Somewhere in the Skies - UFOs 2023: Part 1 | Feat. Micah Hanks

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

On episode 314 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are joined by listener-favorite, Micah Hanks! Hanks sits down with us to discuss the recent Senate UAP Hearing, a new UAP video shared by AARO, a recent shadowy meeting of intelligence leaders at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, mysterious cattle mutilations in Texas, why aliens are likely to be artificial intelligence, and a giant-sized expose on former AATIP director, Luis Elizondo. It's a jam-packed episode as we head further into 2023 and deeper down the rabbit hole of UFOs! Follow Micah Hanks on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/MicahHanks Visit the Debrief at: https://thedebrief.org/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Book your Cameo video with Ryan at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Official Store: CLICK HERE Buy Somewhere in the Skies coffee! Use promo code: SOMEWHERESKIES10 to get 10% off your order: https://bit.ly/3rmXuap Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Email Ryan directly at: [e-mail] Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2023 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

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It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song. Book Direct at ChoiceOtales.com. The Somewhere 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. somewhere skies. Whatever they are. There's a whole fleet of them. They seem to defy the rules of physics, hovering, stopping on a dime, moving at hypersonic

speeds. Splashed. It's flashed. Today, the man in charge of investigating UAPs said his office now has 650 reports. More than half have a round or sphere shape, possibly balloons, typically white, translucent, or metallic. Observed at 10 to 30,000 feet. So far, no sun.

of alien involvement. No credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity. Sean Kirkpatrick says this case remains unresolved, a cylinder object spotted somewhere in the Middle East. But this flying object with a tail, he says, turns out to be a plane. This is the heat signature off of the engines of a commuter aircraft that happen to be flying in the vicinity. Are there capabilities that could be employed against us? Absolutely. The adversary is not waiting.

They are advancing and they're advancing quickly. This is somewhere in the skies with Ryan's bread. What's up, guys? Welcome. I am back home in Scotland, finally. After a month away from my home, traveling like crazy, it just feels so good to be in my own place again and sleep in my own bed. And as many of you know, I had some really weird trials and tribulations while I was away. But thank you to everyone for checking in on me.

I had some stuff happened with my ears where I was almost 90% death for a little while. It was a little scary. I even recorded and edited an entire episode of the podcast, 90% deaf. So that was really interesting. You'll have to let me know how it sounded. That was the last week's episode. But enough of that, we have so much to talk about. The Senate UAP hearing happened this past week.

Everyone has their own thoughts and opinions on how it went. But we also have some other awesome stories to cover tonight. And I couldn't think of a better person to come on with me tonight. My mystery co-host, he has covered basically everything either directly or tangentially that we're going to be talking about tonight. So let's not waste. any more time. Let's bring in our mystery co-host, the one and only Micah Hanks. Welcome back, brother. Good to be here, Ryan. Actually, welcome home. It's good to see that you're back in the Land of Lords and Loch Ness. And it seems that your hearing has stabilized. Is that correct?

It is, I would say I'm back up to about 60%. So I will admit, I'm listening to you right now on as high a volume as possible on my my earbuds here. But things are getting much better day by day slowly but surely. So thanks, man. Thank you for checking in on that. What? What do you say? No, listen, actually, that's no joke.

That's no joke. I have struggled with hearing issues for most of my life when I was a child. I, you know, had a lot of those earaches, but the scarring that actually resulted on my right ear drum has caused permanent hearing loss in that ear. Not all, but I mean, you know, I'd say a percentage, maybe 20 to 30 percent hearing loss in that ear. My left ear is good to go, but it's always, you know, been an issue I've had to kind of work around and everything. And, of course, being a musician on the weekends, when we got loud PAs and things, you always got to be mindful of that stuff. So, but I saw you were doing your very best daredevil in reverse.

You know, he has super hearing, but he's blind. And you had, you know, poor hearing for a few days. And so you're using your super acute euphological vision to be able to navigate New York while you were back to your state side, huh? Exactly, man. I was even staying in Hell's Kitchen. I'm glad you caught that. I did feel like Daredevil in reverse. But that's crazy.

I didn't know that about you. I actually, my right ear is permanently damaged as well. Oh, really? So I had about 30% hearing loss, too. That is eerily similar. I can't believe it. So we are truly soul brothers. We are soul brothers.

We knew that already just from the way that we relate. But we're going to have to talk to Gary Nolan then. And Gary's perspective on if there's anything about you and I and the right ear, you know, I actually did have coffee with Gary recently, digitally. And on my podcast this week, the Micah Hank's program, that discussion with Dr. Nolan, man, this is one for the books. It's sure to be almost as good as that really incredible. interview that Chrissy Newton did with him a while back, which was my favorite single podcast

of the entire year of 2022. But again, it was great to finally catch up and talk with Gary. It would be interesting to see what he might have to say about that and the continuity between those experiences you and I've had. Yep, we might have some regressed memories that are going to come to the surface. You never know. We'll see, man. Well, I'm very much looking forward to that interview. You're right.

Chrissy knocked it out of the park over it. rebelliously curious, but I know your conversation will only continue that. So we'll definitely tease that at the end of this live stream. But hey, let's talk about the meat on the bone of tonight's live stream. And that is the Senate UAP hearing. I was in New York when this happened. I remember live streaming it. They were about 45 minutes late starting.

So I kind of had to make do with my live. stream. I did a little dancing to keep people entertained, played some video clips. But then finally, boom, it drops. And Jilabran just hit the ground running. And we got to hear finally, finally from the head of arrow, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. So I guess let's just start from the beginning. What were your initial thoughts when you finally got to hear the voice of Sean Kirkpatrick? And how do you think it went from the start of the hearing? Well, I will speak to that point. You know, Dr. Kirkpatrick has remained sort of in the shadows.

There had been, of course, last December one brief off-camera, well, press briefing that he and Ronald Moultrie provided about the current efforts of Arrow. And this in advance of the release of that report. Now, if you knew where to look online, there were actually forums and, you know, you know, other kinds of things that he had participated in from his past work with U.S. Spacecom. And indeed, Dr. Kirkpatrick was very involved in that. Also, there was following the announcement of his official position with the director of the Alderman anomaly resolution office, his resume appeared online.

And so a lot of people were aware of just how in the loop Dr. Kirkpatrick is, not only on the science side of all this, but also the national defense implications of what we're looking at. So in terms of the Senate hearing, I mean, this was an oversight hearing and a lot of people were kind of, you know, wondering what we might see out of this. The resounding shockwave of responses on social media seemed to be discontent. A lot of people were very disappointed. A lot of people see Dr. Kirkpatrick as a bureaucrat. They feel like he's dismissive toward the topic. Some even were saying he seemed annoyed.

I disagree with all those things. I was actually very pleasantly surprised. here in very simple terms, we have a scientist not making proclamations about what UAP are or are not, not saying they are this or are that. He's saying, here's the data, here's what we have learned so far. We are very new at this, and we're only beginning to get into this analysis. We have about 650 some cases we're working with, maybe a couple dozen we've actually worked through at this point. Not much.

Currently, within that small data set of those that we have looked at, we don't see any overt evidence of anything exotic extraterrestrial or anomalous. So most people in the mainstream media left it right there. Okay, well, you know, there's nothing to see here because we aren't seeing them aliens. But I'm thinking to myself, okay, here we've got a guy who's a scientist, who's acting like one, who's talking like one, who's doing what scientists should do. Okay, he's giving us data. And he is saying fundamentally that rather than here's what I hope they are or what you guys are hoping they are, what they should be, or what I is a skeptic think they are. No, no, no. He says, I'm going to follow this wherever the science leads, and we're going to see this through.

But right now, and he said this and emphasized it to Senator Gillibrand, who we've got to commend for bringing this all together. Again, I remain a fan of Senator Gillibrand. But he said, I hope you will give me time and understand if you don't hear from me for a little while. We've got to deal with the issues that are of most pertinence to national security first, but we're going to follow this wherever the science leads. That's basically, in my view, everything that really any serious proponent of the study, the scientific study of UAP should hope for an official to be saying it's what we need. Frankly, I think that rather than the death of euphology as it's been characterized by some online, know what this is is it's exactly what euphology needed. And you know what?

If in the end it doesn't provide evidence of exotic technologies, ET visiting from afar, that doesn't matter. We need to do what Dr. Kirkpatrick is talking about. follow the science, see where this leads, see what it determines, who knows, in that great scientific tradition, we may actually learn something if we do. And I say good on him. I think he's a great addition and not only to government and national security, but also to the long-held concerns by the collective UAP community. What are these mysteries of our skies? Let's not lead with presumptions. Let's actually look at the data. Absolutely, mad. Hey, cheers to Sean Kirkpatrick. I'll raise a drink for that, for sure. Cheers, man. I, you know, a lot of people were saying this is just, this is so boring.

He's saying exactly what the establishment wants him to say, blah, blah, blah. But I will say I was thoroughly impressed with how he handled this. Look, like you said, this is brand new. Clearly, clearly, he didn't quote unquote want to be there doing this. He wanted to be at the office doing the work. he's been hired to do. For what time he was given for the lack of resources he has, we know Gillibrand has been, you know, going up against everyone trying to get the budget for Arrow, the budget they asked for, the budget they deserve to do this work. Um, Kirkpatrick was working

with like three people when he first got hired to do this. I know it's up to a few dozen now, which is awesome. Like we're now moving forward with this, which is great. So you're right. This wasn't so much, okay. Here. Here's them aliens. Here's every case we're looking at. It was kind of, this is what Arrow is going to be doing. Here's one or two things we've looked at. One thing we've positively identified and one we're still unclear about. And I do want to play that video. We'll discuss the Middle East video in just a little bit here. But I agree with everything you said. I was very impressed with what he had to say, how he had to say it. And how he had to say it. accessible he made it. Like you said, as a scientist, it can be very, I would assume, daunting to try to explain your methodology of what you're doing. For someone like the everyday person out there, they're not going to understand, you know, the methodologies or the sensor systems in which they're using or how they prioritize cases, this, that, this, that. I thought he made it very digestible. I learned a hell of a lot. during this about what arrow is going to be doing. And one of those things, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is we finally learned about the shapes and everything, which was really cool, the commonalities between shapes,

the maneuverability. So I guess let's start there. What did you think was what really stood out to you at the hearing? That, my friend, that what you just mentioned stood out. And I'm so glad you mentioned it, because again, you know, there are a lot of folks out there. to sound like I'm attacking the community. It's a community I'm a part of. I always try to maintain skepticism as my default position, but I don't play by that kind of, I guess, you know, playbook of a lot of modern skeptics where it's, we always presume that something

that seems extraordinary, therefore is, and therefore there is a simple explanation, maybe even a mundane one. We're always going to find at all costs some kind of mundane explanation, no matter what the data might actually appear to indicate. That's the issue, the flawed logic, I think, that some skeptics, not all, but some skeptics do tend to lead with. There are very well maybe cases where a genuine anomaly emerges. I think that there's a lot of faulty logic in terms of, well, if there's an anomaly, then it's going to display these clear characteristics. It's going to move really fast. It's going to do things that seem magical. And we haven't seen anything that's truly anomalous like that, therefore none of these things are anomalies. And I'm thinking

to myself, whoever said, I mean, yeah, we've heard. of course, about the five observables and things like that. But great, okay, apart from that, whoever said that really something that is supposed to represent a potential for humankind and for the sciences that could be groundbreaking, whoever said that it necessarily has to be like magic, that it has to act a certain way, do certain things, this is the big gripe I always have with Neil deGrasse Tyson and a lot of scientists. They watch Hollywood films. They see what alien spacecraft look like in those Hollywood films. and then they say if alien spacecraft were visiting Earth, we would know it. No, you don't.

You have no idea what they'd be like. You only know what you've seen in films. So I think that both the skeptics and the believers often come at this going, look, we know what this is or we know what it should behave like, and it either is or isn't that. We don't know any of those things. We just need to look at the data, and we need to try and be open-minded to it. Now, that's what Dr. Kirkpatrick's doing, but he's also taking things a step further than the predecessor agency. The UAP Task Force did.

Here's how. Like you point out, Ryan, yes. in that briefing slide that he showed during the session with Senator Jillelbrand in addition to this footage. You didn't have to show us footage of a UAP, but he did. But he's also showing us this slide right here. And this one not only gives us the reported UAP morphology, it also gives us a lot of characteristics, altitudes. It's giving us, you know, information about radio thermal propulsion or lack thereof,

and also hotspots where these things tend to appear around the world. Although, and again, rather than leading with biotermal, biases and presumptions, Dr. Kirkpatrick is pointing out, hey, there are probably actually some issues with biases that emerge from these statistics. For instance, UAP showing up around certain hotspots, that probably actually has to do with the locations where our sensors are more than the prevalence of UAP reports per se. The altitudes that we see over here on the left side of the screen where the bars are the highest there. Well, of course, that's the altitude that most aircraft operate. But the thing is so important about everything we're seeing on the screen right now is that all this information is what previously was omitted from the public ODNI reports in 2021 and 2022. But more specifically, in a classified version of the 2021 report that was obtained by researcher John Greenwald Jr. using a mandatory declassification review. And you and I both talked with John at length about that report. This information was conveyed but redacted in that version of the report.

There was an entire portion in the back, a appendix of the 2021 report that discussed the shapes, you know, common shapes and appearance of UAP. Now, the title of that apparent chart that appeared on that page was left, but it redacted all that. You know why that was redacted, Ryan? Because there had been a classification guide that had been written by the UAP Task Force leadership. That classification guide also redacted, but nonetheless a redacted version of it released through FOIA, and I think it was Greenwald that got that also. That UAP classification guide dictated what information was supposed to be removed. So Dr. Kurt Patrick is showing us this.

That means two things. One, that obviously he went through the necessary declassification process to be able to get that released and did so, and then included that information that was previously left out of the reports, even the declassified version of the classified version that went to government in 2021. One, Dr. Kirkpatrick and Arrow have declassified that, gone through the process. They included that in their briefing slides that they showed us during the Senate hearing. And that also means that in addition to trying to get this stuff declassified and doing so, they did so with the apparent purpose of showing it to the public.

Now, people are out there gripping about Arrow and Dr. Kirkpatrick. Folks, we are seeing more transparency about what the government is collecting about this phenomenon than the predecessor agency, right? some of whom, and I've met some of those people, you know, I think I can say his name now since he's come out and he's appeared at Alien Con and given, you know, interviews, but Jay Stratton, Chrissy Newton and I sat and we spoke at length at Jay Stratton. He is a fine guy. We had a great conversation. I have a lot of respect for Jay. Also have met and spoken at length with Dr. Travis Taylor. So I'm not faulting the UAP Task Force by any means, having spoken with them and having what I feel is a pretty good feel for their take on this phenomenon, what the issue represents to national security. the importance of getting this information out to the public. But it is still relevant to point out the arrow for all the issues people take with Dr. Kirkpatrick,

his attitude, you know, how he conveys himself on camera, everything that UFO Twitter was talking about the other day. Folks, we're finally seeing more, more transparency, we're finally seeing more data. We're finally seeing more relevant information probably than we have ever seen about the United States government and its collection of UAP information. and that also being treated scientifically and discussed in an open forum, a Senate hearing. What is to complain about? You finally get what you've been wanting and everybody's angry. I don't get it.

I mean, this is maybe some of the best information we've seen probably in decades. Yeah. Well, and there's a couple issues I want to bring up with you in terms of some of the very vocal people in the UFO field who, you know, before this hearing would say things like if they don't bring up crash retrieval, and ET bodies, then we know they're lying because we know for a fact that they, that Kirkpatrick is aware of these things and, and this and that. And if he does not bring up the ET presence, then this is all a sham. I take huge issue with that, as I'm sure you do as well, Micah. This man is a scientist. This man is working on a new program.

This man does not have access to everything he wants. That's something I want to ask you. We heard that we heard Kirkpatrick talk about how he does not have the clearance that he needs to get the sufficient data to have a full data set on what Arrow is doing at this point. I believe it was what he called. It was a section 50. Title 50. Title 50 where most of the classified information. is that he would need to investigate these things thoroughly.

He does not have access to that. And Gillibrand just said straight up, do you need access to that? And he's like, yeah. And she's like, okay, we'll work on that for you. What did you make of that whole issue with all of this? That Kirkpatrick, even Kirkpatrick, not the public. Like, we're working as UFO researchers, independent UFO researchers with very limited data. But even Kirkpatrick is working with limited data and not getting what he needs. So what do you make about that whole issue with all of this?

Yeah. And that's a very important point. One that again has been emphasized by my colleague Tim McMillan there at the debrief who may have also been tweeting about this. But essentially we're talking about Title 50 authority. And of course, Dr. Kurt Patrick complaining about the necessity of having that. The issue with that is that without access to that information, He is being left out of, I mean, I don't know by some estimates as much as maybe 80% of, you know, intelligence community information related to the topic. Probably a lot of that coming from, you know, a particular three-letter agency, right, that handle central intelligence for the United States of America. So the important point here is that Dr. Kirkpatrick is explicitly saying, you know, I'm seeing people in the chat there saying he's read into everything and therefore he should know all this stuff. He explicitly said the other day that he's a little bit of. limited in terms of what he has access to, and he is appealing to Jenad Branden there by the Senate for additional accessibility to information. Now, this is not a new problem. Okay, it not only illustrates the limitations of what ERA was able to do, but it also underscores an ongoing problem. You may

remember there was an excellent political article. I think Brian Bender did probably back in 2020, And this had to do with the efforts at that time by the UAP task force. And Chris Mellon had been quoted in Politico's saying that members of the UAP task force at that point were saying they were being stiff armed. Do you remember that? Yep. They said that they were being stiff armed by members of the intelligence agency who in that instance had reportedly not been fully compliant with requests by the UAP task force to get access to certain information. So again, what Dr. Kirkpatrick is discussing, there is an ongoing issue. And it goes back much further even than recent years.

You know, back in the 1980s, there was an organization called the Citizens Against UFO Secrecy or Calls. And they had filed a lawsuit against the CIA and also the National Security Agency. And they were trying to get access through the FOIA process, of course, as civilians. They were trying to get access to CIA information and NSA information about UAP, incidentally, Todd Zekyll, I believe one of the members, had actually been a former NSA employee, but that notwithstanding, they were trying to get access to FOIA. And what ended up happening with the case of the CIA was that a lot of information, first they denied they had any, I believe. But then it later came out through FBI documentation where the FBI said, you know, we have some stuff,

but we're going to have to go to certain agencies, the NSA, the CIA, and get, you know, permission from them to give you what we've been shown. And therefore it revealed that those agencies had, but they, said they didn't. So additional lawsuits were filed. Ultimately, in the case of the CIA, several documents actually were released, a huge batch of documents were finally released. The NSA, it was a little more difficult to get access to that information, and ultimately a judge had to rule in favor of the NSA saying that the public desire to know what the NSA had about UAP, or UFOs, as they were called in those days, was not outweighed by the potential impact on national security that the release of that information would have.

And that's very significant because additional attempts over the decades to try and get NSA information about UAP have failed. And again, they've come back to saying, actually, any documents we had, we no longer have. They've been destroyed or whatever. So there's long held concern about the level of secrecy within the intelligence community. What they exclusively want access to what is being currently, apparently kept out of the

hands of Dr. Kirkpatrick and the All-Domain anomaly resolution office and what researchers for years have tried to get access to information about and have only had limited success. This is an ongoing problem. And it comes down to one thing, Ryan, you know, at what point is necessary secrecy unnecessary? At what point do we get beyond just protecting ways and means and sources and methods? And we get over into the realm of understanding that there are certain topics related to this that the public does deserve to know about, should know about information that should be made publicly accessible. Now, again, I go back to the UAP Task Force. They had had their issues with this themselves, but they, perhaps in good faith. I mean, I presume that this

wasn't good faith in the interest of national security. They had a classification guide that governed what information could be released and how it could be handled. We didn't see a lot of stuff for a couple of years. And then the other day, while everybody's complaining, a bunch of this information just came out, courtesy of Dr. Kirkpatrick, who apparently went through that declassification process. Information that previously was being kept out of our hands and that we weren't made access, you know, given access to, suddenly just became available. Somebody apparently realized, okay, this is no longer something that has to be held, you know, out of public view. How much more that's being withheld by the CIA, by the NSA, by anybody else in the intelligence

community, national geospatial intelligence. I mean, we can go on down the list. How much more information is currently being withheld that perhaps on further review would not gravely impact national security and could be released. At very least, it should be released, or at least access, Title 50 authority perhaps, should be granted to Arrow. That's not what we're seeing right now. That's what all that means, and that's the longer term problem we've been dealing with now for decades. Absolutely. I mean, and like you mentioned, not even just with the UFO topic. So I think this was kind of Kirkpatrick's way of saying to those agencies, we're coming after you. And you have to do this. We'll see. We'll see what happens with all of it. But I want to

play the video that Kirkpatrick showed during this. Now, he showed two, one, which they were able to positively identify as a man-made aircraft. But then we had this other one from the Middle East. So I'm going to go ahead and play that quick and then get your thoughts on that on the other side. Great mind. Awesome. You'll see it come through the top of the screen. There it goes. And then the camera will slew to follow it.

You'll see it pop in and out of the field of view there. This is essentially all of the data we have associated with this event from some years ago. It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based off of that video. Now, what we can do and what we are doing is keeping that as part of that group of 52% to see what are the similarities, what are the trends across all these, do we see these in a particular distribution, do they all behave the same or not? As we get more data, we will be able to go back and look at these in a fuller context. As we get more data. And to anyone wondering, no, this is not the Mosul or this is not the same event as Jeremy Corbel is brought forward. He's been very vocal about that.

This is a different event. I think they said it took place in 2009, perhaps. Yeah, something like that. I'd have to go back and watch the video, which was not the same as Jeremy Corbell's. But what I think is interesting about this is we got to see, you know, what Kirkpatrick is able to do with very limited. data. It gets put somewhere. And then when we do start to find similar shaped objects or maneuverability, then we can go back to that one that we don't have the data for and say, it's pretty similar. It's moving kind of the same. Let's try to, you know, compare that to that.

So I think, again, like this is what he's working with. Very limited data when these things are submitted and obviously a lack of transparency. What I think is really cool, and, you know, he mentioned this more towards the end of the hearing is, let's see here. He has assembled a pair of teams, an intelligence community team, and a science and technology team comprised of engineers, physicists, and others that are performing a competitive analysis of data arrow is collecting. That's pretty cool. You know, it's not just, you know, the scientists over here or the, the intelligence people over here, they're working together and they're competitive. Like they all, it's like trying to get the gold star to put up on the board in elementary school. Whoever gets it gets the pizza party.

So I love this idea of competitive analysis in trying to understand these things. So yeah, I guess let's rewind. And what did you make of this section of the hearing when he showed the videos? Did this add anything, you know, to the optimistic side of what Arrow was doing? Oh, yeah. I mean, it certainly did. It was better than the video that Scott Bray showed us during the congressional hearings last year. I mean, I don't think anybody really expected that Dr. Kurt Patrick was going to sit there,

show us all the stuff that had been classified previously in the ODNI reports and give us what may be a better UFO video than any that we've seen since the three historic Navy videos were released. Now, again, there have been some. down-to-earth explanations offered. McWest has presented the idea of a winch aerostat small platform or some similar kind of a surveillance aerostat that might have been in use by the United States in Iraq at that time or in other locations. And that's, you know, possibly a good suggestion. I do think it's noteworthy that, again, the similarity of that object or the so-called metallic orb that we saw before the Senate the other day that Dr. Kirkpatrick released.

As you pointed out, it is similar in appearance to. the object that was purportedly photographed over Mosul that Jeremy Corbell released earlier this year as well. The issue with that that I take, however, is that if it were any kind of a really well-known technology that the U.S. military would have been using, for instance, like a tethered aerostat radar system, and again, what we're talking about here is basically a small, inflatable blimp-like device, usually tethered to the ground, and it has functional radar capabilities, and it's used very much for that purpose. thing is, is that that also is a data collecting medium. So if that's what the objects in these videos were, I would imagine probably that there would have been data that could have been retrievable about the date and time that would have pretty clearly indicated the location

of said aerostat, its position, its use, its function, and other data it was collecting, and that probably could be used to rule this out. To the contrary, and I may be wrong about this, but I mean, just pushing back a little against that aerostat idea, Dr. Kirk Patrick said during the Senate discussion the other day that this video that we have of this object is essentially all that we have about this one. So, again, to me, it seems that if there were a very simple explanation and there very well may be one, and by the way, to his credit, Mick has not come out and said, that's what this is, it's solved. He's merely put that forward as a, you know, likely proposition. And I think that's a good one.

That's a very helpful addition to this dialogue. But I would imagine that due to the uses for those kinds of tethered aerostats and the kind of data that often they're used to collect for surveillance purposes, there would be data that we would be able to use to triangulate the time, the location of the footage. Keep in mind that it were electro-optical systems on board that Reaper drone, that MQ-9 that captured this footage. I would think that we should be able to determine if it were an aerostat used for surveillance, if that were the case. Maybe I'm wrong. But what we do know is that Dr. Kirkpatrick said that footage is essentially all we have when it comes to that incident. All we know about that incident and the object that was filmed is essentially what we see in that footage.

And really, I think that, again, we hear a lot these days about UAP falling into the so-called low information zone. I think that's something to keep in mind here too with so little to work with as a video of what looks like a little spherical object flying. And obviously the Reaper drone is following it. It's trying to observe this thing. Some have tried to suggest that the object moving or the appearance of movement could have actually come back down to that parallax effect idea and that it was actually the movement of the Reaper drone. Again, it seems pretty telling that the object was followed. They attempted to track and film it. They wondered, you know, what this object was.

This was something that was obviously of interest. We may never know what it is, though, because once again it falls into that low information zone. We don't have a whole lot of information to work with. The problem, though, there is, and we saw this recently about, A similar video. Well, it wasn't really similar, but another interesting video that appeared online. It appears to show, for lack of a better term, a saucer-like object flying toward and then passing by the cockpit of an aircraft. Now, I have only begun to kind of look into this video.

There are conflicting stories about the provenance of the video. Some say that this Colombian model Valentina Ruiz, you know, that she actually had filmed. But then there's another story. Again, you know, there's so much information that still needs to be followed. up on and determined about this. But nonetheless, the general response I've seen to this video, and the reason I bring it up is twofold. One, people just ignore it.

Well, a lot of people on TikTok and social media, they're going nuts and saying best UFO video ever. But again, a lot of people who maybe would be capable of providing an intelligence and intelligent analysis of this, they just kind of look at it and go, well, you know, it's probably a balloon and I don't have any reason to look at it any more deeply. That or they just ignore it altogether. I mean, a lot of my fellows in the UFO community, they just, I mean, I bring it up and they're kind of like, eh, you know, whatever. Or they haven't seen it at all.

And then I show it to when they say, eh, whatever. Again, just a very brief look through the frames, a frame by frame analysis appears to show the object moving through a cloud bank in the distance, which remains in the distance as the object appears to emerge from the cloud bank and move in the direction of the aircraft. So again, my first feeling actually had just been that this was probably some sort of a CGI manipulation, all right? I don't think we can say the same thing about the object filmed over the Middle East that Dr. Kirkpatrick showed us. That clearly seems to be an actual physical object. But a very interesting point, again, that McWest raised when he looked at the footage that, you know, what was attributed to a Colombian model, I think you discussed this a bit on your program too, which has been all over the place on TikTok for anybody who wants to go look.

Mick pointed out significantly, he said, it appears mostly or most likely to be a balloon or a balloon-like object, which I found coming from a computer coder of his, you know, of his merit and knowledge. I mean, I thought that was interesting that he leads with the idea that it seems to be a physical object. And it certainly looks like one. It looks good. It was Mick saying that, actually, that caused me to take a second look. But again, I saw a lot of others. Mick didn't say this, but a lot of people said, ah, you know, the object's just being still.

It's just hovering. and it's the plane that's moving. That's what causes the appearance of motion. Well, looking at the footage, if it's a real object, and I haven't ruled out, I don't have the technical capabilities. I don't know if anybody really does to really conclusively prove that it's not CGI. But looking at the footage, it does appear if it's a real object, that it's moving in and out of that cloud bank,

and then extends out and then begins to move toward the aircraft. Counting for compression artifacts that are known to occur with smartphones, counting for the obvious fact that if this object is moving toward the aircraft, the aircraft's moving toward it also, and so that closing of the distance with the two objects moving toward one another superficially increases the appearance of the speed that the object is moving as it passes the aircraft. Taking all that into account, if one thing can be demonstrated about that, I think that it seems to be that there's an object that does move in and out of a cloud bank,

which demonstrates motion that it's not just remaining stationary. That was interesting to me, and again, I've got to thank McWest for even raising the idea that there might just be a balloon-like object, which is, again, for now, what I classify it as. It's a balloon-like object that it appeared to be demonstrating motion, not unlike what we see in the footage that Dr. Kirkpatrick displayed the other day. So my point is, even though these fall under the low information zone, we shouldn't necessarily say, ah, well, we'll never figure it out,

so we just shouldn't look at it. It's probably just this or that. Remember the late great Stanton Friedman saying, science by proclamation, you know, that's not what you do. You don't proclaim, well, this is what that is, therefore I will not look at it or a will you look at it. You know, it's important or it's not based on what I prejudge. No, the true scientific process involves taking an unbiased approach, trying to see what

information you can glean, actually looking at the data, being willing to go where the data takes you and not letting it lead you where you hope to go, right? Those are important tenets to the scientific method. And I think that, again, when we look at videos like this, they don't offer evidence of the extraordinary, but maybe they do deserve a second or even a third look, even if they do fall into that low information zone. And so, again, I'm glad Dr. Kirkpatrick

put this out there in the open. In fact, actually at the Metabunk Forum the other day, or maybe even as recently as today, I see that they have actually done an image stabilization. Did you see this? Of the object over the Middle East. So now we have a better look, thanks to the stabilization

that the folks there on the forum did, of this object as it's passing over the Middle least we may never know ultimately what that was, but it's an interesting piece of footage. And again, it currently remains in the unknowns in the unidentified camp for Aeros analysis, which in itself is a bit compelling. It is. It is. If it remains unexplained, that's what we love to hear when in reality we should love when

it is explained. But hey, that's you. You know, again, I don't lead with any kind of expectations. I'm not trying to say it's aliens. I'm not trying to be too skeptical. I try to balance those things very carefully. You know, Michael Huntington, our good friend, who's there in the chat chiming in as well.

And I think Mike's definitely somebody who rides that fence in just the right way. You've got to be skeptical. You've got to challenge your own beliefs, but you also need to challenge your preconceptions and biases. And I think that what we've learned especially from these hearings in recent days is that I'm seeing all this chatter online. Everybody should probably take a step back, breathe, and think about what we're seeing.

I think we've seen some really important information in recent days. Absolutely, man. And kind of, you know, the last thing I want to touch on with the hearing was the conversation about the whistleblower legislation that's been put into action. But not only that, a hub where people will eventually be able to submit their content to Arrow. You know, we've been waiting and waiting for this to happen. I mean, I know you and I know certain individuals who were brought in front of Arrow to testify and said that it went amazing. I spoke to a gentleman we had on the show a few months back,

Mario Woods, who had a very dramatic UFO setting over a nuclear installation, and he was on the phone with members of Arrow for over three and a half hours, which is incredible that they were. would take that much time to hear him out, just his testimony. No photos, no videos, no documentation, just to hear them out, which I think is great that they're willing to do that. We did hear that Kirkpatrick is, you know, taking submissions. However, he submitted this to, you know, the superiors that would eventually get this thing going where people will be able to submit their stuff to Arrow. He submitted it before.

Christmas and they've yet to do anything with it. So I think we have to keep that in mind, too. This isn't Kirkpatrick being like, oh, yeah, I'll just go whip up a website over on Angel Fire where you can go submit your stuff. You know, there needs to be protocols and stuff for stuff like this. So what did you make of that whole part of this? You know, we're hearing that arrow will eventually become a place where you can submit your content to. be investigated, possibly. Possibly. There's probably going to be a high threshold of what they'll actually look at. But yeah, what did you make up that whole section of the hearing? I found that

interesting. Yeah, I found it interesting too, Ryan. And, you know, again, it's hopeful. We also know that Arrow has already displayed. I mean, this is always kind of part of what they hoped to do. Dr. Kurt Patrick spoke fairly at length about their science plan the other day. But, you know, in addition to having kind of an online portal where people could submit what they deemed to be reliable information about UAP that might be of use to Arrow and its assessments. I think that we also have to take into consideration, you know, some recent past events that have occurred. For instance, I think right before he left Politico, reporter Brian Bender in one of his final, maybe he actually's very last newsletter, had reported that Susan Goff had confirmed that New York-based Enigma Labs was going to be quite. operating with Arrow. And it seems pretty evident to me what the nature of that will involve based on what Dr.

Kirkpatrick said during his testimony the other day. They are looking at trying to liaison with academia and with, you know, the private sector and also, you know, with other agencies like NASA, right, in the effort to try and collect as much data as possible. But they also, for instance, we saw this excellent paper that came out that Dr. Avi Lube and Dr. Kirkpatrick co-authored physical constraints on unidentified aerial phenomena. And I had Avi on the talk about that the very next day after the paper. I think it was still pre-print actually just shown up online.

But the point is that, again, you know, what Arrow was demonstrating with these kinds of activities is that they are working toward trying to create meaningful scientific relationships that are helping to facilitate the acquisition of data that can thereby be, used and then can be presented in a scientific, i.e. a paper or a study, but in a scientific format that undergoes peer review and then can be made accessible. There's a whole lot more transparency, actually, than I think a lot of people expect it. I'm certainly surprised by what I've seen so far. And further to that point, yeah, Dr. Kirkpatrick saying, and yes, we want to have this online medium through which we can directly obtain information data from people. who want to submit it to us. I think that's excellent. I think we need more of that. We've also had a lot of civilian agencies over the decades who have been doing that already.

The National UFO Reporting Center up there in Washington, formerly operated by Robert Grebel. But, I mean, for the last several decades, since the early 90s, it's been operated by Peter Davenport, who just unfailingly is collected and provided that data free to the public right there at the New Fork website. You know, we've also gotten ARCAP. I mean, David Marler's new National UFO Historical Records Center, which I went out and actually, visited earlier this year. I hope maybe that these sorts of civilian resources are things that Arrow will also look at as being beneficial to their, you know, further immersing themselves in information and also processing that data and that that data, as Kirkpatrick seemed to convey the other day, will be presented in a scientific, you know, forum or format.

It will undergo peer review and be made available to what extent it can be to the American people and to the world because this stuff's important. So I was very glad to see that, Ryan, and it's another important component I think. Now, to the whistleblower thing, you know, I haven't spoken to, well, yeah, actually, I have spoken to a couple of people, like you mentioned, who have been pretty visible, you know, in the community already, but who have also been approached by Arrow and who have provided testimony. I saw Robert Hastings writing earlier this year or late last year, maybe, but I think it was

earlier this year, that he had been contacted and basically asked, who the people he thinks Arrow should reach out to and speak with would be, and he provided a list of recommendations. And we know that Arrow has spoken to some of those people, mostly former personnel, military personnel, and government employees who witnessed UAP incidents at strategic facilities, nuclear weapons sites, things like that. So I am glad that they're looking into that. I hope that that process continues and that it doesn't, you know, reach hurdles. And I've spoken with a few other people in Washington who have at least some degree of awareness of how that process is going and everything, again, at the current moment, sounds pretty promising. I guess we'll kind of wait and see. But I will point out finally, one thing that's kind of interesting that some were pointing out on social media the other day was that Dr. Kirkpatrick has spoken to these, again, presumably what we would call whistleblowers, and yet still says that there's no evidence of anything exotic.

and people are saying, you know, either he's lying or there just isn't any real information that, you know, is evidential of extraterrestrials. You know, we haven't found the Roswell wreckage. Maybe they never was any. Again, I want to emphasize to people. First, what would constitute unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial technology? I mean, for instance, if we see something strange that's moving in what appears to be orbit in space and then suddenly it just changes direction and we're like, that doesn't seem to be a satellite. do we say therefore aliens, right? I mean, to me, that is once again a bias.

That's a pre-judgment or a presumption. The first judgment should be, okay, we just saw what appeared to be a technology, passing through low-earth orbit and doing seemingly anomalous things. Who on Earth might have built that? That should be the first question. Because in the furtherance of our understanding of national defense-related issues, we want to know if our enemy has something like that. My gosh, probably one of the most important.

important, relevant sections of the hearing the day was Dr. Kirkpatrick being asked, I think, by Representative Joni Ernst about the potential that China or Russia may have demonstrated capabilities that have been, you know, the Arrow now has information about his evidence of UAP. Could some of these be foreign technologies? That point, I think you played it in the intro there, where Dr. Kirkpatrick says the adversary is not waiting. they're progressing. They're doing things that maybe we don't do. They're willing to put it in layman's terms. They're willing to take the noodle and see if it's done or not. They're going to throw it and see what sticks on the wall.

Whereas United States government for whatever reason we don't. And this is the very reason. What he's talking about right there is the very reason why China's hypersonics development exceeds current U.S. capabilities and why suddenly the U.S. has realized, well, you know, we've got our tails in the wind, and we better get caught up here because China's really progressing with this. this stuff. This is what he's talking about. And he's not just, you know, pulling that out of the air. I mean, Dr. Kirkpatrick is drawing on his experience as an intelligence official, his past work with US Spacecom, you know, his past work in intelligence, you know, and here he is now working

on the UAP situation. He says, we've only moved through a very small portion of our 650-so, you know, object's data set. We're just really getting into this historical review that Congress mandated that we do that goes all the way back to 1945. So when people are saying, he's a lot of the way, He's either lying. Again, the UFO proponents, many you just take it as his lying, or the skeptics, on the other hand, saying, see, no evidence of aliens. It's awful early to be making those proclamations. We really should wait and see what happens. And just to that point, again, I've illustrated a lot of things, the historical review that's going on. But let's also not forget about, well, again, of course, the whistleblowers. Some of that testimony, once it's processed, once all the individuals that they intend to interview have been interviewed. Who knows if there's going to be information about legacy programs and things like that that comes forward. And we really do learn some extraordinary things in the years ahead. But let's also not forget that Dr. Kirkpatrick is saying, let me take care of national security first.

Those things we deem most important. But then in the broader sum of all the data we're collecting, Arrow is going to go where the science leads. And we will be forthcoming with the public about that. That seems to be the mission. And that, to me, is very important. Final point, because I don't want to get too long. the tooth here. But I mean, there had been some in recent days saying, you know, if there's no

evidence of anything anomalous, if there's no clear evidence of hyperacceleration and phenomenal things happening, then there's only one real question. Why do we need an arrow? The reason why is exactly what Dr. Kirkpatrick said. Look at what our enemy is doing. Look at what the adversaries of the U.S. are capable of of and how quickly they're advancing. And if those advancements currently or what we're calling at least a part, a portion of our data set, we're calling them UAP, those need to be looked at.

If arrows the office that's looking into those anomalies, we need an arrow. Absolutely. Well, we need an arrow, but at the same time, Kirkpatrick was even the one to say, what we're doing right now

is so there won't need to be an arrow in the future, which it took me a minute, but I'm like, oh yeah, that makes sense. What they're doing is, what he termed as CP, once we analyze, identify, resolve what this thing is, it then becomes someone else's problem. It either goes to the Navy or it goes to the CIA or it goes to NASA.

You know, he said, if we are to find any of this is possibly extraterrestrial, we then bring in NASA and we begin to work with them. They are the public face of what presumably could be something extraterrestrial. It's not Arrow's job to tell you there's aliens. That's not what we were hired to do. That's not what this program is about. First and foremost, it's to identify and to make sure national security is where it needs to be. It's clearly not. We have objects floating all over the United States from China. So there's a problem. An Arrow is there to mitigate that problem and help to try to resolve it. But for anyone to think that Arrow was going to come out with anything, anything to do with aliens in this hearing is, in my opinion, Micah, it's utterly

ridiculous to have made that assumption. That's not what this is about. I'm sorry. It's just not, guys. I've been skirting around that ever since, you know, we heard that this hearing was going to happen. We all knew that no crash retrieval programs were going to be talked about. They weren't going to talk about the dead aliens at Roswell. We're not there. Maybe in the future we will be. Like you said, retroactively, they're going back to 45 even. Maybe something will happen with the whistleblower legislation.

However, right now where Arrow stands, like you said, we have to wait and see. It's still in its infancy. and first and foremost, national security comes first. Very well said, right? And listen, again, it very well may be the case that in the broader scope of Arrow's mission, they do find evidence of something anomalous. And maybe they'll come out and say, you know what? We didn't expect to find this, but we just looked at it scientifically.

And we have looked at this one instance, this one weird thing we found, this one case from 2000, whatever. And man, we can't find any other experience. planetary model other than we see what appears to be a spacecraft entering Earth's atmosphere, exiting Earth's atmosphere, and man, we think it's alien. And we got to report this to the White House and to the American people. I mean, here's what we think we have. And this is the best evidence we've ever seen. I mean, it may, we don't know, but in the eventual sense, that kind of data could come out of this. And, you know, again, that's why I say, folks, wait and see. I know we hear a lot of that these days.

Wait and see big things coming. There's something around the corner. It's almost here, folks. Just hold your breath a little longer. I don't buy all that. It's nonsense. Listen, let's not get evangelical about things. But let's give Arrow time. Arrow may not be the UAP investigative organization that the UAP community wants, but it may be the one we need.

Boom. We're ending, we're wrapping up the UAP hearing with that, man. That was a perfect way to put it. Before we move on to our next story, which is somewhat connected. I do want to play this very, very brief clip. Our good buddy Dan Warren over at Fifth Pillar of Emphasis on TikTok actually went to the hearing, sat there. You can actually see him in the audience during this. And he got to speak to Senator Gillibrand directly after the hearing.

So I'm going to go ahead and play that clip very quickly. And then we're going to move on to our next story of the day. Sound good? Cool. How did you think the hearing went today? I think the hearing was very helpful. I thought Dr. Kirkpatrick clearly laid out the scientific approach he's taking to all of the unidentified area phenomena that he's had access to. He said he's had access to over 600 pieces of data, whether it's video or radar or heat sensor.

He's going to analyze it through a scientific method with two teams. He talked about his scientific team. He talked about his intel-oriented team and how they do a thorough review. And if they disagree, then they adjudicate it. I thought that's a great scientific method to actually begin to identify. identify this. At the end of the day, if he's got 600 or so unidentified a phenomenon, he will bring it down to a very small number of what is still unknown. There we go, guys. There was Senator Gillibrand. Thank you again to Dan Warren for fighting the good fight,

getting over there and doing his thing. I thought the hearing was exactly what we needed, like Micah said. So we're going to leave it there. But we're going to move on to our next story here, actually, that happened just a couple days after this. So let me bring him back in. There he is. Micah, let's move on to this story that you wrote over at the debrief. Intelligence community leaders meet at Wright Patterson for historic national security briefing. Again, this came days after the UAP hearing.

So let me read this very quickly. On Thursday, leaders from across the U.S. intelligence community begin arriving in Ohio for unprecedented national security briefing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. For those of you don't know, Wright-Patterson is huge in the UFO field. This is where supposedly the wreckage from the Roswell UFO crash went. It has a very rich history with UFOs. Among those in attendance at the Friday briefing are Director of National Intelligence, Everald Haynes, CIA Director William Burns, and General Paul Nakasone,

director of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service Chief. Several members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, many of whom are arriving, are also scheduled to attend. Let's see here. I want to read just this one last part here, Micah. Other topics receiving attention at the briefing will be the Chinese spy balloon that passed over the U.S., as well as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, each of which have been among the national Security Matters discussed in classified documents that were recently leaked online by 21-year-old

Massachusetts Air National Guard airman Jack Texieira, who was arrested on April 13. On Monday, the Pentagon said that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has tasked Ronald Maltry, who we know from the Congressional hearing on UAP, under Secretary of Defense, to lead a comprehensive review of DOD security programs policies. and procedures. So unprecedented meeting, Micah, again, this comes right on the heels of the UAP hearing, where clearly we're seeing a huge gap in national security and the way the Department of Defense is handling things in our skies going undetected. So a lot of people want to know, does this meeting happening at Wright- Patterson have anything to do with the UAP? I stated the other reasons for the meeting,

But what do you think, man? What does this story mean? And should we be talking about it on a UFO podcast? This message is for all earthlings. We are trying to communicate with you. Please tune into Sundown 96.6 FM to hear messages from all of us paranormal beings 24-7 all Earth year long. We highly recommend you download Sundown 96.6 Apple or Android app. For the clearest of continuous codes from us,

visit sundown-966.com for further information, and be sure to catch somewhere in the skies every Wednesday at 9 a.m. Beaming across our radio airwaves. Always look to the skies, Earthwinks. This ends message. 96.6.6 FM. You know, I'll give credit to Tim McMillan for bringing it to my attention early on Friday, and I did the principal authorship of the article there, but he and I got that out together.

That said, you know, at that time, I think it had primarily only been really reported by local Ohio news outlets and the rest of the media kind of latched onto this. I found it very interesting. I don't suppose that there's necessarily any kind of a connection. All I can really kind of say is that connection or not, I mean, there are a lot of interesting developments. of what's going on right now. Now, again, specifically the fact that within one week, you know, we have, I mean, all the primary, like you mentioned, again, Director of National Intelligence, Averall Haynes, CIA Director William Burns, Paul Nackason, you know, Director of National Security Agency and Central Security Service Chief, I believe. But all that happening, you know, at Wright Patterson Air Force Base within the same week that we had a Senate hearing on UAP, it got a lot of people wondering, I don't suppose that there is necessarily a connection. But But, you know, we shouldn't rule anything out. Keeping in mind that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, it has this historic importance with relation to the UAP topic. Again, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was essentially where the longest-running systematic scientific study in a military body, U.S. or otherwise, has ever been carried out. That's where that took place, and that was Project Blue Book, which operated, I guess, from mid to late maybe 1952 until 1969.

But, I mean, it had the two predecessors to Project Sign and Project Grudge. And in fact, Project Blue Book early on, if you read Edward J. Rupelt's book, the report on unidentified flying objects, he initially refers to Project Blue Book as the new Project Grudge in that book. But the point is that that's kind of the historic importance of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And it's played into the mythology surrounding the UFO subject pretty heavily, including the idea that wreckage from acquisitions, maybe the likes of Roswell, might have been taken to write Pat.

Again, you know, that's stuff that to me, obviously there's some truth to these historical matters in the broader spectrum of euphology, but I think there's also a layer of mythologization that kind of ends up being kind of piled onto that. And a possibly valid incident involving possibly, the recovery of something of significance. There's been a lot of speculation about what Roswell actually represented.

The official explanation, of course, that we know is the Mughal balloons. But there have been some reasonable challenges, I think. I think it's actually very fair to say that there have been some reasonable challenges to the mogul narrative that have been presented by certain researchers like Brad Sparks, Kevin Randall, and others. And I myself, just telling you that I've gone through the reports. There were two actually in the 1990s that the U.S. Air Force release. because at that time, widespread public interest had prompted congressmen and women to appeal to the Air Force and say, you know, we want you to reinvestigate Roswell, tell us what you know.

So there was that report that was put out. Roswell case closed. I think John Greenwald and I have said this in agreement that there are a lot of things in the report that don't quite jive. You know, there are a lot of loose ends of things. And it just kind of seemed like the Air Force was throwing everything that they could at the story. and fundamentally it comes down to one thing. They said it was a flying disc, then they changed the story and said it was a weather balloon, right?

Then they changed the story again decades later and said it was a mogul balloon because that was a classified project at the time that we couldn't tell you about it, so we had to lie. Guys, they changed the story, what, three times? How do we know they aren't lying this time, right? That's the problem. And again, although as a matter of philosophy, I never think that an argument should appeal to conspiracy,

there are instances where I think it's not wrong for people to be suspicious of our government. There are instances, and I'm actually more of a Roswell skeptic, I'll mind you. I'm not really one of those, you know, all in on it being a crash record retrieval. But I don't think that the American people are wrong to be suspicious of our government, because you know what? Sad truth is, they do lie to us. They lie to us a lot. They lie a whole lot.

And we have come to expect that. And so people naturally lead with those kinds of suspicions. And again, when the government gets all burned out and says a bunch of conspiracy theorists cooking up nonsense, you know what? I made you, you made me first. Remember from the first Batman movie, Batman's holding the Joker and everything? I don't like that. It's like, you know, you guys, you're calling us conspiracy theorists, but you're the ones that lied to us. All right?

You made us that way. So we shouldn't necessarily leave with conspiracy. But there are times where a little bit of conspiratorial thinking may be oriented, given the way that we've been treated in the past and the kind of information. we've been given. Now, that said, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, I'm not making any kind of conspiratorial claim that that's the reason for the meeting that occurred the other day, but I mean, with everything I just talked about, the history, and with people's general distrust, especially for the intelligence community, right? We're with the government, we're here to help you, these three-letter agencies, men and black suits show up on your front door, and you're always glad

to see them, right? No, no, you're not. I mean, people naturally get suspicious. What do I really think this may have to do with, though, Ryan? I mean, in recent days, we of course had this situation, and that's what we reported on in our debrief article. This young Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, 21 years old, member of a Discord chat, releases highly sensitive documents online, classified documents that are potentially damaging to the U.S. interests, and also potentially to our allies, or at very least damaging in terms of the way the U.S. looks to some of our allies, and, of course, could potentially also provide some vital information to foreign average series. It's not the kind of thing you want.

And when it becomes evident to the United States government that one of the most significant classified leaks, at least in the last few years, has recently occurred as a result of a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who was sharing documents, right, like they were potato chips or something in a Discord chat with his buddies. Yeah, I bet intelligence officials are going to be going up there and meeting one of the most significant Air Force installations in the country

to have a real serious talk about the management of our information in government. Yeah, I'm sure they are. Yeah. Well, and, you know, everyone's joking. They're like, come on, 21-year-old. You got that stuff leaked out there, but not the UFO stuff. Come on, man. You had the chance.

You had the chance. I think about Snowden, you know? I mean, you could be any of these, you know, leaks. And, again, where I stand on this again, where I stand on this, is that I think that there is unnecessary secrecy in government, and I think that there's necessary secrecy. And I think that sometimes there are instances where a whistleblower performs a very necessary function in terms of transparency, openness, freedom, liberty, all those kinds of things. There are also instances where the release of classified information can be incredibly hurtful, damaging, not just in terms of embarrassment it may cause to agencies. I mean, I'm talking about release of the names of individuals, their locations, their jobs,

you know, stuff that could endanger American lives. And that's the kind of stuff that you don't want getting out. And so it's a fine line trying to manage that whole whistleblower thing, which really kind of comes back to our previous conversation and Aero's efforts right now to try and talk with people who may have knowledge about things from within government and testimony they may be able to provide. And also the necessary protections for those individuals, if they were parts of special access programs or things in the past that previously would have, you know,

prohibited them from coming forward under law. We have to always be mindful of the very careful dynamic, the fine line between the necessary and the unnecessary secrecy, because those are fundamental elements of really a free society and really the role that we as journalists play in that, too. Absolutely. Yep. I think that sums up this story pretty well, man. When there's over classification and non-transparency, that's when leaks happen. That's when whistleblowers come forward. It's a natural process of our kind of way we've set things up in America. So, I mean, you know, while we can hope for leaks at times, sometimes they can be extremely dangerous. So there has to be a process. And I think that whistleblower legislation is a good

example of how it will be done properly and safely. So I think if anything, that's how we could tie it to that story. I see in the chat, a lot of people are talking about this cattle mutilation story. We got it. That's on the list, guys. We have a lot to talk about with that. But there's one quick story I want to talk about before that,

Micah. This one's really interesting, and it does somewhat connect to some work you've done in the past. And that's AI. This is a story over a big think, and it was called Why Aliens? Let me pull this up here. I've got it. There it is.

Why aliens will likely be artificial intelligence. So this article kind of argues that advanced civilizations will require AI. That goes not just for us, but for anyone out there who is likely to visit us. Even though most movies about aliens depict biological creatures arriving to Earth, this is unlikely to happen. Crossing interstellar space would take them a very long time, so much time that it makes little sense to send short-lived, perishable, organic bodies. Consider the realities of interstellar travel. To reach other solar systems,

current thinking, excuse me, current thinking is that we'll need to build light cells that can reach maybe 10% of the speed of light. That gets us to Alpha Centauri in 40 years or so, an entire adult human lifespan, and that's just one way. The likely solution is artificial intelligence and artificial bodies that could better withstand the rigors of space travel. For that reason, we shouldn't expect visiting aliens to be organic creatures. The article also mentions futurists who took it a step further and envisioned an immortality roadmap using AI to digitally reconstruct people. The AI would take DNA and other information from a recently deceased person and reconstruct

them in a simulated world. This one kind of went over my head, man. I'm not going to lie. The whole AI conversation is happening before our very eyes every day. It's moving so rapidly. It's scary. It's exciting. There's many pros.

There's many cons. But AI is at the forefront of the conversation right now when it comes to everything. Technologically. I know it's a huge, huge talking point over at the debrief. lot of the articles going on over there. But the reason, the real reason I wanted to talk about this article is because you wrote a book in the past, one of the first books I ever read on UFOs, and one of the first books I ever got autographed by you.

And that was the UFO singularity, where you actually talked about a lot of this stuff and possible connections between artificial intelligence, the quote unquote singularity and UFOs. So what do you think of this concept that if we are to, ever find alien life if it ever travels here. It's most likely not going to be, quote, unquote, biological, but artificial intelligence. What do you make of this whole thing? Yeah, it's a really interesting prospect. I'm glad everybody else is finally getting caught up, huh? Finally. You were way ahead of the times, man. You know, to the credit of my publishers at that

time, you know, I'd wanted to write a much broader book that kind of analyzed the current state of the UAP issue. And I was calling them UAP. I mean, back at least as early as 2015, there's an article on my website at Mikeanks.com. But I mean, I think even earlier than that, I've gone back and looked at articles where I would at times refer to, you know, UAP and also sometimes still UFO. You and I've had this conversation. We kind of interchangeably use them at different times. Generally, what I'll do is I'll say UAP if I'm talking about stuff happening right now. If I'm referring to historical incidents in cases, I may use UFO, right? All kind of the same thing in truth. Now that said, in 2013, the publishers said, we're interested in your

perspective on the AI UAP connection and really propose that rather than that being a chapter in a big book, you should just write a shorter book that looks at just that. And I mean, I've got a lot to add to that topic. Now, that book, VEOFAS Singularity, it was maybe a good starting point, but it's not maybe the fullest, best expression of that idea. idea. In recent years, we've seen a lot of interest in this. I've corresponded with some incredible scientists about this. Dr. Benjamin Gertzel, Ph.D. Avi Loeb, of course, who's very, very acutely aware of the UAP AI possibility. Lord Martin Rees, Jill Tarter, right? I mean, the scientist upon whom the character in contact by Carl Sagan is based. I've corresponded

with some leading thinkers, and they all essentially echo the same sentiment. If and when Alien life comes to Earth, there's a very strong possibility. We're going to be looking at AI as opposed to just biological visitors. And here are the reasons why. I can summarize this very simply. Go watch Transformers. I mean, in Transformers, you see the Autobots arrive on Earth. And I'm thinking, I remember watching those, the famous Transformers films from years ago,

watching those and thinking, I know, there's an idea. You know, why would we presume that visitors from elsewhere would necessarily be by, biological, right? I mean, think about what long periods of travel in space, even if we could move it, you know, or approaching the speed of light, at very least. In terms of relativity, we know kind of what happens, you know, when you actually reach light speed. So let's say that you're traveling close to it. I mean, first of all, you leave, you get back home, all your friends are dead. That kind of sucks, right? But the thing is, I'm thinking, you know, if you had post-biological intelligences that are traveling through space, One thing that they are able to overcome is the acrophy of musculature that occurs when humans spend long periods in space. They may be able to overcome the problem of food shortage, keeping in mind that when we look at space travel as we do it, you want to try and make your spacecraft as efficient and you want to try and put as much on there. You want to have as much space for payload as possible. Why? Because when we're talking about a manned mission, let's say we're sending people to Mars, you've got to send supplies with them. Now, you can also do a future mission where you deliver some more stuff, but generally, you've got to have fuel on board that rocket.

You've got to have space onboard that spacecraft to be able to carry the materials that are going to the destination with you. And keep in mind that is that rocket is the stages that rocket are delivering the spacecraft that's going to convey you from point A to point B, maybe Mars in this instance. I mean, most of what's putting that thing into space is going to get lost. That spacecraft is all that's going to make its way to your planet destination. So you've got a very finite amount of space, and you've got to get all the essentials in there to sustain human life. When we're talking about post-biological intelligence, artificial intelligence, or robotics or something along those lines,

you may be able to overcome a lot of that. We look at ideas like von Neumann probes, right? Or the other one is the Bracewell probe. A von Neumann probe is essentially an artificial, intelligent self-replicating probe that is capable of traveling through space. It could be very small, but it may be able to utilize things like sunlight from stars. So technically starlight, but we call it sunlight because that happens to be the name we give to the nearest star to Earth. But they may be able to collect radiation in the form of heat and starlight, right, as they're passing through different planetary systems or by them. It may be able to collect information or other materials from. asteroids and things like that, may be able to mine metals and other kinds of materials that can be used in the construction or self-replication of similar probes that are disseminated and dispersed throughout the galaxy. If they're relatively small, it seems very possible that Earth could have been bombarded throughout its history by Von Neumann probes from different locations in the universe, different intelligences that may be long gone by now, but before they cease to exist that they created these things and they began the dispersal process. maybe those things travel all the way

and make their way toward Earth's atmosphere and they're destroyed, maybe they're small, they remain somewhere out there and they're operating in our solar system but they're very small. They're producing almost no signatures apart maybe from minor little radio frequencies and things like that that if we knew where to look or tried to look

might be detectable, but we simply haven't tried looking and so they could be all around us and we haven't found them yet. A Bracewell probe is a little different. This Ronald Bracewell's idea of something that basically goes and it hangs out at a Lagrange point and it waits until the civilization on the nearby planet begins to exhibit capabilities that are worthy of contact and then contact is initiated. But I often wonder, do UAP actually display some of these capabilities?

In modern parlance, there was a great idea in a paper a few years ago that took the von Neumann idea, the Von Neumann probe concept and kind of modified that, gave it a new name, Lerker probes. In other words, probes that might be carrying out a mission, they're surveilling planet Earth, but they aren't overtly trying to come out and say, howdy folks, here we are. We're going to drop down on the White House lawn, introduce ourselves, and ask you to take us to the big guy upstairs. Show us to your leader. Again, these sci-fi ideas that inform so much of our thought about what alien life or visitation by an exotic intelligence would be like, all that goes out the window when you really think about it. It's all presumptions, yet again.

There could be alien intelligence, artificial remnants of some exotic intelligence from long ago that have been proliferate. and they may be working in our galaxy, in our solar system even, right here in our planetary neighborhood. They could be working out there surveilling us right now. And we wouldn't even know because we haven't tried to look. But what if some UAP, you know,

thinking about how, you know, they don't seem to really want to have to stop and say hi. They're usually just doing their own thing. And if we start tracking them, they try to get out of the way. Think about Chad Underwood talking about the Tick-Tac immediately starts jamming his radar, right? These things try to fly off and get out of the way

as quick as they can. They essentially behave kind of like a hypothetical lurker probe. They're here. They're doing their job. They could be very well technologies that are somehow autonomously just going about some programmable kind of mission. And they're trying to stay out of our way so that they can better complete their mission, whatever that is. I mean, it's not impossible that we're already looking at an alien form of AI that's operating here on Earth. And although that's a speculative idea and thereby an extraordinary claim, more and more scientists,

who are looking at the possibility of what alien contact might be like are entertaining the likelihood that we are more likely to encounter an alien form of AI than we are biological visitors or organisms. Very interesting. You know, and it even, you know, kind of reminds me of the recent conversation that George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell had over on their podcast, Weaponized, where they talked about this term the techno terrestrial

in terms of could an alien invasion happen through our technology, not a flying saucer landing on the planet and taking us over, but could it literally come from within our own technology as we progress, a digital Trojan horse, as it were? I find that fascinating too.

You know, could they be trying to communicate through our internet, through our interfaces, through what we eventually these algorithms we're creating with AI. Could they eventually use those to communicate with us? The possibilities are obviously endless. This is all hypothetical. But I find it really interesting that the conversations we once had on

Little Green Men from Mars is now turning to possible robots or like you mentioned, these lurker probes. And we're moving kind of away from the biological, which is true for us as humans as well. We are getting closer to the verge of that singularity, possibly. We are, but you know, here's the other thing too, Ryan. Again, it's predictable human behavior. Before we go into space, we watch Buck Rogers,

and we think that if we can fly into space, that aliens can do it to, and they may eventually come here. And then we start putting probes out into space after Sputnik, right, gets put into orbit, we realize, holy crap, we've got to get something up there quick, and we do. And then the space race is fully on. But then we start thinking well, but intelligent aliens, they also may be putting probes out there, right?

And then AI becomes a thing. And humans start saying, well, if we can create AI, then maybe aliens could do it too. Whatever the next big thing is, 10 years from now, Ryan, when we're,

you know, I guess you and I are in our 50s. And, you know, we've grown up these incredible beards, you know, and it's going to be awesome. But I mean,

I can't grow a full thick one right now. I know. Same either, buddy. When we get to that point, though, I hope we'll reconvenven. been and have this conversation and you'll remember me saying whatever the next big thing is, we're going to start saying that's what aliens are going to do too.

And it's just, we're always informed by whatever the latest technology we have is. You know, 500 years ago, we would call them aliens, or I'm sorry, angels, right? Angels, demons, you know, whatever. We're informed somewhat by the technology of any given period, and we project those human expectations onto the phenomena that we observe, right? Now, again, I actually think that there is a very, good chance, though, that AI is going to play a role in the UAP thing. And, you know, we'll have to kind of wait and see what happens here in the years ahead. But it's definitely an interesting time. I just hope that with our progress we're seeing with AI, that it's done responsibly. And that that doesn't become a problem for humanity before it is something that facilitates new avenues toward knowledge, right? That's a concerning side of this. And of course, technologists and people we've seen in recent days, you know, maybe arguing that we need to pause for six months and really consider the ethical implications, the existential implications of the quickening rate of development of AI.

These are things that need to be considered. But one last thing I'll leave with our fine folks at the Central Intelligence Agency who happen to be out there watching right now because I know you are. If you guys haven't looked yet, here's an idea. Why don't you look online? Try and find evidence of aliens, not in space, but on the Internet. because, you know, if I were an alien or any kind of alien intelligence visiting Earth, I wanted to get information about Earth and what was happening here. I'd get online.

I'd hack into the web. I'd get all the information about the earthlings from the largest single source of information that's been ever put together by humans, which is in that digital format on the web. Maybe we should be looking for evidence of visitation there first, because if they ever came here, surely they would go online and try and get as much information about us as they could. Just a thought. So true. So true, buddy. I love it. All right. Let's move to an unfortunate story. And that is this recent story about six cattle that died mysteriously in Texas. So six cattle died in Texas with their tongues removed, the hide around one side of their mouths gone, and no blood spilled, authorities said. The cause of death for the six animals was unknown. The Madison County Sheriff's Office.

said in a statement. As of Friday, there are no updates on what happened. The cattle were found along Texas State Highway in three counties, excuse me, Madison, Brazos, and Robertson. With each animal part of a different herd and a different pasture, the sheriff's office said. Five of the animals were adults, the sheriff's said, and one was a yearling. In two cases, the animals' genitalia and anuses had been removed with a circular cut that the sheriff's office said had been made with the same precision as the cuts noted around the jaw lines in each cow. Ranchers also reported that no predators or birds would scavenge the remains of the cow, leaving it to decay untouched for several weeks.

The sheriff's office noted that similar incidents had been reported across the U.S. and was coordinating with other law enforcement. This, Micah, is why I wanted to talk to you, because you wrote a huge piece. recently over at the debrief about other cattle deaths that it occurred in the United States. And I found a lot of this strikingly similar to the investigation and reporting that you did. So first of all, what do you make of this recent story in Texas? And did you find any comparisons between what you did previously with your story in this one? What do you make of this?

We're now back to cattle medallations. Never thought I'd see the day. You know, they happen pretty frequently. I mean, there have been a spate of incidents involving these purported mutilations that have occurred out in Oregon in recent years. I've been looking into some cattle deaths that occurred around Meeker, Colorado late last year. And what's being reported down there in Madison County and a few other surrounding counties in Texas is actually quite a bit different from the case I looked into. Now, first, what's being reported in Texas based on this article that I'm looking at the very same one, you sent me earlier.

This appears to be what you might call classic cattle mute criteria, right? I mean, portions of, you know, the tongue and the face are removed, surgical precision of the incisions that were made, soft tissues and locations that include anus, genitalia, what have you. also notably they're saying that there's a lack of depredation by scavengers that occurs in the aftermath of these deaths and no clear evidence of any kind of a struggle or anything that might have happened because I mean it does happen occasionally that animals like wolves of course mountain lions also and even in some instances certain kinds of bear if they're hungry enough will sometimes attack cattle they say that they didn't find any evidence. of that and further that the general scavenging kind of behaviors by animals that would come along after an animal has been killed like this hadn't occurred, that these animals wouldn't touch the purportedly mutilated cattle. But that contrast, that's very similar to the classic what we might call cattle mutilation report, but it's very different from the kinds of things that I was observing in Meeker, Colorado last year. because what we had there was about, I mean, maybe a couple of dozen or so calves that just kind of mysteriously dropped dead out there on Colorado's western slope.

And so the Colorado Parks and Wildlife began to investigate this. And they had initially said that there was some evidence of depredation that they attributed to a large canine. But then it was determined that some of these cattle that seemed like they just dropped. dead. There was no clear discernible evidence, and they have come out and said, be explicitly say there is no evidence we can strongly attribute to wolves, which actually gets into a bit of a political issue that they've been experiencing in Colorado because there's currently a wolf-reintroduction plan going on out there. Of course, the idea that wolves or any other kind of a predator might have killed cattle, that's probably not interesting to most of the people out there who say, come on,

cattle mutilations, we know aliens are doing it, right? Those, if we're talking about, you know, wolves or something like that, we're not interested in those. Actually, to the contrary, after I put this article out there at the debrief, a lot of cattle mutilator, not the mutilators themselves, but the cattle mutilation researchers reached out, and they said this is interesting to us because what your report and you're reporting, based on the interviews I conducted with Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials, including the Northwest Regional Manager, Travis Black, reached out to a biologist who had conducted some of the, the analyses. Also, it was the largest single, wasn't technically a FOIA when it's a state agency like that. It's usually a public records act request, but it was both the largest and the most expensive public records act request potentially. I ended up being the price reduced a little bit, but I mean, it was one of the most extensive foias, you might say, that I've ever been

involved with, and they released gigabytes of information to me, which included beautiful imagery of the cattle necropsies, which, trust me, you don't want to eat. those after you've had your lunch. Not exactly pleasant stuff. But again, I waited through all this data to try and really get a much deeper understanding of the different kinds of things

that can contribute to cattle deaths. And here's how this applies to what we might be seeing in Texas and other mysterious cattle deaths that occur. Livestock deaths, actually, some prefer to say because it's not always just cattle. Occasionally, we also have this happening to horses and things like that, as in the famous

case of snippy. But first cattle can be susceptible to the onset of different kind of bacteria. Clostridium is the strain that usually can lead to various kinds of infections. But one of the conditions that often affects those cattle is what's known as black leg. There are also based on the altitude at which some cattle are existing, especially there's at higher altitudes, what's known as brisket disease, which is, I think, a form of hypoxia that can also lead to further complications that certain cattle can experience thereafter. There's also toxicity that is often overlooked as a potential cause of death in cattle.

Toxicity can result from, for instance, I think, Tanny Ragward, I think, is the name of one of these plants that in some instances, there have been cattle that have, when they're being moved from one plot of land to another, the cattle may, some of them, ingest one of these toxic plants. They're moved over within sometimes hours or a couple of days. The cow dies, right? And they're like, there was nothing on the land here that could have possibly killed the cattle, mysterious death. But toxicology reports later indicate that indeed there was the presence of this particular toxin in some of these specimens.

What's interesting about the classic cattle mutilation cases like this is I would argue that researchers like myself, and actually a lot of the old guard cattle mutilator investigators like Chris O'Brien and others, they're very aware of all these different things that can cause the deaths of cows. I often see skeptics saying there's no evidence of anything extraordinary and all these alien theorists. Look, you've got to be clear, a lot of the cattle mutilation researchers are not trying to link this phenomena to UFOs or extraterrestrials or anything like that. Right, right. But I also take issue, first of all, with that sometimes unfair or improper connection that is made. And further, the skeptics claim that there in every case is a mundane cause behind these cattle mutilations.

That flatly is wrong, and I'll tell you why. Back beginning in the 1970s, when a lot of these cases were occurring, and you had Gabe Baldess and a lot of these guys who were, you know, members of state organizations, police agencies and things that were investigating this because at that, time, the FBI said, well, we're not getting involved. And actually, there may have been, you know, justification for that because there, a lot of these cattle deaths, they didn't involve anything that seemed to be going across state lines, right? In other words, the FBI was arguing there doesn't seem to be any kind of a need for a, you know, federal law enforcement investigation to get in there. This is kind of outside our jurisdiction. Now, they did, the FBI keep a file on cattle

mutilation, but it mostly was just they were kind of keeping tabs on the individual states and their individual investigations. Gave out as and others who were looking into this, though, they noticed some really strange things. In addition to the kind of criteria we see in this case in Texas right now, surgical precision, very key components or, you know, body parts being removed, eyes, tongues, anus, genitalia, things like that, soft organs, which notably skeptics do point out, and maybe rightly so in this case, that those kinds of soft organs usually are the first thing. things that scavengers will go after. I know that from my own extensive analysis of delicious, lovely cattle necropsy photographs

that yes, indeed, even when we know that there wasn't something like a mutilation that occurred. Often those components are missing because those are the soft tissues that little scavenging animals, insects, birds, and things are going to go after. So that does happen. But I'm no cattle mutilation investigation expert by any means, but from what I do and know about it, I'll tell you this, there were also instances in the 1970s where they they began to find that there were substances,

like a paint-like kind of a substance that had been found on the backs of some of these cattle that would fluoresce under a black light, which the cattle ranchers, the producers, in other words, had not put on there themselves. It was as though some of these cattle had been branded, not like in the traditional sense of branding cattle, like they'd been marked possibly for monitoring or for whatever else. I have personally interviewed a few producers who have experienced this phenomenon. and who have investigated it firsthand, who are not part of the researcher community there, the cattle ranchers who have had it happen to their cattle.

They've told me the stories about everything you see here in this article, you know, sometimes exanguination, the blood is drained from the animal entirely. Sometimes the markings, again, are clearly surgical. And curiously, they also say, and this is one gentleman I spoke with, who I believe also was from Colorado originally. When I interviewed him about one of these cases, he said that there was, were clearly these three about football-sized impressions in the ground, forming a triangle around where the cattle's remains had actually been found

as though something had come down from the sky and potentially dropped, deposited those remains there. Now, what that might have been, I don't know. But these are certain elements that are criteria that appear in the minority of these kinds of cases. And again, I'll defer to, you know, experts like my colleague, Chris O'Brien, who will tell you that the majority of these things are mundane, but it's that small number of cases that point to there being something else.

And Chris doesn't say aliens, you know, I've heard him say jokingly, sorry, Linda, you know, it doesn't seem to be aliens. If anything, Chris has argued for years now that he thinks that there's probably some sort of a governmental monitoring program that is looking at the possibility of radiation, contamination, and these sorts of things with regard to cattle, and that this has been something that's been going on for many decades. So at least for my own part, I feel like the cattle mutilations in those instances, they are a clearly consistent phenomena and that there's consistent criteria that seem to denote those

kinds of cases. The ones I looked at in Colorado were not that. And I think that it's clear and it's important to understand that there are things, factors that can contribute to the deaths of cattle in those instances that may be mistaken for cattle mutilations. And after you sent me this story, no joke, I literally started looking at flights because I'm ready to fly to Texas now and I'd like to go down there and talk to those producers and look into this. I'm not kidding. Absolutely. I knew you'd be on it. I knew it. I knew it. Yeah, it's been the talk today. This story really made the rounds. J. L. and Heineken in the chat, I got to read

this to put things on a lighter note. I think I've heard the word anus more in this live stream than past ones. Yeah, pretty sure I've never used the word anus in any live stream. I could be wrong on that. Someone go back and dig in the archives, please. But, yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, I mean, that's the reality of the situation. It's extremely graphic and unfortunate what happens to these animals and, you know, we're no closer to answers. And they seem to be happening all over the U.S., I'm sure in other countries as well.

But a lot of it does happen primarily in the U.S., at least the ones we hear about in the Western world. And they remain unexplained. So, yeah, get on that plane. Get over to Texas, man. We need you on this case. But I knew you'd be the guy to come to. I'll very quickly interject too, though. I mean, it's not impossible to.

occasionally hear about these kind of things in other parts of the world, mutilation incidents involving livestock. But when I've reached out to my South American correspondence, especially in Brazil, but in certain other regions of Latin America, they do seem to say that there is less of it there. And depending on whom you ask, there seems to be less of that occurring there, which to me, unlike UFOs, which I mean are reported all over the place. again, my Brazilian colleagues speak at length about the prevalence, the tremendous prevalence in the history of national security with relation to that down in Brazil. But they say that there's a lot less of the cattle mutilation

kind of a thing, which again, to me suggests that unlike UFOs, maybe cattle mutilation is something that's primarily a U.S. problem. And if, again, that may lend some weight to some of Chris O'Brien's theories, which I think really are probably in some total the best assessment broadly of the phenomenon. And again, he wrote that excellent book years ago called stalking the herd. If anybody really wants to take a serious deep dive into cattle mutilations, I mean, that is the book to read about it. Stalking the herd by Chris O'Brien. Absolutely.

Can't recommend it enough for sure. Awesome, man. Well, let's move to our last story of the night. We got there. We finally got there. This has been a jam-packed episode. for sticking around, buddy. I truly appreciate your time. Thanks to everyone in the chat. I'm trying to read all your comments, guys. Chat is lively tonight. I'm loving it. I'm

absolutely living it. And I do have to send out a special thanks to Jazz Shaw. He did give us a super chat here that I was not able to shout out. He left for the night, but thank you, Jazz. Truly, truly appreciate it. Always good to hear from Jazz. Yes, absolutely. Huge supporter of the channel here in the podcast. Probably, going to have them back on very soon. Okay, Micah. Last story of the day, we have to end with our buddy, our friend, our colleague, our nemesis, our hero, our anti-hero, the one, the only Luis Elizondo.

This story came out in popular mechanics this past weekend. The Elizondo saga continues. The article was called The Truth Is Out There, So is Lou Elizando. Unidentified craft are entering restricted U.S. airspace, Elizondo wants to ensure they don't cause the next Pearl Harbor. So a recent expose on Luis Elizondo was published by Pop Mech. It went through a deeply thorough and personal journey through Elizondos' life growing up, his life during his time in the military and with the Department of Defense,

including his work on ATIP. It also chronicled his resignation from ATIP, the trials and tribulations of his home life after them, his dealings with pushback from his peers in superiors and what has been accomplished in the UFO conversation since he came forward. But this article, Micah, was huge. It was massive, wonderful work by the gentleman who wrote it. I've never read anything else by him, but he did fantastic work on this. Went and actually stayed with Elizondo for a little while, spoke to a lot of his colleagues and whatnot.

But what really stood out to me is that quote you see at the bottom there. So I'm just going to go ahead and read it. And this quote came from an intelligence colleague of Elizondos who remained anonymous. But I did want to read this out. An army of more than 1,500 volunteers within the intelligence community now meets on classified networks where they analyze UAP videos and data. This group includes literally everyone, CIA to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency,

and everyone in between. You know, a lot of this article was stuff we already knew. It was cool to get a more human side to Elizondo and the, you know, kind of the consequences and ramifications for him resigning from his position at the DOD. And also with everything he brought forward. kind of where he's at right now in this journey he's been on these past few years. But this quote really stopped me in my tracks.

You know, we've got a UAP hearing that just took place with Arrow. And we're learning of how small this group is that's looking at UIP. And then we have this quote saying 1,500 volunteers on, you know, these classified networks are looking and analyzing UFO videos. I immediately reached out to you. I'm like, what the hell is this? Where did this come from? What is going on? So, first and foremost, what do you think? What do you think about this huge expose about Elizondo coming out right now? I find it interesting. It came out right now. We know his book is going to be coming out hopefully this year. But this quote, what do you make of this? Yeah, I haven't had the time to read the article yet. And of course, you and I talked about this beforehand. So I mean, specifically,

I know we're talking about this quote, and I definitely have perspectives to add to that. First, I do just want to say I'd like to read the Popmec article. Good to see that they're still, you know, providing in-depth analysis of that aspect of it and the people who've been involved. Because, again, I really think that somebody who led the charge with that is my co-founder and cohort, my good buddy Tim McMillan, who prior to us founding the debrief, back when I was just pitching an idea to him for a blog, I'd said, you wait. I said all these magazines that are so interested in UFOs right now, it's going to be harder and harder to get published stories about that frequently. We wanted to create a medium where we could do that with the debrief,

and that's what we did. But before we ever launched that effort, Tim, you know, was doing excellent reporting on that subject, getting to know Lou Elizondo and others in government, as I've also done in recent years. And to that point, the quote that you shared there is not particularly surprising to me. And I can tell you one great reason why. citing another individual that Lou knows very well and that has recently kind of come into the public spotlight with relation to his involvement with UAP investigation. I've already mentioned his name previously.

That's Jay Stratton. I think very highly a Jay Stratton. I don't keep in touch with him frequently, but we do remain in contact. And on one occasion, although it was an off-the-record conversation, I didn't sit down and interview him. You know, because frankly, with the exception of one interview that he gave to journalist George Knapp, in fact, the same weekend that I sat down, met Jay, and got to know him, we were all there together at a scientific coalition for UAP Studies event in Huntsville, Alabama. But the final day of that event, I'd gone downstairs, and I was sitting there, listening to one of the lectures. And shortly thereafter, my colleague, Chrissy Newton, came down and also joined me over at the table there where I was.

And I glanced over my shoulder, and in the back of the room is Jay Stratton, he kind of gets my attention and, you know, motions toward me. And so I said, Newton, Stratton wants to talk. I'll be right back. Actually, I'll grab you things. I said, we're going out here together. And so I brought Newton with me, and she and I, we sat down. Jay was very kind. He wanted to catch up and talk. And a lot of the reason why he wanted to talk to us is because, again, he'd spoken to Tim in the past and everything.

And you might say it was built somewhat on the reputation of the debrief. and, you know, our work as journalists. But I really just wanted to talk, shop with him, is what I wanted to do. This wasn't about being a journalist because, and I'll admit this, when I put my journalist hat on and I'm covering science and defense issues, I'm not always a UFO guy. But in the background, I'm always a UFO guy first and foremost, and so are you, and you know that about me, you and I both, right? And sometimes we may be involved in other endeavors and we do our day jobs and things like that.

But, I mean, I am through and through someone who is skeptically inclined, but fascinated with the UFO subject. And so the opportunity to sit and talk with the former director of the UAP Task Force was very significant. And one of the big takeaways from that conversation, which was off record. I'm going to go spill the beans and talk about a bunch of stuff. He didn't convey any kind of secret information to me. He is a patriot, and he takes his job very seriously and his classifications and his oaths to government and everything. I appreciate that about Jay. I think that some of the mischaracterizations of him by certain people in the media and online and on social media, they haven't met him, they haven't spoken with him.

I have, and I can assure you this is a highly intelligent, highly skilled, highly trained, intelligence official who takes this subject very seriously and appears to still maintain an interest in the subject. Now, that said, at one point I mentioned the Navy UAP Task Force, and he kind of stopped and goes, he says, honestly kind of dislike it when people refer to it as the Navy. UAP task force. It was established under the cognizance of the Department of the Navy. But Jay was clear in saying, look, you've got to keep in mind before the official establishment of the UAP task force. You may recall actually Susan Goff provided a quote to researcher Roger Glassell talking about an interagency task force that was looking at this issue. And then it came out first in actually a language, draft language for a Senate bill that ended up

actually going into the NDAA for, I think, fiscal year 2020, maybe 2021 at that point. But that was the first place where UAP task force appeared. Actually, it first appeared, I think, on John Greenwald's website, because just speculating, based on the quote given to Glassel, he said, do we have a UAP task force? Then there was draft language in that bill. And then Norquist, actually, at the time, I think, acting deputy secretary of defense, I think, He actually, under the cognizance of the Department of the Navy, established officially, this UAP task force. But the thing is, that interagency task force had already existed for a while.

So back to the conversation with Stratton, he kind of looked at me and he said, this has been a thing where multiple agencies and government, you know, some of the best intelligence agencies on the job, they're all, you know, looking at this. And some communicate with others better than others. others don't and try to communicate as little as possible. This kind of comes back also to the issue that Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick is now encountering with the so-called Title 50 situation, right? He's limited with the amount of information that he can access that the intelligence community has with relation to UAP. So to that quote from the new Elizando article, my read on that is something that many have told me and that actually has been talked about quite a bit already. there is an interagency effort, multiple different agencies that are involved in this. Again, that very quote says it's CIA to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency,

one of the friendliest agencies I've ever worked with in attempts at trying to gain access through FOIA to information about this, although those FOIAs were largely unsuccessful. I mean, we've reached out, my colleagues, and out of basically all these agencies. Make no mistake, there may be an arrow, there may have been a UAP task force before that. that's in terms of the actual component within government that is designed with the express intent of and for the mission of evaluating UAP, right? Currently, that's arrow. But make no mistake, just like Kirkpatrick was saying, we're going to try and make this somebody else's problem. There won't be a need for Arrow in the future.

There are plenty of agencies that are already looking. I'm surprised they only say 1,500 volunteers, because there's probably more than that, the amount of eyes must be on this. topic within the intelligence community. I mean, it must be unprecedented. But again, we know very little about that apart from these kinds of conversations and the conversations that, you know, journalists like I and my colleagues and I have with people who have worked in that position and what little they can tell us, you know, with adherence to their own oaths to government and the protection of national security interests. So it's frustrating at times for us old guard UFO guys, Ryan, gosh, are we getting old? That's old guard UFO guys.

guys. And we're looking at all this, and it's like we've moved into this brave new world where you have to kind of be a part-time expert on government and policy and all these kinds of things. But at the end of the day, what interests me is the phenomenon, right, and how science can be applied toward understanding the phenomenon. And then more fundamentally, even than that, what to us as humans does the phenomenon represent and what does that mean going forward? that's what's important. And so I'm not surprised by that statement. I look forward to reading the article. But again, at the end of the day,

the thing that really interests me is the phenomenon and how we as humans can relate to it. I mean, I'm reminded of an excellent book that takes this kind of human approach to an alien phenomenon, right? Somewhere in the skies. That seems to be at the core of it all, doesn't it? I love you, brother.

I always appreciate the shout-outs. Hey, it's true, though. You know, and I had kind of this, I was at a crossroads with somewhere in the skies a few months back where I was so exhausted from the Navy Tic Tacs and the government talk and this and that. And this is by no means a slight to the guest I had on when this crossroads occurred. That was the one and only Alex Dietrich, which I will forever be grateful and honored that she came. on my little show. But after that conversation, I had a moment of reflection

where I went back into my archives and looked at my earlier episodes of the show, my witness accounts. Or, you know, just talking about close encounters and UFO sightings. And like you said, it's like if you're going to be a euphologist nowadays

or I shouldn't use the term euphologists. Right. A UFO researcher, I guess. You have to know how the government works. You have to know the different, you know, every, you have to know every fact about every intelligence agency. You got to know this, that, this, that, this, that, to get anywhere in the conversation.

And I was just so done with it. And a lot of it had to do, I think, with the last UAP task force report that came out. I just had a moment of like, okay, I give up. Like, this is going nowhere. I'm so done. I want to go back to where someone in the sky started. And that's the stories. That's the people having the experiences.

However, when you finally have the head of arrow come out and do this Senate hearing and talk the way he did and be so. What's the word? So he made it so easy to understand. It gave me hope that someone like me who knows nothing about government knows nothing about how bureaucracy works or how to even do a FOIA request or anything like that. It gave me hope that, yes, I can still be a part of this conversation. So I don't know where this long diatribe is going that I just said, except that it's good to see an article come out about, someone like Elizondo and hear the human side of it. So I was really, I really left this article being like, this is cool.

I want more of this. I want to hear more about Kirkpatrick. I want to hear more about Stratton and what got them interested in this stuff and this and that, this and that. So yeah, I guess that's kind of my reflection on all of this. Yeah. All of this conversation going on. Ryan, I think the stories are very important. Again, you know, there are those.

who and I have some sympathy for this argument. I really do in this era where now with so much computer science and with the ability to collect more data, you know, we don't just have radar and visual. We have a whole variety of different sensory capabilities, which actually, I mean, for decades, we had the ability to detect, you know,

radar and radio frequencies and different kinds of things like this. Radiation. There are a variety of different, I guess, sensory capabilities that science and government have had at their disposal to try and detect and to measure and to gauge aspects of the so-called phenomenon, right? But in this modern era, I would argue that we have a whole lot more of that, and in the existing technology that we've had for decades, is far more sophisticated and capable. And so we have this unique capability now, this unique opportunity, really, to use better capabilities than we've ever had before. artificial intelligence once again plays into this because with artificial intelligence and machine learning, it can speed the process at which humans are able to analyze and process that data.

And ERO is hoping to do that too. Dr. Kirkpatrick is aiming to try and not only resolve certain UAP cases, but also to take information that is gleaned as a product of the resolution of certain cases and to build models that allow future evaluations of similar cases to perhaps be carried up more quickly with the assistance of machine learning. See, we have all of these different tools now, new tools and also better tools than we've had in the past that may both speed but also make more efficient and capable our ability to analyze this phenomenon.

A lot of people are like, well, why do these UFOs all of a sudden just start showing up? That's why, you know, new technologies are helping to facilitate a better understanding of something that I suspect has been here for a long time, much like how after the Second World War, and we began to use radar, right? We suddenly detect objects up there in the skies. People have been saying for centuries they were seeing things in the sky,

but once after the Second World War, radar first is used by the United States and Canada and Britain and other countries around the world. Yeah, sure, we start detecting these things that people had been saying for a while they were seeing. And as time goes on, more and more tech. technologies corroborate what? That's right. The eyewitness accounts, the stories. Yes. And we often see this question, you know, is a story of a sighting of a UFO good? Is it useful at all? No, they're just stories. What we need is data. Some skeptics, you know, like Mick West, continue to argue that we don't see any data that's truly extraordinary. And therefore, euphology is dead. Again, I'll push back on Mick a little bit on that point because, first of all, there may be some presumptions and biopies. is at work right there.

What is your criteria for anomaly? What evidence informs your perspective that something worthy of study has to exhibit that truly anomalous character? What if something that was truly exotic and extraordinary to humans as a scientific discovery exhibited no hyperacceleration or other magical capabilities, but it nonetheless was something that represented, for instance, a hypothetical alien technology? Again, then on the other side of things, we have the believers who have all their insistence on, but here's what's happening. You know, there's a hybridization program. Certain extraterrestrial hybrids are immersing themselves in our culture and they're living among us right here today. And it's a, you know, it's like a pod people, earth take over by aliens that have been here for a long time. You know, again, at some point we have to recognize that some stories sound a awful lot like fiction, but there are some stories that I think are useful.

They're not just stories. And just because they don't have those same remarkable characteristics that many believers seem to want, that means they're useless. Maybe we should say sanely and soberly that at the core of this, we as humans, rely on those stories to convey experiences. And outside of the human experience with the phenomenon, what does it matter to humans anyway? Yeah, the stories matter. The stories are at the core of the essence of how humans relate to all this. So I think what you said is very important. We need those stories, but we need to corroborate those stories increasingly with time with the better data that we're equipped with.

And this phenomenon, if be there a phenomenon, may not end up being what we thought it was, but we may still learn some things. And that, my friends, is how science works. Amen, brother. I cannot think of a better way to end this, man. Hope, hope for the future. I'm very hopeful for the UFO topic moving into the latter, mid to latter part of this year. Science is where it's at. We're going to get this NASA study in the coming months as well, which I'm excited about.

And we will get the annual report from Arrow as well, which would be really cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I have hope. I have hope. And I have hope for the future of this topic, those researching it. those investigating it within government and outside government as well. There's room at the table for everybody in this vast array of phenomena we seem to be experiencing.

So I'm so honored that you're one of those colleagues that I continue to take this pursuit with my friend. So lastly, but not leastly, where can we find everything you're up to? And yeah, anything that you could tease coming up over there at the debrief and the Micah Hanks program. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Of course, this week I'm going to be dropping a podcast on the Micahanks program. Dr. Gary Nolan and I sat down, caught up quite a conversation. So you'll definitely want to hear that. But you can follow my work at micahanks.com.

The podcast is at micahanks.com forward slash podcast. Imagine that. And then the debrief, of course, the debrief.org is where you can find it. again, you've got to add the V in there. So the debrief.org every weekday. And sometimes on weekends, too, we've got contributions from fine riders out there. Ryan Sprague also has been a contributor, and I hope to get him back over there doing some writing for us here in the days and weeks ahead.

But I'm always there Monday through Friday, and we're always churning out the latest in science disruptive technology, and occasionally when there's news, we talk about UAP as well. Love it, brother. I love working with you guys over there. I'm always honored to contribute however I can. Everyone in the chat is saying nice shirt, Micah. We love the shirt, giving you all the accolades you truly deserve my man. So I'm going to say goodnight to you and debrief with the audience a little bit.

Ooh, I didn't even mean to do that. Debrief with the audience a little bit. But I want to thank you for your time tonight, as always, and your insights. So thank you, Mike Hanks. My pleasure. I support your work and everything that you do, Ryan, as you know that. And let's catch up in the days ahead and let's chat, man. Maybe you can get some contributions for us over there at that fine website.

But listen, I'll let you guys enjoy your evening. Thank you to all of you who listen to. And don't forget to, of course, smash that subscribe button and send some dollars along to this gentleman. He works very hard. And indeed, you got to show him some love. Let Ryan know that you appreciate what he does like I do. All right, ma'am.

Chow and thank you. Thank you, brother. Have a great night. I truly appreciate it. Cheers. There he is, guys. our mystery co-host of the night, the one and only Micah Hanks.

We covered so much. I knew he was the one to have on for this episode. So thank you. Thank you to everyone in the chat. Thank you for the super chats. Thank you for all of your comments and questions. I'm sorry if I didn't get to all of them. But yeah, we had a lot to discuss.

No podcast highlights of the week, but we did have plenty of news to bring you guys. This episode will be the podcast. of Summer in the Skies that will drop at midnight. Midnight ESC. So, yeah, if you are listening to this, we had a bunch of visuals here on the YouTube version, so you can head over to YouTube to watch this.

And then next week, I have a big episode coming your way. This was supposed to release this week, but because of all of the traveling I've been doing, the weird ear stuff that's been going on, I was not able to finish the episode. But this awesome conversation tonight will be the podcast for the week. But next week, I have an episode that will be dropping called Harvested the Dark Encounters of Susan. Buckle up, guys, this is probably going to be one of the most emotional and possibly disturbing episodes of the podcast to date of a lifelong series of events that happened to this woman,

known only as Susan here in the UK. I hired a brilliant New York stage actor to do a lot of voiceover for this episode, truly honored for her time and talents on the episode. So I think you're going to love it, honestly. I love producing these audio documentary episodes where I really get to stretch my writing muscles, my research muscles,

and get people in the world of theater or film to contribute as well. because that's what it's all about, honestly. Bringing everyone in and becoming a part of the someone in this guy's family. So be on the lookout for that episode dropping next week. Let me go to the chat one more time before I get going here. Seeing if I missed any questions you guys have. No questions. Everyone just loves Mike's shirt.

Amazing, amazing. All right, guys. I am going to say goodbye and good night for tonight. However, however, one last thing to tease for you guys. Be on the lookout in the next week or so for a brand new book by me. I haven't talked much about it. I've teased it a little bit, but I just was informed that it will be dropping at the end of this month. So a brand new summer of the sky's book coming your way.

in less than a week. So it's going to be, it's going to be amazing. I'm so, so proud of the work that so many did in contributing to this book. This book truly belongs

to the people I interviewed. I wrote an intro. I wrote a few things in it. But honestly, this is a book by you, the listeners and the experiencers that have reached out to me at somewhere in the skies.

So this is, a celebration of you guys, this book. It is my love letter to you. It is a platform for anyone to share their UFO stories and that's what we truly stand for. That's somewhere in the sky. So going back to my roots, be on the lookout for that book coming to you next week. I'm so pumped, so excited. I'll have more info about it very, very soon. But in the meantime, please like, please subscribe. If you want to leave a superchat, that helps the show tremendously. If you can't afford it, no problem. All I ask is that you like and subscribe. That's it.

Share the show with your friends as well and family members and all that. That's it, guys. I'm going to say good night. And as always, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching. Have a great. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network.