Somewhere in the Skies - UFOs: What We Know (And Don't Know) with Robert Powell

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

On episode 384, we are joined by Robert Powell. Powell is the author of several books on UFOs, the most recent being "UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (and Don't Know)". We discuss the book, Powell's journey from director of research from MUFON to eventually founding the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, and then we talk about all the latest UFO hearings and the determinations made by AARO with several UAP cases. Follow Robert Powell on Twitter: https://x.com/rpowell2u  Visit the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies: https://www.explorescu.org/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/somewhereskies/videos Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Produced by LIONSGATE Copyright © 2024. 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

As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 362326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. Hello, I'm David Marler, author of Triangular UFOs, an estimate of the situation,

and the executive director of the National UFO Historical Records Center. And you are now, Somewhere in the Skies. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome, everyone, to Somewhere in the Skies. I am your host, Ryan Sprague. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you see the gentleman right next to me. And that is the one in only Robert Powell. He is the executive board member and one of the founders of the scientific coalition for

UAP studies. And he is the author of his most recent book, UFOs, A Scientist Explains What We Know and Don't Know. So I want to welcome, I believe, for the very first time, Robert Powell, is somewhere in the skies. Well, thanks, right? I mean, I know you so well that it just seems like we've probably done a podcast, but maybe not.

Isn't that crazy? I'd have to go back and really look. we're up to almost 400 episodes, Robert. Wow, that's impressive. It's been a journey. I'll put it that way. But I love it. And I love talking to people like you.

And there's so much to talk about it. I mean, not just, you know, what's going on in the world of UFOs today, but what you guys have been doing over at the SCU, what you've been doing individually. I've been seeing you all over television and in all of these papers and everything. So it's exciting. But let's start with, I guess, kind of what a lot of people probably know you for. And that is your work with Mufon and also now with the SCU.

So would you mind painting us just a little picture of who you are and kind of what got you into UFOs? And fast forward up through Mufon and the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Sure. So, Ryan, when I was a kid, I was what you would call a geek, right? Had a chemistry set. You know, I got it taken away a few times for making an explosion in the garage. You know, so that was my life as a kid. So I grew up and I really wanted to be an astronomer,

but there weren't any astronomy jobs, really, back in the 1970s. So I went with my second favorite love chemistry, but I wound up in the semiconductor. industry, which makes all of, you know, the submicron nanoscale computer chips that we use in our phones and our laptops and everywhere. And so I love that. That was really great. And I was able to retire early. So I said, well, okay, what all do I want to do?

And one of the things I wanted to do was to go back to a book I'd read in high school by Jay Allen Heineck. And that was the UFO experience. And it's written in a scientific manner. So I always thought, well, you know, there seems like there might be something to this. So I said, okay, one of the things I'm going to do now that I was fortunate in retiring early

is that's one up. And so I joined the organization Mufon. And within a few months, I was their director of research. And I think that that happened because I was a director of a R&D lab. but advanced micro devices, which is where I'd work. And so I guess that impressed them. And so they may be director of research.

And so I spent 10 years at Mufon, really. I probably interviewed several hundred people. I've read thousands of the Mufon reports. And I tried to instill science and to move on. And I had some success, but I found kind of gave up. And so in 2017, myself and three other individuals created the scientific coalition for UAP studies. And our basic mission is the scientific study of UFOs or UAP. And today, and this has been only seven years since we were formed, we didn't go out and try

to grab a bunch of people, but they've come to us. We now have over 350 members of our members, over 30% have PhDs. Meanwhile, me, I've got a lowly bachelor's in chemistry, but over half of the SCU membership have advanced degree. So either a master's or a PhD. Engineering is the number one field of our membership. That's the most common. But we also have astrophysicists, biologists, chemical engineers. I mean, you name it, we have it. And in terms of work experience, we've got individuals from the FBI. I know that's going to start the, you know,

Oh, yeah. People talking on the rumor mills. We've got members from NASA. We've got people that work in the semiconductor industry. People have worked in the defense industry, you know, so there's some more rumors that can get started. But there's really a, what it shows you is that the scientific community is really interested in this subject, because those are the people that are basically joining the SCU. So that's kind of, you know, 20 years squeezed into a nutshell for you, too. I know. It's so hard to do.

And the accomplishments just are nonstop. But I have to ask, you know, with the Scientific Coalition for UAP studies, I mean, it's in the name, science being the, you know, at the forefront of the organization. But what sort of is the mission of the coalition? And maybe could you give us a little a snapshot of some of the work that you guys have done thus far? I know you've been, you've worked on some highly visible UAP cases. So, yeah, what exactly is the SCU and what are some of the cases you guys have worked back? Yeah, so let's start a little bit with the mission, which is the, you know, the scientific exploration of the UAP subject.

And then we've got goals and submissions that go with that. So the basic way that we look at doing that is examining case reports where there is sufficient evidence that we can do a scientific examination. So that means we need something like a video or trace evidence or multiple witnesses. We need a lot of good evidence in a case in order to evaluate it. So that's one area we look at, and I'll talk about that a little more. But another area is academia. So one of the important things that we feel needs to be done is bring more of academia into the study of UAP. And we started on that in 2017, and I think today there is a lot more of people out of academia

that are interested in this subject. And just the membership in SCU tells you that's the case. So we look at that. We have projects that we develop. And then we also try to get the younger people involved. So that means, for example, we have individuals who will go to university campuses, and maybe give a presentation if there's a UAP organization there. For example, recently, one of our members, Michael Glosson,

whose PhD in philosophy, gave a presentation to a Yale student body, as well as Vassar College student body, all on the subject of UAP. So there's a lot of interest with the younger people. Now to jump back to some of the cases that we've looked at over the last seven years and some of the papers that we've written. So for example, some of your audience may be familiar with the Stephenville report, which that was actually written just prior to the formation of SCU. in that case involved radar data as well as multiple witnesses. So it had sufficient information that you could do a scientific type of report. And then there's the Aguadilla case, which we could talk about a little bit later,

which because arrows, you know, come out, talked about a little bit. And that was a case where we had witnesses plus some radar data plus a three-minute video. Also, there was the coming to mind is the Nimitz incident, right, 2004. Probably most people don't know. We began investigating the Nimitz USS Princeton incident that involved the F-18s and our pilots in the year 2016. So almost a year and a half before you saw the New York Times article. And so as an example, I had interviewed Gary Boris and the senior chief, his name escapes me at the moment. Kevin Day.

Kevin Day. Thank you, Ryan. Yeah, Kevin Day. I was actually the first person interviewed Kevin Day. I interviewed him within, I think, six to eight weeks of the New York Times article. Oh, wow. And I interviewed Gary Boreth shortly after that. And I also interviewed James Slate, who was the, he was the command, the second commander,

or the lieutenant commander for a favor. He was in the plane that stayed up above. So that, so I talked to him about it. He hasn't been in the press much. He was. Yeah, I don't recall that name. And he got so many phone calls and so much headache from it and to his family that he said he wouldn't talk to anymore. And actually, we've never, his testimony is in our report, which is on our website, you know, on the Nimitz case.

It's like 250 page report. But he has never authorized me to release his, audio testimony to us. So, you know, we honor that. So until he does, we're not going to release it. But he's kind of like Frager. He's just a very matter of fact. No, he was a lieutenant commander. And, you know, in a nutshell, it was like never saw anything like this in my life. Never, you know, never again. And whatever it was wasn't made here. You know, and that was, that was his take. And then, you know, he ends the interview. Meanwhile, I had to go to Iraq, so I didn't have time to think about the Tic Tac.

Right. You know, we had Alex Dietrich, the other pilot on the show a while back. And, you know, it's hard with these pilots because you want to try to get them to theorize about what it might have been that they saw this technology. And everyone wants to push towards NHI, NHI. But I do really appreciate that neither Fravor, Dietrich, Slate, or I believe Chad Underwood as well, the gentleman who filmed one of these objects. None of them are willing to go as far as to say, oh, yeah, it was alien or we think it might have been alien. You know, they might skirt around, well, it's definitely not technology that we are familiar with. But like you said, what's most interesting is I remember even Alex Dietrich telling me, you know, yes, it was an interesting event.

It definitely was something I will remember forever. But I had a mission to go on. I had a mission within days of this that I had to prepare for. So I couldn't worry about what the Tick-Tac was. And that's interesting. The dichotomy between possibly seeing one of the most famous UFO events in the past couple days. decades and saying, yeah, it was interesting, but I had something else to do. Right. And of course, that something else they had to do was something that could easily have

lost their life then. Exactly. So that usually takes precedence. Yeah, yeah, I would say so, for sure. Now, you did mention Aguadilla. I do want to get to later in the conversation, sort of the analysis they came out with Arrow, who just came out with their annual report. We just got a Senate UFO hearing a congressional. It's crazy. It's been a heck of a week for UFOs. But before we get to all of that, Robert, I'd like to talk a little bit about your newest book. And I want to get the title right here, UFOs, a scientist explains what we know and don't know. So what kind of, what inspired you to write this book? Right. So this book, what inspired me was I was like, okay, I've been doing this for 16 to 17 years now.

And so I want to write a book that encompasses what I truly believe about the phenomenon and what I think it is or what I think it's most likely to be, right? Because nobody truly knows what it is. Right. But we can hypothesize as to what it might be. And so in the book, I've written it so that it's useful both to someone who has background knowledge on this subject, as well as someone who, perhaps has never picked up a book on a subject.

So I start off in the very first chapter giving a little historical view by giving cases throughout history, some of the most interesting cases that have occurred. So I give the reader a background in that. And then I have a chapter where I explain why this is not just a figment of people's imagination, right? So as an example, I have a graph that shows number of view of you, UFO reports by time and it's going along, right, starting way back in the 1800s going forward. And then all of a sudden, in 1942, you get this blip going up. And it never stops after that.

From then on, you have constant UFO slash UAP reports. So you have to, when you look at that data, you have to say something happened in 1942, either that or the whole society, not just in the United States, but throughout the world, got onto a kick of wanting to believe in like UFOs, right? So I fall on the side that something happened and that this is a real whatever it is. And then it's a scientific question to figure out, you know, what exactly did happen? So what? What? What is some of those theories about what happened in 42? I mean, a lot of us always go to 47 with the, you know,

the Kenneth Arnold citing kind of being the kickoff point of the flying saucer craze. But, I mean, you were able to date it even further back to 42. So do you have any theories on why that might have been? Well, you know, of course, 1942 is when the foo fighters, that's first started, was in 1942, which, by the way, is just a piece of trivia information. The band of Food Fighters was named that because the lead guy, his dad, was familiar with food fighters from the Second World War. So that's where they got that name. Okay.

But that's what the pilots, not only American pilots, you know, and British pilots, you know, saw these food fighters, but they were seen by Japanese and German pilots also. both sides thought it belonged to the other side. So that's what starts that initial upward jump. So the question becomes why, you know, and that's really difficult to know why, right? Because, I mean, we could theorize. You might theorize, for example, in the 1930s, the dark side of planet Earth began to be lit up with lights, right? That's when we started lighting our cities. Well, if you have a civilization

far out there and they have telescopes just, let's say roughly 20 to 30 years more advanced than where we're at today, they could look at our planet, right? They could block out our suns so its brightness didn't affect their spectrometers. And their spectrometers would see this plan. and they would see that there are light emissions coming off the dark side of it, right? And they would be this wavelength of incandescent light. So then you're going to be, if you're out there, you're going to say, okay, I don't know who's on that planet, but clearly there's some level of intelligence on that planet. Right.

So then it's just a question of can they get here, right? Yeah. Because you know how we are. I mean, once we discover an exoplanet that we say, hey, there's a civilization on that planet. If we could get there, then that's what we would do. Now, if we can't get there, all we can do is continue to observe it and, you know, draw conclusions and write papers about it. Right. Yeah.

Well, I will, okay, so you mentioned other civilizations. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Now, we've had something like SETI that's been around for a really long time, trying to search for radio signals and whatnot. But we have this new sort of resurgence of trying to reach out to or trying to, I guess, capture certain signatures of another intelligence or civilization. And that's sort of taken the form of techno. signatures. Right. What do you make of this whole new search for ET when it comes to

tech new signatures? So, so this is one of the two items that I feel really has driven the desire to understand more about UAP from the scientific community even, as well as the public, of course. And you know, you've got the most common thing that people talk about, which was the December 2017 New York Times article, right, about the Nimitz event that we just talked about. But the second part to me is more subtle. And that is the two generations that are youngest generations today, which is the millennials. And if I recall right, it's generation. Is it Z? I believe Z. Yeah, Zoomers or something. Think about both of those generations, have grown up knowing that exoplanets existed.

Right. And like when I grew up, there were no such thing as exoplanets. I mean, the first exoplanet wasn't discovered until 28 years ago. And the most common thing that Citi and other people, other scientists would always argue, is that our solar system may be unique. There is no evidence that there is even another solar system like ours out there. let alone that there are thousands of exoplanets, right? But that's where we're at today.

Today, we know that there are literally thousands of exoplanets. So I think that's the subtle part is people go, okay, there are thousands of exoplanets. You know, we know now also that water is the most common molecule in our galaxy. we know that the building blocks for life exist on asteroids and meteorites and comets. So it's not too difficult to say, okay, we believe there's intelligent life in the cosmos, and we believe there is a lot of intelligent life in the cosmos. So then the only question is, can that intelligent life get here? Right.

And if you look at SETI, for example, when SETI first started, and I think that that was an excellent thing to begin doing is they were looking at a very specific analog wavelength, right? And look at where we're at today, 50 years after SETI began. I mean, our civilization has moved away from analog towards digital. another 20 years, we may not even have analog signals going out into space. Right. So to really search for life in space, I think you have to do what we're doing now with the telescopes that we send up, where we're trying to look at the atmosphere of a planet and look at, okay, what are the molecular components in that atmosphere, right?

and do they indicate the presence of life? And our next step will be once we develop what's called a coronagraph where you can block out a sun, a star that's out there, right? So once you can block that out, that allows you to look at any wavelengths being, you know, set off by the planets around that star, right? Because that star heats those planets and those planets are sending it, sending, out wavelengths of light, infrared light, ultra-violent light that we can then begin to detect. And I think someday we're going to look at a planet and say, we are detecting a particular

wavelength of light coming off that planet that is not consistent with what we would expect to see based on the star that that planet's moving around. Interesting. So would that, in your opinion, say that we're not so much detecting a biosignature, but a techno signature? Like, whatever that is, is almost like artificial or made by something? Imagine if you had an advanced civilization looking at our planet. Yeah. And if their spectrometers are sensitive enough, they're going to do. detect the isotopes of uranium and plutonium and strontium from our nuclear detonations in our atmosphere over the last 60 to 70 years, right? So if you're that civilization and you're looking at Earth and you say, hey, these guys got isotopes of uranium and plutonium, you go, well, someone

has figured out how to make nuclear energy, right? Because it's not natural to have those isotopes in your atmosphere. The only thing you wouldn't know absolutely was, was that civilization still in existence or had they blown themselves to smithereens, right? Yeah, yeah, good point. And that begs the question, is that why so many UAP are seen over these nuclear installations, too? At an alarming rate, it would seem, at least according to many out there.

But that's interesting. Yeah. What else does the book sort of dive into, if you don't mind. It dives into some of the very strange parts of UAP or UFOs. For example, how they're totally non-aerodynamic, right? So if you've got a witness who gives your report, and they say they have a disk-like object that's moving through the atmosphere, and then suddenly it turns vertically and moves to the atmosphere,

rapid speed in a way that that's not how we would move a craft through the atmosphere, right? We would have it on the side. Or someone, like one of my favorite cases that I had from a R&D scientist who has contracts with the DOD reports a barbell-shaped UFO, right? I mean, if you're going to make up a UFO story, why would you make up, oh, shaped like a barbell and I'm just hanging in the air, right? Yeah. So that's why I talk about in the book, these stories, right? Or I've got this disc and he's coming down and he's just fluttering like a leaf as he falls towards the earth.

I mean, who makes up stories like that, right? So if the object's close enough to the witness, and that's what I talk about in the book, cases where the object is so close that you can't really, you can argue only one of two things. You see that either the guy made up the story or it happened. You can't say he misidentified the planet Venus. Right. So I go through that in the book. I talk about EM issue, electromagnetic issues, like when a car stops or your phone turns off in the presence of the UFO.

And I talk about some of the really wild cases where there's reports of a person's. headlights bending towards a UFO, right? There's no physical, I mean, there's no simple physics explanation for why that could happen, right? So I go through those type of cases, and I also talk about a challenge for academia, right? So I don't know if you've heard the term soft science and hard science. Yeah, for sure. And I don't like the terms because it's it's the hard scientists kind of insulting the soft scientists by using such a term. But basically the hard science is like my background chemistry or physics where if you mix sodium bicarbonate and vinegar, for example, you will get carbon dioxide and I can repeat that experiment over and over and over and I get

the same result. And that's what a hard scientist loves, right? I repeat my experiment. But in soft science, take for example, you have, take biology, you have a petri dish and if you control the temperature and all the variables, you can predict how fast this bacteria will grow in your petri dish, right? But what if you switch from bacteria to chimpanzees, right? And I do an experiment with a chimpanzee. You try to repeat the experiment. Well, you may not get the same result because your chimpanzee may not have the same view of things as my chimpanzee did, right?

And move that up now to human beings. Okay, this is where you talk about psychology and sociology. becomes very difficult to repeat an experiment, right? Or like in the most recent presidential election, right? Just trying to predict how people are going to vote. And the problem is you're dealing, the higher the intelligence that you're dealing with, the quote, softer the science, because you can't control it. So now assume, make the assumption that we're dealing with an intelligence that's hundreds of years more advanced than us. So how do I make the assumption that I can repeat an experiment on that intelligence? I mean, how am I going to go do that? As a matter of

fact, I have to suspect that the experiment's being run on me. Right? Yeah, good believe. Because I'm the lower intelligence, not the thing I'm looking at. Yeah. So that's a challenge. for academia that I talk about in the book. And then the other thing I talk about in the book is how we've gone about it today, right, which is through the military. And how if we really want to solve this problem, we really need to do it by funding academia to study it, right? Because the military, they have national security,

and that requires close closeness, right? Not openness. Science, on the other hand, requires openness, right? It requires that you write a paper. Someone reviews it. They critique it. They write another paper. They give their views of things.

And that's how things develop. And I think that's the only way that we're going to get a final answer on the UAP question. Plus, and this is a kind of philosophical. thing. Someday, you know, whether you want to believe that it's one year from now or it's a hundred years from now, we will make contact with an intelligent life form from another star system. So the way we are situated today, that contact will be made by a military organization, not a civilian, not a group of scientists, but a military organization. And is that the way that we want humanity to be representative when that day finally comes?

I say no. And so I think we need to make those changes now. Yeah, that's a little scary. Yeah, I would much rather have an academic and a scientist there than just a army general or something like that. Very good points. Well, you mentioned sort of sociology and in terms like that with the soft sciences. This is interesting. I was at a UFO conference somewhat recently, and I had a couple parents come up to my table, you know, who either listened to the podcast or have read my books, and they had their kids with them. And we're talking like eight, nine-year-old kids,

And, you know, and the parents saying, yeah, they listen to your show. And I was like, oh, you don't think about those things when you host a podcast or you're doing television of the amount, not just the amount of people you're reaching, but the demographic of people you're reaching. And that really took me by surprise. And I was really fascinated to see a tweet you put out recently, actually, that had to do with a, I believe it was an email you got. over at the SCU from a grandmother who said that her grandchild was getting interested in UFOs, but was hearing all about the Pentagon and, you know, these things could be a threat and all these. And abductions and all this kind of thing. Yeah, and it can be very alarming for a kid to hear these things in a world that is now saying UFOs do exist.

And your response was perfect because it wasn't like you just, said something, you wrote a book about it. So I want to get the title right of this one. The truth about UFOs, a scientific perspective. And this was a book for children, which I don't think had ever really been done in the world of UFO. So yeah, tell us a little about that. Yeah. So this book is written for the kid who has kind of a scientific bin to him, right? So it could be as young as a seven-year-old who's super sharp and liked science to, you know, a 12 or 13-year-old. But, and as a matter of fact, and Ryan, I've had a bunch of adults that weren't familiar with the topic told me they love the book. I mean, it was perfect for them.

So, yeah. But what caused this book is when my, my middle grandson was eight years old, it comes to me because he knows, you know, grandpa studies UFOs. So he checks this book out of his school library. And I look at it and it's got a picture of a gray on the front. And I can guess what's inside this book. And so I say, Gavin, Gavin, Gavin, don't read this book. I want you to take it back to the library. I don't want you to read it.

I said, I will promise you, I'll write you a book that will tell you the truth about UFOs, and you don't need to read this book. So that's what he did. So I lived up to my promise. And so what I did is I wrote the book to kind of inspire the mind of children. it doesn't say they have to believe UFOs are real or not real, but I give them, you know, cases that have happened, like for example, the McMinville case. I talk about that.

I show a picture of an old-fashioned camera, and I tell them what happens, you know, the farmer comes out, takes a couple of pictures, they see the pictures in the book. And I said, so what do you think happened, right? And I say, talk to your parents and discuss it with them. And did, you know, did the farmer fake the picture? Do you think he faked it? Or was it really there? And if it was, what could it be?

Right? And I also talked to them about things like, like Skylab. If they see, you know, a bright light going over and how that could be Skylab and that they should talk to their parents to get a feel for what they're looking at. And I explained to them that in that very first millisecond that you see anything in the sky. that first millisecond, it's a UFO because you don't know what it is. But your brain starts thinking and it says, wait, did that be a bird? Could that be a kite?

No, oh, that's a bird. So within a short period of time, your brain takes that from a UFO to an identified fly object, right? And that's what we do with all things. And what we have left, right, in the true study of the UFO phenomenon, is those few cases that we can explain. It doesn't matter how long we take and think about it, we can't come up with a rational explanation for what it was. So that's kind of what I go through in the book.

And I just try to get the kids to talk to their parents about it. It's a good book for a kid and a parent to sit down and kind of read together. It's something I wish I had when I was a kid. Yeah, me too. I wish I hadn't had that. I love it. You're almost training the younger generation to be iphologists instead of euphologists. Like, let's explain these things conventionally as best we can so that we don't use all of that brain energy on the,

the quote unquote, UFOs. Like you said, when you go down the list and you're left with an unknown, those are the cases that we truly have to dig deeper into when we have all of the data. and the evidence. So that's cool. That was really cool to hear. Well, let's move, Robert, maybe a little to modern day. Uphology. What's going on right now, like we mentioned at the top of the show. It's been a crazy couple weeks in the UFO world, not one, but two hearings in the United States, a congressional hearing, a Senate hearing. The annual report by the Pentagon's UAP investigative group came out.

So, oh, man, my head has just been spinning. We covered it all over here at somewhere in the skies. But I'd like to get your thoughts on everything that's going on. And the first kind of major thing that has happened as of late was the House congressional hearing, where we had a representative from NASA. We had Luis Elizondo, who everyone who listens to this show is quite familiar with at this point, Tim Gulladette, who's a former Navy Rear Admiral, I believe. And the last gentleman was a journalist, Michael Schellenberger.

So again, this was the second congressional UFO hearing we've had in the past two years, where a lot of big claims have been made about UFO crash retrieval programs and reverse engineering technology and stuff like that. So I guess let's start there. Were you able to watch or absorb the congressional hearing? And what were your takeaways from that? Greetings, everyone. Ryan Sprague, your host of Summer in the Skies.

For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Sky's podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button. at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber.

Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, ad-free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Sky's HQ and help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support and keep looking up. Yeah, so I've watched the hearing.

Okay. And my first take, and this is not to slight the witnesses that were there at all, because, you know, like Tim Gallaudet, is a really good guy. I liked him. But my first thought was, you know, why couldn't they have gotten some really juicy witnesses, right? I mean, we've all heard from these guys and we already know, you know, what they're going to say. And let me back up just for a moment. So from a science viewpoint, right, like with the SCU, the question of, does the U.S. government have this craft?

or are we hiding alien bodies, right? That's not a science question. That's a black and white. We are or we are not. And that's really up to Congress to subpoena the documents that people claim that they have, right? And maybe they do. But we can't do anything about that from a scientific viewpoint. That's Congress's job.

And I will say, as of right now, of course, We don't know everything Congress has done. I think David Grush was the first who said he's seeing government documents. I'm not aware that Congress has done anything to investigate that. So I would much have preferred that, for example, the House committee had gone and looked for those documents, subpoena the people who own those documents and put them under oath. to say, do those documents exist or not? That's to me what they should have done. And if they want more witnesses, I would have subpoenaed the Admiral in charge of the USS Roosevelt Strike Group, which that's related to the 2015 incident of the gimbal video and the GoFast videos, right? So that

guy should have been brought in. The pilots, right, who videoed the gimbal, who claimed that on their radar, there were a lot more of them. So this guy should have been brought in. And if I was Congress, I would have said, where's the radar data? I want the radar data. And they better not say I threw it away, right? So that's what I would have done in that congressional, you know, here. To me, that would have been much more valuable.

I would have to agree. You know, the, anytime these things happen, it's exciting. when you're seeing these guys swear under oath and talk about UAP and your adrenaline's pumping and you're like, wow, can't believe this is actually happening. But then when you sit with it for a little while, you do sort of wonder these things. Like it's been over a year since Gresh has come forward with all of these claims and we're no closer in the public, at least of knowing if any of this stuff is true or verifiable. And like you mentioned, these Congress members saying we haven't been able to get any further information in a classified setting or in a skiff with David Grush about these things.

And I'm sitting here like, why not? You know, you have people like investigative journalist George Knapp who says, I've been in a skiff with some of these people. Jeremy Corbell and I have been in skiffs. So if us two, us two schmows can get in there and talk about these. things in a classified setting, why can't these Congress members? So you do have to wonder, like, what is really going on here? Is there a huge, you know, stamp down when it comes to these members? You had representatives like Jared Moskowitz saying at the top of this hearing, we were, some of us were pulled aside before this hearing and told not to ask some of you specific questions.

If that is true, that is, that's a little alarming to me, that in an open congressional floor that you are being told not to ask these witnesses certain things. Again, you know, you can always pull the national security, security oath classified, you can pull those cards. But at the end of the day, it's troubling if that is the case. So, yeah, did anything else really stand out to you with any of these representatives from a scientific standpoint? We did have Mike Gold, who worked with NASA, worked on the NASA UAP study group. Yeah, yeah, anything positive come out of this thing. Yeah, I mean, I thought and SCU's released a press release about both of them. And the basic thing that we said, and we took pieces out of both the Senate and the House subcommittee discussions was when there were points made about providing funding for academia or scientific groups, because that's where we feel that this needs to go.

If we want a solution to UAP, then put the money there for academic. to go research it. And it's going to take, I would say, hundreds of millions of dollars each year to properly research this subject. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's a lot of this, unfortunately, comes down to funding. And that's, I guess that's where we could go next.

funding when it comes to the official Pentagon UAP program, which is now called Arrow, we had a Senate hearing that was headed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was speaking with the new head of Arrow, John Kozlowski. And this came right on the heels of Arrow releasing their annual UAP report. So let's move to that. What did you think of the Senate UFO hearing? What do you think of John, our new director, who seems to be taking things a little bit differently than the past director. And yeah, yeah, what did you make of the Senate? So, yeah. So let me just put a little bit of the background on that. Yeah. So the previous head of arrow, right, which was Sean Kirkpatrick.

Yes. With all due respect to him, I just don't feel that he did the right job at Arrow. And for example, that first report that came out that was supposed to look at the history of the UAP subject, it was horrible. And I actually wrote an entire post on my ex-account, formerly called Twitter, about all of the errors that were in that report. I mean, I don't know who wrote the report. Maybe they got an intern to write it for them, but it was just filled with mistakes. So that's how where we were. And I like John. I think there's a good chance he may do well, right? And so I'm willing to realize

that some of what, like he presented in this last meeting, was left over from his previous administration, right? And so I think everyone should give him an opportunity to, you know, run Arrow in the way that, you know, he thinks it needs to be a run. And I'll say we've, we've had communications with Arrow and prior under the previous administration, we never could get any communication out of Arrow. So I think there's improvements that are happening. Yeah. So in terms of that, now a lot of people have been talking in the UFO research community about some of the determinations that error has made. And this came in the form of them talking, John,

specifically talking about some anomalous cases that have yet to be resolved, in some cases that they believe they have resolved, two of which being the Go Fast video and the Aguadilla Puerto Rico incident. Now, both of which the SCU has looked at in tremendous amount of focus and attention. in analysis. So what do you make of their determinations with both of those, Robert, and where do you stand when it comes to? Right. So, okay, that's a good question, right? So in the Aguania case, and I don't remember the length of our report, but it's somewhere around a 150-page report because of the appendices. But we looked, we took a year and a half to evaluate that case.

And it's been put into writing. It exists on her website. And Arrow, you know, John has, you know, presented basically, I guess, some summary points out of his case. But we don't really want to reply until we've seen their final report, right? And so we contacted Ero. They were responded back within 24 hours and said, we will get you a report as soon as it passes through our publication process. And so what we're going to do is we'll look at that report and compare it to ours. And if by chance they're right, then we will release a statement that, you know, it's correct. If there's discrepancies that we see in the report, then we'll put that in what we write up. But we're going to treat it in an academic fashion.

We're not going to jump on social media and start listing, you know, here's all the errors in, you know, a given report. Yeah. And I suspect that report was probably initiated back under the previous administration. So even if there's errors in it, that doesn't, you know, and there's nothing wrong with errors, right? Any science-based report can have errors in it, right? I mean, our report on Audubty could have errors in it. So that's what we'll look at.

We'll look at the report and see if they found some errors in ours and then we'll, you know, do a write-up on it. Right. Yeah. Isn't that what they call kind of like a poke hole situation where you put all the scientists in the room? I heard this on another show recently, my good buddy Andy McGillen over at that UFO podcast talking about this concept of like, yeah, put all the people in the room with all the data, all the evidence and see if you can pull holes in it. If you can't, that's the closest you can come to a definitive explanation. Exactly. And what we did, and hopefully this is what they did, you look at all the data you have.

have. So in that video, you look from beginning to end and you put together your hypothesis, right? Okay, does it fit the information we have from beginning to end? And if it doesn't in one or two places, is there a reason, right? And is it a legitimate reason? Or are we going to have to go grasp, right, for something crazy in order to explain something, right? So that's what we'll look at. In the case of GoFAST, SCU has not actually done a report. We've looked at it internally, but the problem with the GoFAST video is that we have not been able to interview the pilots, right? Because my understanding is there probably still active duty. This happened in 2015. The same thing with the gimbal video, which Arrow did not comment on, but we have not

done a full report on the gimbal video because we have not had access to the pilots. And we feel it's important to be able to talk, you know, to the witnesses. Because a witness's testimony is just as valuable as the equipment's testimony, right? because our eyes can see things across multiple, you know, wavelengths and we're seeing it 3D. And there are things we can do that that equipment can't do. Of course, the advantage of the equipment is it's not going to change its mind on what it saw, right? And sometimes we can do that, right? we can or we can input our prejudice into what we're seeing.

But there's pluses and minuses to both. But that's why we would want to be able to talk to those pilots before we would want to spend the time investigating the video. Because it takes a lot of work to investigate a video and to go do that and not have had access to the pilots. It's in our view, it's not worthwhile. Right. Yeah, I think when you have the data and the evidence from, let's say, radar or different instrumentation on an aircraft, and then you can triangulate that with the witness testimony, that's when you can really get to the core of what this could be or couldn't be. Robert, I love your thoughts on this. Now, there are many skeptics out there.

Well, not just skeptics, but people in general who will argue that. that pilots are no greater witnesses than, you know, the person on the ground seeing a UFO. What do you think of that idea that pilots are no more better at identifying or a UFO than the average person back here on the ground? Right. Yeah, there's some truth to that, but there's also a lot of untruth to it also, right? So if you're talking about, let's say, a pilot's flying at night and he sees a distant light, right? And he doesn't know for sure what it is. I mean, his testimony is probably no better than anyone else's. And your best testimony would be an astronomer sitting in that seat, right?

But if you're talking about an object that pulls alongside his aircraft, right, like with what Fravor had, in Frager's example, right? He's actually dives down towards his tic-tac and engages it and he's flying around it. Well, at that point in time, your pilot is your best witness because he, his mind, he has looked at object that he's engaged at close distance. So he is better equipped to estimate the size of the object. Was it 15 feet, 30 feet, or 45 feet in size, right? He's also better equipped to judge the distance

because that's what he does all the time in his profession. So, you know, it depends on what he's looking at. He's looking at a far-off star? No, he may not be the greatest witness. If he's engaging an object or an object's off his wingtip, I'll take the pilot's testimony over an astronomers or a physicist or anyone like that in that situation. Right. Yeah, that's a very good point. I would too rather than someone just seeing it from afar, for sure.

I do have, if you're okay, some listener questions that came in. Are you willing to stick around for a few others? I always enjoy the listener questions because you never know what you're going to get. You never know. Like a UFO investigation. Exactly. Always a land of curveballs. Yeah.

Cool. Well, our first one comes from Ricardo over on our Patreon. Now, our patrons get priority to ask our guest's listener questions. So he goes to the top of the line here. So thank you, Ricardo. And his question for you is, is the SCU planning on opening a, up its doors to citizen scientists. I'm thinking of something along the lines of SETI at home or tagging images on a web portal

to create a database for training AI systems. So yeah, any plans to start working more with the public? I know you guys do a lot with the public, but yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we're not averse to working with the public. As a matter of fact, we have a one of our projects is developed. of a database, right, where we'll collect all the data that exist on all UFO reports that we can get our hands on. And we'll put them into a database that the public would have access to. So if the citizen

scientist wanted to, you know, do a research project using that database, they could do it. So that's one area where, you know, we're looking at working with, you know, the public. cool awesome that's good to hear that's always exciting when you can get the public more involved with these things because i think a lot of people feel uh helpless when it comes to these things like they see a UFO maybe they report it but then you know where does it go from there and that can be even true for things like uh whatever sending a report to moof on or you know this new enigma initiative that's out there or even arrow we've heard we've heard rumors that some military people who've reported their accounts to arrow, it just gets swallowed

up and they never hear from them again. So it's good to hear. And I'll have one more thing to that, Ryan. And that is, SUU is not, although the bulk of SCU are people with science backgrounds, we have people, we need people in other areas too, right? For example, we all, sometimes we need a social media manager, someone who has the time, on their hands and has experience, for example, with managing our social media accounts, right? Or someone who is experienced in writing grants, or someone who has, you know, experience and going towards, you know, corporations that might provide a seed money, for example. So if someone has those skill sets, they're always welcome to go to the SCU website.

Right, which we will have linked in the show notes for you guys. I highly suggest checking out the papers you guys have published and how you guys can possibly get involved as well. This is an interesting one to bring us back to Stephenville, Robert. We didn't talk much about that, but Tanner on Patreon wants to know where does that stand now? Where do you personally stand on the whole Stephenville event? And yeah, he asked, I know a lot of people might not be familiar with it. So I guess maybe a brief rundown if possible. Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty complex case. A real brief summary on Stephenville. In January, excuse me, get some water. Yeah, no worries. It's in January of 2008. And this happened in Stephenville, Texas in the surrounding 20-mile area. Stevenville is in northern Texas.

So if you know what, if you've ever been to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, there's what used to be called Carzwell Air Force Base there. And that's where there were jets from there involved in this. And 70 miles to the southwest is Stephenville. And a little bit past there is a military operating area where these jets normally fly and, you know, drop flares to do various operations. So in January of 2006, or it was 2008, 2008. We got reports from, oh, two dozen people within a matter of hours of these very bright lights that were moving at a high rate of speed and that various people had seen.

So I went to Stephenville, and I personally interviewed a lot of the witnesses, and I got radar data from the FAA for that day. And so what I was able to do, and this is, as far as I know, the only time this is, or probably the only time this has ever been done, is I was able to match up witness testimony with the radar data. In other words, for example, there was a constable who was at his home and he says, I look to the south and this is the time of night it was. and there's this object that's hovering. And I go back, you know, into the house to get my wife. She doesn't want to leave her favorite TV show. So I come out with my son.

And now this object that was to the south is directly above my home. And it is just about a dozen lights just moving in random fashion. Then suddenly the lights come together and they move to the northeast towards Stephen than Phil, an extreme rate of speed. And he used the term like the speed of life, but he was being facetious. So I get the radar data, right? So on radar, I know where the guy's home is, where he was I know what time it was. So I look at that on the radar data. Well, what's on radar? There's an object to the south of his home, just like he said. And it sits there for six or seven spins of the radar, which is every 10 seconds or so. And then suddenly you see on radar the next week,

this object is to the northeast. And the minimum speed, right, was 1,900 miles per hour. And it could have been much faster than that. And we don't have anything that can hover and suddenly go to 1900 miles an hour in less than 10 seconds. That's approximately nine G forces, right? Our And that's indirect what we call linear acceleration, not like an F-18, which he generates seven or eight G-forces because he's banking. This is a straight-ahead. That F-18 going straight ahead won't generate more than maybe one and a half G-forces. This guy was over nine G-forces. And so we don't have anything that can do that.

And it's on radar. And I have a witness who saw it. And they all match up, the kind, the location. you know, the extreme speed. So I don't know what it was, right? There's no way I can know what it was. The only thing I can say is what it was not. And it was not, we have nothing, you know, in 2008,

nor 16 years later in 2024 that can do that. So, Stingville is a true total unknown in my book. Wow. And there was one other witness where we had radar data matched up with him, too. And so that was what made that such a neat case. I love that case. That's, yeah, that's all you could ever ask for, except for an answer. Exactly for the answer, yeah.

Yeah, except the most supportive part. But, hey, we like living in the journey. It's not always the destination, I guess, Robert. Yeah, it's hard to get the answer sometimes if, Unless you can grab whatever it was it was there. Exactly. And put it on the congressional UFO floor. Yeah.

Thank you to Ricardo and Paul for those Patreon questions. I'm going to move to Facebook here. We have Paul. And Paul wants to say, in a recent interview, Dr. Kevin Canuth speculated there may be a gap in our understanding of the quantum relationship with inertia. To what extent do you, Robert, think inertia might make. play a role in UAP craft?

The only Okay, so inertia, right, is our mass as we sit here. And since we're sitting on planet Earth, it's one G-force of, you know, force on us. And inertia

is that, you know, we're going to remain sitting here unless there was a force acting to push me up, right? Which is the way a rocket works, everything else does. Well, the problem with high G forces is that your craft will begin to tear apart. An F-18, for example, is not going to withstand more than maybe 15-17 G-forces, then the wings rip off of it. And the human being

inside it is going to be smushed into jello if you go much beyond, you know, 17-20 Gs. Well, like these objects and we have data where they go much faster than that, like in the Nimitz case, we had a calculation based on how fast the object disappeared from those four pilots, Fraber and the other three. That was over two to 300 G-forces. And I think this is what Kevin is referring to. So how can you do that, right? So one theory is that somehow you reduce the mass, the inertial mass of an object. Now science today, as far as we know, there has been no evidence to say that you can reduce the inertial mass of an object, right? In other words, I have a given the amount of mass, right? And you can't make me weigh an ounce while I'm sitting here in this

chair. But as far as we know. But the concept is that there might be a way to lower what we call the inertial mass of an object. And so think about this. If you could, let's just say, if you could reduce my weight to a fraction of a gram, right? Well, now you could just about shine a lot, a laser on me, and I would take off it near the speed of light, right? Because there's no mass that the laser has to overcome any significant mass. And that would explain a lot of what we see, right? explains the ability of extreme acceleration.

It explains the lack of interaction with the atmosphere because there's no mass interacting with that atmosphere. And it would explain how an object survives that type of acceleration. Because if you have basically no mass, you are not being endangered by that extreme acceleration. So that is one concept that me fits all the facts of what we see.

But as to how you, you know, reduce the inertial mass of an object, nobody knows how. Yeah. It's just a theory at this point, right? It reminds me of, you know, we have these ideas that some of these craft aren't really even being pushed or propelled, but pulled instead. Like, you look at something like that. tick-tack that's going from like the surface of the water up to the the you know the rumored cap point back down and then presumably maybe off into space i i don't know but you have to wonder like

what could propel something that quickly and that rigid i i it just astounds me every time they think about yeah yeah yeah it's interesting um let's move to i believe this is our last listener question for you robert Kate on Facebook asks, why is the government so afraid to reveal the truth about UFOs? Certainly no government on the planet owns them or controls them. So, yeah, why do you think they're afraid to reveal the truth if they actually know that truth? Right. And that's a good question. And it's one that I'm just speculating on, right?

Because we don't really know, you know, as to why they won't reveal everything. I'm fairly confident there is information they haven't revealed exactly what that information is. I don't know. But I suspect that the main reason is this, that if you're dealing with a technology that's far advanced, there's probably some level of hope that, okay, maybe we could figure something out on how to reverse engineer that technology. and we don't want our adversaries to learn anything from us, right? So we don't even want to tell them what the shapes of the objects are

that we think are the real objects versus maybe the unreal objects. And so that's one possibility right there, right? Is that because of all these nation states that make up this planet it and all of them constantly at war with each other, then you don't want your enemy to know anything. Another possibility would simply be that, well, there was a concern of how the population would react to it, right? But I kind of favor the former, that it's just related to military and not wanting to

give out any potential information to your adversaries. Hey, how are you? Ready to go for a run? Running connects us to a rush of energy that flows through our world. The cheers of friends that unlock a new gear within us. The intersection of interests that inspires a run crew. The support that gets you over the finish line. Connection is why we move forward and what inspires us to keep going. Let's run there.

Learn more at brooksrunning.com. Sources and methods, you know, that seems to be the wall they hide behind when it comes to. It is definitely a wall that they hide behind. Yeah, it's not even like the craft itself that they're not willing to share with the public. It's, you know, we don't want any information to get out of where we have the sensor systems, the advancement in the technology we're using to capture some of these UAPs. UAP and of course, you know, the technology itself. And look at some of these these leaked videos we've gotten from like in the Middle East and whatnot.

Like these are being taken by spy drones like things that technically shouldn't even be there. Yeah. So it's it is. It's frustrating because it's like, yeah, we want to know the shape. We want to know what the craft did. And we're sick of getting like these very quick. whatever, 20, 30 second clips of a craft. And then what?

What happens after that? Like, what happened after the TikTok that Chad Underwood caught went off the screen? Like, these are things we want to know. Are these longer videos out there? And what did they actually show? Yeah, and you know there are because just take the gimbal video, right? These guys are screaming like crazy about what they're seeing. And then all of a sudden the video ends.

Now, why would he have stopped videoing? Right. Yeah. It just makes no. Yeah. That's enough of that. All right. We got to go land.

I got to go feed the kids. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Well, okay. So to sort of wrap things up with you, Robert, and thank you for your time. We've had two UFO hearings. We had the report come out.

We have the work you guys are doing over at the SCU. We have things like the James Webb Telescope doing its thing, Galileo project over here. with Avi Loeb, Americans for Safe Arrows. Like every morning I wake up, there's a new organization looking into the UAP. It's so cool. It's so exciting. But what comes next?

Where do you think we need to be focusing our attention in the UFO, I guess, research community and the public at large when it comes to this every elusive topic of UFOs? Yeah, I really. support, pushing on Congress to provide more, you know, resources and funding for academia and scientific organizations to study the subject. I think that's the way we need to go. That's where it's at. I would have to agree. And you are seeing UFOs making their way into classrooms more and more each day. Like you mentioned, hard sciences, soft sciences. You have Harvard university students all getting involved with the Galileo project. I know that you guys work with a lot of

different institutions and it seems like you're partnering with new people every day, which is super exciting, not just in America, but globally, which I think is very important. You mentioned that, right? I forgot to even mention one of the papers that we just wrote was we partnered with some University of Toronto students. And it's basically a paper where we took the very best of the best cases across history. So in other words, the object was very close to the witness. We have multiple witnesses, right? The cases that either somebody made it up or it's real. There's nothing in between. So we took those, we came up with 301 cases. And then we looked at, okay, what are the characteristics of these objects? And so in the paper, we, you know, we show two, actually three basic disc shapes and two different

triangular shapes. And those are the most common of all the shapes. Interesting. So that paper is on our website also. So all of these are available. Oh, perfect. Okay. Well, again, guys, we will link to the website for SCU where you can read all these papers. Well, that leads into my last most important question, Robert. Where can we find everything the SCU is up to? And what do you have going on in the world of UFOs and where can we find everything you're up to? Well, yeah, probably the best place is on our website. And, you know, that's explorescu.org. And we, there's papers on there. There's papers written by others that

we think are very good papers that we recommend people read. People can also go to, for example, to our Twitter sites. There's an S-U Twitter site, and then I have a Twitter site also where I post things. So across all of that, they can, you know, stay up to date with what we're, you know, doing and what we're working on. Probably one of the next things we work on will be the, you know, at the paper that Arrow wrote. You know, that's on our radar screen. And then we have a conference that will be in June of this year. Okay.

So we're working on that. Okay, perfect. And again, we'll be sure to link to all of that. And I hope people can make it out. I've had many friends and colleagues who have made it to your events. I, unfortunately, being in the UK now, it's a little tougher. but yeah, I plan to make it out there at some point for sure. And of course, guys, I can't recommend it enough.

The new book, UFOs. A scientist explains what we know and don't know by Robert as well. Go check that out. Wherever you get your books. Is that available in audiobook as well, Robert? No, it's not. It's not yet available in audiobook. Okay.

But e-book, I would assume. The publisher on that. Gotcha. try to convince them to do that. I know. It's not easy. Trust me. I've been struggling with the audio book for a while now for mine, too. But I can't recommend the book enough. And yeah, yeah, everyone, please go, visit and explore the SCU.

I love the link you guys have for that as well. And we have the Soul Foundation event that's taking place as we're recording this. I know you guys have representatives at that as well. So we will be having an insider's perspective of that event from our wonderful moderator, Suzanne, who is at the event right now. She'll be reporting to us on the live stream this upcoming week. So be on the lookout for that. And be on the lookout for everything that Robert does as well, guys. Go follow him on Twitter and all of that.

And I have to thank you again, Robert. I can't believe this is the first time you've been on the proper podcast. But this has been so refreshing. I've enjoyed it, Ryan. I enjoyed this just like I enjoyed your books. Oh, thank you. It's great. Thank you so much.

And next time I'm in the States, the beers are on me, my friend. That sounds great. Thank you so much for joining me today and Summer in disguise. All right, thanks. Thank you. I'm Ryan Spray. And I'm Andrew Sanford. And we love pro wrestling.

It's the best. Headlocks, elbow drops. Skaithing promos and chair shots. We just can't get enough of it. So, we started a podcast. You can join Ryan and me as we dig into the ins and outs of pro wrestling like the rabid fans we are. We've got interviews, previews, predictions, news, and so much more. And we're going to cover all of it on somewhere in the rain.

Oh, yeah. Is that supposed to be macho, man? Nope, no good. We'll work on it. Join us every Wednesday. wherever you get your podcasts for all new episodes. And we'll see you somewhere in the rain.