Somewhere in the Skies - Unit 731, Operation Paperclip, and the UFO Connection (w/ Micah Hanks)

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

On episode 368, we welcome back Editor-in-Chief of The Debrief, Micah Hanks. Ryan and Micah discuss some of the latest UFO news and then dive deep into the highly controversial history of Unit 731 in Japan and Operation Paperclip in the United States. Did both of these highly secretive projects have any possible connections to UFOs? Follow the Debrief at: www.thedebrief.org Follow Micah Hanks on Twitter: https://x.com/MicahHanks Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies 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 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

This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome, everyone, to another live podcast recording of Somewhere in the Skies. I am your host, Ryan Sprague, and thank you for joining us a little later than usual. We had to give extra time for our very special guest tonight because he is such a busy man. You know him as the editor-in-chief at the debrief and also the creator and host of the Micaheux. of the Micah Hanks program. We're going to be talking about a few of the darker times in history and certain projects that certain governments have done that might have some sort of connection to UFOs and

everything in between. Let's do it. Micah Hanks, welcome back, my man. Ryan, it's really good to see you, buddy. It's been a while. And again, keep up the excellent work. You've been doing that, obviously, with somewhere in the skies. And so I hope our conversation today will be in the further insights.

of that ongoing mission of yours? I think so, man. We have so much to talk about. And it's been a while since you and I have caught up. A lot has happened in and out of the UFO world. I was listening to your most recent episode of the Micah Hanks program. And you brought up such a great point. You said in the beginning of the episode,

you know, there's not a lot of bombshell UFO stories happening right now. We're not having these David Grush sort of revelations or anything like that. Because if we were, the debrief would probably be one of the first to know, if not publish that information. But there's a lot going on. There's always things going on in the background, in the shadows. And we are going to cover some of the history of some of that UFO stuff tonight, including some recent stories that you and and others have written over at the debrief concerning UFOs in UAP,

but before we do that, space, we got to talk space, man. There's been a lot of new stories coming out about possible life on other planets, on other moons. And I thought, you know, let's cover two, one of which you wrote over at the debrief

about the possibility of life on Venus. But I wanted to bring this one to you. We don't know much about what, what's going on on Mars yet. But there has been some exciting news. So if you don't mind, I'm just going to go ahead and read a little bit from this story. And then, yeah, we'll just get your thoughts and see what the audience thinks as well. Sound good.

Sounds excellent. Let's dive in. All right, my man. So NASA's Perseverance Rover may have just found what it was looking for on Mars. So I'm going to go ahead and read this. This comes to us from CNN. The NASA Perseverance Rover may have found a pivotal clue. that's central to its mission on Mars.

Geological evidence that could suggest life existed on the planet billions of years ago. The robotic explorer came across a vein-filled red rock on July 18th that appears to be scattered with spots that could indicate that ancient chemical reactions occurring within the rock once supported microbial organisms. So David Flannery, member of NASA's Perseverance team said, these spots are a big surprise. On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated, excuse me, associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface. And then also, Brian E. Horging, co-investigator on the Perseverance mission, said,

we're absolutely thrilled to have this sample in the bag. The rock is exactly the type of sample that we came to Mars to find. and we can't wait to get it into our labs back here on Earth. This is precisely the type of potential microbial biosignature that was envisioned when NASA designed the Mars 2020 mission, and we've used every instrument in our payload to find and understand this rock. To finish here, Micah, it is the hope of NASA's leadership to return the samples to Earth by the 2030s,

with less complexity, cost, and risk than originally planned and the agency is expecting to have answers for how best to return samples from Mars by the fall. So basically, man, you know, we have all these missions in place. I remember specifically, I believe, you me and a few others, when Perseverance first landed. I think it was Perseverance. Yeah, 2020. We did like a live stream where we got to see it land, and it was so incredibly exciting. And now look, man, the fruits of the labors are occurring.

So what do you think about this story coming out about Mars Perseverance? You know, I think collectively we all sort of shared in the excitement, those of this, at least who follow, you know, space news, we all kind of collectively shared in the excitement of sending perseverance, this, you know, highly advanced Martian rover to the Red Planet to conduct these studies that not only are collecting, you know, information about the geology and information that's going to help us unveil some things about the past and how the environment on Mars looked. Again, maybe in its early history at a time when many space scientists think that there would

have been an abundance of water, liquid water on Mars. But of course, we're also looking specifically for signs of life. And like you mentioned, the debrief had a live stream and everybody was watching in real time with the successful touchdown of the Perseverance Rover, which, I mean, that's only the latest iteration of those kinds of robotic explorations of the red planet we've been undertaking in recent years. Curiosity is still conducting science missions there and making its way up a mountain, whereas Perseverance, or Percy, as they call it, is conducting its investigations there in the Gisero Crater. Now, with this recent discovery, again, unfortunately, I don't

think that, based on the photos, I've actually seen that the space agency is released. They aren't as illustrative and as promising looking as the image that you had right there. If you look at this rocket's a whitish colored rock. It seems to be sort of porous. But again, space scientists, some of whom you quoted there, they have essentially said this is exactly the kind of thing that we're looking for. And here's the reason why that's important, because the apparent chemical composition of this rock, or more importantly, the telltale signs based on the imagery that we're seeing, we won't really conclusively know until a sample is retrieved, and that sometime, hopefully by the early 2030s, or at least sometime in the 2030s, we'll be able to

retrieve that sample, bring it back from Mars back to Earth. That'll be the ultimate step to being able to determine what the significance of this stone is. But based on the imagery we're seeing, it seems to be a likely kind of a stone where the conditions, chemically speaking, for the presence of life long ago, would probably, this would have been conducive for the presence of life. And so the specific chemical nature of the rock is something that's going to have to be further examined. But right now they're saying this is exactly what we've been looking for. It's a very promising discovery, and we hope that once we are able to look at the chemical past of the stone,

it will help us to determine whether or not it was something that represents life that would have once existed on Mars. Now, you know, we found a lot of different things that seem to be suggestive of life. I mean, there have been sulfates or salts, essentially, that have been found in various kinds of areas of the Gisero Crater. One might think that, I mean, salt's not going to be something that's super important. But again, what's really crucial about this is that the presence, of these sulfates, clays, and other kinds of mineral components right there in the Gisero Crater. Yet again, they point to the fact that there was probably an abundance of liquid water at one time there on the Martian surface.

And that's the very reason why the Gisero Crater was targeted for this kind of search. So again, coming full circle from where we were a few years ago where you and I and several of us were watching in real time as Percy made its way there to the Martian surface to see this most recent development. And obviously this is probably the most significant recent development that we've seen with the Mars mission. To see that they have found something that is potentially so promising in terms of the existence of even just simple organisms, microbial life that might have existed on Mars long ago, that's an incredible, incredible development. And again, what it really points to is the question that here on somewhere in the skies and on my podcast, the Micah Hank's program. And really, I mean, all of us collectively who look at the UAP question, it's one of those questions that we all have.

are we alone in the universe? And so this may be a pathway to determining whether or not at least at one time life existed somewhere else in the universe. Once we know, even if it no longer exists on Mars, once we know conclusively that there were life forms on the red planet. If that's ever proven, it's still important because it shows that life can exist elsewhere outside of Earth. And that what we need are at least semi-Earth-like planets. But again, if you look at Mars with its size in comparison to Earth and the much harsher environment there, if life could have existed on Mars, it's all the more promising that much more Earth-like planets out there. Some of these rocky exoplanet worlds that were now beginning to tease out details about their atmospheres through spectrographic readings that were able to do with the incredibly sensitive instrumentation on the James Webb Space Telescope, there are much better candidates out there. And if life once existed on Mars and we find evidence of that, even if it's no longer alive, the whole doorway has now been opened to the search for alien life because we know it can exist elsewhere other than Earth.

And it's in likelihood out there someplace else on far more Earth-like planets. Exactly. I think it was just last week we were covering the moons, Europa. And Celadus, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct as well. They're finding liquid water on these planets just below the surface. which again maybe life isn't thriving there as we know it as intelligent life even right now but in the past it possibly could have and this will lead us propel us to other moons or planets like these that could harbor life now so i i do find that very fascinating you know maybe ancient life did exist on mars and while maybe it's a little depressing that it's not there now uh things like that can tell us so much

about our own planet when we find so much in common with planets like Mars and Earth. We shouldn't rule out the possibility. I mean, going all the way back, I think, to the missions, the early Martian missions, you know, the 1970s, there was speculation at that time, and you probably recall this, that there may have been biosignatures detected then, but we didn't necessarily know what to look for, and we may have misinterpreted some of the data. So, I mean, we should hold open to the possibility. It's probably unlikely, given the harsh environment there on Mars, but I mean, it's not impossible that we may still find some simple form of life on the red planet. I mean, if we found it and it's still there that really opens up the floodgates

in terms of what else we might hope to discover. And again, with the advancements that we're seeing now with the James Webb Space Telescope, but again, with the Roman telescope that's forthcoming and many other additional space-based observatories that will put into orbit in the decades ahead, I mean, if we don't see it in the next decade, certainly within our lifetime, We're looking at the eventual discovery of irrefutable evidence of biosignatures from other planets. And we will know conclusively at that point whether or not we indeed are alone in this universe. Right. Which leads us into our next story and our next planet.

This was a story that you covered personally over at the debrief. And this was like a life on Venus. New discovery deepens controversy over possible signs of life in the planet's atmosphere. Let's get the old slideshow in here. So recent observations of Venus have yielded new evidence of a compound in its atmosphere that could indicate the presence of life. Phosphine, a toxic gas that astrobiologists have proposed could be associated with the presence of life on rocky planets. This was initially detected in Venus's atmosphere in a surprise discovery four years ago. I remember the day that story came out, man.

UFO Twitter was going nuts. So now new observations potentially strengthen those past findings, hinting at the presence of bio signatures, that if confirmed, could mean life forms are able to thrive in the planet's harsh environment. Extremophiles, man. What do you think? You wrote the story. What do you make of this exciting discovery on Venus?

Well, I'll just say this. if we thought that the Martian environment was extreme, try going and hanging out on Venus for even a short period, let alone an extended one. And yet, much to our amazement, my understanding, I guess, is that essentially spectrographic reading, again, we can break apart the light that we discern using our space telescopes and also some ground-based telescopes.

And this allows us to determine what kinds of chemical elements are present in the atmosphere of, of course, nearby planets, but we also are able to do this with much further distant planets. If you recall some of the more recent, or actually I should go back further, some of the very earliest big announcements that were made by the James Webb team

have been that the Webb telescope was detecting some things in the atmospheres of very distant exoplanets that are very strongly suggestive of, if not, life forms, at very least, potential habitability, right? Now, much closer to home, Venus, you know, we have a very hot planet.

We have a planet that's very unforgiving. And yet the spectrographic readings of its atmosphere seemed to be pointing to the existence of phosphine, which, as you correctly note, is not a new discovery, but it was a very controversial discovery when it was first made. Right. In fact, four years ago or so when the initial findings were revealed, there were some rather, you know, I guess really some of the most respected authorities, really, in the field of astronomy were coming out in journals and, you know, academic. and publications were saying, you know, we're not only skeptical about this, but one, and I mentioned this in the article, they had actually cautioned the research team in question and had almost scolded them saying, you know, I'd like to remind our colleagues about, you know, the proper manner in which we disseminate this kind of information to the media, knowing that they're going to run with this and jump all over this and start saying life, you know, confirmed on Venus. Even the research team involved said, you know, we're a little ways away from being able to say conclusively that there's life on Venus.

All they reported was that phosphine, which is, again, a toxic gas, but it's usually associated or found in association with the presence of life forms. They seem to have detected that in the atmosphere. With the new findings, we have two things that are of importance. First of all, not only is there additional potential corroboration for the presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, and some of the researchers involved with this study have said this is maybe the more important point, there also seems to be evidence of ammonia. And as I point out in the article, there's also some additional corroboration for this, which comes from, I believe it was the initial detections made by the Viking probe if memory serves,

where essentially new readings of the past detections of, and again the spectroscopy, I believe would be the term for it, of the Venetian or the Venetian, I guess, not Venetian, those were blind, the Venetian atmosphere. it seems that a rereading of that points not only to possible corroboration for the existence of phosphine, but also they have interpreted ammonia as being among those components. So now we have two different sources saying we think that there's not only phosphine, but also ammonia. And what that really means is that, again, these are strong potential indicators that there are processes occurring that are normally associated with biology. Now, how that would happen on a planet so harsh as? Venus is quite a mystery. We don't know if the

certain substances that we're detecting are in the atmosphere because they are being produced there or if they're being produced below the atmosphere, for instance, somewhere on the actual surface of the planet. But there are some ways we may be able to get some additional information. There are some forthcoming space probes that might be able to provide us much better information about this than what we're currently using to base these determinations on. And again, it's all still very much at this.

point in the subjective zone. But I mean, it's probably the best and most promising potential confirmation for the existence of phosphine that we've seen to date. And when you add to that, the presence of ammonia, again, a lot of people are really talking about this. They're cautious, but they're optimistic. Because if we find evidence of any kind of simple life forms, whether it's Mars or on Venus or any other kind of nearby planet or a moon may be encircling one of the planets in our solar system, yet again, these are going to be probably, like you mentioned, the term extremophiles. They're probably going to be like you mentioned, platforms that have existed in a much more demanding environment than Earth.

You know, the Goldilocks zone that we're in, you know, is very conducive to the formation of life. Look all around you, you know. Whereas on nearby planets, it's not so much the case. So if we find life in our solar system under those conditions, yet again, my contention would be that we look further out and we find much more potentially habitable planets that are much more Earth-like. And we have a very good chance that we're going to find life on those planets. It's exciting. Again, I hope within our lifetime we can at least have one of these discoveries, whether it's on Mars or Venus, even the possibility of microbial life would be enough for me to go to my deathbed being like, we did it, guys. We finally did it. Mission, as George Bush would say, accomplished.

Well, let's move to intelligent life, possibly, out there, Micah. Now, you wrote a fascinating, I guess I would say more hypothetical article recently that involves one of our favorite terms when it comes to both the debrief and science fiction, and that's warp drives. I loved this story, man. scientists propose clever new strategy for spotting alien warp drives that may be lurking in the cosmos. So for people like me who don't really understand what a warp drive is, could you maybe just break that down in the simplest terms for us? And what these scientists may be looking for out there to possibly prove that these could exist, I guess. Yeah, well, first I got to give props to Chris Plain, who is our intrepid, reporter on warp drives there at the debrief. Only on occasion will I throw in a quick story on that,

or MJ might do the same. But Chris has really led the charge with our reporting on warp drives. And we've had some very interesting developments in that area over the last few years. This recent story is intriguing because it's dealing more with a theoretical. In other words, if warp drives exist, do we have a way that we might be able to detect them? And they do propose that. But first to your question, what exactly is a war? warp drive and how would that work? I guess that the popular notion of a warp drive has been with us for many decades, but it was really brought to a large audience through Star Trek, of course, you know, superluminal travel,

you know, light speed travel. We see this in Star Wars also. Those ideas existed in fiction, but back in, I guess, the 1990s, Miguel Alcubieri, I believe, is how he pronounces it, Alcubieri worked out the mathematics and found that hypothetically, we could create a device that as opposed to producing thrust like a chemical rocket would do, what this device would do is it would bend space time around it. And so essentially imagine a device that it bends space around it so that as opposed to producing thrust and moving through space, it just bends the space around it and it moves

itself in relation to the warpage of space around it. That's what a warp drive is by creating a so-called warp bubble. around said device, which again, I think, you know, we still see physicists refer to it as a propulsion unit, at least in the sense of it being something that could be used to move passengers through space using this technology. But again, I want to be clear,

it's not like producing a blast of energy or something along those lines. It's not traditional propulsion in that sense. So the warp drive concept is indeed, at least relativistically speaking, feasible. In other words, if we look at our best understanding of the physics of our universe in relation to gravity as outlined by Albert Einstein, actually, I guess, more than a century ago with general relativity, we can mathematically demonstrate that in theory a warp drive, that kind of technology could exist. Now, in practicality, it's a different story. You know, trying to actually construct a warp drive using our current knowledge and our current engineering capabilities. We aren't to that point yet.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that some other intelligent civilization, let's say that there may be hundreds or even thousands of years further along than we are. It doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't have had the time to work on this. And if they followed a technological progression similar to ours that might involve not only the same sort of engineering that we've undertaken, and also, you know, explorations of the physics of the universe similar to what we've undertaken, but also, you know, that may have been complemented by advanced artificial intelligence that helped to speed along the innovations that they were able to produce. Similar to like what we're seeing here on Earth happening right now, we're in that nascent phase as far as AI's introduction.

But let's say another civilization out there as much further along, it's not impossible that they might actually be able to produce warp drives. And indeed, what we know about that is that mathematically speaking, they can be produced and that Einstein would have agreed. He would have said the math's there. It could be built if only we had the technology and the engineering prowess to do. so. Hey, we have to start somewhere, and that's often with an idea. And some of our best science fiction writers are the ones to eventually show us the way, pave the way to these

technologies. I mean, it's crazy. That's why I love science fiction so much, man, because it eventually a lot of it will become science fact. So, yeah, exciting. I mean, we could talk about that all day. I mean, in fact, before we get into discussing really what the current idea about detecting these things is is outlined in the story. I'll just mention Arthur C. Clark's, my favorite example. I predicted the existence of the telecommunication device. He and Kubrick in the film representation of 2001 of Space Odyssey, there were maybe a few years off on sending crude missions to Jupiter, but nonetheless, they essentially predicted video conferencing.

They predicted a lot of similar technologies. a lot of those things we first see in science fiction, and then they become a reality. And it's almost a weird kind of a chicken or the egg kind of a thing. Are these eventual technologies, is there eventuality almost predetermined given the necessity for being able to have video conferencing like you and I are using right now? Or was that an innovation that was inspired entirely by representations in science fiction, right?

Sometimes it could be a little bit of both. But warp drives obviously are a good example of something that I think we had the idea before we, and long before, in fact, we ever were able to make it a reality. We're not to that point yet, but maybe somebody else already has. And so with the new research that's outlined in the article, essentially what they are arguing is

that if a warp drive is feasible and if other intelligent civilizations have harnished the abilities, engineering, speaking, and otherwise to build these things, then what happens if a warp drive breaks down? That's essentially their premise. If a warp drive

breaks down, they ask, would this produce something that would be detectable here on Earth, and that something is, of course, gravitational waves. Now, since 2015, we've been detecting gravitational waves, and the researchers note that the kinds of gravitational waves, these ripples in space time that are produced by a highly energetic event, these kinds of gravitational waves that we are detecting right now are specifically those that are associated with celestial phenomena. If it were to have emanated from a hypothetical warp drive or a warp driven spacecraft, it would have a different

kind of a signature. And this is the exciting part. The side is to say we're not currently using gravitational wave detectors that would be able to detect those kinds of G waves, but we do technically have the ability to do that. So while we can't build a warp drive, we

could modify some of our existing equipment and we could engineer gravitational wave detectors that would be able to detect mathematically speaking the kinds of Again, I'll call them G waves just for sake of simplicity here, but we could detect those with the current level of technology we have. So maybe one of the kinds of things,

one of the developments that would precipitate the eventual creation of real warp drives will be first here on Earth if we detect them. But if we detect them, again, that's a very loaded kind of a discovery because we know that to detect a gravitational wave that we would attribute to a work drive would seem to mean that somebody out there has succeeded in building this technology. themselves. And so with that discovery, wouldn't it be ironic, Ryan, if rather than finding microbes on Mars or on Venus, we detect a gravity wave signature that is so specific mathematically in keeping

with the theory that's been outlined by researchers for what we would expect to be generated by the breakdown of a warp drive, that we have detected a cosmic flat tire, and thereby we know that somebody's sitting out there, you know, drifting along in a derelict warp craft, and we know that they exist therefore we know that there must have been alien intelligence that created it wouldn't it be interesting if that's how we actually had final proof that we're not alone hikers guide baby yeah i love it i love it also g waves is officially your hip-hop name it's only the second hip-hop name i've been given today so yeah that's it that's it come on you're uh it's sunday it is sunday so that is true this is usually a day to rest but i am

putting you to work man because next we're going full-on UFOs. But, Micah, we are going to take just a very quick break for everyone to grab a drink, guys. Rest those eyes, take a look at our quick commercial here. And when we come back, we're talking everything UFOs with what the debrief has been covering. Some of Micah's personal curiosities of stories that have gone a little, let's just say, they've been lost to us in the UFO. world, including those from NASA.

And then later in the show, we are going deep into Operation Paperclip and Unit 731. I find this absolutely fascinating. So stick tight, guys. We'll be right back here at Somewhere in the Skies with the one and only Micah Hanks. Hey, everyone, Ryan Sprague here, host of Somewhere in the Skies. If you've ever thought about supporting us, we have great two easy options for you right now. If you listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Or you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash somewhere skies.

Both of these options give you the same benefits, early access to the main show, bonus episodes and content, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. So to help support Somewhere in the Guys, click that subscribe button on Apple or visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you so much for your support and keep looking up. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all.

In fact, we're so confident, restoration is guaranteed, pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. All right. Let's do it, guys. Let's get to UFOs, Micah. And what better place to start than Arrow?

Everyone's favorite UFO organization that has tweeted maybe three times in the last year. That's besides the point. They recently came out with a report that had to cover the materials that they have been looking at, that a lot of us know as quote unquote arts parts or the materials that to the Stars Academy were in possession of that then went to the army through Crata and then ended up in the hands of Arrow. So yeah, man, I'd love to get your thoughts on this report that came. out a few weeks ago, what they discovered, do you think it's significant? Will this lead to anything? And yeah, what do you think comes next for these materials and the analysis of them?

Well, you know, Ryan, we've had a lot of different material samples that are allegedly associated with UAP that have been collected over the years. Most notably, I think, in recent years, Dr. Jacques Valet has been leading a pretty significant effort to try and collect a lot of these samples. and he's of course been providing some of those material samples to Dr. Gary Nolan at Stanford University. Dr. Nolan gave a lecture at the Soul Foundation Conference last November that I was in attendance at, in which we saw some of the initial findings. Again, I think that Gary's approach, Gary has a lot of, you know, his personal views, I guess, toward the subject and he talks about them a lot publicly. But when it comes to the science side of his work, he's really kind of focused only on one thing.

What can I, through very reliable material analysis, material science applications, what can I determine about these alleged samples? And what does that reveal? And some of those initial findings are intriguing, but nothing pointing to any so-called cosmic smoking gun. In other words, the kinds of signatures or characteristics associated with material that we think might point to off-world origins. And I'll get more on that in a moment in terms of how we would determine that. As you correctly point out, there was a recent study that was, well, actually it was a sort of a summary report on another summary report based on an analysis that was conducted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory of a very famous alleged UAP sample. You mentioned they were called arts parts, and I'll talk a little bit about why they're called that here in just a second. Right there in the image, we see a, actually, I think this image had been put online on the TSA,

not TSA, the TTSA to the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences website. I also think that there have been some question about at one time maybe the use of stock imagery in association with some of these alleged samples, but again, I'm not sure that that's the case here. In any case, the sample that was recently analyzed by Oak Ridge was first obtained by Arrow, the All-D Main Anomily Resolution Office, of course our current DOD effort to not only study UAP, but apparently also to analyze material samples. And the origins of this sample are kind of intriguing. So really, if we go all the way back to the 1990s,

I believe it was 1996. Radio host Art Bell had been talking a lot about what was the big story in Uphology at that time on his late-night radio broadcasts, and that, of course, involved Roswell. We're going to be talking about Roswell quite a bit today, in fact. It seems to be the story that will never go away. But what happened was Art received some messages from an individual based out of South Carolina.

And he apparently was in the military and he also had a family member who had previously served in the military, I believe his grandfather. And the story had been that with all this discussion about Roswell, this anonymous individual who referred to them to themselves in these messages to Art Bell as only being a friend, he said, I can't risk my career and my current position in government. to tell you who I am. You're just going to have to take my word for this, but this family member of mine had been involved in the retrieval of a craft from Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. And he said,

to help to supplement this story I'm telling you, I enclose within this message some samples. And these were with my grandfather's belongings. These samples were obtained from the crash site by him. and he kept them all these years and I now impart them to you, Art Bell, and hence how they became known as Art's parts. So Art apparently had submitted these samples for some analysis. I think that eventually what ended up happening was they were entrusted to researcher Linda Moulton Howell. She also had begun to make inquiries into the possible nature and origin of these samples.

Intrigingly, way back in the 1990s, one of the scientists with whom she had discussed these samples had been none other than Dr. Dr. Travis Taylor, of course, the star of history's Secret of Skimwalker Ranch. Travis Taylor, that far back, had been looking at these samples and was kind of intrigued by him. A lot of people had been. When To the Stars Academy obtained those samples, as you mentioned, there was a KRADA, basically like a cooperative research agreement with the military, and this enabled these samples to make their way ultimately to Arrow, which became the official UAP investigative body, successor to what formerly was known. as the UAP Task Force, which incidentally, by the way, Dr. Taylor had also done some analysis for the UAP task force. So in any case, when Arrow obtained these samples, they had Oak Ridge National Laboratory conduct the analysis. And a summary of their analysis was published online, along with a summary of that summary that was published by the All-Domain Anomily Resolution Office.

And what they found when these samples were analyzed was essentially that, as had already been well known for many decades, there were combinations of magnesium, zinc, and I believe Bismuth, which is kind of the outlier because we don't know exactly why that material would be found in samples. You know, finding unusual magnesium composite alloys from that era, presumably the 1940s, early 1950s, that wouldn't necessarily be really strange. It's some of the other elements that are present in the sample that are a little odd. Now, if you read the two summary reports, it's intriguing because Aero kind of says, look, there's very little here suggestive of anything strange.

Everything about this sample conforms to known processes that could have been in use at that time and that might have been in use for some, you know, what we might call some novel aerospace technologies that were in development. Oak Ridge, if you read, one more thing, actually, in Arrow's summary, they also further state that Oak Ridge finds the samples to be unremarkable.

If you actually read Oak Ridge's summary right there, I think, on the last page, they say that these samples don't seem to indicate anything that couldn't have been produced through known engineering processes on Earth in that era. But they do note that the particular components that are in the sample, right? The magnesium, the bismuth, and the zinc are kind of strange. And they do point that out. Now that by itself does not necessarily mean that this sample is anomalous, at least beyond simply being an unusual composite material. But it's not impossible that there may have actually been some experimentation at that time involving these particular blend of elements and that that might have been something that somebody tried to make.

Arrow is pretty quick to point out that everything about the isotopic arrangement of this sample points to this having been produced on Earth. And that's what's most significant. When material scientists are looking at a sample and they want to say, okay, how do we determine whether this came from someplace other than Earth or if it was probably made right here on TerraFerma? it's the isotopic ratio, really, that's the most important, one of the most important factors. And so Oak Ridge's analysis clearly determined this sample, whatever it is, however strange and unlikely these proportions of elements might be, it still points to isotopically having been made here on Earth. Now, one reason I still find this sample interesting, and I think others probably have come to this conclusion, too, is that just because we can say the sample seems to be of earthly provenance,

that does not necessarily mean that it may not be of interest. and particularly the fact that Aero says this was, you know, in keeping with some experimental kinds of engineering technologies that might have been in use at that time, we could infer, and this is highly speculative, Ryan, but I mean, we could infer that these samples might have actually belonged to some experimental aerospace vehicle of some kind, and that they very well may have actually been retrieved from something like a crash site in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. but what we know about them is that isotopically, whatever that advanced aerospace vehicle was, it seems to have been made here on Earth, which to me is a very intriguing prospect, which is going to play in with some things we'll be discussing a little later on too. So as far as I'm concerned,

for all we know, these samples very well may have come from Roswell, but what the material science tells us is that whatever those samples are, the technology they were associated with seems to have been from Earth, and that still remains unidentified. Maybe not anomalous, but it still remains unidentified. Yes. And, you know, this reminds me, it's so much echoing, man, of some materials I had tested with our mutual colleague, Frank Kimbler, the geologist in Roswell. Now, I brought several materials that Frank allowed me to have tested to a metallurgy lab in California.

And when our results came back, they were very similar, not so much in compensated. but in the overall, I guess, response of the scientists who looked at it, saying, you know, yes, these materials, they were definitely made on Earth, but the, I guess the alloy or the makeup of it was so highly sophisticated that if this were to have come from 1947, it is extremely interesting because of how sophisticated and complex it is. So the question for me, when it comes to all these things, is not so much, you know, is it alien? Is it highly anomalous? But what is the chain of custody? You know, with Frank, I have his word that he dug these up at the Roswell crash site and even found them amongst military buttons that were, quote unquote, carbon dated, I guess would maybe be a term. I don't know, back to the early to mid-1940s. So the fact that the meadow was found with these buttons from the 1940s would say to you that they were there at the same time.

You know, we could get super Sherlock Holmes with all of that in terms of like, yes, no, maybe. But when it comes to this, the arts parts, as it were, chain of custody would be so good to know in terms of this because we don't truly know. We have the word of this person who sent them to art. And then it was in Linda House and then it was into the stars. It's just changed hands so many times that even though Arrow says that, yeah, it's made on Earth, the real question is where, why, and when. Yeah, so a couple of points right there. As far as radio carbon datability, I'm putting on my archaeological hat here. And again, I'm not a professional archaeologist, but I am an avocationalist who has spent a lot of time in

the field with archaeologists and working on sites. I don't know if radiocarbon datability would be a factor we could consider with establishing the provenance of those. Generally, there's a limit on that. There's what's known as optically stimulated luminescence, which might potentially be one way. And then there are other ways, too, that might be useful in terms of dating the provenance of a fairly recent, again, decades old as opposed to hundreds or thousands of years old. But there might still be other ways that the provenance of a material like that could be.

determined. I will say this, and I don't remember if they came from Frank or not, but in one instance, years ago, I actually participated in an informal analysis of materials that were sent. They were recovered there from around the Roswell Records site, and they were passed along to a friend of mine, and we did an informal analysis of these. At that time, my non-scientific perspective of that, having stood nearby, having held them, and having, you know, a observed what was being determined about them at that time in that informal environment was simply that they were kind of strange. But, I mean, they did mostly resemble, I would say, like tin foil, right? And intriguingly, I think that some of the samples that Frank has provided you, they had that same sort of appearance. There are a lot of references, a lot of references to that from over the years. There's another one, too, that of all things came allegedly from Werner von Braun, Von Braun, the famous former Nazi rocket scientist. who was brought back to the United States. We'll discuss more about that process that brought him here a little later.

But even in one anecdotal report that I find to be a somewhat dubious claim, but he nonetheless had allegedly said that the material he saw at Roswell, yes, according to this account, he claims to have been to Roswell. And he even said, you know, the material, it was kind of funny. It was almost more like a living skin, but he says in terms of its general appearance, it was almost like the kind of aluminum chewing gum wrapper. If that was crushed up, that's sort of what it would have looked like. I'm intrigued by all these references from over the years to this foil-like material recovered from Roswell,

and if indeed maybe some of it was left behind, it is my contention that probably something did actually crash at Roswell. So I wouldn't be surprised that there's some material that's been recovered. But as to what that is and what its origin, I don't know necessarily that we would be able to determine that. The big problem with the Oak Ridge samples, the arts parts samples we were discussing, is that, again, those came from an anonymous source. And although the material analysis is intriguing based on what Oak Ridge and its most recent, which we have to presume, therefore,

is also the most significant, most recent and thereby the most state-of-the-art analysis that's been produced, as far as I know, on any alleged UAP materials, that still is intriguing, but it still doesn't help us to really resolve where that material came from. And they arrow in the summary and also Oak Ridge in their summaries.

They state that. They say there's a problem with the lack of providence. We don't really know and can never prove where these samples came from. So all we can tell you is what the material science reveals. And that leaves us with a perplexing question. You know, this is not otherworldly material, but it's still kind of odd. If it really came from Roswell, what does that mean? Exactly.

And the last, I guess, sort of question I want to ask you, on this story, Micah, is, you know, I talked to a colleague Dan Zetterstrom a few weeks ago about this very issue with Oak Ridge, you know, not just the fact that the former director of Arrow is now working with Oak Ridge. That seems a little odd to me and all too coincidental. But not only that, correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to get a proper determination, a conclusive determination on something like this. Unlike I did with my samples, I was not able to get other labs

to look and cross-reference the analysis with what we discovered. Wouldn't Oak Ridge need to at least confirm with at least two other labs? Frank is always telling me this. Three labs need to look at this. Three labs need to come up with the same

conclusion before I will take their word for it, basically. You know, yeah, we could see. What do you think? Yeah, conceptually, I mean, if we're talking about the scientific method, you know, you want to repeat your results and that repeatability is an important component. I would say that an analysis by Oak Ridge National Lab is probably, you know, giving this to the best to the best. You know, one of the very, the premier laboratories that we have in the United States right now. And I find it personally, it's just my opinion, I find it highly unlikely that Oak Ridge would produce any kind of questionable results.

I'm sure that they thoroughly looked at this sample and that they analyzed it thoroughly. Would it be helpful to have additional laboratories if they had comparable capabilities and the equipment that would be requisite to be able to produce comparable analyses? Would it be useful to have other labs analyze this? Certainly would. But I think the problem there is going to be the same in the sense that they're probably going to come to within a very narrow margin of error. They're probably going to come to very similar determinations with their analysis. and they're going to produce nothing that will provide any additional historical provenance.

It won't help us to determine where these samples came from because they came from an anonymous source who anonymously wrote these letters and sent these little fragments to Art Bell back in 1996. So they're going to hit the same wall that Oak Ridge did. We don't know who sent these things to him. And so at the end of the day, we can't really conclusively say that these things came from Roswell or we can't associate them with any kind of specific technology. We can just analyze the samples and tell you what our analysis. entails. So again, in my

opinion, if we had a sample that, for instance, we had witnesses and they said, look, we saw this thing drop off the craft, we had multiple witnesses, we know the exact location, we had video of the object dropping this molten material down. If there was something where we had a lot more data

and we could attribute that to an anomalous aerospace event of some kind, it might be more worthwhile to have multiple labs look at it. And I know some may disagree with me on this point, but again, I think that without any better historical context for the origins of these samples, I don't think that it's going to be a best use of our time

to give this particular material to multiple labs to have them corroborate what Oak Ridge already found. In this case, I think they've given us probably all we're ever going to know about these particular samples. And it's never going to be enough to really blow open the whole story on whether or not these actually came from Roswell. Very, very good point. Good callback to Mori Island, too, man.

I love that. Yeah, well, Murray Island. But now listen, Ryan, again, Dr. Valais, he's been collecting a lot of different material samples. And actually, the case that came to mind, although you're correct, there was allegedly this kind of slag that kind of fell from the objects over Mori Island. And again, many historians actually view that as likely having been a hoax. That incident probably hadn't been real. But there was another case from just a few decades ago where witnesses had observed a UAP and there was apparently molten material that dropped off of it. I believe it was a police officer who responded, who collected some of those samples.

Ballet, I believe, has had those for many decades, and those are among the batch that are currently also undergoing material analysis at the Nolan Laboratory. So yet again, that may be the kind of case I'm talking about. You know, it's odd to me and a little frustrating that Oak Ridge, and for that matter, to the stars and Arrow and everybody, they're putting so much focus on samples that really have just been hyped over the last few decades as being alleged UAP. material. We have no way of knowing. The reason they studied them and performed the analysis was for one reason and one reason only to see if the isotopic composition of those samples was anything that seemed to indicate off-world provenance. That they could have determined. And nothing about the isotopic arrangement says anything other than terrestrial. This sample was made on Earth. That's about the most significant finding about these samples, probably the most important thing we're going to be able to learn from them. And having know historical provenance, my point would be, hey, look, then let's go look at some better samples, ones where we do have provenance and we do have that chain of custody established. And let's see what the isotopic arrangement on those samples is.

I love it. Let's move on. Well, you know who seems to be moving on from the UAP topic, Micah? And that is our favorite organization, NASA. Now, you recently came out with a story over at the debrief saying, hey, guys, remember that UAP study you did? What's going on? So, you know, I had an oceanographer and NASA oceanographer actually on the show about a year ago, right when the report was about to come out. And she was indeed a member of the UAP study team, Dr. Paula Bontempe. And I reached out to her within, I guess, hours of your article coming out, because you brought up such a good point of what is going on with NASA in all of this? It's been a year now. What is happening? And I immediately, it was like very good question, Bica. Let me go back into

my emails and find Dr. Paula Bentempe. And just like you, I came up against nothing really is going on. And that really disheartened me. So would you mind telling us a little about this story, why you decided to write it. And what was this one quote that you got from the NASA press office? Yeah, I would be delighted to talk about this because, you know, if it doesn't involve an explosive revelation with sources speaking on background with knowledge of a program from decades ago, you know, it doesn't get a whole lot of retweets. And so this story, I think, is incredibly important. And yet most of the usual suspects, and again, people, friends and colleagues of mine in the community who are apt to go and to jump onto a story like this and to share it,

this one didn't seem to gain that kind of traction. And I think for one really simple reason, Ryan, it didn't involve some explosive revelation. And right now the community is really thirsty for revelations. They want to know what is happening, not what is not happening. But I think it's really important, really vitally important that we look at what agencies who have been held accountable, at least to some extent, in terms of UAP investigations, by the United States government, but really more importantly by we the people. You have NASA that endeavored to assemble a UAP independent study team,

largely under the, I think the encouragement of our current NASA director, Bill Nelson. He's obviously spoken to the Navy pilots, and he's kind of been a pro-UAP spokesperson, which is rare for NASA leadership. But he assembled some of the study team members, as we see in the image right there. And they did produce a report. Now, I support the efforts of the space agency, and I appreciate the NASA Independent Study Team.

Let me say that. And I also will say that it's unfortunate that many of the team members said that they have very bad experiences. Some of them had been harassed. That's inexcusable. There should never be harassment. As a journalist, I have to hold them accountable

just like anyone else. I have to ask questions and I have to report on what I find, but I do so fairly, respectfully. You know, we don't harass these people who we task with doing things that we hope we're going to get us information that we all want to hear, right? That all said with those caveats out of the way, I was a bit underwhelmed by the UAP independent study team's findings. They had $100,000, I think, in U.S. taxpayer money to do little more than make some recommendations about what NASA could be doing going forward to help in UAP investigations. So in addition to making recommendations about what resources NASA could be providing, they also appointed a UAP director of research, Mark McInnerly, I think his name.

That name initially was not revealed, but later that day, I think they realized pretty quickly that if we don't reveal this person's name, we're sort of backpedaling on the transparency that we've claimed that we're going to represent with this, as NASA traditionally tries to represent as an agency really altogether. And so they released Mark's name with Mark. And with Mark's background, I think he, I think having worked with NOAA and other agencies, you know, again, he is probably a really good person to be heading NASA's UAP efforts. But naturally after the release of that report and having not looked at any UAP cases, not having actually analyzed anything, but merely making these recommendations, many people, myself included, and certainly my readers, readers of the debrief, they wanted to know, well, so what next? What's NASA going to be doing?

and what's this director of UAP research going to be involved with? How will NASA's resources be leveraged maybe by the DOD's efforts with the All-Dain Anomily Resolution Office? Is NASA actively engaged with investigations by Arrow? Are they providing resources or additional investigative capabilities? If not, what are they providing to Arrow? How is NASA helping in this effort? So I reached out to the public affairs at NASA. I also reached out to multiple members of the independent study team.

I received responses. Oh, in addition to that, I also reached out to Mark McEnnerney himself. I reached out to the UAP director of, or director of UAP studies at NASA. Of all the individuals I reached out to, I got responses from exactly zero. None of them responded to, and in some cases, again, more than one, very fair, reasonable, you know, queries that I made to them, where I even said, it's very unfortunate that many of you had been harassed, and I said, please understand that any quotes that you provide to me about my inquiries into the ongoing efforts of NASA with relation to the subject, please know that they will be treated fairly and that your perspectives and your feedback is taken seriously and treated respectfully.

No responses whatsoever. NASA Public Affairs did respond, and they simply said that NASA is continuing to review the findings of the UAPE, independent study team to determine next steps. I think that's a really nice way of saying we're not doing anything. I think that's a really, really, really word salad way of saying NASA has produced its report, and now we hope we can go back to doing what we did before, which is have no involvement with this, which is disheartening, Ryan, because, again, you would expect that if we're going to put taxpayer money behind an official investigation where all these scientists are appointed to look at this,

they're going to do a little more than just say, well, you know, here's some stuff we could be doing. And then further inquiries, oh, you know what, just tell them we're still, still we're doing that 30-page document. We've had almost a year. We're coming up literally next month, I believe, on the one-year anniversary.

Question, why does it take a year to review a 30-page document all of us read within an hour after it was published? What is there in that document that still requires further review? Now, again, as a journalist, my job is to hold government officials accountable. If they're going to be taking the money that I earn and that you earn and that we all earn taxpayer dollars and that's what they're going to do with it, I think we deserve better answers than, yeah, we're still reviewing that 30-page report.

I'm very dissatisfied with the responses I got. And again, I want to thank you for bringing attention to this issue as I tried to do with my reporting at the debrief. It may not be a huge revelation. There may not be whistleblower allegations associated with this. But if we want to get to the bottom of the UAP mystery and we really want to leverage all the scientific tools that we have at our disposal, this is an important issue, and people need to see it as such. People need to recognize that if NASA, and we could further argue that maybe

there's some limitations that we've seen with arrows involvement within the DOD, but if these agencies aren't going to do it, you know, what are they going to do? And if they aren't going to do it, then who can we rely on to help us try to get to the bottom of these things? That's important to me. And again, I really wish that NASA had been a little more transparent as they said that they would be. So far, they have not. Well, in, you know, sort of driving the point home, silence speaks volumes. And when you are dealing with a public, let's say the UFO community, who some went to the extremes of even harassing some of these individuals, like you mentioned, you're dealing with people who like to fill in the gaps. of uncertainty when they're not given transparency,

when they're not given answers. That is how conspiracy theory is birthed, essentially. So when it comes to NASA, who pretends to be so transparent, how hard is it to just say, like we will eventually come out with another report, or we will show you what we can do with, let's say, more funding that seems to be the only way to get anything done, what we can do and how we can better articulate, investigate,

and eventually disseminate the information that they find on UAP to the public. Absolutely. Oh, no, listen, you hit every point right there, Ryan, and here's the whole thing. I would have preferred and appreciated more if NASA Public Affairs had said, you know, listen, we're not really making any progress on this. there aren't any current active investigations or other kind of efforts. You know, we put out that report. That's all for now.

But, you know, if there are further updates, we're going to add you to our mailing list. And we're going to let you know when we have additional guidance. I mean, I would have preferred that more than saying we're still reviewing the findings of the study team to determine next steps. Frankly, you know, if all they were able to produce was that lackluster report with $100,000, my immediate response is, first of all, no further review necessary. Second of all, next time you want to put together a study team, I have people who will produce actual results with that modicum of taxpayer money. People well equipped to actually make scientific determinations and produce results that are going to move this subject forward, not just keep us treading water. I would have preferred it more if NASA had simply been honest and said, you know, we're not doing anything right now.

The way that they termed that response they gave me said that, but it set it in an evasive way, which is in the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, antithesis of, in my opinion, the kind of transparency they claim that they stand for. Now, I know I'm using some pretty harsh language and I'm expressing my frustrations, elegantly as I can, of course, but I will give them this. I don't think that any government agency desires to have to be involved with and tasked with UAP investigation. It is not the kind of thing that traditionally any government agency has enjoyed. This especially goes back to the U.S. Air Force with not only Project Blue Book,

but even its predecessor program, Sign and Grudge. The FAA had done everything it could to pass the buck on that. And quite literally, John Alexander talked about going up there, taking Robert Bigelow and some of the folks from the National Institute for Discovery Science and meeting with the FAA, the FAA were more than happy to have all the UFO reports that it received, forwarded right along to NIDS and also to be sent to the National UFO Reporting Center. Curiously, the FAA

who is in charge of maintaining the safety of our airspace and controlling and regulating what happens in our airspace, they, on their website, currently forward because, of course, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies was listed there as a time, sort of the

more official successor to NIDS. They're no longer listed. It's gone back to merely listing the National UFO Reporting Center and local law enforcement. The FAA tells people if you've seen a UFO, contact the police if you think that there's any kind of danger or if you think that there's any other kind of an issue that you think somebody needs to be notified. In other words, don't tell the authorities who are governing what's happening in our airspace,

tell your local police as if they can do anything. But my point is, none of these agencies want to have to be involved in UAP investigation. We've seen it now evidence that NASA obviously is essentially trying to pass the buck too. I wish more people would go to the debrief.org, read that article. And if you're dissatisfied with what NASA had to say to me, share that article. You know, take that quote. Please, you have my permission. Take that quote.

Put it in a tweet. Put that out there. Share that with people. I'd like to know how the listenership out there feel about NASA just saying, you know, we're still reviewing that 30-page report. We've got a lot of reviewing to do. We're just slow readers, guys. We really, really like to take our time. No, wonderful article.

Micah, yeah, guys, go check it out over. at the debrief. And yeah, well, all right, man. Let's get controversial. These are parts of history that no nation likes to revisit, but we have to because we learn from the past to propel us into the future. You are a shining example of that with your mantras with the Micah Hank's program and whatnot. And recently you covered on your show Operation Paperclip.

Now, I know the surface level of what this was, books such as that of Annie Jacobson, the fictional version portrayed on the X-Files at one point, but this was real. This basically ushered in our entire space program. But you took a different angle with your recent episode of the Micahanks program, and you also found other interesting threads. And this has to do with two projects, actually. Let's go through Operation Paperclip first, if you don't mind. And then I want to move to the very controversial Unit 731 in Japan.

And the reason we're talking about this is because of its possible connections, both of these, to UAP. Is there a connection that's yet to truly be seen? But these are questions you're asking on your show right now. So, yeah, would you mind maybe running us through, I guess, what was Operation Paperclip? And are there any possible connections with the UAP, with any of this? Certainly. To understand ourselves and where we are right now, we have to understand where we come from.

And that's what historians do. Historical researchers study the past. and I think that the emerging picture from me, as far as UAP, is a very interesting one because I've always been intrigued by the history of the subject. But I guess in recent months what I've been doing more is focusing not so much just on historical reports of anomalous aerial phenomena. But I've been looking at actual U.S. government and other world government efforts and specifically also exploring their possible relationship to the UAP subject. And what it's really revealed is essentially this, that our understanding culturally and conceptually of what UFOs or UAPR are predicated somewhat on certain cultural ideas that we can trace back to the Second World War and the immediate years thereafter, and certain ideas and concepts that were emerging. Yes, there were UFO sightings, but I think it's very important to point out in there. Many historians most recently, like Professor Greg Higian and David Clark from the UK and others have noted this over the years as well,

that if you look at the early days of UFO siding reports from the 1940s, people didn't immediately look at that and say, oh my gosh, we're being visited by alien spacecraft. I think the initial concern for Kenneth Arnold and for everybody else in the summer of the saucers, 1947, we're seeing strange things in the sky. We don't know what all these things are. We don't know where all of them are from. Their immediate concern had probably been okay. Could these technologies be coming from the Soviet Union? And if the Soviets have them, what are their actual origins?

More specifically, did the Soviets obtain some weapon maybe that had been in development by the German scientists during the war and toward the end of the war when, of course, the Reich fell and the Russian army moving in. in there and everything, and the Allies are immediately in a race to try and find out what were the Germans developing and what technologies can be recovered and thereby used to, in the case of the United States, and also in the case of the Soviet Union, to their respective benefit. But that was not a mutual arrangement, whereas, of course, during the war with the Allies, the Russians and the United States, they were working together against the Axis powers. With the fall of the Reich, and then, of course, with the surrender, of the Japanese with the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I mean, overnight, the Allies quickly became the new enemies. And so in those nascent 1947 UFO sightings, and even some of those that were reported later, but which reportedly occurred earlier, one of the immediate questions had been, does somebody have some kind of technology here on Earth that's highly advanced? And if so, where did it come from? Is it possible that this is something that originated during the war,

maybe from within Nazi Germany? the essential concept with Operation Paperclip, really Project Paperclip would be the name, and it actually had a predecessor program, Operation Overcast. But really what we traditionally now call Operation Paperclip, and again, you referenced Annie Jacobson's book, which is kind of the definitive work on this,

what that program aimed to do was, we've got to go and we've got to find German scientists. And it wasn't even just about getting German scientists and bringing them back to the United States. it was preventing those German scientists from immigrating to neutral countries where they might continue their research. And then later, in those neutral countries, you know, if the Soviets got to them or if one of those other countries exploited this technology, they might have a technological advantage over the United States. The U.S. did not want that to happen. But there was the more obvious and pressing concern.

They knew that the Soviets were trying to do the same thing. They had a similar program of their own. Ascovayaeim, I think, is how they, that's probably a butchering of it, but that was, I think, the name of the operation that they waged where they brought thousands of German scientists who were in the Soviet occupied zone. They brought them back to Soviet Russia and they absolutely put them to work in a parallel program to what became known for us as Operation Paperclip. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on who you ask, we brought some of the leading scientists. I mean, the absolute number one objective was to try and find Werner von Brown. And not only did we find von Braun. Von Braun basically caught wind of the fact that the United States wanted to try and bring these German scientists back.

And their feeling was kind of like this. They said, look, you know, the Brits can't afford us. We don't want to end up in the Soviet Union. We fear the Russians. And of course, you've got to keep in mind. during the war, the Russians and Germany, I mean, they had absolutely been in the heat of battle against one another. If you recall, you know, Hitler had literally led the Nazis on an attempted invasion, right? And they had grossly misunderstood, I almost used another Bushism, a misunderestimation there.

They underestimated the cold of the Russian winter. And they hadn't brought enough coats and they hadn't brought enough boots. And so it's arguable that the harshness of the Russian winter had been one of the absolute factors that impeded them from making their way all the way to Moscow, right? So we might say that after the war, the Soviets and the Germans were... 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. Krisby, saucy and $4?

Very. Only at 711. Valley 36 2326 participating stores only well supplies last to have for full terms. Mortal enemies. The last thing that these German scientists want to do is end up in the Soviet Union, right? So they said given that they're not probably going to treat us very well and the Brits can't afford us, at least really only one option. We'll go to the United States. So by the time what became known as Project Paperclip got underway,

Werner von Braun was already aware of the fact that, okay, you know, weighing our options, we're going to be better off going with the Americans. And so von Brown and a number of his hundreds, in fact, of his maybe close to a thousand of his colleagues, they surrendered. And they said, okay, you know what, we're coming with you. And they did. And that included the mentor of Von Braun, Hermann Oberth, who was kind of the father of modern rocketry, really.

And to this day, if you go to the Air and Space Museum there in Huntsville, Alabama, they actually have copies of Oberth's books on display there, which was the second time I'd ever seen those, by the way. When I went there earlier this year, I was with Chrissy Newton and my friend Dan from Canada, Chrissy also Canadian, but we all toured the museum there. Years ago when I was in the Science Museum in London, they also had some copies of Oberth's original works. But in any case, Oberth and Von Braun and many others came back to the United States. They went to work primarily there in Huntsville, Alabama, and they began laying the groundwork for what became the American space program, which obviously did give us a strategic edge. It put, you know, the first crude mission on the moon, and the Americans were able to lay claim to that before the Soviets did, despite the fact that the Soviets, of course, beat us to putting an object into orbit with Sputnik 1. but it was clear that despite the fact that the Soviets had made some significant acquisitions themselves, as far as propulsion scientists and other scientists from Germany, the United States,

I think probably came out on the better end of that deal, at least as far as what history is shown. But that wasn't immediately evident, though, right after the war. You've got to take into consideration that by the time 1947 rolls around, And we're hearing about, you know, saucer sightings over Mount Rainier and then also some whispers about something that crashed out there in the New Mexico desert that same summer. The American public wasn't going, my gosh, now we just get out of a war. We're in a cold war with the Soviets and now aliens are invading. They weren't thinking that. You know, they were very concerned, okay, are these pilots like Kenneth Arnold seeing some sort of a new Soviet technology?

Is this Soviet technology, you know, based on the kinds of designs that wall-thens? and Rymer Horton, the famous Horton brothers, the German aeronautical engineers who had been designing the interesting and very, they're almost so modern looking. If you look at the Horton Brothers type aircraft that were in production back during the Second World War, fortunately the Nazis didn't get these into production and start using them, but they had intended to do so. But you look at these things and they're very out of place, temporally, in the way that they look. They look much more like a modern B-2 spirit, you know, like a modern stealth fighter. And yet these designs were already being designed way back then. It's very intriguing when we think about the way that, for instance, Kenneth Arnold described those discs that he saw over Mount Rainier. He didn't say he saw flying discs.

The press reported the way he described their movement as looking almost like a saucer skipping across the water. But the description he gave was of these Chevron-shaped things, maybe almost kind of batwing in the sense that they had this. kind of a, you know, shaped toward the back where there's maybe like a tail section, but no actual stabilization like we'd see on modern aircraft, or I'm sorry, on aircraft of that era, you know, vertical stabilizers, you know, rudder, tail, what have you. The descriptions that Arnold gave, one might assume, especially from the distance he saw these things, was very similar to the Horton brothers style aircraft. And in fact, that description carries over to some of the descriptions of the alleged object that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, which we're going to get

to here in a moment. But in essence, and in short, Operation Paperclip was the project that the U.S. used to bring Nazi scientists back to the United States. And we were very concerned at the time that the Soviets not only had a program of their own, which they did, but that they may have made some significant advancements at that time. And that these mystery objects we were seeing in the air may have been the result of that, and that they were using these things to surveil the United States. and echoes of that theory persist even today. I'll point to another of Annie Jacobson's books, her very first book on Area 51.

Her theory about what happened at Roswell, and I don't believe that this is accurate, but it is the theory that she was told by her source. And that's an interesting story unto itself about her source and how that source was revealed recently. But long story short, that source was Alfred O'Donnell, and he had reportedly worked at Area 51 many years

ago. He claimed that there was a Soviet aircraft of some kind that was radio controlled. The Soviets had used Yosef Mingola, the nefarious angel of death, the Nazi scientist, to produce children that were, you know, strange looking, strange enough that they would have been mistaken for being aliens, and that Stalin sent this alleged flying saucer over here and crashed it to confuse the Americans. That was the story Alfred O'Donnell told Annie Jacobson. She didn't reveal him as the source in the book. But many UFO researchers had known that was the source for years. Anthony Brigalia had determined that.

Nick Redfern had talked about that. I knew that. I talked about it on my podcast and revealed her source one week before Annie revealed it on, I think it was an appearance on, oh gosh, what was the podcast that she went on? It wasn't Rogan. It was, oh, gosh, who's the young MIT engineer? Oh, yeah. Friedman.

Yeah, yeah, Lexington. Lex Friedman. I like Lex, but she went on Lex's show and she randomly said, you want to know who my source was, literally a week after I said it on my show. I don't take credit for that. I just call it a synchronicity that I had been talking about it, named O'Donnell, and then she goes on Lex Friedman's show and names him as well. But my point in bringing up Annie's interpretation of the Roswell case is that yet again, she ties it back to that trope of the Soviets had technology that had a German connection, in this case with Mingola, and that that had been sent. the United States. Again, it's very eerily reminiscent of the very same sorts of theories that were emerging at that time the summer of the Saucters in 1947. Do the Soviets have something we don't, and did it come from Germany? Fortunately, I don't think that the story that O'Donnell told to Annie Jacobson is the correct interpretation of Roswell, but it is close to another that we'll look at here in a moment. Operation Paperclip has a mixed legacy. It is obviously a controversial program because although it gave the United States a strategic advantage, it also relied on Nazis.

And if you go back and you read a lot of the original paperclip documentation that's been made available at the websites of the CIA and the FBI, and I've gone online and read these anybody can. You'll see that in a lot of the original memorandums, they say, you know, we are to determine whether anybody had any association with the Nazis and certainly we're not going to work with any war criminals, but they were pretty loose on their policies for determining those things. And again, kudos to Annie in her book on Operation Paperclip for really pointing out some of the checkered past associated with these key scientists who pave the way for the American advancements in the modern space program. So again, it's a very checkered legacy of Operation Paperclip. Now, final point.

Yeah, there are some UFO connections. That's the second part of your question. The connections I've found, of course, are all these claims that began to emerge after Kenneth Arnold's siding and all the stories of UFOs start appearing in the media. Sure enough, first in an Italian newspaper and then later, I think actually an engineer quoted in Der Spiegel, people start coming forward and claiming that they had knowledge of Nazi era, wartime, German projects that were designing aircraft that fit the description in some cases of the sorts of flying disks that are now being seen all over the place over the United States. The problem is, and again, I think that a great person to talk to about this is Graham Rendell, who's excellent reporting on the foo fighters. you've had him on the show. He's a mutual colleague, but Graham has read all those documents,

and he'll straight up tell you. You know, what was going on was these people were trying to go and talk about things that they claimed that they knew about in the press, probably to get the attention of the Americans, hoping the Americans would get them out of Germany or wherever they were and bring them over. Hey, yeah, you know, I know some stuff about flying saucers. Bring me over there and give me a cushy job in Huntsville, you know.

There's never been a shred of proof that seems to conclusively link saucer-type UFO technologies to advancements that were occurring in Nazi Germany. But that's not to say that there weren't technologies that were being produced during the era of the Reich during the Second World War that may have a relationship to the UFO sightings. And again, this all, to me, really has to do

with these curious descriptions that Arnold gave us, some of the Roswell witnesses gave us and others. Edward Rupeld in his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, He talks about good UFO sightings that describe aircraft that sound very much like more modern swept wing type designs, which would have been a good fit for the Horton Brother type aircraft, you know, that were, again, known to exist then, but were nascent at that time. So I think you could make a very good argument that some of those designs were brought back to America.

There were probably some experimental aircraft tests, and some of those actually could maybe lead us down a very even darker and stranger path toward trying to understand what happened out there. in the New Mexico desert in 1947. That brings us to our next controversy. Now, right back here on my bookshelf is Nick Redfern's body snatchers in the desert. This was also another theory brought forward by Annie Jacobson in her book in a different manner. But this idea, like you had mentioned, that there were possible test subjects being used in some sort of possible high altitude experience. like you said, early days of the space race and everything, and darker parts of history. And that comes with even at the time, Japan.

And you recently brought up to me an article that came out in the Associated Press talking about this quote-unquote Unit 731. And it's possible connections with the UFO topic. Could you expand on that maybe a little and tell us what that is and what those connections might be? Yeah. I think it's really important to emphasize that outside of UFOs, even though these are hard areas to look at, you know, as a historical researcher, and there's been so much that's been written about this. And I've got dear friends who are, you know, professional Holocaust historians and people who, you know, have actually been tasked with the academic research into these shameful periods. in fairly recent human history. We have to study these things because we have to realize,

we have to accept that these things happen. And that's not something for any nation to be proud of. And really, more collectively, is humankind for any of us to be proud of. But they happened, and it's important to know that. There is the Operation Paperclip that involved Americans bringing German scientists back to the United States to work here in America and overlooking sometimes some of the kinds of activities they've been involved with and their associations with the Nazi party,

things that some of those, the more political and military counterparts to those German scientists, were being tried for, right, at Nuremberg, war criminals. That's what we're talking about. What until more recent years, I guess, has not really been as widely acknowledged is that there was an operation paperclip of the East. And that involved the atrocities that were undertaken by a secretive unit that effectively was the largest, to my understanding, the largest bio-weapons investigation program probably that's ever existed.

And that was what you've referred to as Unit 731. It was a investigative unit that was headed by a pretty notorious scoundrel, I think it's fair to say, Shiroishi. He was a fairly high-ranking medical officer within Imperial Japan, but what they actually had was they had outposts in Japanese-occupied portions of, I believe, southern China. And they were essentially doing experimentation on humans. They were doing terrible things. They were doing biological weapons testing.

They were doing tests with chemicals, tests with the bubonic plague. They were doing vivisections on live prisoners to see what their reactions were to the removal of organs and things like this. Essentially, everything that the Nazis under Yosef and Angela had been doing and that we recognize as being such atrocious behavior during the war, I mean, the Japanese were as guilty of all that and had done that within Unit 731. The problem is that when we arrive in Japan, initially we don't even know what Unit 731 is, and there's a good reason for that.

Unit 731 existed, but with the surrender of Japan, they realized what would happen. It's kind of like the Germans not wanting to go back to the Soviet Union after waging war against the Soviets. And knowing that they kind of ticked off Stalin, well, the Japanese kind of knew what's going to happen when the Americans get here and start finding out that we've been torturing Chinese. We've been torturing Americans against some of the vivisections on live prisoners had involved captured American pilots. They were pretty sure they knew what would happen if this ever came to light. So what did they do? They destroyed all the documents. hundreds of prisoners who were still being kept at the unit 731 facilities were murdered.

All right. Prisoners were killed. Prisoners were taken out and shot. The bodies were destroyed to what extent they could. And again, this recent Associated Press article that I referenced and sent along to you, here we have the 35th anniversary of the discovery of a pile of bones at a medical institute in Japan that they think may have been associated with some of the atrocious human experimentation that 731 was carrying out. When the Americans arrived, we didn't initially know what was going on because the Japanese had tried to destroy all this information.

But we quickly began to find out, and we essentially struck a deal with the devil, a devil's bargain, where we recognized, look, they did experimentation that we morally are not going to go do ourselves. But we need to know. We need to know what were the effects on the individuals that they tested in chambers where there was pressure to gauge what the effects. of high pressure on a body would be, for instance, like if a person flew at very high altitude. We were trying to build our own aircraft. We were putting into effect a new kind of an aircraft design that might involve nuclear propulsion, it being the early years of the atomic age and the harnessing of the atom for the weapons that literally brought the war to an end. And that would become what was known as the nuclear engines for propulsion of aircraft or NEPA program. With all these considerations in mind, we knew that we needed this information. We didn't want.

want that information. We thought it was terrible, but even more than we thought we needed it ourselves. It was the same situation that we saw with Operation Paperclip. We don't want the German scientists to end up back over in the Soviet Union, and the Soviets are using this stuff before we can use it. And so what do we do? The Americans essentially grant immunity to Japanese war criminals to ensure that we're able to get not only the information they have, but also in some cases, some of the scientists who worked on this to prevent the Soviets from getting it. And while the trials were on the way, this would take place a couple of years later at Nuremberg, but as the events leading up to the trials at Nuremberg to try Nazi war criminals were being laid,

we were granting immunity to war criminals from the east for an effective counterpart to Operation Paperclip that would bring some Japanese scientists back over to help us understand what the results of that inhumane, human experimentation had involved. Now, you know, Ryan, this is where things take a really strange turn. And again, I'm so glad you mentioned that book, Body Snatchers in the Desert by Nick Redfern. Like I mentioned, to understand this period in history is important. And apart from any UFO discussion, I think it's important, even though it's not fun stuff to discuss, it's important to understand Unit 731 and also what was happening in Nazi Germany

and the implications of that with regard to Operation Paperclip. But being a historian of sorts involving the UFO subject, I'm also intrigued in the overlap between our mutual subject of interest and how these programs had a relationship to that. Nick Redfern did incredible work with his book Body Snatchers in the Desert. And I think that that book is far more important than most people probably realize. It came out in 2005. And yet again, in the early years, 1947, 1948. You know, Americans weren't looking up at things in the sky and going, I think aliens are here. What ended up happening was, naturally, there was some speculation about that.

People in the press used to laugh about little green men. When the Air Force, again, newly formed, it only dates back to 1947, too, before that was the Army Air Force, when it became its own separate and the third iteration of the branches of the U.S. military, really one of the very early projects that the Air Force was assigned, and it was given the very second highest and level of importance. This was Project Sign, the so-called Project Saucer, to investigate these UFO sightings. Rupelt tells us in 1956 that there was an estimate of the situation that was produced where Project Sign investigators said, look, some of these sightings are so weird.

We don't think these things are anything the Soviets have. We don't think these things are probably German technology. They sure aren't ours. Some of these things are really strange, and we think it could be off-planet technology. That was the first real, unofficial announcement from, a military body that seemed to look at this as being something that could be not ours. And I say unofficial just because when that estimate was produced, it was apparently rejected by top brass. They weren't happy with the findings and all copies were later ordered to be declassified, but never released.

They were destroyed. The fact that never has there ever been one of those copies of the estimate surface has caused some of the more critical historians to doubt whether it existed. But if we take Rupel that his word, the estimate existed. And indeed it did seem to suggest that at that point, by 1948, Project Syme was starting to think maybe some of these things aren't Russian super weapons. I point that out because, again, that's where we can start to see the evolution of the idea. And culturally in the years ongoing, it would continue to become more evident to Americans, not just in the military, but really more in the broader populace, that maybe some of these things that we're seeing aren't ours. Right? By the time the Roswell Incident is published in 1980 by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, I mean, the argument they are making is the one that's pretty well established and widely accepted. Something crashed in the desert, we think it was actually an alien spacecraft.

But again, if we go back to the summer of 1947, when an object was first found on the Brazel Ranch in 1947, the immediate concern was not, well, do we have a spacecraft from another world that's crashed here? we were worried about these flying disc reports. We were worried, is there some sort of an effort by Stalin and the Soviets to surveil of the United States, has something like that crashed out here in the New Mexico desert? And so in the book that Nick wrote, Body Snatchers in the Desert, he produces some incredible revelations. But here's the intriguing thing about this. When he wrote this book, which essentially argues a few things, A, at the end of the war, when the United States went to Japan and we find out about Unit 731, and even before that there was an incident where we actually learned some about this program, several whistleblowers that Redfern spoke to came forward and they said, look, this program existed and we need to do some tests involving human test subjects. Some of those test subjects had actually probably come from the Unit 731 experiments, but some of these also may have been U.S. prisoners. There's some documentation that supports that.

during the summer of 1947, there were some tests involving essentially some sort of a lifting body aircraft that utilized another kind of a Japanese-based technology, a modified fugo balloon, which was essentially just a large balloon. We can talk about the fugo program here in a moment, but this balloon would have carried this lifting body into the air. And the test of the aircraft presumably would have been something associated with the aforementioned NEPA or a nuclear engine for propulsion of aircraft program. Now, they didn't have a nuclear aircraft. What they were trying to test was what the effects of a nuclear-powered aircraft would be on pilots and crew. And so what they were doing was they were putting a pilot in a shielded, according to what Nick was told by these whistleblowers and what he outlines in great detail in this book and also in a follow-up book. But essentially what happens is there's a shielded compartment where there's a pilot. And then there were these test subjects, many of them people who suffered from various different kinds of conditions like progeria and things like this.

and they were also on this aircraft, documents that later have been revealed, refer to them as mutants. But they essentially were in this craft with a nuclear source, which was to essentially produce the effects of a prospective nuclear engine. And the test was with a lifting body aircraft just to see effectively what would be the effect of this nuclear engine on those crews. The story that's outlined in the book essentially is that there was a test, and this occurred right around July 4, 1947, the balloon carried the craft aloft, but the craft was dismantled partially from a lightning strike.

The craft eventually separates from the balloon and crashes. The balloon crashes too, and hence there were two crash sites. One involved records that actually understandably would have looked like a balloon, but the other crash site would have involved a Horton Brothers style aircraft, and there certainly would have been bodies. Now, Ryan, you may have spoken to people over the years who have said they knew, or that family members that they had knew of bodies. I have personally interviewed people who have had family members

who they have given me the names of, who have said, and they told us that, you know, even though nobody believes the whole Roswell thing, there were bodies, and those bodies were transported back to Fort Worth. I mean, I've interviewed people who've told me this. And if you look at the conventional stories about Roswell, either that it was an alien spacecraft or what the Air Force maintains, it was just a mogul balloon, those stories don't seem to account for all the details, really.

I think that probably what Nick outlines and body snatchers in the desert is the best story that so far to me in the checks all the boxes. And really the smoking gun for all this is a document, which I actually have right here. And I want to reference if I can pull this open here. Well, where did I put the document? I have it here someplace. Here's the quote from the document, though. Oh, wait, hold on.

Actually, I do have it right here. She'll just give me just a moment. right here. So the, I hope I have the name of the document as well. Let's see here. Well, maybe I can't get it actually. I'll have to pull that up for you in a second, but the relevant quote is this one. And I'll quote from this document, enclosed for your information is a copy of research memoranda and then it gives the number from Psychobiology Branch. It's a little hard to read here, but it seems to say Acre Medical Laboratory subject is above. Incidents of errors in experimental aircraft controls were obtained through accident reconstruction and written 621 project reports.

It goes on to say, and this is, I think, the most important part. The recent air accidents at White Sands Proving Ground, as outlined by 28th of May Collection Branch, Air Intelligence Requirements Division Report, dealing with mutant experiments of extreme altitude flight, capsule ejection, and decompression effects could be classified under six major categories, and then they give those classification categories. then it goes on to say, and this is really important, as to the actual causes of the two incidents on 25th of March and 4th of July 1947,

of the loaned S aircraft PF, analysis of the engine design and thrust stress factors, P9 personnel and Atomic Energy Commission consultants in conjunction with advisory people from Army Air Force's scientific advisory group and Armed Forces Special Weapons Project could not fully agree as to the exact cause of engine failure in both cases. and it goes on to discuss pilot error and other issues.

But again, the smoking gun is it explicitly says July 4, 1947, referring to a crash originating from a launch at White Sands. Yeah, I mean, look, I got to clear, this is all in body snatchers in the desert. And if you take that documentation into consideration, again, I think Nick had initially come upon that document from research he did at the Maryland National Archives. The Air Force's investigations back in the 1990s when they had what's now called the government accountability office, but I think it was called the General Accounting Office at the time. Senator Schiff, I think from New Mexico had spearheaded this effort to get the Air Force to

reinvestigate Roswell. The Air Force essentially looks, well, first the GAO goes back and they look for all this. They don't find anything. They can't find any evidence of any Air Force records of crashes that occurred prior to or around the time of July, 1947. There had been a few that year, but they were all later in the year. The problem is they were looking at. Air Force records. Separate documentation clearly does seem to be describing some of the NEPA test programs experimentation around that time, and it does explicitly refer to that specific date we associate with the Roswell incident. But the GAO did find something else, if you recall, that was really, really peculiar. Like the documents from, I think, the middle of 1946 up until the end of 1949,

all of them coming out of Roswell Army Airfield were missing. And the GAO said we have no, we don't have anything that can account for the means by which or under what authority all of those documents would have been destroyed. Now, again, Nick's contention in his book is essentially this. If we were trying to say that they were trying to cover up the Roswell incident alone, why would they have taken documents going all the way back to the middle of 46 into the end of 1949 and gotten rid of those? But if they were trying to block out a bunch of correspondence involving tests and programs that were underway throughout that period, they might have taken a larger amount of information and destroyed that.

So again, the general idea is that, yes, some of the scientists from Japan who had been involved with the atrocious experiments were brought back to White Sands and were involved in some of these tests. Horton Brothers' style technology probably was involved in the actual aircraft tests, but that in likelihood there is some paper documentation that seems to support the idea that the Roswell incident didn't have to do with aliens that had to do with these kind of programs. But again, the real main focus of that book, I think, is these whistleblowers, the so-called Black Widow.

There's also a whistleblower that he calls the Colonel. And these people all came, and they told Nick all of these things. So it's not just the documentation that he found. It's people who came to him and said, as the Black Widow who had worked at Oak Ridge back in the 40s said, she said they brought bodies to Oak Ridge. This was something associated with the NEPA program. These bodies, they looked like they were Japanese, and some of them were just mangled like they'd been in an accident. the colonel tells him all about the experiment with the aircraft and how the test subjects had been on board the aircraft and all of this.

But then there's a final thing that's really interesting too that comes out of Nick's research that really should be mentioned here. And I'll reference Popular Mechanics from way back in the summer of 19, it was July 1997. Popular Mechanics had an article that they published, and that was by one of their Science and Technology editors whose name, I believe, was Jim Wilson. I'm looking at a copy of this right now.

And I want to quote from the very end of the article in the final, again, the cover story of that issue, it being the 50th anniversary of Roswell. The cover story was Roswell, as you can imagine, but the final section in the Roswell article that was featured as the cover story in Popular Mechanics back in July 1997. The final section title is a Japanese UFO. And this is what Popular Mechanics reported. As our investigation neared its close. Popular Mechanics was alerted to a forthcoming release of documents that may fill in these two. missing pieces of the Roswell puzzle. They may also explain two other

curiosities, the presence of the criss-crossed radar deflecting pattern on the bottom of the Roswell craft, to the consternation of those who seek unearthly explanations for Roswell, and the origin of the dead aliens who have so often been described as having oriental features. Wilson goes on to write,

Popular Mechanics has been told that the documents scheduled for future release will tell of a Japanese counterpart to Operation Paperclip. One of its purposes was to determine if the Japanese had constructed a suicide piloted version of the Fugo incendiary bomb. During the Second World War, the Japanese launched these unmanned high-altitude balloons in the hope that they would land in the Pacific Northwest, explode, ignite forest fires,

and thereby deprive the war effort of needed lumber. The effort was an obvious failure, and the Japanese may have attempted to build a second generation of the Fugos that could be guided to targets by suicidal pilots. Popular Mechanics suggests the craft that crashed at Roswell will eventually, be identified as either a U.S. attempt to re-engineer a second-generation Fugo or a hybrid craft which uses both Fuggo lifting technology and a Horton-inspired lifting body. In either case, Japanese engineers and pilots brought to the United States after the war to

work on the project could have been the dead alien bodies recovered at the crash side. And also equipped with a rudimentary radar deflecting underside, such a balloon could have reached stratospheric altitudes as it traveled over Western Europe and been well above the range of then existing mig fighters and missiles, even if it had been detected. It could have carried out both photo reconnaissance and air sampling experiments, similar to those of the Mughal Balloon, before gliding back to Earth and friendly territory. So they go on to say 50 years after the fact the questions about Roswell still ring loud and clear. Our investigation leads us to believe the explanation that require an extraterrestrial presence,

while possible, are nevertheless highly implausible. We're putting our money on a flying disc labeled made in Japan. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV! Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live.

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No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Wow. That is telling to say the least. Wow. The thing is the documents never surfaced. But what we can infer from this is that obviously somebody, one of these whistleblowers or someone who had similar knowledge had been in touch with Jim at Popular Mechanics at that time. And they were aware of those documents, just like Nick Redfern became aware of them decades later. and then in the follow-up book that he wrote to body snatchers in the desert, Keith Basterfield, you know, the truly, I think, groundbreaking Australian UFO researcher, he says that this contact of his, he calls Martin, told him similar stories. And so now there are several people, and there are others too, but I mean, several people have heard this story over the years. The intriguing thing, too, is that if you look at the U.S. government's disinformation efforts,

especially those that had been undertaken by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations beginning in the 1980s. Most of it, like for instance the Majestic 12 documents, if you really want to look at one thing that it all kind of hinges on, it is the Roswell crash. I mean, the MJ12 documents were confirmed, I'm sorry for those who may believe in these, but they were confirmed to be a hoax. Those documents talk all about it all began how in 1947 a disc was recovered in the New Mexico desert, Roswell, New Mexico.

Why would that kind of disinformation be injected into the UFO community and really the broader public zeitgeist? I mean, there may be a few reasons, which could include ferreting out moles, you know, and trying to provide disinformation to the Soviets and things like that. But another alternative is also to try and put UFO researchers off the trail of finding out that Roswell didn't have anything to do with, you know, alien technology. They may have been intentionally trying to encourage belief in an alien connection so as to cover up something else. So again, I think that looking at the deeper history, I mean, I think that the Popular Mechanics article right there said at all, there seems to have been very little documentation of it, but I mean, many people have come forward and revealed that there was a operation paperclip of the East. That involves some stuff that the U.S. wasn't super excited about or very proud of. There's a good reason why they'd try and cover that up, but it probably points to the real story behind what happened at Roswell.

It really makes you wish it were alien, doesn't it? Oh, yeah. Real history is so much darker. I always say that. Wonderful work. I know you're still exploring this on the Micah Hanks program. You will be covering things like Unit 731 and more on Operation Paperclip in the near future. So I highly suggest people go subscribe to the show.

and check that out. I do have just a couple listener questions here, Micah, if you don't mind answering some of these in the hot seat, and we'll get you out of here, man. We're going almost on two hours. That's okay. Just real quick, I just want to add in addition to those podcasts I'm doing about this subject. Again, please go check out Nick Redfern's books. You know, I saw a comment somebody put up on X about, you know, these latest UFO revelations are about as significant as the latest Nick Redfern book. You know, they're joking about how Nick writes about subjects he enjoys.

And he'll write a groundbreaking UFO book and then he'll turn around and write a book about werewolves or something like that. I've known Nick for years. I actually admire the fact that he that he doesn't take himself so seriously that he thinks he can only write groundbreaking stories about what whistleblowers have told him. He writes about what he likes. I would also hazard to guess that probably body snatchers in the desert is one of the most significant books on the UFO subject not only of the new millennium, but probably that's ever been written. And it frankly should be required reading for anybody who really wants to look at the history of

this subject from an alternative perspective. So I got to give credit to Nick for that incredible research he did. Absolutely. I always say, you know, read that and read Greg Bishop's Project Beta as well. 100%. Awesome. And let's get to a couple of these and get you out of here for tonight. I want to thank all of you guys for sticking around. This has been incredible. I do want to thank again, James Craig and Gary McNaughton for the super chats guys. Let me see here. This is an interesting one. Robert asks, what do you think about parallel universes in them colliding? I have an experience that I can't explain and I have a witness. Wow, that's interesting. But yeah, do you, what are your

thoughts on parallel universes, Micah? And if they were to ever converge. Well, you know, I'd like to answer this question by tying this in a little with what we've been discussing. I think it's a natural tendency of humans to latch on to their favorite theory. And, you know, based on what you've heard me discussing here, I might seem like one of those despicable UFO researchers who's trying to, you know, say that all these sightings of flying saucers back in the 40s and 50s even, maybe even ongoing up until today, that there are probably earthly explanations for this. these things. Again, we look at the material retrieval, allegedly from Roswell that was studied recently by Oak Ridge. They said, this seems to have been something from Earth. If we look at the recent stories, you know, again, that we're talking about here about a possible earthly explanation for Roswell, that would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it? But contrary to that being, well,

then therefore, I think everything comes from Earth and there are no real interplanetary or interdimensional UFOs. I'm not making that argument. Nick Redfern, by the way, isn't making that argument. He and I are both, I think, very open-minded to possibilities, but as researchers, we have to follow the evidence on a case-for-case basis where it may lead. That all said, I'm very open-minded to the idea about

alternate realities and other dimensions. I think we have to have good evidence to support those kinds of things. And the problem we face, of course, is what kind of evidence would meet the criteria for, well, this is what we expect an alternate reality or or an interdimensional phenomena.

You know, it's going to have these qualities, and if we see this kind of thing, we can say that that, of course, is interdimensional. We do know some things that I think we could associate with interdimensional phenomena. But I think that that's really kind of virgin territory in a lot of ways. And yet that hypothesis has been very appealing to a lot of researchers over the years. Jacques Valet, who we've talked about a lot.

He certainly looked into that. Interestingly, Ryan, I think that concept, although worded differently, was probably one that was espoused a lot by John Keel. He called this ultra-terrestrial phenomena. But as far as what John Keel thought happened at Roswell, this is unbelievable, but I kid you not. He thought Roswell had something to do with a Fugo balloon. Imagine that.

And I don't know who tipped him off about this, but he wrote about it in Fate Magazine back in the 90s, and it was very unpopular at the time. But he said, I think there was some sort of a Japanese balloon experiment, and that that's probably what Roswell was. And people said, you are out of your mind, John Keel. So you hear even John seemingly had either been tipped off or come to that conclusion himself and was really close to solving the mystery.

And this is the guy who had popularized the term ultraterrestrial for possible interdimensional phenomena related to the UFO mystery. So again, the moral of this story, kids, you don't have to say it's all ours or all theirs. On a case-for-case basis, it could be many things. And sure, interdimensional phenomena, great. Sounds awesome. For some cases.

Some, some, yes. And you can, if you're watching this, I'm actually reading John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse for the first time. So read your keel, guys. He had it all along. I love it. He had a lot of things, that's for sure. Yes, he did. Maybe not so much other things, but again, it's fun to read if nothing else.

Exactly. Yep, use that imagination. Dennis asks, should Arrow be disbanded? don't know this Gary, don't know this Gary Nolan believes it should. What do you think? Is Arrow worth having around? There are a lot of problems with Arrow.

I have spoken recently to some folks who have had some direct interactions with Arrow. I'm not in a position really to talk about that right now, so I won't. But I certainly haven't had any direct interactions with Arrow. And I can only kind of observe this from what I read, is what everybody else reads. With respect to Dr. Nolan, he's saying probably that they should be a ban, or disbanded, rather, because of a lack of efficacy that they've displayed. I think that it's overall, at least in theory, it's a good thing for us to have a government UFO investigation. But based on what I've seen them doing, I think I probably share some of Dr. Nolan's concerns and criticisms.

to give you a few examples of the issues that I take. For one, the Aero Historical Report was deeply flawed. There was a ton of poor information in there. You'd think that with all the access to information that Arrow would have, that they could have made determinations similar to what we've discussed today about Roswell. What did they actually say about Roswell? Only the same thing that the Air Force determined back in the 1990s, which I strongly suspect is inaccurate.

And that wasn't the only inaccuracy. The Aero Report also got a lot of things wrong about, previously wrong determinations made by the Condon Committee. They got the names of key witnesses. They got the names of dates wrong. They got the names of, gosh, all kinds of things wrong, really, but names, dates, you know, other things as well. I've gone over this. Robert Powell has gone over this, but I think probably the most exhaustive analysis of all the flaws in that report was the op-ed written by Chris Mellon that we published there at the debrief that showed all the issues at the Arrow Historical Report.

It doesn't just stop at their historical analysis of the phenomena based on document evidence that they had, which I think unfortunately they uncritically looked at, for instance, the past historical analyses by the Air Force and others, they didn't question what was written. They just basically regurgitated that in their new report and didn't even ask whether it was correct or not. And then rather tellingly, the mainstream media did the same thing with the Aerohistorical Report. They didn't fact check it like we did at the debrief. The mainstream just reported what they found, as if, well, you know, it comes from the government, so it must be true, right?

Great that all of a sudden we're just trusting them at their word for everything they say. The other issue, though, is also in their analysis of some of these recent reports. Another significant article that I think was published this year and that I wrote that nobody really paid much attention to has to do with the fact that it involved Mick West. Now, you've had Mick on the show. Kudos to you. We don't have to agree with Mick all the time, but he has a very important perspective. I'm glad you've gotten him into the mix and had him on the show and talked.

with him as you have in the past. The article that I wrote was essentially Mick pointing out reasons why he thought Arrow was doing a really bad job. And I thought, you know, the UFO community should appreciate the fact that our number one skeptic who is really kind of the bane of the existence of all the euphologists has something in common with those who are pro-UAP research. He's saying Arrow could do a better job. That to me was significant. So we wrote an article where I brought mixed perspectives together and how he actually picked apart ERO's analysis of the so-called EGland UAP incident from last January. So when you have both, you know, guys like you and I and, you know, commentators like,

you know, my friend Mark von Renencomf, you know, who writes for the Hill and for, you know, Ross Cool tart, you know, who reports for News Nation. You know, you have all of us talking about how bad what Arrow is doing is, and you've got Gary Nolan talking about that issue. But then you've also got on the other side, Nick West, who's a skeptic saying, yeah, they're kind of not doing a great job. That's kind of what I'm talking about and what I think Dr. Nolan's talking about. And so it seems that his perspective is we should disband Arrow.

I think that as opposed to disbanding the effort, what we need to see from Arrow is a better job. Same critique I had for NASA earlier. If we're going to give you taxpayer money, and I get it, they don't want this job. Congress mandated that they do this job, okay? But if they're going to have the unlamentable position of having to be involved in UAP and investigations and do so with taxpayer money at the direction of Congress, they need to do a better job. And one way that they could overcome their hubris is to not try to do all this by themselves as newbies. They need to get people like Robert Powell and Rich Hoffman and the folks at the Scientific Coalition for UAP studies involved.

They need to get my colleague Joshua Pearson, who's written a landmark doctoral thesis on analysis of UAP characteristics. And they need to talk to him. They need to go and they need to talk to Dr. Mark Rodiger, who is in the shadow of the late great Dr. Alan Heinek, has continued with the efforts of the Center for UFO Studies. And they need to go talk to Mark Rodiger. They need to go talk to historians like David Marler at the National UFO Historical Records Center and his colleagues like Barry Greenwood and Jan Aldrich. They need to go and have those kinds of historians who've really done the work. They need to have them review those historical reports before they publish them. They need to go have those scientists who have been involved.

in UAP investigations for decades, looking at these reports that they're putting out and saying, you know, maybe here's some feedback we could give you and tell you guys some things that maybe it would be helpful for you to know. I mean, we've only got a few decades involved in this. What do we know? But it might help you all. You're kind of new on the block. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Like, why not use the public? I mean, every other institution is using the public for, you know, citizen science and things like that. Why not in this content? use it as well. Like, what's the worst that can happen?

You can ignore the information they give you. The baffling thing there, Ryan, is what did NASA's UAP study team actually call for in writing in their report that NASA officials are still reviewing and trying to determine next steps? Here, I'm going to give the folks at NASA some help. Okay. If you're trying to determine next steps, then go read what the UAP team said. They said crowdsource. They said get people who have got websites that are collecting data about UAP. leverage those resources,

collect better data and more of it. Look, this is the reason why earlier this year I launched the UAP sightings reporting system. NASA said we need citizen scientists in crowdsourcing efforts, collecting more data and better data. Okay, let's do it. NASA ain't going to do it obviously,

so that yet again leaves the ball in our court. So again, in what small way I could contribute, I'm doing that. But that, again, is standing in the shadow of people who for years have been doing this for decades. I mean, look at what, again, Peter Davenport at the center, for you, or I'm sorry, the National UFO Reporting Center, what he's been doing, that the FAA wouldn't do.

And so they pass the buck and make him do it. It always seems to fall back on civilian researchers anyway. So I would say those government officials who keep saying, we need to get more citizens involved. Hey, guess what? You've had citizens involved. Listen to them. Absolutely, man. I couldn't bet it better myself. I do want to thank Neil for the super chat here, guys. And with that, Micah, we're going to close things up. out, buddy. We're going on the two-hour mark. But I do want to give you a moment. The floor is yours, my man. Tell us what is coming up on the Micah Hank's program, what you got going on over at the debrief, and when will the next big bombshell happen? I'm just kidding. I'm just, but yeah,

tell us what you're up to, buddy. Listen, you said at the very beginning of the program that I'd been, you know, pontificating on my podcast recently about how if there were any big developments on the way that my team and I would know about it. Not necessarily. I'm not saying that we are so clued in that we should know everything that's happening. I mean, there's always the possibility because there's all this talk online right now about a so-called September surprise. It may very well end up being that there is some sort of a surprise. There may be a new whistleblower coming forward. I don't know. And just because I haven't heard that doesn't mean it won't happen. But what I am saying is that, you know, having come to know and establish pretty good relationships with most of the

people who were former officials involved in the UAP studies in government, most of the scientists and academics who are currently involved in serious approaches toward the study of this, and remaining in communication with a lot of these people, again, if all of us haven't heard anything, again, I'll suspend my judgment, but I'm not really sitting here with bated breath waiting to see what the next big revelation is. I'm going to do the work to try and find out. find out really what the broader context of all this is and what meaning we can derive from that. That's what I'm trying to do. But again, if we're lucky, maybe there will be some great revelations to come. But I'd really like to see more of as the government officials who we've

tasked with doing this, that they actually do their jobs and that they actually produce some meaningful findings and not just keep, you know, kind of going through the motions and saying that, well, we need better science. You know, I think we've got more resources than they seem to think, let's use all those. That all said, with the historical side of the, things recently on the Micah Hanks program, I've done a two-parter where I've gone deeply into Operation Paperclip, but then also the Unit 731 and the relationship potentially to the early years of euphology with both of those. You can check out those podcasts. And of course, you can just follow my work at Micahahanks.com and the debrief.org. Last point, I saw Susan saying something

about a birthday there in the chat. Ryan, have you got a birthday coming up, my friend? I do. Don't you as well? Am I wrong? Are you in August? I'm in April. You have one of those A months. So yeah, I'm 18 17. No, you know what it is? You're one of the first to always wish me a happy birthday. So I think I sort of mix those together. I do. And Suzanne was so nice to put this link in here. I am raising money over on Facebook. You know how you have an option to have a birthday donation. And this goes to a wonderful organization, Donate Life, which is big on advocacy of organ donation, which many, know my mother was an organ recipient. We unfortunately lost my mother a couple months ago, but this was a organization. She was heavily involved with. So I am proudly in her name, hoping that people will consider donating to that.

I'll put a link in the show notes for that as well. But yes, I want my August surprise, Micah. So let's get that David Grush expose that he was going to write out or something, man. Give me something. Well, I'll keep working on that as always doing again, since I haven't had an opportunity to say this to you yet, my condolences on your loss. But again, I couldn't imagine a better way for you to honor her memory than this charity. And I implore everybody like Ryan and Suzanne are saying right there, please consider making a donation. That's really important.

You know, you can save lives by honoring the memory of an incredible human being. She'd have to be incredible to have begat the legendary Ryan Sprague, one of my best buddies. So again, my condolences, but she's doing some great. stuff right there with that and thank you. No, thank you, man. This was a huge eye-opener tonight. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. And I know we will be working together sooner

than later. But yes, guys, please go subscribe to the Micah Hank's program. Go read everything at the debrief. Check out his awesome UFO sighting organization that he started over there. tell him your UFO stories. We will put links for everything in the show notes, Micah. But last question for you before we go.

Okay. What is, because I did see this in the chat, and I think it's a fun way to close things out. Do you have a favorite small town monster? You got a favorite cryptid or folklore character. Yeah, I'm putting you on the spot there. Let's end things with a fun little cryptid question. Well, you know, I mean, I've got a lot of,

a lot of fondness for the folklore of cryptozoology, and obviously there's the possibility that some of those creatures are not folkloric. Those who are really familiar with my work know my long-time fascination with Sasquatch. And I know that's like the obvious choice, but again, in terms of what I believe to be the most feasible cryptid, if you want to refer to it as such,

I prefer to call them relict homoids, but the anthropological plausibility of there being another kind of a hominin or at least an anthropoid ape similar to us in existence on Earth today, that's always fascinated me. I'm equally intrigued by sea serpent reports, and I know a lot of people are like,

oh, God, sea serpents, but really, if you go all throughout the 19th century, even into the early 20th century, there are a number of intriguing eyewitness reports, some of them by, you know, credentialed scientists and naturalists who observed, again, I guess what you might call the stereotypical long-necked aquatic creature.

The Mied Waldo siding off the coast of Brazil, the famous, I think it was the 1846, ancient datalus siding where Captain McQuae and his crew observed a large, something near their sailing vessel. Paul LeBlond, who is the late Paul LeBlond, he was a researcher up in Canada who had documented sightings of similar creatures off of the Canadian and the Pacific Northwestern United States.

oceanic, you know, waters of these animals that are unrecognized by science. I'm fascinated by those two. But if I had to just pick a good old-fashioned crypted that, you know, nobody's really explained yet, probably the Flatwoods monster. That was a fun. Yeah. Joyce, very, very good choice. We just did a Flatwoods Monster revisited episode not too long ago.

So that's one of my favorites to you, man, for sure. Yeah, that's fun. All right, my friend. that was a fun little note to end on. So I do want to thank all of you guys for your questions for Micah and I and for sticking with us for two hours of what will be one of my favorite conversations we've had here on the live stream. That's for damn sure. So Micah, I want to thank you once again, brother, for coming on somewhere in the skies. And yeah, can't wait to see what you do next, my man. There'll be lots to follow. You take care, man. It's great work you do, Ryan. You as well, my friend. Guys, thank you for joining us tonight. I will leave you with our mantra, as always,

and that is keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching Somewhere in the Skies. The Somewhere in the Skies podcast is part of the Lionsgate Sound Network. Please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever possible. Thank you for listening.