Somewhere in the Skies - Skinwalkers at the Pentagon with George Knapp and Colm Kelleher

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

On episode 265 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we welcome investigative journalist, George Knapp, and microbiologist, Colm A. Kelleher. They are the co-authors, along with James T. Lacatski, of Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders' Account of the Secret Government UFO Program. Officially reviewed by the U.S. Department of Defense and cleared for public release, this is a follow-up to their 2005 book, Hunt for the Skinwalker. This new book unmasks the massive scope of the Pentagon’s landmark UFO study that ran from the Defense Intelligence Agency, The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP, which investigated the “Tic Tac” and other “nuts and bolts” UFO events. The program also probed the plethora of bizarre phenomena that government investigators encountered on Skinwalker Ranch. By the end of the two-year program, more than a hundred separate technical reports, some of which ran to hundreds of pages, were delivered to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Today, Knapp and Kelleher detail some of those findings, discuss aspects of the book nobody has asked them about yet, and then answer listener questions. Buy 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon': https://amzn.to/3w1H2PZ  The PhenomAInon Database: https://www.phenomainon.com/ Ryan is now on Cameo! Book your video today at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Somewhere in the Skies Coffee: CLICK HERE  Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at: https://bit.ly/3rJpbd7 Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2022 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

Today on the show, investigative journalist, George Knapp, and biochemist, Column Callagher, authors of Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. This is Somewhere in the Skies, with Ryan's bread. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today on Somewhere in the Skies, and I can't believe it's taken me this long, but it's finally happening. We have the authors of Skinwalkers at the Pentagon authors. We have George Knapp and Colernerner joining us today. Now, I know a lot of you guys know hunt for the Skinwalker.

This is the follow-up book. It goes into way more in depth about what Colm experienced on the ranch, what others experienced as well, and everything that's going on in the UFO discourse right now with the Secret Pentagon UFO program and everything between and how Skinwalker Ranch is connected to all of this. So I'm so excited to finally have them with us. They've done a bunch of interviews on this before.

So we're going to try to cover new ground. tonight and ask a lot of the questions that are coming now, where does Skinwalker Ranch lay in this greater conversation on the UAP topic? So, again, for the very first time, thank you, Kohlm, and thank you, George, for joining me on somewhere in the skies. Great to see you, Ryan. Great to be here. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. I know you guys have done a lot of interviews. So let's kind of just jump into it. I want to ask, you know, you guys both co-authored the original book come for the Skinwalker. And now we have the follow-up with a third author. So I was wondering for

some of our listeners and viewers who may not be familiar with who that is, could you tell us a little about who James Lakatsky is? And what was the impetus for him to finally come forward with his connection to all of this? Whoever wants to take that? Jim Lakatsky is a long-time defense intelligence agency analyst. He's also got a doctorate. He's also got a doctorate. in engineering. He's a ballistic missiles expert. He used to be a contractor with the missile defense agency before he moved to a defense intelligence agency. So this guy is the original rocket scientist, if you want to use that term. But he's also got a very open mind. I mean, he's not sort of the usual sort of scientific person that likes to have, you know, tunnel vision

and doesn't sort of stray outside his boundaries. So you mentioned earlier that George and I had published this book called Hunt for the Skin Walker way, way back in 2005. Well, it turns out that in early 2007, Lakatsky came across this book in conjunction with other meetings that were happening at Defense Intelligence Agency. So he read the book. another guy on our present book called Axelrod.

We name him Axelrod because of, you know, for several reasons. But Axelrod also read this book, Hunt for the Skinwalker. And, you know, it did occur to Lakatsky and a few of the colleagues, including Axelrod, that the descriptions in Hunt for the Skinwalker of these objects that were flying around Utah airspace in northeastern Utah that seemed to be able to come and go at will. They seemed to be able to defy normal physics. And nobody seemed to either know about them

or was concerned about them. So Lakatsky started looking into the possibility of seeing what kind of technology might be behind these objects. And secondly, whether or not that technology had anything to do with United States National Security because the guy was part of the Defense Intelligence Agency and also part of the Defense Warning Office at DIA. So long story short, he wrote a letter to Robert Bigelow

asking him to visit the so-called Skinwalker Ranch. That was the basis of our book, Hunt for the Skinwalker. So in July of 2007, La Catsky, and Bigelow flew in Bigelow's private jet up from Las Vegas, up to, landed in Vernal, Utah, which is about 30 miles from the ranch, drove to the ranch. Lekatsky was on the property, maybe a couple of hours. But during that time, Bigelow went in to chat with the ranch managers in what used to be called Homestead 1, which is one of the homesteads that is nearest the entrance to Skidwalker Ranch.

and Lakatsky sort of joined the group. He was looking, standing in the kitchen, when behind Bigelow and the ranch manager, this technological device materialized out of nowhere behind Bigelow, behind the ranch manager. Neither of them saw it. This device was like a curved, metallic-looking object. And later, Lakaski described it as being similar to

the cover album of Mike Oldfield's tubular bells. So Lackatsky didn't say anything at the time, but he was watching this. He looked away, he thought he was saying things, looked back, the object was still there, and it was sort of embedded in a sort of a yellowish, cloudy sort of vapor. And again, he was the only one who saw it. Lecatsky didn't say anything.

the object then sort of dematerialized in Likaski's words. So he never said anything to Bigelow until later. But that was the sort of instigation of a drive that set up between Lackatsky, Bigelow, Senator Harry Reid, that resulted in the formation of a new contract that was run through the Defense Intelligence Air. agency for $22 million, 24-month contract. The initial contract actually was supposed to be five years, but the end result was a contract that was run through the DIA for 24 months,

and then a three-month no-cost extension. So the total contract that was run through the Defense Intelligence Agency was 27 months. So, you know, in a way, you know, George and I could sort of say that the book, hunt for the skinwalker was one of the early instigators for what eventually became the program, once Robert Bigelow, Jim Lackatsky, and Senator Harry Reid, and Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye got involved in a bipartisan funding process that funneled $22 million through the Defense Intelligence Agency and ended up with what became known as the OSAC program. I'd add to you about Jim Lekatsky.

So, you know, I don't have a security clearance. I wasn't part of OSAP, but I've had to develop a good friendship with Robert Bigelow and with column with other people that they work with from the NIDS organization. And I had also had this ongoing 30-year conversation with Harry Reid about UFOs. And a lot of these disparate threads all sort of came together at the same time to create OSAP. So in 1989, I had started a conversation with Reed about UFOs, about Bob Lazar, Area 51, recovered disc, crash retrieval programs being tested in the desert. And whether you believe any of that stuff is true or not, it was of interest to read. And he was the first person I told about it outside of our newsroom. And we started the dialogue about UFOs.

He said, keep me informed, keep me in the loop. And he helped me behind the scenes acquire things that I couldn't acquire on my own. In 1995, in 1996, when Bigelow created NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science, with all these amazing people, Edgar Mitchell, Jacques Valet, how put off all those folks, hired Column Callagher, Eric Davis, and a few other really amazing professionals. They had me speak at their first full science advisory board meeting. And afterward, I told Reid about it. I said this amazing group of people, including one of the guys,

two men who had walked on the moon, and one who was a U.S. scientist, a U.S. Senator at the time. And so I told Reid about it, he said, yeah, you think I can get invited to it. And he did. He went to a meeting. He got hooked on the subject even more than he was from my conversations with him. And that laid the seeds or laid the groundwork for what later became the OSSEP program, just all those connections.

Because some years later, when Lekatsky goes to the ranch, has this experience, meets with Bigelow, goes back to Washington, creates the outline for a program, presents it to Reed. Reed was already on the hook. He was already ready to go. And then September of 2008, Bigelow signed a contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency, creates Ossap and Bass. A week later, he goes on coast to coast with me and announced it to the world. Told the world he had an unnamed partner. They're going to study UFOs, but nobody paid attention to it. There was the breadcrumbs there for anybody to be aware of what was going on, but no one paid attention to it, and it just faded away. that was the beginning of OSAP.

And although I had heard Lakatsky's name only in fleeting references here and there, in March of 2018, this is four months after the New York Times story comes out, I get invited to D.C., invited by Senator Reid to meet somebody. And it's on St. Patrick's Day. And the person I ended up meeting, and I didn't know who was going to be, it was Jim Likaski. And he laid it out for me. And I knew there had been a program. but I had never heard the acronym Allsap.

I never heard A-Tip either until I saw it in the New York Times. And we reported on it and Bigelow's quoted and Reed's quoted in those stories. But so many of the key elements of what was reported was wrong. They were wrong. And Lackatsky and Reed laid it out for me on what was wrong. And it was quite a bit. It was quite an education. And after that, in the spring of 2018, I started making public presentations about it.

Lecatsky shared a great deal of information with me. things that Colum had known all along. And, you know, my eyes were open to what had really been going on. And so I started speaking about it, even though Lackatsky did not want to go forward at that point, Colum and I started a dialogue with him. And he, I think, to a degree, he was frustrated by how much of the information that was out of the public arena was inaccurate about what had happened, who had done what. So that's part of what we tried to do with the book, is to set the record straight about

what the program was, what it encompassed, how big it was, and it was an amazing thing, and if it had been allowed to continue, we might have some really solid answers by now. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident, restoration is guaranteed. Pour your money back.

Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. And I'm glad you bring up two things, George, and I'm really good you brought them up. The difference between ATIP and ASAP and also, you know, the original reporting on all of this. Why do you think, either of you, please feel free to step in,

Why was there so much confusion and why did the New York Times, you know, not to say anything about the authors of the articles? They worked with what they were given, what the New York Times allowed them to put in there. But why was this so inaccurate from the very beginning? You know, again, I'm so happy you guys clarified so much of this for us, the public, on what ASEP was, what ATIP was, what eventually ATIP was. came and where that money actually went to because that is, you know, the biggest question so many people have out there. Was this money actually used to investigate UFOs or was it also the paranormal? So what do you guys think? Why was the New York Times so wrong or were they told something different? What do you think? Well, I think part of it was, you know, for like, for example,

Lou Elizonda, where, you know, the book that we wrote, people have wanted to characterize it as anti-Lew or attacking Lou or attacking Atip, which it is not. You know, it's never been that. Those are two different entities entirely. I think Lou in the beginning could speak about A-TIP because that was the program he was involved with. And he didn't feel like he was authorized to go ahead and speak about Ossap. So he phrased things in that way.

I think there were other people who were whispering in the ear of the New York Times at that point who knew the difference and who muddied those waters on purpose. I think they felt if we tell the real story about Osap and all the weird stuff that I got into, it won't be credible because, you know, UFOs, that's credible. But when you get into weirdo cryptic creatures and things like that and hitchhikers, that's too strange. Let's just keep it simple at this. Well, you know, that's fine. If you want to get a story past the editors in New York Times, I can understand that. But it's not honest. It wasn't accurate. It was way off the base. And those mistakes that were made then are repeated,

week all over the world by journalists who should know better, you know, especially now that the record has been cleared. Anybody can read this, see it for themselves. There was an ATIP, that's for sure. But there was an OSAP that was a much bigger program. It's a program that got the $22 million. It might be the largest government-funded UFO-related program in U.S. history. They had 50 full-time employees at one point. A-TIP had none. They had a scope that didn't involve just military UFO cases. It was UFO cases all over the country. In fact, all over the world. The database, which we'll talk about later, involved information from multiple different countries all over the world. And then not only was it big in terms of number of employees and its scope,

it also looked at things beyond UFOs. It followed the evidence where it led. And often, it led to some very strange places and we can get into those details. I don't know why the New York Times has never corrected that. The mistakes that it made and the very first couple of lines of that story, but they haven't. Those mistakes have been repeated as recently as a week ago. The New York Times article has never been corrected, and that's kind of really interesting because the main reason that we wrote the book was to correct the record.

The New York Times article made, what, three fundamental errors in the first six lines of the story. You know, it linked the $22 million to ATIP, wrong. It linked Lou Elizondo as the head of the $22 million program, wrong. And then it located the program at USDA and in the Pentagon. Wrong. It was actually at Defense Warning Office at DIA. So the original New York Times article, unfortunately, I think, as George said,

there were people whispering in the ear of the New York Times reporters. And the result was that there was a series of mischaracterizations and inaccuracies that took on a life of their own. And then sort of month by month, year by year, they amplified into what now is the received wisdom, is that the $22 million program was A-TIP. It was led by Lou Elizond. and etc., etc. Whereas that was not the case. And the reason that Lakatsky and myself and George decided to write this book

was partly to correct the record. Now, this is not to denigrate in any way what the sterling work that people like Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon have done since the 2017 article in getting this topic before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the various Senate Intelligence Committee, and making the UFO topic real. But the fact is the reporting was erroneous, and our book, Skin Workers of the Pentagon,

definitively, in our opinion, corrects the record on that. Colm, I want to touch on a few of the weirder aspects to Skinwalker Ranch with you guys in terms of what's happening now. In the book, one of the most disturbing things that I remember reading was this idea of an infectious, agent or even one of the witnesses claiming that they had an autoimmune system disease occur after witnessing some of this phenomena. Have you caught up with these individuals? Is this still an ongoing thing with these people who have claimed these things? And what do you think?

What can we do? I mean, in terms of if this phenomenon is actually what caused this in these people, Is that something that should be further studied on Skinwalker Ranch today with the new owners? What do you guys think? Well, I can say straight off that this was not a Skinwalker only. This was not confined to Skinwalker Ranch only because we investigated other cases, as George mentioned. The OSOP program investigated cases all over the country. We deployed people to Montana. We deployed people to California.

We deployed teams to Texas to New York State, following up on cases, documenting on cases. Actual field research. I mean, we did have 50 full-time people who are working 40 hours a week, 2,080 hours a year, on this UFO problem. We even deployed people to Brazil in response to UFO cases. So this so-called hitchhiker effect that you're referring to also is associated with cases. We documented this effect in people who had close encounters with UFOs who had not been anywhere close to Skinwalker Ranch. So this goes beyond Skinwalker Ranch, and it is actually documented in other UFO cases. But to get to the heart of your question, as we began to follow people who had had anomalies in their immediate sort of framework on Skinwalker Ranch, a lot of the people initially that the Defense Intelligence Agency deployed on the property were from military intelligence.

They were from armed services, and they were deployed on the property in order to corroborate and to evaluate these stories that had come out primarily from Hunt for the Skinwalker, but also other stories that were involved with Skinwalker Ranch. And they involved not only nuts and bolts UFOs, but they also involved discarned entities, alleged poltergeist activity, cattle mutilations, reports of unusual creatures were seen on the property, and a whole host of other quote-unquote paranormal effects. So when these five people from military intelligence, over different time periods were deployed on the property, all five of them actually encountered unusual activity on the property. And then what really got people's attention was

when they went back to the East Coast where they lived, their families within a few weeks of them returning began to experience waking up at night with these black human art creatures standing over them in beds, in their bedrooms. Blue orbs, red orbs, white orbs, yellow orbs flying through their houses. Some of them reported bizarre-looking

almost like mythical creatures that were manifesting in their backyards. at different times. They would experience poltergeist activity. Things would, wine bottles would shoot off the wine rack and sort of smash against the wall. Poltergeist activity would erupt in their home. So in all of these cases, we documented that what seemed to be a primary case where anomalies were experienced on Skinwalker Ranch,

then two and a half thousand miles away on the East Coast, suddenly this activity would start appearing in people's homes. And not only that, there were some of the kids who had experienced activity, wanted to keep silent about it, didn't want to talk about it at all. But then their school friends and neighbors started telling them that they had seen weird stuff like creatures outside their bedrooms, black shadowy creatures in their rooms, you know, orbs flying around.

So not only the families that the primary investigators were experiencing that, but also neighbors and school friends in the local kids' schools. So, I mean, my background is biology and biochemistry. So the first thing that occurred to me was that this, whatever this effect was, was behaving like an infectious agent. So the primary infected person that, you know, that the indexed, index case to use the terminology would be infected on skinwalker wrench, then it would be brought back to the families.

The families that the spouse and children would be then infected, then neighbors and school kids would also be infected. So one of the things that we reported on in our book was the hypothesis that this could be an infectious like agent. and that the so-called hitchhiker effect could be amenable to standard epidemiological modeling. Everybody now is familiar with the coronavirus epidemic for the last two years of standard epidemiological modeling

that people do with viral infections. So I would hope in a future UFO program that would involve studying the effects of UFOs on humans that this kind of thing would be part of a future UFO program. I would very strongly advocate that studying UFO performance and studying UFOs with sensors and with all of the sensor activity that we deployed on Skin Walker Ranch and elsewhere is absolutely important. But at the same time, studying the effects of UFOs on people,

people and studying these effects that include, you know, medical effects, autoimmune diseases would erupt in some of these people, psychological effects, and then, you know, sometimes these paranormal effects would erupt in people. All of that study is following the data. The OSOP program did not start off to study things that go bump in the night. We started off to study. We started off to study UFOs. And one of our first cases that we studied was the famous Tick-Tac case that occurred in the Nimitz carrier strike group off the coast of San Diego. So that was a hard sort of case with multiple sensors involved, tracking objects that

appeared to defy the normal physics. But at the same time, these close encounter cases that happen to people also have. have effects on people that include medical effects, they include physiological effects, psychological effects, and eventually if you study people over months and years, they can start reporting paranormal effects as a result of UFOs. So that's the sort of essence of the so-called hitchhiker effect that we reported on. I would add, Ryan, that of the five intelligence agents who went to the ranch during the Ossap study, all five of them took something home, and for some of them, it lasted for years. It stuck with them. And for one that we know of,

it's still happening. We're talking 12, 13 years after it first occurred, the first experience. The hitchhiker phenomenon didn't start on the ranch, but it was a unique opportunity to study it there. I mean, it's been reported all over the world in association with UFO events. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some people who were exposed to the Tic Tac had similar effects that they have not been publicized yet. You know, if you use the term poltergeist and people in the UFO field kind of titter about it and want to diminish or dismiss this because, oh, look, that's a goofy study. They're looking at ghosts. Well, it's not ghosts. We don't know what the hell it is.

Nobody does. We notice that that phenomena happens in connection with UFO experiences. they're in connection with each other, happen to the same place, and it seems to have long-term effects and stick with people. Don't know what it is. Don't say it's ghosts. We just compare it to paranormal and culture guys stuff, because that's what's been investigated and described before in the literature.

Interesting. Right. Yeah, this whole hitchhiker effect thing is what I think a lot of people are really finding intriguing. And also, I know, George, you even mentioned, people reading the book are experiencing the hitchhiker phenomenon. if you want to believe that or not. But hey, who knows how far this could actually go in terms of the phenomenal aspect. We wish we had made that up as a marketing device, but we didn't.

You know, we did get some reports from that. We have no idea how much, how seriously to take. It's interesting. Well, George, in terms of seriousness, there, a lot of people have pointed out the stories that were in the book. You know, we have the poltergeist activity, cattle mutilations, UAP, portals even, all of this stuff. But I distinctly remember you tweeting out one day about the book of look at this page, check out this page, read between the lines.

I want to know if you're willing to share, what are some of those gems that people have not picked out yet, have not asked you guys about? Is there anything in terms of that that you can share with us here? Well, page 152. it has some pretty heavy hints about crash retrievals. Colm and his colleagues were hot on the trail of what they believed was a crash retrieval program. They thought that they would have access to it eventually that they'd been let in the door and they had prepared Bigelow Aerospace, the facilities there, to receive exotic materials.

I don't believe that happened. A column can get into that, but they were prepared to receive those materials. and they were trying to figure out who were the keepers of the secrets. And page 152 details some of the efforts that were made, the people who were meeting with higher-ups at Department of Homeland Security and some other places inside at the Pentagon, and they were trying to get the answers to it and knocking on the door to find out who's got the goodies.

Where is this stuff stashed? And the door was not just closed, it was slammed in their faces. So maybe Column could elaborate on that. Yeah, please. Yeah, we obviously, everything that we wrote in the book, we put to the Pentagon an organization called Dopserd that is involved in vetting all of what is written in a book that has security implications. So we had our book reviewed over a 10-month period by four separate organizations. And, you know, so whatever is in the book, and George mentioned, page 152, was actually read, vetted, and authorized for release.

So we're not saying anything out of school that the reviewers in multiple different agencies didn't want to be put out there as a, you know, as a source of information. But as George mentioned, one of the organizations that we were interacting with after the OSAP program was terminated in late 2010 was the Department of Homeland Security. And several of the high-level people that we talked with in the – and we do talk about this in the book, too. But several of those people began a series of their own investigations and did bump up against. what, you know, this so-called Keepers of the Secrets that is a deeply embedded series of programs with extraordinary levels of security in the United States government

that has been close hold for decades. Well, they did bump up against that program and they were told unceremoniously to get lost. And it was not sort of a polite, we can't talk to you. It was a very hostile, very rude in your face, sort of, this will not go any further, cease and desist immediately. Now, part of this, as we mentioned in the book also, may have been a sort of a cultural aspect where the Department of Homeland Security, as you know, was initiated following the 9-11

bombings of the trade towers. So the Department of Homeland Security was a relatively new kid on the block. and sort of other intelligence agencies like CIA and DIA, and, you know, the 17 intelligence agencies that exist and are responsible collectively for United States security, the Department of Homeland Security was considered a new kid on the block. And so here were these people from DHS, even though they were all very high-level people at DHS,

were sort of knocking on doors that the old-timers, was completely inappropriate, and certainly they would not be let in. The gatekeepers of these programs that are sort of long, long term, over many decades in the United States government, simply refused in a very hostile way to grant any access to these people. But the bottom line was, after those experiences, the people who were directly involved, doing the knockings on the doors, came away, not believing that they were told to go away because there is no crash retrieval program, no goodies hidden. They came to believe, without any question,

that there is something out there, that it is being hidden somewhere, and that they were just refused entry to the door. Interesting. Well, you bring up another thing, getting this book cleared. I think that caught a lot of people's eyes, too, that this book literally had to be cleared before publication. So my question is, I guess,

how much if you had to give a percentage didn't make it in that they said, nope, nope, you're not going there. Could you give a ballpark on that? Or is that it's something you guys can't talk about? Well, I mean, we got a, we received from Dobser eventually, and obviously things were pretty slow because of COVID. But the various reviews were farmed out to different agencies and different individuals within those agencies.

who had a sort of, they were stakeholders in, you know, being part of this program. So a lot of them sort of went, went through and changed, changed some of their details, some of their names, obviously, some of their affiliations. We were told to remove some of the details about the location of the program at Defense Intelligence Agency. We were also told in many, many different cases to remove some of the, descriptions of individuals who were involved with the program. We were told

to change the names of many, many individuals who were involved with this. So, you know, there were pretty comprehensive changes demanded and also, you know, the layered on top of this obviously was the

medical injury cases that we were investigating. We had two MD, PhD, physician scientists who were on contract to OSAP, who could be deployed anywhere in the country to investigate some of these medical injuries. And we document some of those in the book.

But this involves sort of taking blood samples, sometimes various imaging techniques were utilized, and following people over many months, in some cases, years, that were involved in these close encounters with UFOs. So that part of the HIPAA medical confidentiality was layered into the insistence on the part of the reviewers to remove all of those medical associated details that were part of these medical injury cases. I mean, that's a fundamental part of medical confidentiality. that is very, very strongly and seriously taken in the United States government.

So any deviation from that, we were told to remove all of that too, and to make sure that all of these personal identification details were removed from people, especially people who were still active duty military, but even people who were going through the process of separating from the military, all of these names we were also told to change and remove. So there were substantial changes made. Hey guys, Ryan here. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is a labor of love every week.

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Thank you for your support and keep looking up. And I want to move to some listener questions, Komo. We still have you here. But I've got kind of one last thing to cap it off with my personal. questions for you guys. Now, Colm, you work directly with Robert Bigelow. George, I know you've interviewed him face-to-face several times and have spoken to him on a lot of occasions. Robert Bigelow gathered a lot of data. You guys did when he was in charge of the ranch, when he owned the ranch through Bass and even through Ossap. But a lot of that was never made

public. And I think a lot of people are frustrated that everything collected is something that the public will never know about. So I guess point A to that question, do you think the public will ever be made aware of the things that Bigelow is in possession of when it comes to data and evidence on the ranch? And two, in terms of Bigelow, and also there's been some controversy over the security on the ranch that some have come forward and said that they were quote-unquote test subjects. So I'm wondering if you guys could speak to both of those points in terms of will we ever see anything that Bigelow is in possession of when it comes to evidence. And were people used as test subjects on the ranch that seemed very disturbing, in my opinion? I can speak to the test subjects thing initially and then we can get to the other question.

I think there was a sort of a mistaken series of interpretations. In the book that we specifically talk about one of the ways that are one of the viewpoints that were in the book regarding UFO effects on people was to essentially utilize the human body as a readout system in terms of UFO effects on people. So one of the thoughts that were discussed and brainstormed at the start of the OSAP program was the idea of contracting with MD PhD people who were very much aware of the effects of UFOs on people, some of which have been documented in the past, for example, radiation like effects. People start losing their hair. They have metallic tastes in their mouths. They go through headaches, nausea.

And, you know, as you mentioned earlier, autoimmune diseases have manifested in some people as a result of close encounters with UFO. So the idea behind the original brainstorming at OSAP was in order to, you know, in order to look at what these UFO effects were, we would be able to, with the permission of these individuals, we would be able to take occasionally blood samples or imaging of these people. But all of the people involved were, we had medical, hippa-related infrastructure in place that was very, very, very careful.

we had signed releases, we had people that were informed consent, that were a part of this. We were operating strictly in accordance with all of the medical procedures that were out there so that we would conform to HIPAA regulations, we would conform to medical privacy. And so all of these tests that were done,

these tests that were done over time. And these were not, I'm not talking about Skimwalker Wrench people. I'm talking about people who, for example, we talked in the book of people, one of these people in Oregon who had blue orbs go through them, or one orb go through them, who came down with the constellation of early non-ionizing radiation effects. we did obtain blood samples over time. We did do imaging studies over time. And so collectively all of those were put into databases, but they were completely protected.

All of the names of people involved were completely protected from a medical privacy perspective. So we conform completely according to, you know, the rules of medical, medical privacy. I'd add this. By the time that Allsap started in 2008, the word was kind of out on Skinwalker Ranch. I mean, our book had been out for a couple of years. The people in that area certainly knew about it. And the guys who worked for bass and for Nids, Bigelow Airspace, they knew it was up out there. Anybody he didn't want to go, didn't have to go. And a lot of people who went out there and had one shot at it said, never again. They wanted nothing to do with it.

So it wasn't a big surprise pulling something over the wool over their heads. As for, you know, the Bigelow information ever being released, the book we wrote Hunt for the Skinwalker is the data from Nids. It's the story of the Nid's investigation of the ranch. And although there might be bits and pieces here and there that have never been made public, and I think probably Mr. Bigelow has images that he's never made public, that's pretty much everything that happened. We told the story as thoroughly as we could, and the result of that is something called ASAP was created.

As for the second book, same kind of thing, the Skin Walkers of the Pentagon. We want people to find those files. I mean, that's why we put, there's 125 reports or so that were written by the guys for ASAP, by the Bass team for the DIA. We're not talking about 10, 12-page reports. Some of these things are 3, 400 pages long. We listed all of them, and that was on purpose. We wanted people to find them. We go after it. File a FOIA. Go get them.

We couldn't publish all that stuff. We weren't allowed to, but we wanted people to know it was out there. And I think when that information becomes public, and it will, it'll become public. There's a new website that claims it's publishing all that stuff, I think, came up last week yesterday. I don't know if it's actually publishing it and anybody has seen that stuff, but good, it should be public. There's nothing classified in there. The public should see that. That's why we wrote the book.

We wanted people to go out and get it. Right. Yeah. The website you're referring to, I think they actually went live as we were recording this, if not today, called Phenomaion. Phenomenon. It's an AI system that's collecting databases from Mufon, from New Fork. And they claim that they also have a lot of Skinwalker Ranch data as well, that they're putting in the cloud that people will be able to access. So there we go. There's been progress already. And I'm sure a lot of that was inspired by the follow-up book that you guys put out. People want to know. They want to see the pictures. They want to see the data. So look, if we're not going to get it from Bigelow, we're going to get it somehow, like you said, George.

And I think that's what people should focus on. I highly suggest people check that out. Phenom. I, none. I'll put the link in the show notes for that. It's pretty interesting. I mean, there were hundreds of documented cases from Skinwalker Ranch that are available to the public. So I think that's pretty cool. I would just add the caveat, though,

that it's really important that if this data is released, that the medical confidentiality is respected. Now, I don't know. I actually have not checked out this website yet, but we went to extraordinary lengths in publishing our book, Skin Workers of the Pentagon, to protect people's medical privacy. And I would hope that if there are data being released, that these medical privacy guidelines that conform to HIPAA are being respected and also people who have active military service, who are retired military, who have expressly forbidden their names to be out there. I would hope that their confidentiality has been protected.

I don't know. I mean, I have not looked at this website, but that's one of my concerns is that, you know, we went round the block multiple times to protect people's medical privacy, and that's a sort of a very basic violation. If it is happening, I don't know if it's happening, but I would put that out as a caveat. I'll tell this.

say this is that, you know, Column and I are both familiar with what's in those reports, in those documents. He more than I, he oversaw writing all of them, and it's a gigantic pile of information, thousands and thousands of pages in these reports. There's no mention of ATIP. There's no mention of ATIP at all because it didn't exist while the OSAP study was underway. So I look forward to seeing whatever ATIP produced during the study, during its study, and I hope if somebody who leaked the OSAP stuff can also get the ATAP files, assuming that they exist somewhere, and put them up as well because we'd all like to read them.

Yes, we would, absolutely. If you're watching out there, please, please, do us all a favor. Well, Colm, before I let you go, man, I want to get your thoughts on this too, as well as George, the stuff going on right now at the ranch. You know, we have a television show on the History Channel, which is insane to think that we now have a Skinwalker race, Ranch television series.

So what are your guys' personal thoughts on the new owner? What's going on there? Have you guys been back out to the ranch? Or do either of you plan on doing any more reporting directly from the ranch or even investigation? Yeah. What do you make of everything going on right now at Skinwalker Ranch? Well, I, shortly after or shortly before Brandon Fugel bought the, the, the

property from Robert Bigelow in March of 2016. Actually, George and I took a trip up to Skinwalker Ranch. And it was kind of like a handover trip where we were just checking out, making sure that the various places were empty and that we had not left any extraneous stuff over this. So we walked the property. We made sure that the Skinwalker Ranch was kind of ready for the new owner. And the new owner took possession of it probably a few days or a week or so after we had been on the property. But, you know, George and I had a really good trip up there. That's the last time I personally have been up on Skinwalker Ranch.

I know George has been up there since then. But I do know that what Brandon Fugel and his team, Travis Taylor and these other people, I think initially when they took over the property, there was a high level of skepticism about, you know, all of the quote-unquote stories that had been reported by the National Institute for Discovery Science and by, you know, the Bass, the Bass OSAP program and all of that. So it was a lot of skepticism, but over time, I think a lot of the experiences that these people have had on the property and also bringing stuff home with them, there's been a lot of apocryphal stories about people bringing stuff home with them,

the so-called hitchhiker effect. Jim Segalah had a really interesting show there recently, a radio show in which he reported, you know, on the so-called hitchhiker effect. I think Brandon Fugel and his team have done a tremendous job in carrying on the investigative, you know, momentum that was generated by Niz,

and by OSAP. And I mean, we can look at Skinwalker Ranch in 2022 and go all the way back to 1996. And, you know, we can definitively say it's probably the most studied 500-acre property on earth with respect to both human involvement and also multiple sensors. I've had a lot of interaction with Brandon,

with Thomas Winterton, with Eric Bard, and other members of their. team and I have been back to the ranch a couple times since columnized visit in 2016, sort of the farewell. And, you know, I think just as they were skeptical about the ranch and the Nid's study and all the rumors about the bulletproof wolf and bigfoot creatures and poultergeist and the effects of digging in the ground, and of course they were skeptical and didn't believe it, highly skeptical, I would say, even derisive about the whole thing. But they took their time, got their feet on the ground. They spent the

a couple of years there getting their heads around it. And they learned long before that TV show got fired up that this was real, that it was really going on. I think they brought in Travis Taylor, who was really skeptical. That was his role to be the skeptical scientist. He's not a skeptic anymore because the things have happened to him, just that they've happened to all the members of that team. I'm so glad that they continued the research that Brandon has put a lot of new resources and energy into figuring it out. I would just, I have warned them person to person that that entity, that intelligence, whatever it is, is fickle out there. And you may have a really hit show for a while and suddenly Mr. Skinwalker says, I'm out of here.

Because that's what it did to Nids. I mean, that's why the Nid's thing ended because it got tired of being hunted and it just left. And the activity died down to the point where there was nothing left to study. And then it came back. So I hope it continues. I wish them nothing but the best. I'm not really all that thrilled about going back, but I probably will at some point. At first, I didn't think it was real.

I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV! Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is ours. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N.

The X-Files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden, belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Nice. That's good to hear. Yeah, the Skinwalker can be a diva. Sometimes she doesn't want to get on camera. I get it. It's kind of like rolling the dice. You know, you never know which visit you're going to go there and you're going to bring something home. It's really bad. Exactly. I mean, just as a coder to that, I think I personally spend about 300 days and nights

on Skynwalker ranch during the, you know, the 90s era. And 95% of the time, it's a beautiful pristine ranch that is, I mean, the views are breathtaking. It's a beautiful place. But that 5% when stuff is happening, everything changes. I mean, the atmosphere changes. The dogs start acting differently. Cattle start acting differently. I mean, everything changes during that.

5%, but for 95% at the time, you know, it's a beautiful western ranch. It's very interesting. The phenomenon does seem to, you know, tap and nudge when it wants to and puts you in your shoes

and in the immediate moment more than anything possibly can. So I love that aspect of this tricksterish nature of the phenomenon, just when you least expect it. Colb, I know you have to get going. So if there's anything left you want to share with our audience, what you want them to take from the book,

and what you think they should focus on moving forward with Skinwalker Ranch and these phenomena in general. Is there anything you want to leave our audience with? Well, I would hope that the skinwalkers at the Pentagon, we put in a lot of appendices in the book, and Appendix Number 2 is a sort of a structure of what a future program would look like. I would hope that the OSAP program could serve as a sort of a template for a future UFO program that would involve, you know, both studying the UFO performance and deploying sensors where they can. But at the same time, studying UFO effects on people. Because, I mean, after all, without humans, does a tree, you know, fall in the forest and does nobody hear, there, can nobody hear it type thing? Just like UFO activity, they do affect humans.

They do create fundamental life-changing effects on humans. So I would hope a future UFO program could conform to the OSAP template that was created. And we still believe that was a very, very successful template that served the United States government in terms of generating 104 technical reports on. the various aspects and dimensions of the UFO phenomenon. So if I look to the future, I would hope that the OSAP program could serve as a template for future UFO programs.

Fantastic. Building off of the shoulders of these phenomena. I love it. I love it. Well, Combe, I want to thank you for being here tonight. I know, you were on the ranch for so long.

You experienced so many, I would assume, life-altering things. things. And that can weigh on a person. It really can when the world just kind of changes in front of your very eyes. So I got to thank you for being courageous enough to do that. I don't think I could be one of those people to spend that much time on a ranch. But I want to thank you more for taking the time to write this book with George and with James. And for showing the public that, you know, this is a place we need that needs further study. And could ultimately, whatever these phenomena are,

could change the world. So thank you. Thank you for all your work on this. Thank you, Ryan. It was great to talk to you. And good luck with your podcast. It seems like a really good one. George, thank you for sticking around for some of our listener questions as well. I really do appreciate your time. I'm going to start with Luis. Luis Jimenez of the Unidentified Celebrity Review really values the work you've done as a journalist throughout the years, as many of us have in this world, that we've lived. of UFOs every day. And the, you know, the, the nature of trying to cover this topic in a very credible way is not easy. So we commend you on that. And Lou wants to know, where do you see the future of the discussion in the next five to 10 years when it comes to UFOs in terms of mainstream journalism? Do you think we're going to be at a point where it's okay to finally

talk about werewolves and portals and, you know, dino beavers even as people have claimed to have seen on the ranch. Do you think this will ever be a discussion the mainstream will be a part of? Well, it's going to have to be because, you know, we've got 75 years of lights in the sky, radar returns, things of that sort, UFO case after case after case. You are never going to solve this mystery by only studying things that flit around in the sky or that pop into the ocean. I mean, how many of those cases do you need to figure out that something is flying around up there, down here, that is not us? You know, I think that case has been made already. You got to get your hands dirty. You know, it occurred to me as I was playing with a laser pointer with our cats

a couple of weeks ago. I'm playing with this thing and they never catch it. And that's kind of what it is like with this UFO stuff. We're never going to catch one of those. We're never going to catch one of those, I mean, other than the ones that might be stashed in a hangar somewhere, but we're not going to solve the mystery just by chasing lights in the sky or a laser pointer on the carpet. You got to dig down into it and follow the evidence where it leads. That's what Alsap did. Follow the evidence where it leads. They did not want to study Bigfoot. They didn't want to dig into poltergeist type phenomena. They certainly didn't expect to run into hitchhiker effects for intelligence agents and officers. but you have to follow it where it leads.

What does it mean? A place like Skinwalker Ranch, unique in the sense that all of this paranormal phenomena is concentrated in one spot. There are other places like it in the world, just nothing that's been as intensely studied over such a longer period of time as this one, where you've got UFOs, orbs, hultergeist type activity, crop circles, big foot, animal mutilations, all at woods. Are they all related? when one happens, when the orbs appear, when saucers are in the sky, these other things occur as well, suggests some sort of a relationship. You have to study that. So whether people like it or not, and, you know, we were on the receiving end of a lot of

Dino Beaver jokes. We didn't make it up. You know, Column Keller is the guy who saw it. You know, now that he's gone, I can say there's nobody more humble and more careful and more professional than Collum. The guy's rock solid. he's honored his security oaths. You know, he's wanted to tell as much of the story as he can

without crossing over a line. As he said, he's been out there hundreds of nights on Skinwalker Ranch out in the dark by himself, absolutely courageous. You know, he's the kind of model for the kind of investigator we need to get to the bottom of this. I would also hope that journalists, my fellow journalists, now have a taste of this, you know, for as long as I've been doing it.

And I still think of myself as a newcomer. And now I realize my hair is a little bit gray and I'm not really a newcomer to this that I've been added for more than 30 years. But, you know, when I started and realized, I got into it, I was really cocky thinking, well, what this topic needs is a good journalist. I'll have this wrapped up in like six months. And of course, you know, I know a lot more and understand a lot less 30 years later. A lot of journalists now are taking a whack at it and they're getting it wrong. and they'll look for the low-hanging fruit as opposed to doing what journalists are supposed to do.

Investigate the unexplained and not explain the uninvestigated. I don't want to beat up the New York Times too much for getting things wrong. I think they did their best. Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal are terrific reporters. They had a heavy lift to get that story told and get it past their editors. I think they were misled by some of the people who are feeding them information, and they got it wrong. when you get those things wrong, you've got to correct it.

I think they have inspired a new generation of journalists to go ahead and take a look at this, which I've encouraged for a long time. Look, this is a legitimate story. And you approach it the same way you do with any other story. Find reliable information, confirm the information, get reliable sources, follow the paper trail, treat it like any other story and see where it leads. I don't know that we're ever going to solve this mystery. But at least now there's a new energy in part because Elizondo blew the lid off of this thing.

Him coming forward with that story has opened up new doors. Because the media took it seriously, Congress got interested. And now it's a whole new world. It's a whole new ballgame for UFOs. And journalism played a big role in that. Well, that whole new ballgame, George, I love your thoughts on everything going on right now. Like you mentioned, this was a snowball effect. ever since the Times article came out, the world has changed in terms of the way the public is gradually accepting these stories and these phenomena.

And we also have the U.S. military now prompting their members to report these things. This was not the case for a very long time. So you can't sit here anyone and say that nothing has changed since this has all happened. So what do you personally think? We're getting a new office in the Pentagon. I mean, this is crazy that we've kind of circled back to this, that our government is going to look at this issue again with hopefully fresh eyes. But what do you make of everything going on right now in the UFO conversation?

Well, I've said this a couple of times. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. The level of change, the tectonic level of changes that have happened in the last four years or so, since that New York Times story kind of kicked things off. I mean, you know, if we left it up to Robert Bigelow, God bless him, I don't think he would have released any of this stuff. If Lou Hillizondo hadn't come forward, I'm not sure Jim Lekatsky would.

If they could have continued the OSAP program with funding and operating in secrecy, I would think we would still not know about it, you know, but we do know about it. And that's dramatic. The fact that Congress is interested, and they've ordered the Pentagon to take action, is all great, but I would temper our expectations here on multiple levels. For one thing, public interest seems high right now, certainly compared to the last decade or two decades ago,

but there have been peaks and valleys of public interest in the past. 1952, we're 60 years from that. There was a gigantic wave, a great deal of interest in Congress and the public and the media, and then it went away, you know. So it's happened before and it can happen again. There's a broad interest among the public globally now in UFOs. But it's always a secondary interest. It's only a small group of us on UFO Twitter and watching your podcast, Ryan, that live and die by this stuff and pay attention to it every day. The rest of the world has jobs, bills to pay. They're worried about the Ukraine. They're worried about climate change. There's all kinds of stuff that is a higher priority than UFOs for most people. So, you know, my sense of what's going on at the Pentagon is

they are being dragged kicking and screaming into this, that they are dragging their feet as much as possible, that people of the higher-ups don't want this responsibility, they don't want to share this information, and they'll do everything they can to obscure it and to fight progress. I think, you know, I sympathize with them to a degree and when they say that you can't tell your friends

without telling your enemies, there are those who would like to share a lot more information with us. That's not going to happen. You know, I think they're going to have, to be drag kicking and screaming into some sort of transparency. Congress is going to have to stay on top of them because if they can get away with returning to the secrecy of old, they'll do it. Do you have any hope that we in the public will get anything from this new program

that's going to be happening? I mean, thank God for senators who are kind of holding their feet to the fire and saying, you need to give a report to the public as well. We understand things are classified to an extent, but there needs to be a report. I think it's going to be quarterly that they'll have to produce in terms of what they've discovered. What do you think? Were you going to see anything from this new program? Well, it's like the UAP task force. I respect the people that were working on that, but you saw what we got. I mean, there was real news in there, you know, 144 cases,

143 are unexplained. That's really a newsworthy piece of information. Well, we had no details. Are we going to get details about the cases where they happen? I doubt it. So again, I would temper my expectations. And in the larger picture, will we ever figure this out? I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced that we're ever going to figure it out. It seems like it's always a couple of inches outside of our reach, that it mutates and morphs and changes into different kinds of mysteries and things

and things of strange phenomena that were described that could be the same as what's going on now, described a thousand years ago as something else. we still don't understand that. And I'm not sure a thousand years from now we'll understand what these things are now. I hope we do, but I'm not convinced. I would have to agree. I just have hope that within my generation's time

we'll have some of those answers or my kids. That'd be pretty awesome. But hey, the progress we made in the last four years is more than we probably made in the last 70 plus years. So I have faith. I have faith. Well, I guess kind of to wrap it up, George. A lot of people want to know, will there be an audiobook version of Skinwalkers at the Pentagon? Is that anything you guys are planning on?

Yes. Yes. We're working on it right now. It could be out. We expect it out this summer. Yeah. Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, we got a real professional guy who's leading the charge on that. We're all contributing to what we can. And I think it'll be really good. So I'm looking forward to hearing it myself. That's fantastic. I know a lot of people are going to be excited about. that. Last question for you, George, before we go here. I ask home this as well, what do you hope people

will take away from the book? You know, there's amazing stories in there. They're very interesting. We, you know, very compelling. But at the core of this book, it says more than just, you know, here's this mysterious ranch. There's all these things going on. Like there is a implication to all of that, to the, to the public, to humanity in general. So what do you hope people? people will really take away from the research, the reporting you've done on Skinwalker Ranch, and more specifically the book. Of course, Skinwalker's Ranch plays a central role in the book, but it's so much bigger than that. It was one slice of a very large program.

What I'd like people understand is that, you know, it takes courage to go after this stuff. It takes resources, too. Allsap, if it had been allowed to continue, it might have some answers by now. It did an amazing amount of work in a short period of time, 27 months. When the public gets a look at the reports that were produced that we list in the book, they're going to be blown away. I mean, they really worked hard. The government got its $22 million worth for sure.

But you can't just study this stuff, lights in the sky, radar returns. You've got to follow the evidence where it leads. That's what those guys did. They had the guts to do it. The DIA for two years allowed them to go forward. Harry Reid and his colleagues got the money for it. And that's what it's going to take. It's going to take money.

It can't just be like Project BluPy, three secretaries and an officer to get this thing resolved, if we're ever going to resolve it. You've got to really work at it. You've got to get the cooperation of other governments around the world. And whoever the keepers of the secrets are, they're going to have to be forced to give it up. You know, if we're going to make progress, that's where we would really make it overnight, is to see that material. If they have saucers or just wreckage or bodies, and I think there are pretty good indications

that we do have that kind of stuff. If someone has it, you're going to have to force it out of them. They're not going to give it up willingly. And so if I were a member of Congress, that's where I'd put my energy is to go after that. And like you mentioned, that's a good point. This is a global phenomenon. We have to keep that in mind. We look at these topics from Western eyes very often.

And we have to remember that Skinwalker Ranch is a small part of that in terms of these phenomena occurring all over the world. But again, I think it is the quintessential kind of inspirational kind of inspirational. for others to go out and say, the world is much stranger than we could have ever imagined. And a lot of that really goes back to Skinwalker Ranch. Well, to quote the great hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. So, you know, there's wisdom in there somewhere. Thanks, Ryan.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, George. Thanks for coming here on Somewhere in the Skies today. And can't wait to have you back. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network. Whatever bike you're looking for from mountain to road, either pedal powered or electric, we've got what you want ready for super fast delivery. Quality gear at prices you won't find in your average bike shop. Bikeshomline.com. Ride more for less.