they have telepathic communication with each other? I think they may. And if you're a highly telepathic alien monitoring those humans on the ground there on the surface, maybe you just might

be interested in those humans who have that ability pitched a little higher. How many times have we heard the following anecdote from the person who would say, I started meditating six months ago and just recently I had some kind of what I think is a contact experience with another intelligence. I've heard this so many times. It's almost a cliche because it's so widespread. What does it mean? Well, I think it could very well mean what people think it means, which is that if you're a highly telepathic alien species looking at humans, who's going to interest you the most? Very likely those humans who have that ability that's closer to yours. You're going to find them interesting. And maybe you'll send them a message that they'll do a download of, as people might say.

So I don't rule any of that out. I think that's entirely possible. I would say it's likely that some of that happens. So yes, I think that's a long-winded hand. answer to your question. Can we communicate with them? I think we can. But the question is how effective is that communication? How meaningful will it be? That's a whole other question. Are these other beings going to be ready to bring us into the Galactic Federation of Light? Because some of us have some sci abilities. Well, that's a whole other question. I tend to doubt that that would be the case. Hey, I know if it's any indication of the world today, I can understand why we haven't been invited to the table for sure um okay last question here rich over on patreon this comes

from marie soul she's actually been our longest patreon subscriber oh since i started the show so um she was super excited to to see you coming on here and she's a big fan of your work on ancient aliens so of course naturally she wants to ask i'm not saying it's aliens but it's alien what are your thoughts on ancient aliens. I mean, it's a simple question, but it's a loaded question. You know, in all of your research, is there evidence that this is a thing? Yep, I think so. I said as much in the alien agendas, but I have a caveat. So I think the caveat is, first of all, I think a lot of evidence that is portrayed as ancient alien evidence is not good evidence for that. And this is not to knock the show. I mean, look, they do their best, but a lot of it is just entertainment, right? Yeah,

nice production values. They're trying to have entertaining TV. I mean, hell, I knew the creator of ancient aliens. He was Kevin Burns. He passed away not long ago. Kevin was a great guy, and he was a total sci-fi nerd. In his office, is like old lost in space imagery and Planet of the Apes and Star Wars. and like, a guy is a complete sci-fi geek, and he loved this. For him, it was entertainment. It didn't mean that there wasn't something to it, but, you know, it's all about this is fun, this is interesting.

And that's what the show, I think, really tries to portray. With an emphasis on some serious issues, yes, I won't deny that. But I think a lot of the evidence that is being portrayed as for ancient aliens is probably not legit. But having said that, I think that we have been very likely subject to a long-term monitoring process. Yes. But we have to keep in mind a few things.

You go back 1,000 years, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 years. All right. And ask yourself, what could an alien species have done with us? What could we have done with them? You know, when you have human beings living in pre-urban hunting and gathering types of communities, could we have done a thing about? an alien presence. Literally nothing. What would have been the point? So, and what could they have done with us, except maybe take some of our DNA? Okay, fine, but it's not like we're going to have

some kind of relationship with these other beings. How would that be possible? You know, at the most, maybe they took some of us and bred us and created the human aliens, human-looking aliens, that we often encounter. That's entirely possible. So I think that there's, is reason to think that we've been subject to a long-term monitoring process. But I think things have been very, very different in the last century or more. And I say that, and I feel more and more, as time goes by, I feel stronger about this. So I think that there's a distinctive difference in the UFO phenomenon in the last century, i.e., there has been an explosion of UFO activity. And it's not that there wasn't a lot of UFO activity in the past, but let me just ask you and listeners, a question

question here. Think of a society like late 90 or mid to late 19th century America or Europe. Okay. So those were societies that were scientific in their orientation. They were very sophisticated. You had very smart people in America of the 1870s and 1880s, right? Very observant, very like can do about all kinds of things. and there was not any consciousness at all of UFOs or aliens. Why is that? No one was seeing them. There were a couple of unusual events in the skies that were noted. It's true.

But there was no UFO phenomenon. There was no awareness of anything. Why? Were they just that oblivious? I don't think so. It was a very, very capable people. I think there was no consciousness and awareness. of the UFO subject at that time because it just wasn't there in large numbers.

But it began to be here in large numbers, certainly measurably by the 1940s. Now, that makes sense. 1940s you see human society going through a convulsion of the Second World War and a massive explosion of science and technology. The reason I am convinced that we are being seen visited here in massive numbers today, and it is massive. is because of our own trajectory as a species, as a society. We are moving into what I call the fourth stage of humanity.

This is a major epoch-changing transition. We've only had, in my view, three other stages of humanity before this. Stage one, which went for hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of years, was hunting and gathering. Even before we looked like this, our hominin ancestors who stood upright, walked on two legs, hunted animals with big, sharp spears, and they hunted and killed them, and they lived in a certain way for a long, long, long, long time. Then, only 10,000 years ago, roughly, we started developing agriculture and domesticating

livestock and animals. That's stage two. That gives us settled human societies. It gives us the wheel. It gives us writing. It gives us metallurgy. It gives us, you know, everything from ancient Samarian society, the Egypt to the Roman Empire, to the Italian Renaissance, all about is stage two. It's agriculturally based humanity. And that gave us a good run. That was a great human society. But then comes stage three where we discover science, like serious science, you know, Galileo and Descartes and Newton and Leibniz and all of these geniuses who gave, who reoriented human consciousness into a completely different way, which immediately, Immediately on the heels of that, we have the industrial revolution.

They go hand in hand. And scientific and industrial revolutions utterly transformed our world, and they gave us the world that we were born into. That's stage three. But we're now moving into stage four, and this is the stage, I believe, that any visiting intelligence is particularly interested in because it's this stage that makes us like them. It's, well, what are some of the qualities of stage four? transhumanism, very strong AI, which we are now seeing in our society this year, really, for the first time in a big way.

You have other things like nanotech. You have advances in things like quantum computing. You have 5G and soon to be 6G, 24-7 surveillance of the entire human race, turning us into one big digital antil. So it's completely transforming human social organization under, one massive digital control, and it will completely transform human psychology and probably human physiology over the next coming century in big way. And with the amount of data that we now have access to, we never had access to data like this before, nor the ability to kind of crunch it and analyze it ever. So this is a qualitative transformation of the human species on par with the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago, absolutely on par with that.

So it's going to change our species and our civilization fundamentally. And it's so progress is not this linear thing. It, it, it advances by leaps and jumps. And we're doing, we're in the midst right now of a major jump into something totally different. I'm not sure I like this jump, by the way. And I don't think that I want to be part of it, to be honest with you. But, hey, what I think has no bearing on the.

outcome, it's happening, it's obviously happening, and no one knows how to stop it. It cannot be stopped. So we're going through this transformation, and we are leaping into their world, and they know this. Nuclear technology is only one part of that transformation. It's nukes, it's computers, it's AI, it's everything. You think of any of the disruptive technologies we're looking at today, and any one of them is world-changing, and now just start putting all of them together. And ask yourself, what is human society going to look like in 50 years or 100 years?

It's not going to look like this. And these beings know this and they are here for that reason because these transformations are making humanity potentially tremendously powerful. And we're really wrong if we think, oh, we'll never be at their level. We've got to disabuse ourselves of that very naive notion. we think, oh no, well, we could never achieve. There are eons ahead of us. Well, I don't think it works like that. Progress is not something that just goes forever and ever infinitely.

It's impossible. There's no such thing. You can't just keep advancing and progressing forever. The world doesn't work like that. Nothing works like that. At a certain point, we're going to hit a plateau where I think most of them are already at, and I think we are about to reach the beginning stages of that plateau. We may have other plateaus to reach entirely possible, but we're going to a big one right now.

And over the next century, I think we're going to solidify our position at that plateau. And things may very well level out for a while. I think that's totally possible. But when they do, we're going to be a very formidable species. And I think these other beings realize this. And I think maybe they want to get control over us or maybe they want to know, like, are these humans a problem or whatever? They may have different attitudes about this. But certainly it is our transformation that is the key.

They're here because of us. They're here because of where we are at on our unbelievable trajectory. Let's just stop and appreciate how dramatic the human transformation has been. We often take this stuff for granted because we're born. We're living in the 21st century and we're like, oh yeah, yeah, smartphones. Oh, yeah. Strong AI. Like it's the norm.

It's not the norm. This is brand new stuff and it is utterly disruptive. And by the way, we have no idea how stable our society is. We've only had to, this stuff is all new. We're creating a completely new living environment for our entire species. You know, we used to live. It was hard, but like you had a relatively stable environment.

Yes, you had climatic changes and all of that, but they didn't happen overnight. You could always kind of rely on your environment. It was always going to be there. You know, we were part of an integral, we're an integral part of an interconnected web of an ecosystem. Well, we've really kind of shot our ecosystem in a large way, and we've created this artificial ecosystem filled with digital stuff that,

you know, I mean, I'm talking to you virtually here. You know, that's kind of weird. How stable is this? We don't know. In the grand scheme of things, this is all really, really new. So I think they're here because we're very interesting right now. Are we going to flame out, like the greatest, you know, flame out, or are we going to jump into where they are? For that reason, I think right now humanity is the greatest show in this part of the galactic quadrant.

You know, in another few centuries, maybe it'll be another species. That'll be the greatest show. But right now it's us. because we are, as I say, we're about potentially to leap into their world. And that's what brings them here. So that started out with the question on ancient aliens. So I suspect the big transformation for us that really got their attention. Well, probably, you know, our invention of fire might have been one.

But then, you know, other landmarks along the way, they're thinking, oh, yeah, these standing up apes are pretty darn smart. keep an eye on them. You know, that type of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if they had the ability to do that back then. But it's, I think in the last 50,000 years, since we've really had complex language, that I think is the current assessment could be a little longer, probably about 50,000 years. When we've actually had complex ability to really communicate, you know, sophisticated ideas,

I think was what really set us on a path from the point of no return. turn. I think once that started, everything that we've achieved now is inevitable. Once you have the ability to manipulate information in terms of abstract language, it's almost like a done deal. It's like when are you going to get to the point where you can now manipulate information, abstract data, where you are discovering scientific secrets and mathematics and all of that. We figured it out. It took us about 50,000 years, which in the grand scheme of things may not be that long. Good point. It could be a freaking spec on the on the larger larger scope i get it wow that's fascinating um thank you thank you for answering those for us rich um well of course last question as always where can we find everything you're up

to yeah i would encourage people to i'm glad you've got patreon supporters i'm really glad you deserve that uh if they want to support me if they find it in their hearts or their uh desires they can go to Richard Olin members and become a member of my site. Or they can just go swing by and check out the free stuff. I have a lot of free material there, lots and lots. So you don't have to become a member. I have a YouTube channel. Oh, so my website is richardola members.com.

My YouTube channel is just Richard Olin Intelligent Disclosure. I'm sure it's easy to search and find. I try to put fresh content up there every so often, like maybe every other week. I'm not as rigorous about it as some people. I'm not like a hardcore YouTuber, but I do have an active presence on YouTube. And I do try to keep that going. Awesome. Yeah.

Go subscribe, guys. That's all I got for you, Rich. Again, I got to thank you for your time. You gave me a chance early on in my endeavors in this field, and I will be forever grateful to you. Brian, and it's a true honor. Thank you. And you don't need to thank me. You deserve it.

You are a great presence in this field, and I'm glad that we have you. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Somewhere in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber.

Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, add free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Sky's HQ. and help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support and keep looking up. You are now somewhere in the skies with your host, Ryan Spray. All right, guys, and he is back.

It has been a while, but we have a very good reason because he just came out with a brand new book. A History of U.S.O's Unidentified Submerged Objects, Volume 1. So welcome back to the show. Once again, Richard Dolan. Hi, Ryan. It's a pleasure. Very always happy to be a guest on your program. You've got a great podcast. And we've known each other for a long time. So it's always fun. Yes, we have. We've had some fun experiences at conferences. And, you know, I always bring this up when you come on. you were the first one to really give me a chance in this field, man. And you published my very first book. So I will forever be indebted to you for that.

A fine book, too. A really great book. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Well, hey, it has led to this podcast that you're on today. And we're going to talk all about the brand new book on a topic that, you know, has come a little bit more to the forefront. But it might be a subtopic of ufology that a lot of people aren't quite familiar with.

So, of course, the first easiest, most softball question for you. What is a U.S.O? Let's go. UFO's 101. Well, the thing about this field of ours, UFO to UAP and USO, we've gone through a lot of different acronyms over the many, many years. So USO today means unidentified submerged objects. So, you know, pretty straightforward. And think of a UFO under the water.

it's submerged in the water. In earlier times, USO was used, and it had actually meant unidentified submersible object, unidentified submarine object. And there were even other types of acronyms used for UFO and USO in earlier years. And I think it's really because we ourselves were not quite solid with what we thought we were dealing with. So the phenomenon of U.S.Os has always been kind of noted by researchers over many years. We've known that there's something going on in the waters of this planet, at least from time to time when they've been noted. And I think researchers really wondered, is this a formal distinction?

or is this just a case of sometimes these UFOs go into the water? And then they come out. Like how much of a big thing is it? So we didn't really even have our first book that dealt with this subject at all until the year 1970. I guess for some folks, that seems like a long time ago. But actually, it's not that long ago. There was one book, a very fine book.

But then after that, in the English language, nothing for about 40 years until the 2010s. We had another very good book on the subject by the late Carl Feintz. He did a nice job on it. And a couple of books or studies in other languages, Russian. The Italian UFO research group over there has done some work on the water-based aspect. But the fact is there has been very little. So it hasn't really been treated until very recently as a well-defined subset of what we call UOO.

or UAP. And so when I got into this about three years ago, and I'll do a lot of different projects from my website. I have a site, Richardola, members, and a very active community there. And I'll get asked questions of all types. And one dealt with a U.S.O case in the 1940s. And I did a like a video presentation on that back in 2022. And I got interested. I thought, you know, this is really quite fascinating. I've always been interested in this subset of the greater mystery. And I just asked myself, how many cases actually are there of these? Like, and where are they? How do I find them? How do you collect them? And so I remember all through the summer of 2022, I just went on a wild goose chase looking for these cases. Are there any

digital databases that I could look online? Turns out there were a couple. Were there like books or old out-of-print magazine from the 1980s or 70s? Yes, a lot of those. Some of them are quite expensive to acquire, by the way. But I really hunted them all down and then sifted through. I went through literally thousands of potential cases for inclusion and ended up with just a little under 700 for my three-volume study here. And it was a real adventure. It was a great. I call it a labor of love. It truly was one of the most fascinating research endeavors I've ever done or I think could ever do. there. That's amazing. And, you know, like you said, three volumes. Now, that is, here's volume one. And it's massive. I know. Yeah, yeah, I love the cover, by the way. Love, love, love the cover.

Well, that's Tracy, my wife, and organizing, she was the project manager on the cover. And yes, I love the great cover for that. Oh, awesome. Shout out. Yeah, two more good ones coming, too. Awesome. Well, okay. So, you know, I've probably brought this up to you in the past. My interest in the topic of UFOs really began with a personal citing that I had over the body of water, the St. Lawrence River in New York. I saw a black triangle over the water, coasted over, went over towards Canada. So, you know, this topic of USOs clearly is special to me. And to see a book finally come out covering the extensive history of these things is it's not only exciting, but

but it's essential. This is a huge part of the phenomenon and the data that hasn't been looked at. So to start with that data, Rich, I'd love to know, like, how did you even begin to compile the data on this? And, like, how do you differentiate these things? Were there patterns? Like, how did you go about the research process? Yeah, this is a core part of what this project ended up becoming.

And it didn't start out like that. I just started it in 2022 with the idea. of finding cases that I personally felt were compelling, that I felt needed to be resuscitated because they had been forgotten. And this was just a forgotten part of our history. I wasn't thinking in terms of data analysis or data extraction. After I had compiled all of the cases for all three volumes and written them all out, this is again, I have to credit and blame my wife. She said, you know, it would be great is if at the beginning of each of these narratives for these cases, wouldn't it be nice to have like just a quick reference of categories, like what color was the

object, how close was the witness to the object, what was the shape of the object, what did it do, was it below the water, did it emerge from the water, did it go into the water, and any other relevant things? And I thought, I had mixed feelings because it was obviously it was the right thing to do. It was a great advice, but I didn't want it because it was just a lot more work. But I thought I will do this because the book, it absolutely needed it. And my goodness, it was, you know, my wife actually has provided a lot of excellent advice along the way. And it's hard for me to judge which was the best bit of advice, but maybe that was. That might be number one because it transformed the whole nature of this project. So I went back through all of the

cases, everyone. This took several months. And I extrad. And I extraded. extracted about 15 data points from each case. And I tried to be very methodical, very objective. And then once that was done, then I just thought these should be in a spreadsheet. And so I ended up creating a very, very, very large spreadsheet, which is a free download. Anyone can read it. But and then once the spreadsheet was there, I was able to see all kinds of patterns that I would never ever have noticed otherwise. And I'll, you know, and I can discuss some of those patterns.

But the first thing I would want to say is when, when I started seeing a whole array of unique and logical patterns, it made me feel a lot more confident, frankly, over the integrity of the data itself. Because it seemed like there are, there are consistencies here that are fascinating. So I'll give you a couple of examples. I made kind of a big thing of these in the book itself because I did have a whole section where I discussed the data. I do a very extended data analysis in this book here. One is a simple one. It's day versus night.

One of the, I tracked, was the object seen in daylight or at night? It's a simple distinction. And what I found was really quite remarkable. So all of the cases, up until the late 1960s, pardon me, specifically the end of 1967, it's 51% of all of my cases collected occurred in the daytime. So almost 50-50, slight edge to daytime, but it's almost exactly even. After 1967, three quarters of them almost immediately all started going at night. And that has been the case to this day.

So it's quite a significant change. And on top of that, military versus civilian cases, cases, it's even more extreme. So military cases, even in the early years, were much more likely to occur at night. In the early years, up to the late 60s, about two-thirds of all military U.S.O encounters were at night, whereas a significant majority of civilian ones were in the daytime. After the late 60s, nearly 90% of military cases ever since have occurred at night in regarding USOs. So it's really very remarkable. And when I look at that, it seems to me this is not a random outcome.

This is a deliberate, distinct behavior that these objects are engaging in. A, a behavioral adaptation or change over time, specifically during the late 60s. So that's interesting. And then B, they seem to have the ability to distinguish between military and non-military vessels, which shouldn't surprise us, but it's interesting to see. that you get this in the data itself, that there's distinction in behaviors. So that's one thing. And I'll mention one other off the top of my head, which is also equally fascinated to me, which is instances of electromagnetic interference. This is one thing that I tracked.

Was there EM interference? Like did compasses go crazy? Did electrical systems go down? Did communications or weapons systems in the case of navies go down? Things like this. So I tracked all of that. From the 19 early 50s onward, and I say early 50s because that was my first recorded instance of a U.S.O engaging in EM interference that I was able to determine. So from that point onward, a lot of cases, I had almost 10% of all U.S.O cases had EM interference, 9.5%. It's quite a lot. One out of 10. Yeah. However, it gets even more interesting when you distinguish military to non-military.

So military instances are 20% EM interference, like communications going down on an aircraft carrier for like a half hour, for example, things like this, weapon systems going down. So it's double for military. And then even crazier is in the few instances of alleged missing time connecting to a USO or sightings of an alleged being. in connection with the USO. So when you add those two together, that's still a minority. It's like 6% of all of my cases. However, those instances showed a likelihood of four times the average

of having electromagnetic interference instead of two times as in military cases. So that's an interesting pattern. I would never have thought about such a pattern. And I didn't think about it even when I was going through all of these cases in and writing them down. I didn't, I didn't see that pattern until I saw it in the spreadsheet. And it was kind of a shocking moment to me. It was like, you know, you can go through these cases and cases and cases and

cases and not see the patterns until you see them in a certain format with the data right there in front of you. Right. Right. And the EM interference for missing time. Like, it kind of makes sense when you think about it. It's like, and the last thing I'll just say here, it tells me it indicates. to me that electromagnetic interference isn't simply or always some random after effect of the

craft themselves. It seems to me that there are instances where it is intentional or it seems to be because it follows specific patterns. That is interesting. And yes, I was just going to stress that too. You can look at the after effect of the technology of said craft or phenomena. You can look at the aftermath and that can be a set of data, whereas then you have the craft itself and the patterns related to the technology behind that craft. So yeah, yeah, the more you zoom out, the more patterns you can obviously make with a lot of these things. It's fascinating. Yeah, there are a lot of these patterns, but those are two good ones that I love to discuss. That's cool. Because it's amazing. Right, right. Well, I want to rewind a bit. Now, you mentioned like

1950s and everything. But I mean, your book goes way further back than the 1950s. So what would you say would be some of the most like the earliest accounts that you came across and that you work? Yeah. I really tried to determine this. This is a very, very important part of my research. So, you know, because when you're looking at a phenomenon like this, you want to, you want to try to be as subjective as you can, obviously, because we're trying to understand what is the truth. And the truth is, if there is a presence here, one of the important things we really must get a handle on, in my opinion, is how long have they been here? We hear all the time people saying, oh, they've been here forever.

And to the point where it's, I feel it's almost become a cliche. And I'm not saying there hasn't been a longstanding presence because I personally think there has been. But that is not to say that that presence has been consistent necessarily over many centuries. My take on this phenomenon, whether we're talking aerial or water-based, is that there probably was a longstanding presence, but it seems to me much more low-key, much, much more low-key than it is today. And I think everything did explode in terms of quality and quantity of reports immediately after World War II. That is what it looks like to me.

But prior, yes, there are some good cases, including U.S.O. cases, but very few. I just have to stress this. So I looked at some really potential early cases. I looked at the Christopher Columbus siting, for example. And that's a good one. That's not a sure shot U.S.O, though. It's interesting. Upon approaching the new world, he was actually a day out from landfall in

of the Dominican Republic, Hispaniola. They saw Columbus and another crew member saw a very distinct light. And a lot's been talked about regarding that. And it is interesting. But I don't include that as an official case either. And that is because as good as reliable as the witnesses were, and I think they're quite reliable. We don't really know what they were.

They were close to land. Did they see a torch on like an elevated part of the shore? It's possible. I don't really know what that was. It is not obvious that that was a U.S.O. So I leave it as I discuss it, but it's not an official case. There are some other early cases like this, whether in Europe or in China, China had a lot of recorded cases that are interesting.

But the problem is with these earliest cases, unfortunately, they're so threadbare that is very difficult to know what you're actually dealing with. and many of them are quite vague to be perfectly honest, and it's just hard to know. And some of them just don't make sense to me. I'll just be perfectly blunt about it. And some are clearly social commentary. For example, there is one from England,

from the 17th century, the 1660s, we're told. Object supposedly comes out of the River Severn near Bristol, described as looking like one of those kites that the young boys fly. This is in 1661. one very interesting yeah uh but then when you read it it the the kite or the object took the form of a of a stern looking man in the sky pacing back and forth and then took the image of a gallant man on horseback got riding back and forth and then took the image of a beautiful woman in a gown and you read that and you realize england had just gone through uh their own civil war

very bit very severe one they cut they had killed their king not long ago. Oliver Cromwell had just died by this point. And so it's clearly, to my reading, an interpretation of the politics of the time. The grim man was a Puritan, was Cromwell, perhaps. The man on horseback was the new King Charles II, who was a gallant cavalier, as a matter of fact, a good horse, horseman. And then the woman I interpret as, you know, peace, justice, tranquility, whatever. It's clearly symbolic to me and I can't take it seriously as a U.S.O account because the fact as many of these societies, we need to understand the social and political and the customs of the time to really understand them, which I think is not, we don't do this enough in the UFO field.

Having said all that, the first really great case that I'm confident of takes place in 1717. So it's kind of late in the day. I don't include any from 1,000 years ago, or Roman times or whatever. I just didn't find them. If someone else finds one, please let me know. I will absolutely consider it. But in 1717, there was a French ship off the coast of Martinique and the Caribbean. French captain of the ship wrote about it in his log.

It was at about 2.30 in the morning. So dead of night. There was a half moon out. So light was somewhat there. Visibility was terrible. And he sees off the side of the boat and a vertical shaft above the water. Like maybe, you know, maybe less than a meter tall. And it's going alongside the ship.

Like he described it as like a masthead, but it was out of the water. And I have not the slightest idea of what that could be conventionally. It was a very, it's not the most incredible detailed siding, but it was matter of fact, He clearly wasn't trying to make a point here. He was just noting a very strange thing that you read about it 300 years later still doesn't make any sense. Yeah. It directs me to some kind of could it be a monitoring device.

Who knows? Something checking you know. Right, right. Well, that's interesting. The whole monitoring thing. Like I know there's obviously cases that modern euphology can look to when it comes to USOs, such as obviously the Tick-Tac event that everyone's. talking about for the best seven, eight years now at this point. However, were there any cases,

Rich? Let's start, I guess, with military, Navy vessels or anything like that, that really stand out to you, like maybe a favorite or two military-wise, yeah. Military case is comprised about 20% of all of the U.S.O cases I have. That's a lot. Of course, that means 80% are not military. So there's a lot for civilians, of course, but a lot of military cases, many, U.S. Navy, quite a few Soviet Navy cases that are fascinating. And navies of other nations, the Royal Navy, Argentine Navy, France has a couple of cases, their Navy, and Australia, quite a few. So several U.S. Navy cases are extraordinary. I mean, just mind-blowingly extraordinary. Most of these cases, not all, but most will come from a retired Navy guy who are like 20, 30 years

after the fact writes to some blog site and says, wasn't supposed to talk about this, but I'm getting late in the game, and I just have to get this off my chest, and they will sometimes anonymously, sometimes they'll give their name. It depends, and they will tell their story. And they're very consistent.

These stories are very consistent. But one that has blown my mind, this will go in the second volume, although I do a little write-up in the intro to this first volume, happened in 1971. in the, I think just north of the Caribbean, possibly Bermuda Triangle, a lot of Bermuda Triangle cases. Anyway, this was the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier.

It was July 2nd, 1971 at 8 p.m. We have got the exact date time. We have the name of the man who reported it as well, and he was running communications on the JFK. So we're talking major U.S. aircraft carrier. They had just done a long series of carrier qualifications, basically tests, detailed tests to check out all of the systems and their response to emergencies and so forth. And they were now north of the Caribbean headed toward

port. And eight o'clock and the witness is at this comm station where he hears on the intercom someone freaking out on the ship screaming. It's God. It's the end of the world. That's what he heard. So it was like screaming. So he leaves his station. He goes out to the deck to look. And now it's 8 o'clock at night, so it's dark. But he sees a glowing orb spherical object that's like orange, red, yellow colors glowing. He said with about half the strength of daylight.

So pretty intense. And he's just watching it. He said it was the size of a beach ball held at arm's length. So fairly large. Yeah. And. And everyone's just going crazy on the ship. He's watching it for about half a minute before the ship goes to battle stations,

General Quarters. So we have to go back down to his communication station. And he doesn't see it ever again. The ship stays on general quarters for about roughly half an hour, during which time all communications were gibberish. So nothing was going in or out of the ship in terms of communication. So the ship was isolated and was not able to communicate. He implied that weapons systems were also inoperable during this.

So they perhaps attempted to launch an aircraft or fire weapon or who knows. That did not happen. There's a little bit of an aftermath to this where the ship's captain a few days later got on the loud speaker and said, before we debord, I just want to remind you all that certain things that happen aboard a U.S. Navy warship are not to be disseminated. where he wasn't specific, but the man writing it in said, we all knew what he was talking about. Yeah.

So that's 1971. And these glowing orbs, there's quite a few of those in the USO collection, as there are in aerial encounters. You get a lot of these orbs. But that was one that completely disabled a major United States aircraft carrier. And there are other such stories

that were U.S. aircraft carriers and also Soviet warships were equally disabled by these things. Yeah, yeah, I remember reading a few of those in the book. How about a civilian case? You know, for someone like me, I spend all my time interviewing civilians about their UFO sightings. And oftentimes they can be much weirder than a lot of the military ones for many different reasons. But does one really stick out to you in terms of like a very humanistic response to it? Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one I keep coming back to, but I've mentioned it in a couple of other interviews, and I don't want to keep repeating the same one.

But there is, how about this one? From the 50s, I just love this case. And I have mentioned it once or twice, so forgive me. But this was in 1952 in an utterly remote region, the Aleutian Islands. One of them is known as Shemya Island. It's closer to Russia than it is to mainland Alaska. So it's way out there. This is right on the Bering Sea there. It's very inhospitable remote. If you look for it on a map, you will definitely realize this is not a tourist destination at all. It's very difficult to be there.

In the wintertime, when this occurred, never gets above freezing. The winds are intense, everything. So there was a guy who was a civilian working there. He was not military. He was a rigor. He described himself, I guess, in oil. and he had this day off.

I've often wondered, what do you do on your day off in Shemma Island? Probably not much. So he was outside, it was daytime, and he's just looking out of the ocean. He's like, what else are you going to do? It's January, 1952. He's looking at it,

and then he says, I heard this noise above me. I looked up, it was a whirring, whining noise, and he saw this craft. It was very similar to the way Kenneth Arnold described the flying saucers in 19, 47. It's kind of wing, like a flying wing design. He said it was shaped like a bat. It had these two wings that came back. No fuselage. There was a dome in the center that was glowing red. And there were two greenish lights on either wing, you could say. And it was just there. And he's watching it going down like a leaf, he said, like this. And then it stopped about 75 feet above his head. It's pretty low. certainly close enough to get a very good look at this thing. And it stopped silent and dead motionless,

which he wasn't describing the winds, but I know the winds there are always intense. So this thing is just there. And then he said it tilted to go down and it just slid into the water. And he gasped, he said. And then he stood there for as long as he could, waiting for this thing to come out of the water, but it never did.

So to me that's amazing. I've often thought like it had to be that moment when he's standing on a rock looking out at this thing had to be probably the most memorable experience of his entire life. Like whatever else, his name was Eldon White. And it was until 14 years later that he wrote this handwritten letter to NICAP, the UFO organization. And Jesse said, look, you know, this is what happened to me 14 years ago. Back in 1952, when this occurred, who would you report this to? There were no easy places to do that. So he writes it out years later.

And no one knows who this guy is. He was totally forgotten by history. And his sighting was forgotten. But my God, just, you got to wonder, like, what is this? So you could this have been experimental technology launched from where? Like, there's no place nearby that you could practically have done something like this. It makes no sense. It doesn't seem like natural phenomenon in any way.

The way he described it was extremely technological. So that's, to me, that's a genuine USO for sure. Absolutely. Man, you had me a handwritten letter, first of all. I'm just imagining him, like, putting it in a message in a bottle and sending it across the ocean. I found that case from the late Carl Fint, who, Carl really did a lot of major legwork on this. and he deserves and receives a lot of credit in my book. He went through a lot of the archives.

So that letter went from NYCAP to the organization Kufo, the Center for UFO Studies, and they had the letter. And Carl just was in the Kufos archives and found it and put it on his now defunct website, but was where I found it. So that's how we get these cases. You know, it's a major team effort.

I'm not going in and just doing all 100% of this myself. many, many other people over the years have laid the groundwork for this book. Absolutely, man. It takes an army. I mean, I wouldn't have a podcast if people didn't report their UFO sightings to me. Exactly. And working with colleagues like yourself, Peter Robbins, and people who bring things to me. So, yes, it truly does take an army for sure.

So I'm recently in the past couple years, I've been traveling to and from Nova Scotia. You know, at least twice, sometimes three times a year now. I live in old Scotia. I go to New Scotia. And one of the big things there, obviously, is the Shag Harbor UFO incident. I have recently spoken at their conference out there. And I just finished filming a feature documentary about the Shag Harbor UFO incident, where I got this. That's fantastic.

Oh, my gosh, man. I'll be the prime witnesses. I'll be the first, I promise. But you do touch on this case in the book, among many others. So what do you think? I'd love to know your personal thoughts at the Shag Harbor event. Where does it lay in the pantheon of U.S.Os? And yeah, it's extremely important. You know, 99% of the cases that I found for this study were utterly unknown, even to experience research, as I would hazard to say, most of the cases I found were just, utterly forgotten. But Shag Harbor, 1967 is certainly not one of those cases. It is really like

the Roswell of U.S.Os in many ways. It's got that level. I would say Shag Harbor, and now we could include the Tick-Tack Nimitz encounter of 2004, which has a U.S.O component. But really, Shag Harbor, is incredible. So Shag Harbor is, as you point out, it's Nova Scotia, which is right off the coast there of Canada. It's kind of northeast of Maine. And it's sitting out there in the water. It's a fisherman's, you know, that's, oh yeah. That's the history there. They fish, they go whaling and all of it. It's lots of, lots of water. So on October 4th, 1967, late at night, getting close to midnight, you had multiple people at this location. They see four basically bright orange lights. They're kind of in a 45 degree angle, and they descend into the water right off the shore there.

And there was a single white light that was visible on the surface for a little while as well before that also disappeared. They have guys going out in the boats. They see this weird yellow foam on the water. We talked about that a lot. Basically, the RCMP responds, and they wondered that an aircraft crash. There was no aircraft. They checked with aviation authorities. There's nothing. No planes were missing. no planes are operating. They send Canadian divers out there. They didn't find anything initially. But what makes this case extraordinary

is what investigators later in covered. Basically, you're talking Chris Stiles and Don Ledger were the two who really dug into this. They were local there. And Chris is still doing this, of course. So the object, according to numerous witnesses, moved underwater toward a secret submarine detection station in the water there.

And you had a situation where the naval vessels were observing not one but two underwater objects that were engaged in some kind of repair operations. This went on for about a week. In fact, during that period, a Soviet vessel appeared as well, but was escorted away. This became, you had Canadian, U.S., Soviet, all converging here. Obviously everyone realized this was something important. And then shortly after this, this is just remarkable, off a little bit off the coast, out getting out into the water, into the open water, two both underwater objects emerged from the sea and just rapidly took off.

So they, according to at least the witnesses that Chris and Don Leisure found, they did that. By the way, there was an interesting case in that exact same area less than a year later in May of 1968. About 30 miles southwest of Shag Harbor, same area there. You had a captain of a fishing boat and then another captain of another fishing boat all in the area. They see this bright red light that came, I can't recall if it came out of the water. It was low over the water, went right over the water, went right over. their boat at night radiating this intense heat. Actually, to the point of burning them,

the captain goes into his cabin to escape from it, and he still feels the heat inside his cabin. He's on the radio with another ship as this object moved over him and then over this other boat. And, yeah, it was seen going on the water at times and lifting up off the water until it was gone. So you had two fishing boats

in the exact same area, catching some very bizarre globular spherical object that they could only identify as an intense light. Who knows what it really was? It was later seen, I think it was just floating. That's right, on the water along the Nova Scotia coast. Just a little, um, after. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. If there's something about the water there, man, I'm telling you. It's pretty crazy. That region? Yeah. Boy, I'm just going here, aren't I? But there are various hotspots for this activity. We all talk about Catalina Island.

We all talk about Puerto Rico. Yes, and yes to both. But another one is that whole Atlantic Coast region. As you go up from like the mid-Atlant, actually Florida, very intense. But then as you go up the U.S. coast there from like Virginia onward, all the way up to Nova Scotia and in fact beyond, that's very heavy activity. of U.S.O's, that whole area there. I love it. It's so interesting. Well, another sort of, I guess, sub-topic within U.S.Os could be alien abductions.

Is this something you tackle in the book at all? I mean, you've got like the Aligash one that happened out on the water. Obviously, Pascagoula is the more visible one that's out there. Yeah, absolutely. So the Alligash, Those are both from the 1970s, and if I were to include them, they would go in the second volume. They're not official cases for me. But actually, I may add something about them in one of my chapter introductions, because they are noteworthy.

The reason they're not official cases is because in neither of those instances was the object definitively seen touching the water that I'm aware of. Even past Agula, that's 1973, Mississippi, the object, according to the two witnesses, Calvin Parker, and, oh, crap, man, I'm drawing a blank here. Anyway, I know this case so well, too, but they saw the object, I think, directly above the water, not on the water. So I'm like, I could. And the same with the Alagash case from 76, the four guys, they were fishing. They were abducted out of their fishing boat, so that's definitely noteworthy. But there are missing time cases that I found in my research, both back in the 40s and 50s and right up until into the 21st century.

I've got a number of cases where it does seem likely that something very strange happened where you've got missing time. One of them is quite fascinating. It's from like around 1982, right by Catalina Island off the coast of ballet there. And there is a man who was a very experienced boat boatman, experienced scuba diver as well. So he's doing a late night boat from the mainland to Catalina Island. So he arrives at the island close to midnight. This is summer of 82. And he realizes he's actually several miles too far east of where he needs to go to a place called two harbors.

which is on the western side of the island. And he didn't arrive there. So he's like, okay, well, I'll just go along the coast, a few miles, and I'll get there. And that was when he ran into this bright yellow square under the water. It had absolutely sharp corners. And it extended about one football field on either side of his boat. It's very large. So think of an extremely large, yellow, glowing, bright, purple.

square beneath your boat at midnight off the coast there of Catalina Island. He said it was visible for 15 seconds like a light. It turned on and then turned off. So it's very well defined. He finally gets to two harbors and it's two hours later. So it should not have taken anything like that. He lost time for sure. And he wrote, he said, look, he wrote this to Mufon some years later. He said at the time I wasn't really thinking about USOs. What did I know about that? But then I learned about U.S.Os and I thought, is that what I encountered?

And as you know, from your research and many listeners, I'm sure are aware, when people have a strange encounter like this and they're missing time or some strange thing happens, they often don't think about it for years and years and years. It's like you just have this weird thing happen and you just chalk it off, you shrug it off, and you forget about it. you put it away in this little corner of your mind because what do you do with it you don't know how it makes sense of it defense mechanism yeah yeah so that's what happened to him and that was definitely missing time case there was another one where um a woman this is in i think 2010

2011 this will be in volume three she was i think in Alabama Mississippi down in the American South there uh she was at the beach at night alone, enjoying the weather, enjoying the scenery. And she also had a very strange visual from an object that I think had come out of the water. My memory is a little fuzzy on this one. But it came toward her. Things got kind of crazy. The next thing she knows, she goes to a diner to make sense of what she had, and she realized that she'd lost a couple of hours of time. And it was, you know, there's a lot of fuzziness to some of these cases. Like you have something weird happen in connection to a siting.

And we don't always know how to process it because I think there's definitely a level of cognitive manipulation. It goes on with many of these cases where there is missing time and the likelihood or possibility that someone was taken or messed with in some way. Right. Wow. Okay, I want to, if it's okay, Rich, I want to circle back to this yellow square thing under the water. That imagery is just sticking with me. But it brings me to a question, I'm sure a lot of people are wondering. Bases.

Do you cover this at all? I mean, we've heard for years that there's these underwater bases. You know, Atec is a big one that I did a lot of research on early in my UFO research. I don't remember exactly where it is, but in the Caribbean, I believe, if I'm not mistaken. Might lose my euphologist badge, if I'm wrong. No, no. But yeah, is that a thing? Did you come up with this in your work?

Are these things coming out of and going into like a base of some sort? Yeah, I think the answer to that is probably yes. So absolutely, this is something that has to be addressed in any study of this. And I quite, I know that I have even more that I'll be saying about this in volumes two and three. Because it, it'll come up. But yeah, the idea of the base. So there are definite hotspots, as I mentioned. Probably, in my opinion, the number one hotspot would go to Puerto Rico in the area just around that.

Catalina Islands up there. Nova Scotia up there. And other parts of the world as well. So then you ask yourself, like, what is there evidence? that some of these are bases. And I think yes. But the fact is no one, I mean, can say this for certain, right? No one actually absolutely knows this. But there's been a lot of suspicion for many years about a base just north of Puerto Rico and around Puerto Rico. Actually, multiple bases. My first guess for a base might be near or around the Puerto Rico trench, which is just north of that island. that trench goes extremely deep.

U.S. vessels can, we cannot go down there. It's far too difficult. And yet we have U.S. O cases where objects have been tracked by the Navy going into that trench. Certainly they would. We can't chase them there. We can't get down there. There's talk, Timothy Good, and a couple of his books covered this unearthly disclosure and alien base. Both of those are very fine books.

he talked about how Puerto Rican researchers believe there was a base off the west coast of the island from like Cabo Rojo in the southwest going out to a little island called Mona Island there and there's a lot of activity for sure so I think probably yes it makes sense to me Catalina Island wouldn't I wouldn't be shocked in the least if there's some kind of base down there and when I say a base I can't see say that I know exactly how it operates, but I would suspect it would it be below the ocean floor. That would be the most logical thing. Like if you have the ability to excavate below the seabed, and that can be done. I mean, it's involved. It takes a lot of technology and science and dedication, but it's not an impossibility. That would be a secure environment for you. And there could be very good motivations, especially if you're a non-human intelligence, you are here. Let us say, you are interested in observing these human beings and this amazing world that we have. There'd be a lot of reasons you'd want to be observing, monitoring, and maybe engaging with it to some extent.

Where would you go? Well, these human beings, they look and they see everything. We're very observant. We're very nosy. We get our sensors and our eyes and ears everywhere. and particularly in the last century, we have really gone kind of crazy with that. Yeah, down in the ocean would be a very reasonable place

if you could set up operations. You might do that. It would be quite secure. And also secure from environmental disturbances as well. Yeah, very good points. Right. I never really thought about that. Like we look at the UFO phenomenon

as a extraterrestrial thing coming from space often. You know, maybe that was. the case at one point and because we started realizing it and acknowledging it and capturing it on these crazy things called video cameras and now cell phones they were like oh boy we got to hide somewhere else like let's go down where they aren't looking and where we should be looking for for things like that this might be why um you know i i have very few convincing uso cases from ancient times where there are actually some pretty good aerial UFO or UAP sightings from ancient times. Not a lot, not as many as some people think, but there's some.

But the water-based ones are hard to find. And maybe it's just because they didn't need to go to the hassle of setting up an under-ocean base back then. It was easy enough to set up something above the ground because we weren't spread out as much. We weren't as invasive as we have become. So it's possible that the U.S.O phenomenon is itself an adaptation to our own continual technological and scientific advancement. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to every week. But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth.

In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority. to ask our guests your listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow. So to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Advancement. My last question for you, Rich, and then I have some awesome listener questions if you're willing to stick around. Thank you. Advancement.

Now, the cases, like you said, stretch far, far back. Have you seen an evolution at all of the technology being displayed by USOs from like, let's say, Columbus up to like the Tic Tac of today? Or are we seeing like the same sort of phenomena happening, like this term transmedium that's kind of the buzzword right now? Do you think we're dealing with the same phenomenon we dealt with back during Columbus times? then, you know, and now, I guess? I would say from the 18th and 19th centuries onward, yes, it's the same phenomenon. I can come, and maybe earlier, but definitely. So, for example, there is an amazing case from 1825.

It's pretty early, right, 200 years ago. And it was involving a British ship in the Pacific Ocean there and an orange, just like with the 1971 JFK aircraft carrier case, you get this orange spherical thing that comes out of the water twice, according to the ship's log 3.30 in the morning. I can't explain that in any naturalistic way. And that's an orange sphere very much that could have been described in any 20th or 21st century case.

So that's quite consistent. And that's transmitting. And there are a couple of other decent. transmedium cases, at least in my opinion, from the 19th century. In fact, there are a couple. Not many, but there's a few. And there are a few cases from that period of time that I can't prove that they were transmitting, but they were very low over a large body of water. And I included some of those cases. And some of them are described like a craft. There's one of 1870 over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a ship and they said this is not a technical U.S.O, but I included it.

It was an aerial object. Again, they're like dead center between Brazil and North Africa. Like you've got a thousand miles of water wherever you look. And this low object under the clouds was just casually going over their ship, which they got, they saw it for, I think, 20, 30 minutes. It was a while until it just drifted out of sight. And look, there's nothing. There's no aerial object that's supposed to be there.

And it was described in a very mechanical manner by the captain of the ship. So I think we're talking objects here. These are not all looking like naturalistic amorphous blobs. Certainly through the 20th century, there's a number of these things where they're described as disc-shaped. cigar-shaped pretty consistently. So what I think changes is their behavior. Like I noted, the behavioral change of going from mostly daytime to mostly nighttime.

But in terms of their appearance, no, I've got to say the appearance is quite consistent over a long period of time, fairly consistent. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right. Well, I'd love to move to these listener questions if that's cool. You bet. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. I put a call out for these and I have not received this many questions in a while. So I did what any entrepreneur does, Rich. I went to Patreon first. Those who support my efforts, they get put at the front of the line to ask questions. So I'm going to go to our Patreon subscribers here. Our first one comes from, um, uh, Ifa, pronounced. I pronounced IFA. She's from Ireland, actually. She wanted to make it clear how to pronounce her name. So thank you, IFA. The famous Nellis Air Force-based radar tracking case supposedly detected an object emerging from the ocean. Do you cover this in your book at all?

Well, okay, so that's a little confusing to me, to be honest, because when you think of the famous Nellis case, I'm thinking of the 1994 tracking of perhaps an ARV over there. over a dry lake, not an actual lake or not a body of water. I mean, Nellis Air Force Base is in the middle of just dry, flat ground. That's what I thought. So there's no ocean in that region that I can think of unless Ifa or this person is thinking of something totally different that I can't imagine. But Nellis Air Force Base is in the driest of the dry. So I'm not really sure.

But the case that I'm thinking of is from 1994. That was leaked to the TV show Hardcover. copy a year or two later. And that's a heck of a case. I mean, that's a fascinating event that describes an object that to this day is very difficult to explain conventionally. Yeah. But I don't know about the water connection there. I'm sorry. Right. Unless it traveled really, really far. Yeah, yeah, which is definitely possible. Cool. But we have no information about that being near body of water, I'm aware of. Very good. Yeah. Well, okay. To kind of play off. of that question then. Any really fascinating videos of U.S.Os in your research? Only very recently.

Yeah. One of these actually was on one of George Knapp's episodes on his Netflix series. I forget the name of it. I watched it. It's really good. And that one's off of the West Coast near the Channel Islands, near Catalina Island, where on his video, and I think this looks very compelling. You see this light in the distance coming down to the water and going into the water. And you see the glow of the water after this light submerged into the water. That's quite interesting. And we have, you know, we've got some of the video that Jeremy Corbell was able to get out. I think it was the USS Omaha case from 2019. Those aren't U.S.Os, but they, one of them is. There is one where the object is seen entering water there.

So we have a few. That's on thermal cam, I believe. But in terms of earlier ones, no, not a lot of video. A couple of alleged photographs, which was difficult for me in most cases to display my book for copyright reasons, which is why I had a very good illustrator to do a lot of these for me. Oh, right. We should mention that. The illustrations in the book, too.

Alan Levine did really excellent work. Fantastic. Equally great for the next two volumes. It got really good depictions of stuff. some of these cases. But as far as video, no, it's tough. You know, it's tough. I mean, first of all, USO cases are actually rare compared to aerial cases. Yeah. We have to understand it. It's out of, it's less than one percent of all of the cases. And I think probably a lot less than one percent. Just because we're not allowed in the water. We're just not there. Yeah, we're land base.

Yeah. We're land creatures. And so you get a lot of these USO cases. that attract near ashore, which is where we are. And it really begs the question how much is being missed farther out at sea, and I'm sure quite a bit. Absolutely. Very good point. Well, to play off of the photograph thing, Joshua R on Patreon asks, the 1971 U.S. S. Trappang photos have always intrigued me and other people.

Do you have any information to corroborate or dismiss these photos? I mean, you Google UFO water, and these trampang photos are going to be like the first thing that pops out. They're striking. Yeah. Well, actually, I cover this in the second volume, which will be out soon. So for people who don't know, so this is 1971, the tripang was a submarine in the Arctic Ocean at the time. This is in March of 1971. And the images first appeared about 10 years ago, I think, in 20.

2015 or around then a researcher got them from some source in Europe, and they were then published in a French magazine, and they got out. So I don't have them here to show, but they are dramatic. There's a lot of reasons. I'll throw them up here in post-production. I'll put one of them up so people can see it. Yeah, I think, I mean, the short answer is I don't know what I think about these. So there are definitely reasons to be cautious about the Treypang photos.

You know, I mean, I guess to be expected admirals and other Navy personnel who have been contacted all said, no, we didn't see anything unusual there. We only saw ice. Okay, so you could expect that. But then you have claims of photo manipulation, at least that have been put forth. I look at some of these claims and I don't know how convinced I am of that, to be perfectly honest. I'm lucky because I still have a little bit of time before the second volume goes out. And I'm still actually, that is maybe one of a few cases that I'm probably going to go over one last time before I make a final decision.

But then you have alternate explanations like maybe these objects were a naval target balloon that was used for weapons. best testing. That's probably the biggest conventional explanation that I've I've heard. There are historical photographs of 20th century naval balloon that have a resemblance to what you see in the Treypang images. So that's a possible one that I didn't feel was believable. Someone talked about, what was it called the, an effect that I'd never heard of before, the Fatah Morgana effect. Those are ways like photos that might show Natural phenomena looking different

Like icebergs Looking not like icebergs I found that bizarre Apparently it's a real thing I have a very difficult time thinking That's what we're looking at here So I don't think that these photos have been debunked In a conclusive way

But I do think We don't have enough information about the context Of what was going on there that I am confident knowing what the heck we were dealing with here. So it's in the book and it's one of those unknowns, in my opinion. All right. There you go, Joshua. It's in the book.

I love it. Well, to piggyback off of that, Rich, you know, we just had like a former Navy Admiral, Rear Admiral testify before Congress about U.S.os. Did you talk to Tim Gulladay? at all in the work that you did? Absolutely. Yeah. No, Tim and I actually talked on several occasions and quite a lot of detail in the course of my doing the research.

He was able to provide commentary on my manuscript, and it was very useful going back and forth with him. So, yeah, Tim, Tim was a very valuable reader for me for this book. Cool. I don't know what else to say about that. I mean, he's interested in this, and I think he's definitely of the strong opinion that this is a real phenomenon for sure. Cool. Awesome. Well, I guess moving away from USA's a little bit, Melissa T on Patreon asks, what do you make of David Grush and his new appointment as a staffer for Representative Burleson's UAP work?

Yeah, what do you make of this new development? I think it's great. Yeah, Eric Burleson, he's Republican out of Missouri, he's one of the real leaders in Congress pushing for what we can call UAP transparency. I've spoken with him myself. I think Burleson's right on. He's like he's very, I think he's very genuinely engaged in this subject in a positive way. So I think it's good that Gresh is, he's a staffer now for Burleson.

I think it's a temporary assignment, like a few months, four months, I believe. Four months, yeah. Yeah. And the reason I think Gresh is very useful here is he, I think he will help. First of all, he knows a lot. Gresh knows much more about this than Burleson or any Burleson staffers do. So he can help, I think, to maybe navigate through, you know, the process of like, what are some good questions in areas of investigation that Burleson and Burleson.

and Burleson's colleagues can undergo to attempt to look for the goods, the assets that Grush has said many times. Like I know where these assets are located. Let's go get them. And so I think it's good. I'm hoping that this actually leads to some positive outcomes. I don't think it's impossible.

Cool. Yeah. Grush has an ability to ask good questions that Congress might otherwise overlooked. So I think it's very good that he's, he's part of that process. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it'll turn into something more full time

or whatnot. We'll see. We'll see. In your opinion, Rich, Anthony on Patreon asks, what do you think is the most credible USO case from the last decade? Also, what is the most laughable one that you look at for stress relief?

Do you have any that are just so bug nuts that you just are like, I don't know if I should put this in there. Well, there's a number of very good cases that I can think of that I would say are credible. One thing that I did for this project is to create an evidence rating system. This is one of the last things that I did, but I did it for every one of the cases. So in other words, I created a set of five criteria by which I would try to measure the strength of the evidence per se.

not necessarily like determining if the case is true or not. That's a little different. You know, a case that comes to you from your grandfather that he told you, you know, 20 times before he passed away, say, and then you tell a researcher, in terms of evidence, that might be considered weak, but are you going to not believe it? It's your grandfather. You're going to believe him. So a lot of these cases that are weak evidentiary in terms of evidence can be very, very true.

and I've included some, a lot of those. On the other hand, there are cases that are, in terms of the evidence, as rock solid as you can get. They are backed by declassified government documents, or they are backed by, let us say, in lieu of that very, very thorough outside investigations that confirm what happened. And we've got a number of those. So there's a number of those, even from the last 10 years. One really, let me just do a weak case. I don't know if it's laughable. I don't think any of these are actually laughable.

Right. There probably were, but they were so laughable that I didn't include them in the study. And I therefore can't probably remember them all that well. But there's one, this is not from 10 years ago. This is from like in 1970. But as I'm recall, it happened around Idaho's Snake River. This one came to a guy who was at a barbershop. That's what it was.

It was at a barber like in the 90s, I think. And the barber is doing his hair. And the barber's like, yeah, back in the early 70s, I was at the Snake River in Idaho. So it's one of these stories. So it's really like ultra remote. And I just barely decided to include it, even though it's weak.

But it was interesting enough. So the barber said, I was at the river and this huge object comes out of the snake River between two towns and I can't remember what the towns were. This will be in my, this will have to be in volume two. But anyway, the barber was a younger guy at the time. He was like so unnerved that he, he said, I sank my boat, engine and all, like to destroy any evidence that I had been out there. Like, he was so freaked out. He said, I wanted nothing to do with this.

I got rid of my boat. I sank my boat. And he said, I told my son this story. But then I said, if you ever share this with anyone, I will beat you until you're dead. Something like that. So this is the guy. So he's older now. He's a barber.

And he tells this customer in the course of their conversation. So, you know what it was? No. It was the barber was the son. who said my father, that's what it was. My father had this happen and he told me the story and he said, if I repeat this to anyone, he'll beat me tell him dead. That's how it was.

I was getting a little mixed up. But it came from this barber sometime in the 90s, about his dad in the 70s. And only after the father died, did this barber feel like he could tell the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a wacky, I mean, it's a crazy story. But like, you know, I think of it. And I don't know. I mean, who am I to say this is complete nonsense?

Yeah. There are so many of these stories that are rattling around in our culture that people have had and hang on to. And I'm actually kind of glad that I didn't remember that perfectly at first because that's how a lot of these stories actually are in real life. Yep. People get a story from someone and then they're told the story and you misremember certain. things and we've always got to be careful. It doesn't mean that the core is untrue, but it could easily mean that a lot of the details are probably wrong. But still, I think, you know, there's a case to be made that some of them are interesting. As far as recent cases that are really good,

there's quite a few, actually. One that I've always been taken by, I don't know if this is a rock-solid case. It's just a good case in the National UFO Reporting Center that I happen to be drawn to. And it's from, I think, 2017, that's less than 10 years ago. You had an oil rigging operation out in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, I'm sorry, Gulf of America. Am I supposed to say Gulf of America now? I'm going to say Gulf of Mexico. Out in the Gulf of Mexico out there, you had rigging operations.

We're talking about 80 miles southeast of New Orleans. So he's out there in the Gulf. So guy writes into the National UFO Reporting Center. He's like, I ran an oil rig out there, offshore rig. It was us. There was another rig that was about two miles away from us and a bunch of others in the area. And it was getting towards sunset. We're talking spring of 2017.

And an enormous, he says like a humongous object comes out of the water. A disc-shaped, classic but gargantuan. flying saucer essentially. Comes out of the water. He sees the water dripping off the sides. He and his three or four guys that he was with saw this crystal clear. He said it was less than half a mile off of our position. We all saw it.

It was absolutely immense. And it hovered for a few seconds. And then he said it shot off, you know, faster than a speeding bullet. It was just gone. He said the guys on the other rig two miles off had to see. this, he said, my estimate is that you're probably looking at as many as 50 witnesses. So he wrote to the National UFO Reporting Center. This is fully online.

Anyone can go find it. Peter Davenport, who runs that website. Frequently, what you'll find with Peter is that he will have his own direct communication with these witnesses of some of these cases that he finds particularly noteworthy. And he had a very extended back and forth with this witness. And he just provided his own commentary saying, I spoke with this man. He is clearly of a high caliber. I have very high confidence in him, et cetera.

So I think I like that case. It's quite recent. It's quite extraordinary. It passes. It passed Peter Davenport's smell test. And it passes mine. I think it probably happened. Yeah.

That says a lot. That's awesome. It's good to hear a modern case, especially dis-shedged. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm sure. The 20, the 2010.

of all of the decades, because I tracked the amount of sightings for each decade. The 2010s is the second busiest decade of all that I have. Oh, okay. The number one is the 1970s, believe it or not. All right. Pre-internet. We had cool sideburns and some bell bottoms and the striped, you know, the puffy shirts. We had the whole thing happening.

Plus we had the most number of U.S.O cases that I found. You crazy hippies. I love it. I love it, Rich. All right. Last listener question. And I'm actually going to tag team this one with Samantha because I have a book behind me. If you're watching this on YouTube, I.T. Sanderson, Ivin T. Sanderson.

Excuse me. Invisible resident. Yep, yep. And this whole theory of biological UFOs or US. Oh, you're thinking of his first book. So that called uninvited guests. Univated visitors. There we go.

Yep, I think it looked back. That's a great book. Love it. Sanderson, he did, he did, he did, he was into like Sasquatch and Yeti as well, crypto stuff, but he did two excellent, and I mean excellent UFO books. And they're both unique in their own way. So yeah, go on. I don't interrupt you.

I'm sorry. No, not at all. Well, in reading that book and, you know, one of my favorite UFO-th themed movies that's come out recently was Nope, which kind of played off of that as well. Jordan Peel's movie. Nope. No, N-O-P-E. Oh, yeah, I saw that.

The comedian, Key, Jordan, Jordan Peel. Yeah, Jordan Peel. Yeah, yep. So he, his idea of the UFO, he played off of Ivan T. Sanderson. Like, these things are biological. They're sentient.

It did, that's right. Yeah, yeah, which I was like, wow, man, you did your research for this one. But Samantha and I both want to know, Rich. What do you think of that theory? And does it play into the U.S.O thing at all? I mean, we're talking water, something that has biology to it, that we as human beings need to thrive and survive. Do you see the idea of a biological UFO or U.S.O playing into the theories of these U.S.Os at all? Are these things alive? I guess is our question. That's a great line of inquiry. And yeah, I think you have to consider it. There are cases where you really wonder about these things.

So first of all, you've got these balls of light with these spheres. So now the question is, because we've talked about a few of them, is whether or not there's an actual physical craft or object inside that glowing sphere. And it's hard to know. There are cases where those spherical objects are not illuminated, and the witnesses see basically a gunmetal gray reflective. ball those are seen so there are definitely some cases where there are spherical objects that are for all intents and purposes a metallic looking craft those exist but there are other cases where

you really wonder are we just looking at an intelligent light phenomenon is this possible and I think maybe it's possible I mean some of them some of the cases strike me as that that is a real possibility. So you have what looks like an intelligent light phenomenon, for lack of a better way of putting it. And so you wonder, are these artificially created life forms to use a phrase loosely? Are they naturally occurring life forms to use that phrase loosely? Are they naturally occurring non-living intelligences,

if we can even imagine what such a thing would be? This is where Ivan Sanderson in his book, Uninvited Visitors, it's so great that you and, is it Stephanie? Samantha. I'm so sorry. Brought this up because Sanderson writes out all of these different possibilities, living, non-living, artificially created, naturally forming, and all of these different things.

And he creates this very interesting flowchart of possibilities of what these UAP are. And I think you can definitely make a case that these craft themselves may have an intelligence of their own, independent of any operators. Like we tend to think, you know, I'm going to build a craft and I'm the operator of the craft. The craft is just doing what I tell it. But could you create a craft that has its own volition, its own intelligence? Well, we're very advanced with artificial intelligence now today. and where does consciousness actually begin when you're talking about AI? This is a very active question that we have in our world.

So is it possible that you're dealing with an object that has highly advanced conscious AI to it? There's a possibility that's not quite the same as being alive, but could it be biological in some sense? Well, we're now at the point of creating cybernetic organisms that are biological plus some artificial component. So it's getting kind of fuzzy in terms of what's alive and what's not alive. And I have a feeling as we move forward into our future, we're going to be bumping into that fuzziness more and more. And it wouldn't surprise me if some of these objects, whether USOs or aerial UAP, fit that pattern. Like there's a kind of biological living aspect to them, but a machine aspect. to them as well.

And whether they're actual natural biological organisms, I couldn't say, I'm not inclined to see that, but I could not rule it out. Singularity, baby, it's upon us. It's going to happen. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting theory. It's definitely a good thought experiment because we don't know what USOs are or aren't at this point. And, you know, with these next three volumes of your books, we will get closer.

And we now have data to work off of. So that's exciting, Rich. Well, yeah, to kind of wrap things up, Neil wants to know on Patreon, do you have a date for an audio book? I'm eagerly awaiting, and I hope Richard does the reading. Okay, two things. So I won't be doing the reading of this. Okay.

People have to understand it's a lot of work. I have done readings of one of my books. UFOs for the 21st century mind. That was a lot of work. And I am still trying to complete the reading of volume two of UFOs and the national security stage. Wow. That's a 600 page book that already broke two other audiobook readers in the past. They actually had to give up. It's too long. So I have to do it myself. And it's just a lot of work. For me, it's brutal. So the USO books, I just cannot. I wish I could. But we have hired a very fine, a very fine, a very, excellent reader of this USO volume.

I have been going back and forth with him, and he is telling me, I've got many of the chapters back from him. They sound great. I think, I don't want to give an exact date. I'm hoping even within a week. It's not impossible. He has said to me, I've got the goods.

We're going to get it for you. He's worked pretty fast. We had a couple of bumps in the road. So, yes, the audiobook, there will be an audiobook for all. three of these volumes. And I had to decide, like, did I want to wait for the audiobook to be done before I published the other three versions?

And I could have done that, but I opted to publish the hardcover paperback and e-book, essentially all at once. And the audiobook will be out a little more than a month later. Okay. So the audio book pretty soon. From when we're talking, I think it will, I could be out within a week. I'm very much hoping that it will be out within a week. I'm very much hoping that it will be out within a week.

week. All right. If it's not, then I apologize, but we're pushing as fast as we can. Awesome. Awesome. Well, speaking of volume two, I mean, people are still probably making their way through volume one now. I still am, too. But when can we expect volume two? Do you have a release? Yeah. I was actually hoping I'd space them two to three months apart. It might be three to four months apart between. But absolutely, like all of the cases for all three volumes have been written out, all of the data analysis for all of them has been done. I may yet add a couple of cases to the third volume, which covers from 1990 to the present. When I stopped, we were not quite done with 2024. And I may pull up a few of those cases in 2025 as well. But really what I need to do with the other two

books is simply organize them into proper chapters, write a proper introduction and conclusion for them, index them, you know, all of the little publishing things that are necessary to wrap it up. The content is all done, though, so we're not talking years, we're talking months. That is a massive undertaking. I don't even know how you can do that. That's amazing. It shocked me. Each of the volume is about 400 pages. So we're talking about. Wow. 12 hundred pages. Yeah. Hey. I mean, it's a lot. When you love what you do, it's not work. So, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's still. We don't want to make our dollar. I, you know, we all do. But, but really, if you're going to do a project, you have to do it either out of love or out of hate or both. And I mean, that's okay. So you, I love this subject. There are times that I hate it because it's just like it's difficult at times. But honestly, it's been absolutely one of the most rewarding. projects I've ever engaged in. Oh, good. That's really good to hear.

Yes, and I can definitely empathize with the love-hate thing. Well, last question. What do you hope people will take away from U.S.Os? I mean, this is, again, a topic that is probably going to be new to a lot of our listeners and viewers. What do you hope people take away from volume one and I guess the overall project of U.S. Oates? Yeah, there's so much involved.

First of all, I want people to understand that this is. a legitimate aspect of the greater UFO or UAP phenomenon. USOs are a real thing. They are around the world. They are in every major body of water. Oceans, lakes and rivers, all of them. There's not a place in this planet where they haven't been seen to appear. So there's that.

Also that the evidence for them are, good, are very good. I would say in certain cases in terms of evidence, I would rank as absolutely certain, but there's no doubt whatsoever that these things happen. So that's one thing. The other thing that I try to do in this book, particularly in the introductions I write to each chapter and the introduction to the book itself is, I'm very happy to speculate on these other beings themselves. One thing that I notice is that I think they are, they and we, are doing a kind of dance in the ocean, as it were. They see us and we are seeing them now. And we didn't see them immediately all the time. We learned about them through degrees, mainly

through the course of the 20th century, as we spread ourselves out into the waters. And so one of the things that strikes me is the adaptations that they must have engaged in during the course of the 20th on 21st century. So for example, we didn't have an ability even to have workable submarines in the water until around the year 1900, like a submarine that actually worked, like that actually was useful, was in near 1900. So we were just taking baby steps. We developed sonar later in that century, mainly during the First World War. We started to develop an ability to have a little bit of ability to see below the water, as it were. But those were baby steps. They would have been watching us through the 20th century. They would have seen us in World War II engage in a global

mass murder of our own species and also take over the oceans in the process. They would have seen us in the mid-50s develop nuclear submarines that can stay under the water basically forever. They would have noticed we would have been putting in underwater surveillance systems. starting in the 1950s, by which we're detecting sonar acoustic signals and deciphering those, looking for Russian subs, but also detecting other anomalies. They would have seen all of this. They would have seen that we would be putting satellites up in Earth orbit in the 50s and 60s. They would have noticed that these humans are going through a technological revolution that they would have to adapt to. This is what I believe.

Like I tended to think in the past, I did not tend to think of in terms of alien adaptation. You know, because when you look at the UFO subject, you tend to think they're so far advanced. They don't have to worry about us. But I don't think that's true now. I think, yes, they are advanced. But we have become much more advanced than we ever were. And we have developed a far greater ability to detect anomalies than ever before. So this actually, I think, has caused an adaptation on their part.

So that's a takeaway that I think I want people to grasp, which is that this is not a static phenomenon. It's a dynamic phenomenon where we are seeing each other. And yet the conversation is not yet out in the public realm where we're actively talking about this to ourselves. It's more like you've got a classified portion of humanity that is very actively engaged in watching them. And they're in there in the water,

they're in the atmosphere as well. And they know that a portion of us are well aware of them. So it's a very interesting dynamic, very interesting story. I love that. A dance in the ocean. I love that phrase. I'm going to carry that with me. Do it.

Where can we find the book, Rich? Yeah. Well, Amazon is available as an e-book, paperback and hardcover on Amazon. I try to get the price down as much as I could for the hardcover, but it is pricey. That's because the illustrations are full color. They are beautiful.

And there was no way I could get around it. The e-books are nice $10,000, easy, cheap download. And it's got beautiful color illustrations, just like the books. You can go on Amazon, just type in Dolan, USO, and you'll find it. Or go to my website, which is Richard DolanMembers.com. That's got a nice big banner link for the book. on Amazon, and people can also see what I'm up to in other things that I do at that site. Yeah, absolutely.

Go check it out, guys. We'll have links in the show notes for the book, for your website and everything. Again, the book is a history of U.S.O's Unidentified, submerged objects, volume one to be continued. Yeah, so Rich, I got to thank you, man. This has been an very insightful conversation. USOs, like I said, holds such a special place in my heart when it comes to why I got involved with this topic to begin with. So thank you. Absolutely. And it's been a pleasure, Ryan. I've enjoyed it very much. I'll happily come back anytime. Somewhere in the Skies is part of the Somewhere Podcast Universe.

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