The Chris Cuomo Project - Former US Navy Fighter Pilot Ryan Graves Breaks Silence On UFO Encounters

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

In this episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Chris interviews former US Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves about his experience encountering unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) along the East Coast between... 2014-2015. Graves provides insights into why pilots don't report UAP sightings and the risks this poses for aviation safety. He also discusses the potential explanations for what he saw, and why increased government transparency is needed around UFO/UAP encounters. Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You know, guys who fly F-18s, you know, jet fighter pilots, and you know, especially the instructors, you can't trust them. They don't know what they see when they're flying. How stupid does that sound? And yet, why are so many saying it about Ryan Graves? I'm Chris Cuomo, the man in the middle when it comes to UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and the government with all these programs and all this money and all this classification saying there's nothing to discuss. Why does that make sense to you guys? Thank you for subscribing and following. Thank you for checking out the Substack if you care about long COVID or getting this podcast ad-free.
Starting point is 00:00:43 Search The Chris Cuomo Project on Substack and sign up. News Nation, that's free too. 8 and 11p every weekday night, but it's not exclusive information about the things that are driving my own recovery from long COVID. That's why I want you at the Substack. I got a team to pay that's doing this research with me along the way. And I do have a new piece that I'm putting out there that you should check out about what protocol I'm using to try to get my brain fog to get better. That takes us to the fogginess surrounding the discussion about what's in the air. What are these things? Can they be explained? Great, do it. I don't care if it's about little green men in a basement
Starting point is 00:01:26 or flying saucers. I want answers from the people who I pay to do the detection for me. And that's where Ryan Graves comes in. He's flying F-18s, he and others, okay? These are our best minds, all right? Fighter pilots are like, you know, astronauts. They're just scientists who are in the air, okay?
Starting point is 00:01:46 They're scientists, these people. That's what they are. They're STEM people. They see things on their radar that they can't explain. And he, now 10 years, has been a catalyst for getting answers for the rest of us. And we're getting closer. So I want you to hear from Ryan Graves,
Starting point is 00:02:03 why he believes we haven't been told, why he believes there are things that we need to be told and why he believes there is risk that is not being respected. Brother Graves, thank you very much for taking this opportunity. How do you feel in terms of your comfortability being involved in something so controversial, political, and also philosophical?
Starting point is 00:02:37 How does this feel for you to be in this position? Goodness, man. He's just coming right out of the gates, huh, Chris? That's right. I'm not messing around. You're a fighter pilot. Let's zero in. Let's do it. I mean, gosh, I think I didn't realize how big of a bite I was taking of the conversation when this first started for me about eight years ago now or so. It was very pragmatic. And a lot of times today, I kind of keep my head down, if you will, to ignore some of the larger ramifications that you just listed, probably because it would be too much on a daily basis for me to contend with, frankly.
Starting point is 00:03:12 So I do remain pretty pragmatic, day in, day out, working this topic, having conversations with folks like yourself, working on the political side in order to make common sense legislation so we could move the conversation forward. So in a sense, I've kind of been stiff-arming the deeper conversations, at least in favor of the work I've been doing. What percentage confidence do you have that what you have observed in your own experience demands explanation as being a true UAP? Yeah, that's a fair question. It started out lower, I think. I mean, it started out at zero. We just didn't think that's what these things were. We didn't really have a term for them, frankly. But I would say around the kind of 2020 timeframe or so, before Arrow was really stood up, I was less confident, frankly.
Starting point is 00:04:09 I didn't know what we were seeing, but I thought there was a pretty decent chance it could perhaps be adversarial. And that was based solely off of my personal experiences, not the banter and chatter that I heard. But after Arrow started confirming these objects that were nearly the exact same shape and description that we were witnessing off the eastern seaboard, that led me to believe that this was most likely, you know, a much broader problem that we weren't aware of.
Starting point is 00:04:37 And, you know, it fit perhaps into that other bucket, that other category, whatever that may be. This was not a one-time thing. You were not the only person to see it. This was not something that anybody willingly explained to you. And most importantly, you are not a kook. Are those all safe points thus far? So far, so good, yes. And I think it's interesting because when I was doing my homework on you back in the day, when I was first at News Nation
Starting point is 00:05:12 and we were covering this, because as you well know, for me, I'm open, but I am not driven by curiosity about extraterrestrial life or anything like that. I'm open. I certainly can't dissuade
Starting point is 00:05:26 anybody from being open to it. That would be incredible arrogance even for a news person. But for me, it's about transparency. And there's no way you have multiple programs and hundreds of millions of dollars and all of these classifications being jammed up the wazoo of everybody who wants information and there's nothing to talk about. The there there is secondary to me. For me, this is about responsibility. So, doing my homework, you are exactly like so many of the high achieving men and women I have met in the military. You are a, basically a STEM guy. You're a STEM guy. You're an analytics, math, of course you're a pilot and we have a romanticized idea about that and you're a hero to us and rightly so, but you are a cold, hard facts, analysis, numbers, probabilities, risk assessments, and the ability to do the same under incredible stress
Starting point is 00:06:36 and duress. So you don't line up as somebody who's about to leap into the unexplainable, who's about to leap into the unexplainable, unknown, wishy-washy world? Was this a hard sell on yourself for you, that you want to talk about something maybe from not of this world? Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, your assessment is generally correct. I mean, I've always considered myself, you know, I always knew I'd be involved with engineering or science, consider myself very pragmatic in that sense. For me, when we were observing these objects, it wasn't any different than anything else we were seeing on a radar in a sense.
Starting point is 00:07:16 So for us, it wasn't wishy-washy, it was there, you know, and it was something that I had to contend with. We had to contend with on such a regular basis that those non-pragmatic concerns never even floated into our minds. I know I've been overusing that word on this conversation, but when we're up there, we're flying, we are so focused on what's important and what we need to accomplish and how much fuel we have and not hitting the person right next to us and all these millions of other things that we need to do that i never allowed myself in some sense to think about all those other ramifications the political the um the i mean all just you know
Starting point is 00:07:53 religious go down the list i think you could say there's going to be ramifications for everything i think but for me it was just a ramification for you know my friends and colleagues that were flying around and had to deal with these things Those are the ramifications I was concerned about. What is your best sense of what you saw? Well, I mean, I think the story is still out there, right? We're seeing these gloat things. We're seeing them go supersonic. We don't know how they're being propelled.
Starting point is 00:08:15 We're seeing them at all altitudes. We don't have the answer to that question, Chris. I think we saw something that was not U.S. technology and that I have no evidence was foreign technology, but I'm still not sure where that leads us. And no one can convince you that you didn't see what you think you saw. It just doesn't make sense. So forgive me for saying it that way, but the way our sensors work is that there are multiple sensors that are looking at different types of energy. And so when one of our sensors sees something, our other sensors go and look at that same spot. And now we have correlation across multiple sensors that we're seeing things.
Starting point is 00:08:50 And then we might radio into our wingman who is maybe 50 miles away to come look over here and they can see something on their radar as well. So I never questioned that because either the same tools I would use every other day to keep myself alive, keep my colleagues alive and execute our mission. Have you ever seen them not on radar visual? No, uh, I attempted to, um, that was kind of status quo for a lot of us for a while,
Starting point is 00:09:15 not being able to visually see them. Um, I don't, I don't know what it was. Um, we would have our, our missiles locked onto it, our,
Starting point is 00:09:23 our FLIR system, our radars. Um, but for whatever reason, we couldn't see them when we'd come up close. At least that was my experience. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why. A lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding.
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Starting point is 00:13:23 It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. So for the uninitiated, when they hear your story, and here I am, I'm as highly trained a pilot as we have. I'm serving the country. My record is redonkulous in terms of the legitimacy of my service and my credentials. I have zero crazy factor, except that I put myself in harm's way for the rest of you Americans. When the pushback is, well, you only saw it on radar.
Starting point is 00:13:59 So we can't know that you detected what you think you detected. Explain to people why that doesn't square with someone who uses the technology as often as you do. Absolutely. So the radar system is considered our primary tool. As we fly around, it enables us to look at very large swaths of airspace. These exact numbers, of course, are classified. And it's also what guides our weapons systems, our missiles. It's what cues our other sensors.
Starting point is 00:14:33 It allows us to scan the ground and pick targets out. It does a lot of different things. We use it on every flight. We fly next to other aircraft in the cloud, utilizing the radar. We put bombs in windows with our radar. We can do all sorts of things. So it's our primary tool, and we have the utmost trust in it. And when there are faults in it, they are pretty easily detectable.
Starting point is 00:14:57 And of course, that was our assumption at first. But having that type of data is extremely high-quality data that is correlated across multiple sensors and multiple platforms. If I had just seen it with my eyes, I think we'd probably be having the opposite conversation where people would say, well, if you only saw it with your eyes, you were probably fooled that we don't have enough information. We don't have enough data. Now we have the data. Granted, it's not out in the public. The opposite, of course, is being asked. How do you handle or how have you learned to handle people questioning everything about you just because of what you say you saw on your radar? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:15:37 I don't know if people are making that judgment. I hope they aren't being that judgmental. But I just I don't concern myself about what other people believe I did or did not see. I know that the colleagues that I flew with were seeing the same things. I know they had to respond the same way. I know this was passed up our leadership chain to a high degree. And I didn't expect there to be public validation of my claims through the release of government documents, through the release of statements from Arrow and other folks. But bottom line is, I don't think the government would be doing this just to validate my claims. Clearly, something is happening. Eight years ago, the
Starting point is 00:16:18 smoke was there, but people were questioning it. Now, no one can breathe because there's smoke everywhere and people are still saying, show me the flames, show me the flames as they, you know, pass out on the floor. So I think we kind of have to move past and just start accepting our reality a bit. It's a good metaphor. Why do you believe that, not all of a sudden because you've been working on it for eight years. But does it seem to you that things are starting to accelerate? And do you believe that we are entering a new era of transparency? And what is your biggest concern about what would stop that from happening? I think one of the, I think we are absolutely entering into a new era. I think the legislation that's
Starting point is 00:17:06 being passed, the attention at a very high level that this is getting, the curiosity and the lasting interest in this that our representatives are showing, this is not going to go away. My fear, however, is that this could turn into a partisan issue of some flavor, and it gets lost into the bickering of our government system. That would, I would say, be my biggest fear, to slow this conversation down. Thankfully, we've seen the opposite. We've seen this be a very bipartisan issue in the best possible way, and it's my aim to keep it that way. Well, so far, the parties haven't figured out how to use this situation to prove the other is worse. And that is the nature of their zero-sum existence.
Starting point is 00:17:55 And that's why, even though there's such a wide cut of the country that is interested in knowing what's in our air and why, it hasn't become a fascination because there's no advantage in it to either side. So there's a blessing and a curse in that, which takes us to why you did this. You could take your life in many different directions. You are incredibly valuable given your training, your experience, your excellence, and your personal qualities on top of all of what you've achieved. What was it that made it so important for you to get involved and what keeps you involved? And again, I know we've overused it early on, very pragmatic concerns in the beginning, but as this conversation has unfolded it's almost been impossible to ignore i mean this has a potential to be you know be the
Starting point is 00:18:52 most interesting conversation that we could possibly have together to be able to explore something like this that's going on whatever it turns out to be people talk about extra dimensional is it something that we don't even understand because we're too limited of our understanding of the universe? I think it's incredible how this topic has been ignored and pushed back inside in a sense due to the stigma and the fear of being different or being cast away due to the silliness of the conversation. Yeah, people think I've lost it.
Starting point is 00:19:22 When I talk about this, they literally, I can't tell you how many people will say, oh, UFOs again. Can't you dig into Biden being on the take from Ukraine? Or can't you dig into Trump trying to sell secrets to the Russians, which are as far-fetched as I don't have any fighter pilot and his cohorts
Starting point is 00:19:48 telling me that they had any kind of basis of proof of those other assertions. But it's where people are trained to look. You also have, to use your word, a very pragmatic reason for this. You're worried for pilots. You're worried for people who are passengers. Recently, when we heard that a specific variety of jet was going to be grounded for safety concerns about panels flying off, that, as the kids would say today, was triggering for you, you were like, you think that's a risk. Let me tell you what's more of a risk to pilots, and they're not even allowed to talk about it. Why do you see such real risk for pilots? Why are they not allowed to talk about it? So the biggest risk is really the point of
Starting point is 00:20:37 your second question. Aviation and safety is built on a foundation of communication. And we discovered this, I believe, in the 60s or so, where pilots were essentially not reporting errors in checklists because they were afraid that if they couldn't follow the checklist, it would reflect poorly on them instead of there actually being a problem with the checklist itself. And that was really one of the things that started this kind of non-retributive communication channels that exist for aviators
Starting point is 00:21:03 so that we can communicate problems without fear of losing our license or being cast aside as a bad pilot just because we're having a problem with the procedure or something of that nature. So communication is really the foundation of this whole system of aviation safety. And so with the UAP and UFO, there's this one strange sliver of aviation safety where we say, okay, we're going to report everything. We have a process for communicating these safety risks. But if it's something that we don't quite understand or falls into a category that we would define as the UFO or UAP, that's out of our hands. We're not going to talk about it. We're not going to report it. We're not going to collect the data and centralize it. In fact, we're going to do the opposite. We're going to create rules and regulations that are going to scatter that information to public organizations that have no funding or real management systems or refer people to the local police. So referring pilots that are flying through the air to local police on the ground for the jurisdiction in which it happened. So you can think of how silly that
Starting point is 00:22:03 is, right? So pilots didn't want to report because they were not encouraged to. In fact, at one time, it was actually illegal for pilots to report UFOs because it was seen as a hazard for the Cold War, as seeing clogging up the reporting systems for actual Soviet actions. And so for a while, it was actually,
Starting point is 00:22:26 there was a law against, I think, up until the 70s. I forget the latter half of your question, but that's some of the things that Pilate's been dealing with. Well, at a minimum, you've got to be worried that if you say, I think I saw a UFO, they're going to say, oh, really? That's very interesting. Do me a favor, just take this
Starting point is 00:22:42 breathalyzer test and then go talk to this psychiatrist because we're grounding you because you're seeing things. And they're worried. It is. And what if that UFO turned out to be a drone that was on landing approach and got sucked down an engine? And they weren't reporting these activities because they were afraid of sounding steely about seeing something. Right. That's the risk.
Starting point is 00:23:02 Here's another fold in the mystery. Got scientists out the ass in this country and around the world. We got all kinds of geniuses and detective devices and systems. Why haven't we been able to figure out what these things are? Or do you believe,
Starting point is 00:23:22 well, that's the story, dummy, is that people have been figuring out what these things are. They're just not telling you. I don't have any information either way. But I would suspect that there's probably more known about how to detect these objects than is known in the public. Right. I mean, because people, cameras everywhere. There's all kinds of detection software. There's all kinds of surveillance going on in the skies.
Starting point is 00:23:48 We have satellites that are beaming stuff all over the place all the time. There's so much corporate software being used to detect what else people are doing and how they're sending. what else people are doing and how they're sending. And all this drone technology now, it doesn't make sense that things could fly around and just get away with it. That's a very good point. And perhaps, you know, I've said this before, but perhaps this is one of the reasons
Starting point is 00:24:16 why this conversation is being forced into the public a bit more now. The commercialization of space, the access to data from space for non-military folks is more and more essentially just limited by economics. So I think that, you know, to your point, that data is going to come out. And I think that might be one of the reasons that we're having this conversation more so now than we were. Now, I say that, but then we're just about a year past like some giant balloon just making it all the way into our airspace and zipping along and confusing, apparently, or at least outwardly, everybody to the highest levels of government. What do you make of how that scenario went down, and do you believe that we know what that was?
Starting point is 00:25:04 I do believe we know what that particular balloon was. There were other objects that were shot down in the vicinity of that balloon, but those are supposedly more mysterious. The government hasn't talked about those, but the Chinese balloon itself, I think we're pretty confident about what it was. But that goes right to the point
Starting point is 00:25:22 that we were trying to make for years based off of what we were seeing off the Eastern seaboard. We the point that we were trying to make for years based off of what we were seeing off the Eastern seaboard. We were saying that we were seeing objects that were stationary or 0.0 Mach and that they were out there all day long. Now, I'm not saying they were necessarily balloons, right? I don't believe that. But the point is that going slow is a vulnerability. It's a tactic that someone could use to penetrate our airspace, our radars, things of that nature. So if we're seeing something that we don't have an explanation for doing something that evade our systems, perhaps our adversaries are doing the same thing. And lo and behold, the balloon was doing the same thing, right? And the balloon couldn't be what you
Starting point is 00:26:00 saw on your radar because the thing that worried you and worried you about imminent impact and safety of you and the rest of the squadron was how fast it could accelerate. And obviously, that's not what the balloon was about. So that is not the answer to the mystery. Correct. And to be clear, if we were to fly up to that balloon, what would happen is we would get that on a radar system. We would see a very clear track file of it moving at a certain error speed in a certain direction. Then our FLIR would lock onto it and we would be able to see a very clear outline of the body of that vehicle. So we would see the box, we would see the wires, we would see the balloon.
Starting point is 00:26:40 You know, we'd fly up to be able to see it, no problem. What we were seeing on the eastern seaboard were radar track files on a radar that were behaving very different ways. They were kind of skipping around on the radar. And that's how we kind of knew it was one of these objects. On the FLIR, it only looked like a point source of IR energy. We wouldn't be able to break out any type of structure or anything like that. And of course, for our eyeballs, we fly right up to these objects, even having the amount of sensors, and then nothing would be there most of the time. So some of the differences. How big a difference do you believe that the Americans for Safe Aerospace and the Witness program, how big a difference do you think that's going to make?
Starting point is 00:27:18 I think it's already made a big difference. I mean, one of the reasons that Congress has been listening to us on this issue is the fact that I can put any number of pilots in front of them, say, hey, here's what they're experiencing, and here's why it's a problem for them. So it's already been extremely helpful. But as we look to expand this, as we look to have more of these reports come in, it's going to be very valuable for better understanding the phenomenon itself, where it's happening, where it's clustered, what the characteristics are, what the performance characteristics or behaviors could be expected. And we're starting to build a database of some of that information. And Americans for Safe Aerospace will be putting out a qualitative report in the middle of
Starting point is 00:27:54 this year with some of those details. And can you give us a sneak? Yeah. We've been seeing a lot of high altitude lights that will be coming down from an unknown altitude and will typically start forming a circular pattern or a racetrack pattern at very high altitudes. And they will typically do that and they'll be visual for anywhere up to an hour. There'll be multiple of them that will stack on each other or perform their own circular maneuvers in the vicinity. It just sounds like random behavior, frankly, when I talk about it, but that's part of the conversation, start to build out some of these parameters and seeing what we can learn from them. So it's a start and we'll
Starting point is 00:28:35 see where we can go from here. How has this experience changed your perspective on existence? Well, I think when you know, when you engage in a conversation about there being something else out there, some other intelligence or consciousness, it, you know, has to change the way you think, you know, you go from, you know, a earth-centric view and then you have that Copernican change in some sense, if you weren't already there with your mental state. And I don't think anyone truly can, no matter how much they might believe in life and elsewhere in the universe, until you are truly faced with that potential being real, I think that shift can't quite occur. Why is it so hard for people to believe that there could be something else out there when at the same time they believe there is a God? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:29:28 I think perhaps if there's something else out there, God is omnipotent. They're assumed to be good. I believe that would be correct to say. But, you know, if there's just other things out there that are faulty like us in the universe, that could be a scary concept. But it's interesting when people shut me down, like, oh, stop, little green men. What is it with you? But you and I share a belief,
Starting point is 00:29:52 I would say to this critic, that the son of God, an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful being that we cannot prove exists, sent his son to us who performed multiple miracles, including walking on water and raising the dead, nailed to a cross, moved to Boulder three days later, and left and then came back and talked to his followers. That we choose to believe on faith. This you dismiss out of hand, even though people have seen things that we can't explain.
Starting point is 00:30:32 I don't get the disconnect there. It doesn't make sense to me. You ascribe it to their fear of malevolence. Well, the Old Testament God was an angry God, right? And there are many people who are major believers in major faith that have big time negative aspects to their faith that, you know, you could wind up in a place that's crazy hot, pack light, man, it's going to be hot where you're going. And yet on this there's a sticking point what do you think we have failed to negotiate thus far in the idea of fact and faith i don't know i
Starting point is 00:31:14 guess our role in it right our role in the view of a creator and our importance to that person versus our role and importance to other creatures and things that might be happening elsewhere perhaps that that has something to do with it. I don't have an answer for you, Chris. I wish I did, Day. At 5 a.m. Crypto is finance for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Kraken. See what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Kraken's registration details at kraken.com
Starting point is 00:31:54 slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer. So that was a hard one. You swung and missed at that. That had to be embarrassing for a guy who's so smart. Now I'll ask you a really easy one. Can you cite me another example of where the government was being asked about something where the answer is, no, you're wrong. There is no curiosity along the lines that you are asking us about. And yet they had multi-programs to look at the same thing, spend hundreds of millions of dollars,
Starting point is 00:32:32 tons of classifications, and even blocked Congress time and again from getting any information on that topic where there was nothing to share. Yeah, I think your last point's the most important one where there's nothing to share. Yeah, I think your last point, the most important one, where there's nothing to share. Why would we be doing all this? Why would we be doing all this
Starting point is 00:32:49 if there was just absolutely nothing there? I think, you know, and I've said that to myself when I started having this conversation eight years ago, where, hey, if this turns out to be some crazy classified program or some type of nonsense
Starting point is 00:33:01 where someone wants to just strike me down. And, you know, I was kind of waiting for that for a number of years, frankly, for someone to come in and just be like, all right, you know, we're done for this conversation for these reasons. And, you know, you have important decisions to make now about how you want to communicate further. But that never happened. And I don't know whether that's just the lack of organization or whether that's or what that is, but that's certainly been there. I mean, there's no need for any of this if it's, look, fine, come on in.
Starting point is 00:33:30 We'll give you a briefing. This is a balloon. This is this. This is an optical illusion. This is this. We tracked this thing down. It's owned by this company. They were doing that.
Starting point is 00:33:39 We talked to them. This we believe. If that's what it was, they would dispense with it immediately. And I give people a metaphor of this about why I care. Let's say we were hearing stories and some people saw evidence of symptoms of problems as a result of taking the vaccine. taking the vaccine. And we knew that there were multiple government programs spending hundreds of millions of dollars with the highest classifications attached to it, looking at these problems with the vaccine. And when we went to them and said, hey, man, this guy's head was bubbling up all over the place.
Starting point is 00:34:25 And this one has this and this one. And they hear you, no, no, I can't talk to you about it. No, there's nothing. Don't worry about it. There's nothing there. We would go batshit crazy as a society, okay? We'd be like, no, there can't be nothing. Because even if you don't want to believe the people who are telling us they saw something, you're studying it.
Starting point is 00:34:43 So what are you studying if there is nothing there? And when I give them that metaphor, there's a little bit of struggle, but they can't defeat it. That's exactly what this is. If there is nothing that is worth all the money and all the people and all the secrecy, then why do they have it? The answer has to be because there is there there. So that takes us to what was supposed to be the big ICIG briefing, the inspector general of this area of government who has access to know what's going on because he's the accountability mechanism.
Starting point is 00:35:22 And I was unsatisfied, but I was happy that it happened. I was happy that it happened. I was happy that the hearings happened. I was happy that this happened. But do you believe that this is them just throwing up obstacles? Or do you believe we are actually moving in the direction of getting people with the right security clearances, although everybody's a nod and a wink that this isn't worth the time, but you need a very, very high security clearance to engage in this nonsense.
Starting point is 00:35:56 Do you think it will happen in the foreseeable future? Well, what will happen in the foreseeable future? will happen in foreseeable future. Members of Congress will be somewhere with someone who can tell them, look, this is what we're doing. This is what we know. Here's what we don't know. Here's why we're quiet about it. And now go explain it to your constituents within the confines that we all agreed to. When I started dealing with this conversation and sitting at some of those tables in D.C. when I was first testifying, I won't call it testifying, but I'll say the communicating to folks within the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. There were all the representatives essentially and the staffers on one side and the DOD folks on the other side. and the staffers on one side and the DOD folks on the other side. And the vast majority of the communication
Starting point is 00:36:48 was me speaking about our experiences and the representatives being told by the DOD folks that they didn't have high enough clearances to continue the conversation. And I think that's been where this conversation has been in Congress for probably about five years or so, where essentially there has been a lot of stonewalling, to your point. Not being able to get right into the programs, not having the proper clearances, not having proper rooms available. I do get the sense that this last ICIG meeting that they had, which wasn't a proper secure space, the representatives did seem, I would say,
Starting point is 00:37:26 more interested coming out of that in the conversation. There did seem to be something that impacted them in a, I'll say, positive way for the conversation, continued exploration of the conversation. It would have been very easy, I think, for a lot of people to come out of there frustrated in order to say that not much had happened. But I think that was, I forget which representative said, but maybe one of their first real briefs on this topic.
Starting point is 00:37:53 At least that's how I'm interpreting it. I think there has been a lot of, you know, the whole back and forth on classification, not just with the David Grush incident, but for the past few years. Well, look, and Grush, again, is somebody people would have loved to have seen kind of smeared, and it hasn't happened. Same with you. Nobody's come out with the usual, which is, you know, this guy got relieved of duty for a reason. You know, this guy's disgruntled.
Starting point is 00:38:21 You know, we're in the middle of litigation with him. You know, that's what usually happens. We're in the middle of litigation with him. That's what usually happens. And none of that has happened here. I see this story as the biggest, most obvious head fake of anything else I've covered. The Russian dossier, oh, that was fake. No, it wasn't. The Russian dossier. Oh, that was fake. No, it wasn't. It was something that was relied on too much by people who should have known better. They knew it was raw intelligence. They had a lot of corroborative stuff. They decided to investigate the way they decided it, you know, exacerbated it, but it was all what it was. This story, you know, Biden and his kid, look, that is what it is. You find that the money went to the family in the way it should have or it didn't.
Starting point is 00:39:09 The election rigged. Either you find that people faked votes or counted the votes wrong or you don't. This one is the only one where we have been told absolutely nothing by the people who use our money and our power of agency to keep us safe, without explanation. I've never heard anything else like it. Maybe that's why a lot of people dismiss it, because it just seems so incredulous.
Starting point is 00:39:43 But it's interesting that people invest more curiosity in things that are easily explained. And here you've been given no explanation. And it is relegated to the land of the tinfoil hat crowd. And I'm fine with the disparagement. I am not looking for proof of the body in the basement that they have with the cryogenic seal. I don't care about any of that. It is what it is.
Starting point is 00:40:12 And if we learn, we learn. For me, it's just transparency. I'm happy for them to shoot down every single thing. I'm happy for people to be able to sit down with you and show you what they've learned about how the radar created a phantom scenario. I just want the transparency. What do you want people to know who are going to watch and listen to this?
Starting point is 00:40:35 I would say, you know, a lot of these kind of issues that you talked about and questions about how we can understand this and how other people have difficulty getting into the conversation. I would just realize that people watching this have more power, I think, to influence people in their immediate vicinity on this conversation. Be the advocate, be that person that's just a sane, rational person discussing this, I think goes as far as anything else to just make this a more palatable conversation for the masses. What can I do to help? You're already doing it, brother. And you and NewsNation are doing fantastic work on this topic. It's incredible to see how you've grown and engaged in this topic. What's right is right. NewsNation has absolutely taken the bull by the horns. I'm just, you know, one guy on that team. But I'm always a call away, and I appreciate you. And as we find sticking points that are about bureaucracy or specific players,
Starting point is 00:41:26 let me know. And I'm very happy to test power. That's the job. And thank you for doing yours. And then some. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate that.
Starting point is 00:41:36 I think it's going to be a big year this year and going forward for this conversation. It's not going anywhere. That's the hope. That's the hope. That's the hope. Look, you cannot listen to the guy and say, hmm, kind of sus. This guy's the real deal.
Starting point is 00:42:05 If there's an explanation for what he saw on his radar and others too, multiple times, then let's have it. And if it's about national security, then say why. And let our elected leaders explain it, right? Am I right or am I right? I'm right. That's why we keep pushing. It's about transparency, not tinfoil hat conspiracies, all right?
Starting point is 00:42:22 I'll leave that to the rest of social media. Thank you for subscribing, following. Thank you for checking out the Substack. I'm going to be taking you through my long COVID journey, listening to yours. We're going to start doing more and more interactive things. And I'll see you on News Nation, 8 and 11 p.m. every weekday night. Let's get after it.

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