The Megyn Kelly Show - The Truth About UFOs and UAPs, with Lue Elizondo and John Greenewald | Ep. 116

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Lue Elizondo, former director of AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), and John Greenewald, CEO of The Black Vault, to talk about the history of UFOs, what AATIP was tasked with investigating, why UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) is the more accurate terminology for UFOs, possible explanations for what UAPs actually are, whether new technology is making UAP encounters more revealing, what Americans should be concerned about most regarding UAPs, the significance of military encounters, the possibility of extraterrestrial beings involved with the UAPs, the UFO historical "cover-up," the backstory of "Project Blue Book," connections and throughlines between historical UFO sightings and the UAP videos we've seen today, the forthcoming Pentagon report about the UAP encounters, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, today, UFOs, or now as we call them, UAPs. that's the new term, unidentified aerial phenomena, which I mocked the other day, but have now come around to. And you'll understand why in a minute. We've got two great guests for you. We've done our screening. So we're going to make sure that these are legit guys who have done actual research on

this thing. It doesn't mean it's an alien thing. It means there's something unidentified in the air that has been spotted repeatedly by the U.S. military. And what is it? Who's it from? Russia? China? Another planet? Our planet? What? Us? The U.S. military? What is it? That's an honest question to ask. You don't have to be wearing a tinfoil hat to honestly want an answer to that. And there have been too many sightings of the things to say, this is just made up. It's some guy on, you know, hallucinogens on his grandma's couch. That's not what is happening here. So we're going to get into it today. And I'll tell you,

it's funny because we were just talking about this, Steve Krakauer, our EP and Abby, everybody was like, I'm so excited for today's show. And I was like, we'll see, you know, I'm open. I like, I'm medium excited. I've totally turned now totally not having done the interview and having like read up. I'm so into this. These guys were really smart and really credible and brought their facts and brought me on a journey of just intellectual exploration and possibilities and with their feet in reality. This is not pie in the sky stuff. Anyway, without further ado, I'm going to introduce you to who's coming on and you will enjoy it and learn for yourselves. Number one is Luis Elizondo, goes by Lou, Lou Elizondo. And

this guy served our country honorably for 20 plus years in our military in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, in Guantanamo. He was running our military intelligence operations worldwide. And then he was tapped by our government to run a group called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, AATIP. And that is a secretive Pentagon unit that studied UFOs, or again, UAPs. And he did it for years. He was on 60 Minutes recently talking about it. He's been on other media talking about it. But, you know, the cat's out of the bag and Lou is unleashed in a way that's really helpful. So he starts us off. And then we're going to get to a guy named John Greenwald, who's CEO of the Black Vault, Inc. And the Black Vault, Inc. is something that is born of his many, many, many, many, many FOIA requests to different government agencies over the years.

This guy's got an insatiable appetite for information. He's now, I think, 39 years old. And he has been trying to create an archive of more than 2 million pages about our government. This is not like, I think they did this. This is John asks for information on UFOs. And this is what they sent in this area, in that area, from this department, from that department. And it's not all UFOs, but a lot of it. And he's come to his own conclusions. He's done his own investigation. And he'll also bring us some of the history. You know, what is Area 51? What was Roswell? What was that? And what are the reports about UFOs from the 1940s and 50s that may have a through line to what we're hearing today, what we're seeing on camera thanks to these fighter pilots as recently as 2015? You're going to love this show. All right, so we'll get to them in one minute. First, this.

Ma'am, how are you? I'm great. How are you? You know, there's an old military saying that any day above ground is a good day, and I definitely subscribe to that. If only it were that easy. So you are an interesting guy. You have been through it. Let me start with thank you for your service to our country, which has been vast and diverse, according to what I read. Can we just start with a little bit about you? Where are you from originally? Yeah, sure. So South Florida, my father was

involved in the US-backed operations in the Bay of Pigs. And so my father was a political prisoner. And as a result, my family came to this country in exile. And so I grew up the son of a Cuban immigrant, worked, was instilled with a strong work ethic. After attending college, University of Miami, I decided to join the United States Army. I guess from a very early age, I was always instilled with that sense of service and try to pay back for the opportunities that my family was given. So I enlisted in the United States Army, had an opportunity to go in as an officer. But instead, I guess maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think in order to lead, you first need to know how to follow. So I decided to enlist and I was in the army for a

little bit. I spent some time in Asia and then I was recruited into a special activities program and the rest is pretty much history. I spent my early career as a counterintelligence special agent, primarily focusing on counter espionage and technology protection. And then later on into counterinsurgency, counter guerrilla operations, and supporting counter narcotics out of Latin America. After 9-11, of course, my whole world changed like pretty much everybody else's. And my focus was then on counterterrorism primarily. And so I spent a good portion of my career over in the Middle East and Afghanistan. And then in 2008, when I came back here, I was here in Washington, DC for a little while.

I was asked to be part of a really small, nuanced group of people. At the time, it was called AATIP. It didn't mean anything to me. I was asked to set up a counterintelligence and security effort for them. And so I did. And it was very quickly then I realized that we were really dealing with now what everybody knows, which is UFOs in 2010. So who gave you the call, if you're allowed to say, to say, hey, I have a new mission for you in 2008? I'll tell you, Ms. Kelly, it was surreal looking back, almost out of a Hollywood movie. I was working in an undisclosed location in Crystal City. And I had one of my colleagues come up and says, hey, Lou, I've got two people here to see you, which isn't unusual. I mean, you do a lot of work in the government with other, other agencies and a female and a male walked in and they asked me a few questions and they said, Hey, look, we hear you have a background in this and that, in this and that. And I said, yeah, yeah. And they said, Hey, we'll be back to talk with you. Now, of course, immediately what goes through

your mind is, you know, uh, what did I do now? Right. Right. You know, some people come in in suits and you know, it's, it's never very good. But in reality, they came back the week later and they asked me a few more questions and they said, hey, listen, we'll have one more meeting with you, but we have somebody who would like to meet with you. We think we may need someone with your skill sets. So I agreed to take the next meeting. And the last meeting occurred in another undisclosed location in the national capital region. I met this gentleman who was literally a rocket scientist. He just exuded this high degree of intelligence, wasn't particularly animated, very much just the facts, which is something I can appreciate. And he finally said,

look, you know, you come highly recommended. You've got the great skill sets that we're looking for. How do you, and then he asked me just bluntly, what do you, what do you think about UFOs? And was that the first time anybody had mentioned UFOs to you in these secret meetings? First time. Yes, ma'am. So you have a light bulb moment there, like, oh my gosh. Well, actually, you know, I don't know if he was kidding. I don't know if he was trying to do some sort of mental assessment to see if maybe I was prone to flights of fancy. So I told him the truth.

I said, you know, sir, I don't think about UFOs. And he said, well, what do you mean? You don't believe in them? I said, no, sir. It's not that I believe in them or I don't believe in them. I just simply never had the luxury to really think about them. I'm not particularly a science fiction fan. I've never had really much time to get involved in the topic. So I really don't have an opinion either way. And he said to me, well, that's great. I'm glad you're objective, but

don't let your personal bias interfere with the ability to collect data. And it was at that point that I realized that this program was a pretty special little program. And through time, weeks, I realized that what these folks were doing was really looking at UFOs. And that was a bit of an eye-opener for me, for sure. I'll bet. So how did he explain the mission? Well, actually, it was a culmination of him explaining the mission. He had a mission briefing, which seemed something out of really, like I said, a Hollywood movie. I couldn't believe

my eyes. But then when I saw the funding line and who was involved, I realized this is very legitimate. And I knew some people that were already involved with the effort tangentially. And these were very serious people. These were some of the best in the field. And so, obviously at that point, I recognized that this was real. This wasn't a joke. This wasn't some sort of rogue operation. It was a fully sanctioned effort. And it was reporting directly to DIA, some very interesting findings. And a lot of the people that worked in the effort were some of the finest astrophysicists and, if you will, nuclear physicists. And everybody from the scientific community had this incredible

track record. And I'm the new kid coming in. And I was really, quite frankly, blown away by the level of expertise and dedication that had managed to be in this effort. Now, is this the Harry Reid program? It is indeed, ma'am. Yes. So Senator Harry Reid, along with, this was, I think what's important to note here is that this was a bipartisan effort. A lot of people like to spin things, unfortunately, as we both know, in Washington as being a political thing. This wasn't. We had the support of Senator Harry Reid, Senator Stevens, Senator Inouye, and even former astronaut John Glenn. And they were convinced that this was a topic. They had,

I guess, received enough threat reporting that there were these incursions over controlled U.S. airspace and over sensitive military installations. Well, it's interesting because you mentioned Stevens and you're talking Alaska, you're talking Hawaii, you're talking Nevada. You know, these are states you hear mentioned in the same breadth as UFO sightings for whatever reason. So it's probably not too surprising that they would have said, yeah, let's do it. And they managed to find $22 million that wasn't taxpayer funded. So it wasn't from the taxpayer somehow. You know what? Well, and interestingly enough, Stevens had his own sighting, you know,

back when he was a pilot. So a lot of these gentlemen were all, you know, veterans. These are very, I think, rational minded individuals. You know, Senator Inouye literally gave his arm for this country. And they all looked at this and said, yeah, this is important. And again, you know, I'm certainly not going to speak on behalf of any of these senators, but they were all convinced that this was a topic at least worth exploring. So you're mentioning like the aerial physicist and all this. So what did you think your role was? Because you had a different kind of background. Mine was very simple.

Mine was to establish the counterintelligence and security portfolio. Because of the sensitivities of the program, the fact that they were trying to up the, if you will, or increase the level of security for this effort, its profile, meant that there was a very specific concern for adversarial penetrations. Russia, China, if you will, trying to collect on what we were doing. And that was a- Wait a minute. Let me just ask you, do you mean trying to prevent Russia and China from seeing what your group was doing, or you were the man responsible for figuring out whether these crafts were from Russia or China? No, no. My job was to stop the Russian intelligence services from finding out what we knew,

what we were doing. So it was a defensive counterintelligence effort, looking at our operational security and looking at our personnel security and looking at our cybersecurity portfolio, pretty much any way that the enemy can, if you will, sneak into your house. My job was to come up with programs to make that much, much more difficult. That's challenging, especially when it comes to the Chinese, but the Russians too. They're very good at getting into our business and spying on us in ways that we don't expect and we haven't anticipated. Very sophisticated. And it wasn't for about two years from 2008 to 2010,

that was my responsibility. And it wasn't until 2010 that I was asked to actually take over the effort. To head up the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or did you just call it AATIP? Correct. Yes. Okay. So now you become in charge of, this is the UFO unit, right? This is the unit that's trying to figure out what you can, UFO, that term connotes aliens, but it shouldn't. It's an unidentified flying object. The whole point is it's unidentified. We don't know if it's an alien thing. We don't know if it's a Russian thing. We don't know if it's a US military tech thing. But the point is to figure out what might it be. And this is a very unusual effort because it's sort of on the books. It's being, it's a bipartisan sponsored thing. And you have the official imprimatur of the US government

saying, go get them, Lou. Tell us what these things are. This is an honest look trying to figure out what these things are. Yes, ma'am. In fact, we were very non-emotional about it. We all went to work every day the same. I think what's important here is that when I was running the program, the same level of rigor and the same methodologies we apply to hunting terrorists and spies were the same thing that we were doing to hunt UFOs. It wasn't really a matter of these, hey, these are UFOs. Look, we've got an intelligence problem here. There's something that's flying around in our controlled US airspace, and there's really not a whole lot we can do about it. We don't know what it is. And whatever these things are, frankly, can outperform anything in our current inventory. So from that perspective, it is certainly a national security

issue. Now, we chose to use the term UAP, vice UFO, and I know some people find that a little bit, if you will, disingenuous, but it's really not. It's a buzzkill. It's a buzzkill. Yeah, I know. Well, but there was two reasons for that. And the first is that there is a lot of stigma. As you know, as a reporter, as frankly, one of the best reporters out there and a journalist, that there are certain topics that are lightning rods. And UFOs in particular, it's got a lot of stigma and taboo associated with it. The first thing we think about are tinfoil hats, et cetera. And it

tends to be a fringe topic. So that's one of the problems. But two, we're not even sure if the term UFO is even accurate anymore. It is unidentified, but the term flying is something that is very specific to flight. And there are four fundamental forces, which is thrust, lift, drag, and weight. And when you understand those forces, you can develop wings and control surface and you fly. These things that we're seeing, Ms. Kelly, don't seem to have any of that. They don't have any of the associated technology that we have to employ in order to fly. We have wings and we have jet engines and whatnot, rudders, ailerons, elevators. These things don't have any of those. They don't have any wings. They don't even have

any obvious signs of propulsion. They don't even have cockpits that we can see. There's no rivets in the skin. So to say that they're flying may not even be accurate. Yes, they are in our atmosphere, but we don't know if they are employing even the same type of technology that we associate with flying. They may be using something completely different, something radically different than what we normally associate as technology used to fly. I like that. Okay. That actually makes sense. So the, hence the change from unidentified flying object to unidentified aerial. Yes, that we can agree on phenomena. And yes, we can agree on that too. Okay. So I accept now I did, I am one of the ones who mocked UAP, but I'm adopting it. I I'm with you now. Okay. So you're there blank slate, open-minded guy.

This isn't your background. You were not a tinfoil hat person, you know, communicating with the great beyond, telling tales of alien abductions in your youth. This was not you. You're a military guy. Like, all right, I'm gonna do what my country asked me to do. Let me get after it. And so how did that start? Did you interview? Because, you know, most of the sightings that it seems you guys took a hard look at were from military pilots. These are people who honorably served our country. These are not lunatics. These are not people who just seem to have some inherent desire to mess with our government. These are pilots. They're serious men and women. So did you interview them or what, how did you start getting to the bottom of what you needed to know? Yeah, we did actually. We conducted quite a few interviews, in fact. And I think people will say, well, why did you only interview military? Well, there's two reasons for that. First of all, because of the Title X authorities, and I'm not going to bore your audience with the details, but there are certain restrictions and limitations

that is placed on the Department of Defense and the intelligence community when it involves U.S. persons' information. And by the way, these rules are in place to protect average Americans. So their personal information isn't, if you will, used in an inappropriate way. There were some times in the past where the intelligence community kind of abused its power. And so Congress mandated that we make sure that we don't do that again. And so civilians have a lot of obviously identifying information. We focused on military pilots for that reason and contractors and whatnot. But also there's a high degree of training that goes in behind, let's say, a top gun pilot. These folks are the best of the best. They are trained observers and they are

trained to identify the difference between an SU-22, a MiG-25, an F-16, and a European tornado from 20 miles away. I mean, these folks have literally a second and a half to decide if that aircraft is friend or foe, because the rule of the sky is that he who fires first wins. And so these pilots are highly trained. And then furthermore, Ms. Kelly, what you have are these trained observers critically looking at these objects and getting an eyewitness account, but it's furthermore backed up on gun camera footage and other electro-optical devices and further backed up by radar data, sometimes multiple radars.

And so if this was a jury and you were trying to present evidence, you now have three separate collection sensors, the human being being one of those, that are all reporting the same information at the same time under the same circumstances of the same thing. And if you were to present that to a jury, I think in this case, the jury would have to convict. We're well beyond reasonable doubt. Now, first off, please call me Megan. But let's talk about it because the first one I see that's been cited most publicly is what happened in 2004 with the USS Nimitz. And one of the things that jumped out to me about that incident, and this is a guy, David Fravor, he's a graduate of the Top Gun Naval Flight School, flying at his wing is Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, a woman.

These are legit people. I mean, this is like, they seem to me like the best of our best. And they had an incident. But one of the things about their reporting that jumped out to me was that there was advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, that had been detecting, quote, multiple anomalous aerial vehicles. And the advanced new radar is pretty interesting, right? Because it's like, was there a moment, was it 2004, where we did something to our technology, whether it was the one on the USS Princeton or our infrared abilities, which I know came into play in 2015, that improved our ability to see things, that for our planes and our radar to see things that our naked eyes cannot? Yes, absolutely. What a thoughtful question, Megan. Yes. So I think what people don't understand

is that the government spends billions of dollars each year in research and development, always trying to stay one step ahead of the adversary. And in this case, the SPY-1 radar, when it was fielded, was one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated radars on the planet. In fact, the person who operated those radars, specifically on the USS Princeton, was a gentleman named Kevin Day, who was also, believe it or not, a Top Gun graduate, but for the radar school. And in the words of Kevin Day, he said it was literally

raining UFOs. They saw them on the scope. And by the way, this is a radar system, the spy one radar that can see a baseball at 80,000 feet. And so these things were seen coming in from 80,000 feet, presumably from low earth orbit. And all of a sudden dropping within a second, 50 feet over the water and hovering and then popping back up again. And what's more interesting here is it's not just the super sophisticated SPY-1 radar. We had E2 Hawkeye in the air that was also picking this up on radar. There were multiple radar heads. What's E2 Hawkeye?

So the E2 Hawkeye is, think of a quarterback on a football field. The E-2 Hawkeye is an airborne radar system that provides, if you will, and go and take a look. And these things are, they're very sophisticated. These, the E-2 Hawkeye is a, it's, it's kind of like a combat controller, if you will, for those who may have been in the military. It's just, it's just an extra layer of radar that provides you an additional level of fidelity. It is correct. That's a great way to, great way to look at it. And so again, you know, you had all these different radar systems looking at it. You had pilots seeing it. You had gun camera footage. And you had this long history over several days of these objects being seen over Catalina Island.

There's even some eyewitness testimony as well on board some of the ships that actually saw these things. And so it was very compelling. And of course, when the pilots came back, they received the same treatment as everybody else who's reported these things, and they were ridiculed. People were making fun of them. They played X-Files. They were mocked. And I'll tell you, if you ever get a chance to talk to Alex Dietrich or Dave Fravor, they are heroes. And I've often told people, these are a rare breed of people. They are one of the few types of human beings that actually run towards danger, not away. And so Alex and Dave were very frustrated, but they weren't the only ones. There were other people that were ridiculed and there were other

people that really had a tough time trying to report this information back then. And I'll give you some- And this is before their incident, again, 2004. And they seem very serious people. They were featured on 60 Minutes. They've been on CNN with Anderson Cooper. I've watched them. I've assessed their credibility for myself. They do not seem like anything close to nuts. But that sighting in 2004 was prior to the establishment of AATIP. So there really wasn't even any place for them to go. They just got mocked as they knew they would be. But to their credit, they did what they were told to do, which is go investigate. And then they came back and said what they saw. It wasn't until later

that the government said, you know what, let's just why stigmatize this? Why don't we actually take a hard look into it? But their on the record assessment of what happened in the air off the coast of San Diego is really shocking. And here's one of the questions I have, and I want to get into that because chronologically I think this will make sense. You might be surprised to know that this goes back much further, but there was an incident in the exact same part of the waters with the USS Boxer between 1998 and 99. So a lot of people know about the Nimitz incident because now it's picked up in the media. But these incidents are occurring all the time. And for me, it's shocking that nobody in the Beltway wanted to do anything about it.

They were okay spending money trying to figure out what these things were, as long as we didn't tell anybody what the results of our findings were. It was perplexing. Did we have the fancy radar back in 98, 99? We had fancy radars. We did not have the spy one radar, but we did have other capabilities and enough so where we had the advantage over our adversaries. So it was enough that even in 98, 99, I mean, we could certainly see these things coming out of the water, into the water. We had that capability.

So let me ask you this. If they lock onto one of these targets and they see one of these things flying through the air like Dave and Alex did in 2004, Have we been able to determine if we get to the spot where the craft is, whatever it is, the flying, the aerial phenomenon, is something there physically? Do we know if something is touchable, palpable material, or whether it's just imagery? Oh, no, it's definitely a real object for sure. That's not even in question anymore. These aren't tricks of the camera. They're not artifacts or lens flare. These are real objects, objects that can be seen and objects that can be measured and objects that can ostensibly be touched. Yes, they have mass, which is very perplexing because what we're seeing, the

maneuvers that they can do, the instantaneous acceleration, the hypersonic velocities, for anything that has mass, now you start getting into a physics problem. Let me put that into context, if I may, just very briefly. We do have objects that can, for example, go very fast, hypersonic velocity. And to put that into context, the SR-71 Blackbird can do about 3,200 miles an hour. But if it wants to take a right-hand turn, it takes about half the state of Ohio to do that. And what we are seeing are objects that are not doing 3,200 miles an hour, but possibly 8,000, 9,000, 13,000 miles an hour in our atmosphere and somehow able to execute not only right-hand turns, but 180 degree turns instantaneously. So the G-forces that would be experienced on something like that are truly,

no pun intended, astronomical. We're talking about G-forces that would be well beyond the healthy limitations of anything biological to withstand. And even from a material science perspective, would absolutely just obliterate, if you will, any type of known aircraft that we have in order to perform maneuvers like that. So these guys said, David Fravor came back and said, we flew out to investigate after the USS Princeton had been detecting multiple anomalous aerial vehicles. They said that they'd been descending 80,000 feet in less than one second, which, you know, think about it. Our 747s that we fly on, you know, from A to B, they go up 30,000 feet. And the thought of them flying all the way down to the ground in one

second is incomprehensible, nevermind 80,000 feet. So that's what they were reporting. They flew out to investigate. They said they found an area of roiling whitewater. So in the water, they're seeing like a churn the size of a 737 in an otherwise calm blue sea. They said they saw an object that was a tic-tac shaped object about 40 feet long and oval jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance, but not moving in any specific direction. When Fravor got closer, he said it came up, it came to him as if to meet him halfway, and then accelerated away like nothing I've ever seen. He said it was jumping around like a ping pong ball, had no markings, had no wings, had no exhaust plumes. He said when it got right in front of me, it just disappeared. Seconds later, the USS Princeton reacquired the target 60 miles away, 60 miles. OK, within seconds, another crew briefly locked onto it before it zipped off again.

And all of this is backed up by his his the other pilot, Alex Dietrich. So is that the first time somebody has gotten that specific on seeing a craft that looked like this and behaved like this? No. This is what I think is so intriguing. I think most people would be surprised. We have government documentation, not civilian eyewitnesses, but military eyewitnesses, where these reports go back to the 1950s. But rather than being described as a flying white Tic Tac, they're described as a white flying butane tank or a white flying throat lozenge. And so obviously we're describing these things based upon our current genre to compare things to like Tic Tac mints and whatnot. But I think what's so perplexing here

is that we continue to see these things over and over and over again. And they're reported through official government channels to the point where there were actually, at some point, these mini task forces, these mini investigative bodies that were created specifically to try to figure these things out because they are, over many cases, over many cases controlled US airspace or sensitive military installations, particularly nuclear facilities, which of course is very, very concerning for us. So these guys got mocked and they talk openly about how they went back and everybody's like, oh sure. And they were playing men in black for it. That's sort of the thing to do to show that you're not a tinfoil hat. You're one of the cool

kids. You dismiss this as nonsense as opposed to just being open-minded. How the hell do we know? We're so smart. We've got it all figured out. Sure. We know bullshit. We don't know anything. So we got to keep an open mind and let the experts like you at least take us down the road of discovery. It's amazing to me when people, they're so smug. They think they know everything. They know nothing. They haven't worked with aerospace engineers. They haven't talked to rocket scientists. They haven't gone and interviewed these fighter pilots like you have. So nothing is done or said officially about this incident with the Nimitz for five years

until you come across the story and you investigate. And I'm sure one of the first things you want to see is data, like backup. What proof is there as opposed to just eyewitness accounts? And did you find any? We did, ma'am. And let me, if I can, just correct the record. We had some outstanding men and women in AATIP that were responsible also for collecting this information, helping us assess it and analyze it, triage it, catalog it, and finally have some sort of conclusive product that allowed us to really determine if this is something that is foreign adversarial or this really some sort of beyond next generation technology. You said something very, I think, very interesting and very important. And you said that a lot of people will tend to laugh at this and they find it kind of silly. You know, there's something as a human being we all have, which is this cognitive dissidence.

And as human beings, it almost seems to be part of the human condition that when we are presented with information that goes against our own personal preconceived narrative, the very first thing we do is reject it. And if you've ever talked to somebody about something serious, perhaps a cheating spouse or a really bad prognosis in medicine, the very first reaction is, I don't believe it, which is normal. That's a normal human reaction to have. And I think what's so important about this topic is, as people begin to get more

information, hopefully they, rather than comport the facts around their, if you will, around their opinions, I think it's more important that we conform our opinions around the facts. And I think you're starting to see that. And I will tell you too, major, major kudos for you and a few of your other brave journalists, because I do know there's great risk in reporting this in the media. And I will tell you that I think you folks are approaching this perfectly fair, objective, just the facts. That is why we are seeing, I think, a lot of progress over the last three years, because there are very respectable journalists who know how to do real journalism. And they're reporting the facts and they're asking the right questions. So my hat's off to you.

Thank you. Thank you. I feel like we've done nothing. I mean, it's been guys like you who have taken the helm. And then it's helpful to have, you know, the U.S. Senate, Marco Rubio and others saying we want a real report now. This is like we've been toying around with this long enough. Let's take a hard look into this. And apparently we're about to get said report any day now here in June. But I it's hard to totally dismiss this no matter how much of a skeptic you may be when i've seen the video you

know it's like this is an audio podcast but you can just google it and you will see um video not from the 2004 nimitz uh encounter but from there are two 2015 videos of encounters uh where other pilots and the new york times did extensive reporting on this based on video that was leaked to them but now we've all seen it where the you can hear the reaction of the pilots, of our fighter pilots saying, oh, look at it. It's rotating. Look at that thing. Hold on. I'll play one and then and then the other. Listen, there's a whole fleet of them. Look on the essay. My God. We're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots to the west.

Look at that thing, dude. That's not our LNS though knots to the west. Don't go all thing, dude. That's not LNS, though, is it? It's not LNS, dude. Well, if there's a LNS thing, it's rotating. So that was number one. And what is the significance of saying they're all going against the wind? The wind is 120, I couldn't tell. Sure.

So first of all, it's not a balloon. First of all, it's not a balloon, you know, cause balloons, first of all, it's not a balloon Megan, because balloons don't go against the wind balloon balloons are buoyant devices and they follow the prevailing wind. Two is the altitude, but three, you have the orientation of the craft doing something that craft shouldn't be able to do that have wings. And then fourth, there's a whole bunch. So a bunch of these things that they're seeing. So I think what's important here is whenever we look at a video, it's very easy to just jump in and be

dismissive and say, yeah, I don't see anything there. But what's important to know here is that there's a whole, if you will, amount of, there's a whole context that occurs before the video and that occurs after the video that people don't realize. And what you're hearing are the pilots saying, look, there's a whole bunch of these up here. This isn't just some stray weather balloon that, you know, was released and kind of wayward now in the sky. And they are behaving in a way that is atypical of a normal aircraft or a balloon or a drone or a cruise missile or any technology you want to insert there. It's something that is truly baffling. And that's not the only one. There are many other videos, many other pictures and photos that exist, but there's also reports and data from radar. And this is also not just a U, during Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, for about five years, there was this little bit of a romantic period between the US and Russia

where they were sharing all their UFO information with us. And you know what? They had the same problem we did. So this is a global issue. And they were seeing some of the trends and patterns we were. And there are some reports out there from very senior, senior Russian generals that were completely forthcoming with the American government saying, yeah, these are real- Okay, but could that be an attempt to throw us off, right? Like, oh yeah, we saw them too. But meanwhile, it's them. Because this is one of the theories that China or Russia, they're way ahead of us, and they've somehow developed this crazy hypersonic weaponry, which you're going to explain to me what that means. This is the term I read.

That's way more advanced than anything we could do. And so they're just going to go along with, oh, yeah, it's so weird. We had it too. But meanwhile, it's them. Yeah, no, such a great argument, Megan. And this is one that we've had to address before. And let me, if I can, for just briefly here, walk through the logic trail on this. So for many, many years, there were really three options to this argument, this issue. And the first one was, it's some sort of

secret US technology, and we're just not coordinating amongst ourselves. The next argument was, well, this is some sort of foreign technology, some sort of adversarial technology that has leapfrogged ahead of us. And then the third option is, well, we're dealing with something completely and entirely different. Well, our government for the first time, and frankly, this has been going on now for 30 years with discussions such as TR3B and whatnot. But for the first time, our government has come out for the record and said succinctly and officially, this is not our technology, period. So that is now off the table, that argument entirely. So then the other two options are, okay, well, that leaves either it's adversarial technology or it's something else. Let's break that down for just a moment.

We have documentation substantiating these sightings going back at least to the late 40s and early 1950s over some very sensitive U.S. facilities. To imagine for a minute where we were technologically just won World War II, and there is a country that has developed secretly somehow technology that is possibly a thousand years ahead of us. And they started exercising this technology, employing this technology in 1950. Now, if that was the case, countries like China that spend a billion dollars, if not more a year, stealing our technology just to have a competitive advantage, or Russia, I think we would have probably seen this technology fielded in some sort of combat theater. And I think it would have been very, very hard to keep this secret

because countries like China- That's actually one of my questions. That's actually one of my questions. Is there evidence that the Chinese have data on our military training or something else that they shouldn't, that would be gleanable from observing those fighter pilots off the coast of Virginia or the East Coast or the Russians. And that's my concern too. Since China and Russia, we know that they are looking into this topic. They've admitted it openly.

If that's the case, then are they ahead of us in understanding this technology? And let's go back to this discussion where you said if some sort of possibly, and I think it's a great question, some country has managed to leapfrog us technologically. Imagine the intelligence failure this would mean for our country that for 70 years, there has been an adversary despite the billions of dollars we put into our 18 members of the intelligence community somehow remained under the proverbial radar and has managed to not only develop this technology, but furthermore, deploy it over controlled US airspace.

And there's not a thing we can do about it. I think to me, that's terrifying. I think that would be an intelligence failure that would eclipse 9-11 by probably- And wouldn't we see China and Russia making so many, like so bigger and more meaningful technological and military and economic leaps and bounds ahead of us? You know what I mean? Like, wouldn't we be left in their dust at this point if they had this kind of technology to spy on us? Right.

In fact, more importantly, you would, yes, you're right. But also you would need to invest the millions and millions of dollars in nuclear technology to keep pace with the United States because you have a disruptive technology now in your arsenal where any weapon the United States has is completely meaningless. So you would not have to spend all this money on your defense because you've got that secret weapon. So again, it just doesn't make sense. From an intelligence perspective. Nothing about that particular argument that it's Russian or China makes sense. Now, is it possible? Of course it is. We can't completely rule it out. And this is why we have said for the record, all options must remain on the table until they're no longer on the table. We don't want to go down prematurely

down any rabbit holes, but there are, these are options for sure. On the, on the topic of our government saying the one thing, and apparently this is what this June report is going to say is like, there's not much conclusive in this June report that, that the Senate ordered. But the expected report is going to say, there's no evidence that it's alien technology. Well, we knew that, but we can't rule it out. Okay. Not helpful. That doesn't advance anything, but then they're going to say, the one thing we can tell you is that it doesn't originate from the American military or other US government tech. This is the only definitive finding in the classified intel report that is being generated. So it's not government tech, which of course is going to make a lot of people say, well,

then it's 100% government tech. If they're willing to go on the record and say it's not ours, they're probably just saying that to cover up the fact that it's 100% ours and they're just trying to head fake us. Well, I think that would be very dangerous and frankly illegal because you don't lie to Congress. That's a big no-no. And you definitely don't lie to the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense. If those type of efforts were going on and, and under the nose of these, of these department heads, and they lied to their leadership, that's illegal. That, that, that's a rogue operation.

And we do know that there were rules and regulations, title 50 for the intelligence community, title 10 for the department of defense that makes it illegal to be running these type of operations without appropriate oversight. So if that's the case, then we've got bigger problems on our hands, because that means somewhere the chain of command has broken down and there are people doing things unilaterally under the guise of US authorities that are frankly illegal. And so I really-

Well, you even have former presidents like Barack Obama speculating about it. And presumably if it were a US program that was super top secret, he would just be quiet. He wouldn't be saying anything at all. Well, look at Dean Eirath, right? He said he was briefed and he wanted, he was trying to get this stuff released

at the unclassified level, but he just ran out of time. You don't release information about your own secret tech if you want to keep it secret. Again, that argument, it just doesn't make sense because you have senior people in the government to include former director of CIA, John Brennan, and even Woolsey now, former DNI Ratcliffe, all coming out saying, yes, we know these things are there. If they were our secret technology, I don't think you would have people being so forthcoming about this.

That's not how you keep something secret, right? And you certainly don't fly it over populated US cities. What you do is you fly them out of Area 51 at these test ranges. So your secret technology stays secret. Up next, we're going to talk about the firsthand account from former Navy pilot Lieutenant Ryan Graves. His squadron began seeing these UAPs hovering over restricted airspace off of Virginia Beach. And he said they saw them every day for at least a couple of years. He is on the record with this. And we're going to get into that with Lou, ask him what he makes of it and talk about

why we need to be paying attention to this. Why these sightings are the equivalent of you waking up in the morning in a locked house, finding somebody else's muddy boot prints all over your living room floor. That's 60 seconds away. There was another guy who's gone on record. Graves, I think, is his last name. Ryan. Yes, ma'am. Great, great human being. And his he had an interesting contribution to all of this, I thought.

So this guy, he said, look, he was part of a second incident in 2015. And actually, we have some audio tape of that. Let's play that first. Oh, God. Can you talk to me? Oh, my gosh, dude. Wow. Look at that. Look at that. Okay, so Graves is somebody who says he's now a former Navy pilot, Lieutenant Ryan Graves. His squad began to see these UAPs hovering over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach in 2014 when they updated their jets radar, making it possible to zero in with infrared cameras once again. He said pilots training off the Atlantic on the East Coast

see things like this, quote, all the time. He says, quote, every day for at least a couple of years we saw this. And he says, look, it could be Russians, could be the Chinese, but in talking about what happened out there and in that tape, just so people know what they were saying was, whoa, got him. You can see the infrared locking in on this thing. It's a fast moving target. Oh, my gosh, dude.

Wow. Look at that thing. You can hear their their wonder and what the hell this is, even though these are trained pilots who, as you point out, can can spot, you know, a mig and so on from all this distance away. They know what it is. They said that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds. He said with the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we would expect, given the energy required to keep an aircraft in the air.

Like they were going so fast. They should have been out of if it were something we understood. They should have been fallen out of the sky in an hour. But they stayed up there for 12 hours straight. He said the object showed up at 30,000 feet, at 20,000 feet, even sea level. They could accelerate. They could slow down. They could hit hypersonic speeds.

One pilot said his plane to merge with one of the things flying a thousand feet below it. He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet cam, but he couldn't, even though his radar was telling him it was there. A few days later, a training missile on his jet locked onto the object. His infrared cam picked it up as well, but he said, I couldn't see it visually. Then later with his eyes, saw a craft fly between him and his wingman east of Virginia Beach saying something flew between them right past the cockpit, a hundred feet apart over the Atlantic. He said it looked like a sphere encasing a cube.

And Graves said, this convinced me this was not a drone. This was not a government, a US government technology because the government would not have flown such a thing with fighter pilots training in that area. It wouldn't have endangered our own people like that. So that's actually pretty persuasive to me that our government wouldn't have been doing that. You know something else, Megan, too, that most people don't know, not only is Ryan Graves a phenomenal fighter pilot, he happens to be an aerospace engineer. So this is somebody who looks at things very critically, very scientifically. He understands aircraft probably better than most people, you know,

frankly in the United States, not only does he know how to fly them, but he also knows how they work from a physics perspective. So when someone of that caliber tells you what they're observing you know, that's, that's even another degree of, of credibility and not only credibility, but, you know, I take their opinions on what they're seeing. I take it to heart because it's being backed up by electro-optical data. It's being backed up by radar data. It's not just one time seeing something. where if you talk to people on certain boats, like the recent incidents on the U.S. Omaha and the USS

Kidd, you know, half of the sailors will laugh when you ask them this question. They're like, oh, you're talking about the UFOs? Yeah, we see them all the time. I mean, it's kind of like the worst kept secret at this point. And you're absolutely right. It's, you know, when you have an elected, I'm not going to go into details, but if you have an elected official, you know, sometimes they laugh going back to this where you had said that sometimes people will laugh. I don't think it's funny that there are aircraft flying over restricted US airspace. There's a reason why we have controlled airspace and look at Washington DC.

Can you imagine if these things were trying to buzz the White House or the Capitol building? I don't think it'd be a laughing matter anymore. And let's not forget that these pilots are encountering these things not too far off the coast of Washington, DC. So I think we do need to look at this seriously. Well, are they, Lou? Might they be buzzing? That was one of my questions. If you can't always see them with the naked eye, you can only have the infrared pick them up. Maybe they are outside of the White House or over the Capitol or right outside of my building in Midtown Manhattan.

How do we know they're not? Megan, we don't. And that's the problem here. And this is why I think folks like Marco Rubio are doing a tremendous job. Politics aside, this is a nonpolitical issue. And he's made that very clear. And some other leaders now in the Senate have decided to come forward, step forward and follow his lead because they're just as interested and concerned and curious about this.

And I think that takes a lot of courage because they have a lot to lose. The same thing that it goes with journalists. You know, politicians have a lot riding on the line. And the last thing they want to do is be perceived as being mentally incompetent or crazy. But wouldn't we have actively by this point tried to figure out whether these crafts, whatever they are, were near the White House or the Capitol building or the Pentagon? Wouldn't we have unleashed this infrared technology in those areas to know? You know, I have to be very careful to speak on behalf of the government. I'm no longer working for the U.S. government in a civilian capacity, as a government civilian. So I don't want to answer on behalf of what the government might or might not be doing or the task force. Certainly, it is a concern for me, and I suspect it's a concern for Congress,

which is why you have this 180-day report that is now due because it is a concern, and possibly even for the Department of Defense because now you have a DOD inspector general evaluation, an official evaluation underway on how the Pentagon has handled this topic over the last three years. So I do, I think people share your concern. I think there's this underlying realization that, uh-oh, maybe we dropped the ball here and we probably need to start taking a better look at this. I mean, because that's what's really interesting, right? If they're everywhere, if they're not just bothering our military or over the seas on the Atlantic coast or the Pacific coast, because, you know, the 2004 incident was off of San Diego.

You know, if they're all across the United States and if they're observing and on a ubiquitous way, then it's highly alarming. And then it's like, wait, what on earth could, how large is it? How vast is it? How, look, what exactly do they know? And who are they? Right? Because it's like, from your observations, these are not manned crafts, right? Like there's no evidence that we human is because the forces inside and the technology seems to be beyond our grasp. And therein lies another perplexing question. You know, again, Megan, you say something that I think is very interesting in your audience. I suspect there may be a few in your audience saying, well, we don't have enough data to know if this is a threat or not. And you know what?

That's a valid point. But if I may share a quick analogy with you, Megan, I know you said you live in Manhattan and I'm not going to ask you where, but may I ask you the question, do you lock your front door at night before you retire for the evening and go to bed? Yes. Okay. And I think most people do just, I know I do. And most people I think will probably do that just out of due diligence and caution. And some might even go a little bit further, lock your windows, make sure they're secure at night, and even turn on your alarm.

Let's say one morning you wake up to have a nice hot cup of coffee or tea downstairs. And as you walk downstairs, there are muddy boot prints in your living room carpet that weren't there the night before. And by the way, nothing's been taken, no one's been hurt, nothing's out of place. But despite you locking the doors and the windows and turning on the alarm the night before, there are now muddy boot prints in your living room. So my question to you is, is that a threat? And I think most people would respond by saying, well, it could be if it wanted to be. So I better figure out how those boot prints got into my living room. This is the same thing when it comes to US controlled airspace. We have a responsibility in our national security apparatus to protect

and defend our national borders. That is part of our charter. And when you have something that can fly, if you will, inside your home, or in this case, the United States or controlled US airspace, we don't know what it is. We don't know how it got there. We have no idea how it operates. And yet there it is. I think most people would agree at that point, it's a national security issue. Threat? Well, maybe not. Is it displaying any type of overt hostilities? I don't know. But from a national security perspective, for us to determine if something is a threat, there's really two parts of a calculus. It's very simple.

It's capabilities versus intent. Well, we have now seen some of these capabilities through the five observables, but we have no idea of its intent. So there's no way we can say definitively one way or the other that it's not a threat. So I think we are doing the right thing by looking into this topic. I mean, of course, I'm thinking of like the movie Independence Day, that there will be a day in which the crafts have enough information that they do whatever it is they're planning on doing. If there is some central planning, that's the worst case scenario that this is some other planet, some being from another planet operating crafts that they mean to come interfere with we little earthlings at some point.

Is that possible? Is that on the table? Sure. Well, I don't know in the way that Hollywood portrays it, but let me give you some real scenarios. First of all, talking about the Nimitz, when that Tic Tac was engaging Dave Fravor and all of a sudden disappeared over the horizon, within five seconds when they reacquired the target 60 miles away, do you know where that target was, where the Tic Tac was, it was at the, at the cap point. This is a, for Dave Fravor and his crew, this, this Tic Tac somehow anticipated where Dave Fravor and Alex Dietrich were supposed to be in their aircrafts for their, for the next waypoint. And that, by the way, so explain that to me that I don't know what a cap point is so that this is where Dave and Alex were about to go? Yes. This is a prearranged location that is inside the aircraft's avionics. It's secure.

It's encrypted. And in essence, this is when you're flying an aircraft, you have these pre-designated points that you're going to go to. And that's not broadcast. It's not like on a radio system where everybody knows where you're supposed to go. That's very sensitive information. That's how you prosecute a war. And yet somehow this thing anticipated 60 miles away within five seconds where Dave Fravor and Alex were going to be. In fact, the Nimitz popped back on the radio and

said, sir, you're not going to believe this, but this thing is waiting for you at your cap point. So that is, you're talking about some next level technology. Furthermore, we have absolute government reporting on these things interfering with our nuclear strike capabilities. Now think about that for a moment. Imagine one of these things flying over a nuclear silo and disabling our ability to defend ourselves. And even more scary, in Russia, they had incidents where these things actually turned them on. So this is my frustration because this information is already known to the U.S. government. Why have we waited this long to start looking into this topic? Taboo and stigma aside, I think certainly we need to look at this from a national security perspective. What can I, can I just ask you some specifics on that cap point thing? So how long would it take a fighter jet like the one that Fravor and Alex were flying to get 60 miles? Well, at supersonic speeds, which is Mach one, you're looking at roughly 760 some miles an hour at sea level. It takes you probably about

six seconds to fly one mile when you're traveling at those speeds. This went not one mile, but it went 60 miles in the same time. So you're looking at speeds that are exceedingly faster than anything we have. And furthermore, you're looking at it without any type of signature. There's no sonic boom. There's no contrail. It's just here now. And now all of a sudden, boom, it reappears 60 miles away. How do we know it was the same craft that reappeared 60 miles away? If they was, you know, if they saw so many in 2015, they were saying there's so many,

maybe it was a twin. Well, it's certainly possible. But the Princeton radar and the E2 Hawkeye were fairly convinced it was the same one. They were tracking it and they were putting all of their effort, if you will, into tracking this one object. So there is a comprehensive investigation on the Nimitz incident. Actually, I think some of it may even be public at this point. I don't know for sure. But you can see for yourself the information in the summary. There is a comprehensive summary

on this that is, I think, got leaked online and is now unclassified. Well, can you explain what is hypersonic weaponry? If we're going to entertain for a bit longer the Russians and the Chinese and not some alien body, otherworldly body, whatever, something not domestic or known to us already as an established government. What is hypersonic weaponry? Sure. So hypersonics is defined by those speeds of Mach five or above. So Mach one is speed of sound. So five times the speed of sound. Now we do have aircraft and we do have some weapon systems that can go that fast and so do our adversaries. But there's not a whole lot of them.

And these things fly in very straight lines, because you can imagine at that speed, think about being in the 747 you mentioned earlier. When you want to turn right into Albuquerque, it's a slow, steady turn, because anything too sharp, you're going to start pressing your passengers up against the wall. Well, the same holds true with this. As I said before, if you want to go ahead and do a right angle turn in an SR-71 doing 3,200 miles an hour, it takes you roughly half the state of Ohio to do it. So these things are not doing 3,200 miles an hour. They're doing 6,000, 8,000, 13,000 miles an hour, and they're doing it in low earth atmosphere.

So what does that mean? Well, lower at low earth atmosphere to a, to a, to a fast moving object might as well be water. It's, it's very dense. We as human beings don't experience air, if you will, as being dense, but, but it actually is, it's, it's, it's it actually is. It's a quite dense solution. And you have these big aircraft. That's why airplanes can fly because that density, if you will, there's a difference on the wings between the top side and the bottom side and you have lift.

But if you want to go that fast, you have to have very special technology to do it. And furthermore, there are signatures. And those signatures include, for example, heat ablation off the front of the aircraft. You talk about atmospheric ionization, the stripping of the electrons. That's why when the space shuttle comes in, you have this plasma on the bottom of the spacecraft. That is because the friction is literally ionizing the air beneath the spacecraft as it's coming in. These don't have any of those associated signatures. There's no atmospheric ionization. There's no heat ablation. There's no contrail. There's no sonic boom. There's just nothing. And for us to understand

that is really a different paradigm, if you will, of where we are today. Because everything we have that can go fast, first of all, it can't go that fast, certainly not in low Earth atmosphere. And second of all, always has an associated signature. And we're just not seeing those signatures. All right. So the $64,000 question then, Do you believe these are crafts being controlled from some entity beyond earth? So Megan, that is a, an absolute great question as well. And if I may, just for a moment, because I want to be, I want to be comprehensive with this answer and I don't want to simply say yes or no. As human beings, we are, we are what scientists often call cardio-social animals. And what that means is for the first, you know,

nine months of our existence or whatnot, we're spent in our mother's womb and we hear our mother's heartbeat. And as a result of that, we tend to look at things in extremes. And if somebody were to ask you, are you hot or are you cold? You know, up or down, left or right,

good or bad, black or white. We tend to look at things like that in a very binary sense because we're human beings. But in reality, Mother Nature and the universe doesn't work off binary. It's far more complex. And so I've often told people this could be from outer space, it could be inner space, or the space in between. And what do I mean by that? Well, we now know through quantum

physics that the universe is far more complex than we ever thought. And the bottom line is that we are now recognizing there are realities all around us that we don't, as a human being, we can't interface with. For example, if you were to go out on a starry night and look at the beautiful sky, you'd see a lot of pretty stars. But if you take a radio telescope and look at that same sky, all of a sudden, everything looks different. You're now seeing an infrared and ultraviolet. Now you're seeing nebulas. So there are realities all around us. You and I having this very conversation, there are Wi-Fi signals coursing through your body. There's AM FM signals, there's radar signals coming in from the airport, there's cosmic radiation coming in from the cosmos, and there's neutrinos coming in from the sun, just completely bathing us. And yet we can't

interact with it. And the reason is because we have only five fundamental senses, if you will, to judge our reality in our universe. And so it's not, in essence, to make this short, 99% of the universe, we can't even see or interact with, and yet it's real. So is it possible that these things are from outer space? Sure. But it's just as possible that these things could be just as natural to Earth as we are. And we're just not at a point now technologically where we can interact. Maybe these things are from under the ocean.

And this is why I think we need to approach this topic with all options on the table until they're no longer on the table. We have to be careful to go down that rabbit hole prematurely that these are from outer space. Because it could be, but it could also be something very different. One of my colleagues said something that I think is very interesting. We spend millions of dollars each year trying to find microbial life on Mars. A lot of money is spent through the SETI program to search for technosignatures, radio technosignatures, by the way, in our own milky way. But this Earth has been here for a really long time. Is it possible that some sort of intelligent life found us first? And I think these are all possibilities.

We have to, and at the end of the day, it could be foreign and adversarial too. So, you know, to come back to, if you will, Earth, so to speak, forgive the pun here, it could very well be a terrestrial explanation. And this is why it's so important we have a conversation about this. It has to include not only our national security apparatus and our intelligence community, but I think it needs to include FAA and NOAA. I think we need to bring in NASA. They've stepped up to the plate, thank goodness. Yeah, they're doing that.

Yeah. I think academics and scientists, we all need to have part of this conversation because it may be a much bigger, much more profound question, just simply it's either from earth or not. That was a fascinating answer, first of all. But second of all your your notion that maybe they found us first you know we're off trying to explore mars maybe they they've already found us and maybe they've been here for a long long time reminds me of all the guff i give my husband doug for watching all these shows on ancient aliens because i mean if it involves world war ii and aliens he will watch it if like i come out of the bathroom after washing my face at night and he's just surfing, guaranteed that's where he's going to land.

And it's fun to mock, but he's like, now you take me seriously when he saw me doing all my research for this. Because who the hell knows? But I love the notion that, look, yes, could be from another planet, some sort of controlled force from another planet, but it could be some sort of force from our own planet, which we purport to understand, but do not. Megan, the universe is wondrous and complex. There were many times in our... This is maybe a paradigm moment for us now, and I'll just say this. This is not new to human beings. We have faced these pivotal moments as a species, whether it was first crawling out of the cave and looking at the sun or standing on a sandy beach

and looking at the horizon. And it took one person to say, you know what, I'm going to sail over the horizon. And everybody, of course, said, well, there's sea monsters out there. The world is flat. You're going to fall off. And it turns out that we are here because someone took that chance. And it turns out that there are sea monsters. There are great white sharks and there's blue whales and there's a giant squid of the Pacific, but we now realize they're not really monsters. They're just part of our world, part of our environment, part of nature, part of our reality. And maybe it turns out this is very much the same thing. Maybe we're standing on a sandy beach yet again, looking to the horizon. And this is simply just another horizon for our species.

Hmm. Ah, it's exciting to think about. I want to pick up on one of the things you mentioned, because this is kind of cool to think about, that possibly this could all be ocean-based. It's funny because a couple of days ago, my little seven-year-old came home and said, Mom, do you know that we only know 5% of our ocean? We're only familiar with 5% of our oceans. And of course, my response was, where did you learn that?

Is it like some stupid YouTube thing or is that in school? No, she's right. Yeah. Okay. I believe it. And that is the theory. Some believe that there's a reason this keeps happening over the oceans because there's some sort of a force, a base, a power deep down in the oceans and the things are coming

up from there as opposed to down from the atmosphere. What do you make of that? It's certainly a possibility. Again, all options from the atmosphere. What do you make of that? It's certainly a possibility. Again, all options on the table. There is certainly anecdotal information that suggests there is a relationship between bodies of water and these UAP. We have seen that. There are some theories now that are being looked at pretty diligently. Your daughter's absolutely right.

We know more about the surface of the moon than we do our own oceans. It's very deep. It's a very hostile environment. The pressures are enormous. And we're lucky if once a decade, we can send something down to the deepest parts of our oceans like the Marianas Trench. It's too hostile down's just, it's too hostile down there. And if we do go down there, we're down there for about a minute and a half and we've got to come back up. So it is certainly possible. And this is again, why we need to get our best and brightest to, to look at this because at the end of the day, your, your seven-year-old daughter might have a better answer or son, I'm sorry, your, your seven-year-old son may have a better answer. Or son, I'm sorry, your seven-year-old son may have a better answer

than we do in the Department of Defense. This is why I swim in the pool, Lou. This is why I stick to the pool. I can see everything that's down there. I'll tell you, Megan, we actually have UFO-free zones at my house because of my work in this for so many years. There are places in the house that if I go into,

I literally have to turn off my phone and I cannot utter the three letters of UFO or UAP at all. Well, so let's talk about being able to utter that stuff and not, because there's another piece of this story that's a little bit more political that I confess I don't know that much about, but maybe you can educate me and my audience. First of all, how is it that you and the fighter pilots, you know, Graves and the others, and I know that you eventually teamed up with Christopher Mellon, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intel under Clinton and W. And this is the guy who acquired those three Navy videos, and I think leaked them to the New York Times. So how is it that any of this is the guy who acquired those three Navy videos and I think leaked them to the New York Times. So how is it that any of this is able to be discussed openly?

Right. Like, why are you allowed to talk to me? Well, because I haven't violated my nondisclosure agreement. I still have it. You haven't? Saying all this stuff is OK? No, ma'am. I have it. I still have my T.S. security clearance. I have to be very careful of that. In order to, first of all, what the American people should know is that the classified information is classified for only two reasons. And that's to protect sources and methods.

And in fact, it is illegal for the U.S. government to classify things to save it from embarrassment or to try to hide money or operations or activities. There are very few exceptions where the government can keep something truly secret from the American people. And I won't go into those right now. But when I was in the ATIP program, look, you can't classify physics. You can't classify mathematics. And you can't classify the fact that there's something in our skies that we don't know what it is. That's not a classifiable thing that you can't classify the fact that there's something in our skies that we don't know what it is. That's not a classifiable thing that you can do. We know that North Korea has nuclear capabilities.

We know the fact that there are terrorist organizations out there that are trying to hurt us. These are things that you can't keep secret because there's no authority to do so. There is a very strict adherence to what we call an original classification authority, an OCA, and also a security classification guide. If you want to prosecute somebody for, let's say, Edward Snowden, for example, for leaking information, you first have to prove that the information being leaked is classified. And in order to prove that it's classified, it has to fall within a classification guide. So nothing that I have discussed with you or anybody else in public violates that security classification. They haven't come after you at all then? Oh, no, they have. No, they have for sure. There are some people that are very upset with me, for sure. They have tried to question that. Well, because I think I've made their life very uncomfortable. There's a lot

of scrutiny going on. It was just revealed that my emails, they're supposed to be retained for indefinite period of time, were recently destroyed by the Pentagon. There is definitely an active campaign effort within certain elements of the Pentagon. And let me be clear here. And just to reiterate, before you make that point, just to reiterate, your program, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was a secretive Pentagon program studying these UAPs. So when you say the Pentagon and your emails, that's who you were working for. So go ahead.

Yes, there are elements that were classified and there were elements that were not classified. But let me just be clear here. The Pentagon writ large in the Department of Defense is an amazing organization full of amazing human beings that just want to do their job. They're loyal and they have kids, they take to soccer and they pay their mortgages and they're true patriots. They've sacrificed for their fellow citizens. But there are some elements in the Pentagon, and I think the DOD evaluation, IG evaluation, will probably root some of this out at some point. There are certain pockets within the Pentagon that have confused responsibility for privilege. And it is my understanding that they have gone above and beyond to try to discredit me and try to, if you will, jeopardize my security clearance. Why would they do that? Help me understand what the motivation is.

Why are they mad at you? Well, because it doesn't usually turn out well for people who decide to break rank. I was very successful in the Pentagon. I was at the top of my game. I was managing two very sensitive portfolios. And I decided to leave the department. Ironically enough, I left the department out of loyalty, not disloyalty. But it was, I think, by some people in the Pentagon, they were very upset. They were very upset that I decided to have this conversation the way I did. And I don't think- So even though you were allowed to talk about it, they didn't want you to? Of course. Yeah.

Because it's embarrassing. Now, I mean, look what the Pentagon's doing now, right? The last three years, they've had to acknowledge the videos are real, that UAPs are real, that they have established a UAP task force, that classified briefings are provided to Congress. There's now 180-day report that's due to Congress and the American people at the unclassified level. Other countries are getting on board now wanting to work with us. That was done by force. The Pentagon, under its own volition, at least the certain elements in there, I don't think were very receptive to this. And now they're put in

a position where they are, some of them anyways, are begrudgingly being forced to look into this topic. So walk me through it, because now my understanding was you were doing the program 2008, 2010, you started running it. 2012, the funding was eliminated. So just quickly, did it stop then in 2012? Absolutely not. And this is one of the statements, misstatements that some people have made in the Pentagon. And they've painted the Pentagon in a corner for which now they have to find a way out. But there were a lot of things that were said that just are simply not accurate or true. The program continued till the day I left in October 2017. Yeah, in fact, there was a second tranche of funding that came through from Senator Reid.

I think it was about $10 million. The problem is that the language was a little bit too vague, and it wound up being taken by another office in the USDI to do some other work not related to UAPs. But we continue to work. In fact, all the effort you see now in the recent information on GoFast and the Gimbel video and the USS Roosevelt all occurred after the PAO office said that AATIP was shut down. Look, we never received orders to shut down. When you are a soldier, you are asked to guard your post and you guard your post until you are given orders that relieve you. Well, those relief orders never came. And I was still briefing senior leadership till the day I left the Pentagon.

So it's very dis- So why'd you leave? Ma'am, I left the Pentagon because of my frustration. I had the honor and privilege to serve with a gentleman named Jim Mattis. This is a person, if you ever have a chance to meet him, which I'm sure you probably have, he is absolute national treasure for our country. He is a scholar. He is a warrior.

He is a hero. And I worked with him in Afghanistan very closely. And the one thing I learned about this man is that he is a man who wants more information and not less. And when I was at the Pentagon and he became the Secretary of Defense and I was in my position, he needed to be briefed. He needed to be briefed that real taxpayer money was being spent on this portfolio. We were having real findings. And furthermore, we were having people in the field. I would literally receive an email.

I remember very clearly from one senior Navy official saying, Lou, we need your help. We've got these things all over the ship. Can't keep people below deck forever. What do we do? And so I kept briefing the seniors, but they did not want to brief General Mattis. And I suspect hindsight being 2020, they were trying to protect him. This is a man who's got an incredible reputation, very serious. And I think they were worried about that if the media were to find out he was briefed on UFOs, it could hurt. It could hurt him. It could hurt the department and what we were trying to do. Also, it was a new administration. We didn't have all our senior

leadership in place at the time. The problem is that this topic is not like a topic of fine wine, where the longer we keep a cork on it, the better it gets. This is a topic, in my opinion, that's like rotten, maybe vegetables in your refrigerator. And the longer it stays there, the more it's going to smell. And I thought it was a liability that the boss wasn't being informed. He needed to know. And so ultimately, I resigned because I knew they wouldn't be able to stop my resignation memo. So I addressed my resignation memo directly to him in hopes that he would finally be able to know the serious nature of this program and that something needed to be done. Was that the first, I don't know, dam to break in bringing this all out public? Because I didn't really know the story that well of Christopher Mellon hooking up with you and then Mellon taking these declassified videos and leaking them to the

New York Times so that they would write an article that ultimately would help make it acceptable to talk about. I mean, if that Times article hadn't come out talking about these videos in 2015 and the Nimitz, maybe we wouldn't have this report coming out. Maybe Marco Rubio wouldn't have paid attention. So it all flowed in a way that was helpful for the public knowledge. But is that how it got started? You did a resignation memo. You connected with Mellon. He leaked the videos and Bob's your uncle. Honestly, I was ready to go work at Walmart when I resigned. I left a lot behind because I believed in what i was doing and i suspect that that mr mellon feels the same way i if you ever have a chance to to meet mr mellon you will you will very quickly realize he's he's not your average bear um he he is he's truly by definition a brilliant human

being he's very humble uh and uh he's he's just he's one of the greatest strategic minds I've ever had a chance to work with. And believe me, I've worked with quite a few. And so when I left, he said, hey, Lou, you know, why don't we, why don't we think about working together? If you are this committed to the cause, which I know you are, let's see if we can, if we can work together and, and, and go private and work together to try to bring awareness to this topic. And so that's when I joined a small, if you will, motley crew of individuals, uh, and, uh, spent a couple of years with a little organization called, uh, to the stars Academy. And, um, you know, we, I think we're able to, to, to move the ball forward incrementally.

And then, uh, later on, Chris and I decided with a few others to go in a different direction. And we're still pushing this conversation. At the end of the day, Megan, it's really not up to me to tell average Americans, my fellow Americans, my neighbors and my friends what to think about this. My job is simply very simple, collect the information and then provide it to the jury and let the jury make an informed decision. And again, at this point, I think- Yeah, and the Pentagon keeps trying to keep things out of evidence and we want to see the evidence. But of course, when it comes to a court of law, you have to establish a basis for the evidence that it's reliable and so on, a foundation.

But that's what you'd put a pilot in for to say, this is how it went down. And these are my witnesses. And this is the, this is my radar picture. So question to you, because it does seem like there's been some fallout. It seems like, I know that you, you had said, I think it was on Tucker that the Pentagon was waging a smear campaign against you. And that there's separately, there's an, you mentioned this to me, there's a department of defense IG investigation. That's where you investigate yourself. The inspector general of your particular administrative agency investigates something that, you know, you allegedly did wrong within DOD. So is that what, what is the IG investigating a DOD

their, their laxity on this? And also, why do you believe there's a smear campaign against you? I know you say that they're not happy you spoke up, but what are they doing to you? Sure. Okay. So the first question is, as far as the IG evaluation, there's several things going on in parallel right now. There's an IG evaluation that was, I think, self-initiated, probably at the behest of some people in the congressional committees. I think there are enough people right now in the Pentagon that realize there's going to be some hard questions being asked here very soon, and they better have answers. do you keep flip-flopping on this issue? Why do you keep saying yes and no and yes and no? And first AATIP was about UFOs, then it wasn't about UFOs. Okay, now it is kind of about UFOs and

whatnot. So I think that's one piece of it. The other piece is that I have initiated my own, without going into detail, IG review. We'll call it a review because it's up to the inspector general if they want to make this an inquiry or an investigation. So I've lodged my own, if you will, request for a review on very specific actions that the Pentagon, let me rephrase that, individuals in the Pentagon have taken against me. I can't go into a lot of detail, but to keep this very general, they have said for the record several times. Initially, they admitted that I was part of the program. And then they started to, about two years ago, start to change their opinion and say, well, you know, Lou really didn't have anything to do with it.

Nothing to see here, folks. Stop asking us questions. And it wasn't until Senator Reid came out and for the record said, actually, Lou was in charge of the program, did a great job, etc., etc., because of course he was a program sponsor, that people realized that the Pentagon hasn't been forthcoming. And the last month alone, there's been a barrage of articles that have come out that have not only shown the Pentagon, elements in the Pentagon have taken adverse action against me, tried to question and get me in trouble with my security clearance. But furthermore, now they have deleted all my emails. So despite keeping my emails indefinitely, as they are supposed to do, because of specific categories of information that I fall into, they're now deleted. So all my emails, all my correspondence allegedly are just gone. And so Hillary Clinton, Blackberry situation. Yeah, no, yeah. It seems kind of odd. And, you know, it's funny because I wrote a lot

of emails to a lot of people. So I suspect a lot of those emails are still out there floating around. But anyways, there you go. There's been some specific actions taken against me. And look with the way I left the Department of Defense. I was threatened when I left. I had certain individuals tell me they were going to call me crazy and they were going to take my security clearance. It was tough. They did not want me to have this conversation in open. I think they were afraid of the stigma and taboo and this getting out that we were running a UFO program. Keep in mind, we spent decades after Blue Book telling the American people we didn were running a UFO program. Keep in mind, we spent decades after Blue Book

telling the American people we didn't have a UFO program. Now we have to come back and do a complete course reversal and say, well, oh, actually, yeah, we did. And think about the liability, right? There's another issue here that if it turns out that these people are correct who have been reporting these things and for whatever reason,

they were taken off flight status because they were deemed psychologically unstable, or they've lost their security clearance, maybe lost a marriage, maybe a broken family, maybe wound up even being homeless. Can you imagine the liability that would be incurred if it turns out that these people were correct and were doing the right thing all along, I can't even imagine. Just to jump in, Project Blue Book was the popular name out of a trifecta of projects aimed to tackle the UFO topic by the U.S. military. There's thousands and thousands of pages on it. We're actually going to get into UFOs by the U.S. military long before your UAP project. But I want to understand whether you think now, given the efforts that you say the Pentagon has undertaken to smear you as somebody who's trying to speak honestly about this, we should be putting any stock into the

report that's coming out in June. Because this is what happened was the US Senate decided the Intel community committee ordered the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to deliver a report on these UAP sightings by should come out by June 25. So should we put any trust in that, given that there seems to be a desire not to speak openly about it? Well, I've said this before, Megan, it takes sometimes longer to remodel your household kitchen than it does to put a 180-day report to comprehensively inform Congress, by the way, at the unclassified level, if this is a threat. I mean, we have to now go back 70 years.

I mean, let's look at the last time we had to do something like this, the 9-11 Commission Report. It took almost three years to put that together. Yeah, they're putting it together pretty quickly. Well, and of course, we had COVID, right? So how many of these people were even at work the last six months to even do this work? So I think what's surprising to me is that it's still an underfunded, undermanned effort. I think we're trying to plug this hole now in the dam with a Band-Aid,

and I don't think it's sufficient. And I think the report is going to probably come out and say, yep, there's some things out there. We don't know what they are. We know it's not our technology. It could be adversarial. It could be something else. And we're going to need more time. I hope that we, out of result of this 180-day report, we realize that we really need a far more enduring capability, something far more comprehensive, more representative of a whole of government approach, maybe like a national laboratory. Think of this as perhaps a Manhattan project, but hopefully for peaceful purposes. I do think that there is a tremendous opportunity here on one side of the argument. Can you imagine leapfrogging 100,000 years of human technical evolution all in one generation. And that's not far-fetched because we saw that with the Apollo missions. We saw that with the great space race

against then Soviet Union, where as a result of the space race, you had over 6,000 separate industries come out as a result of that. We had LED light bulbs, we had CAT scans, we had all these things come out that really helped and benefited humanity and continue to help us. So, you know, I don't think it's all doom and gloom. I think we need to approach this topic sensibly. I think once we get rid of the tinfoil hats and the silly, you know, if you will, water cooler talk about, you know, aliens and stuff like that, you know, maybe we can have a more serious conversation of what this really is.

And at the end of the day, it may turn out that, you know, some of that water cooler talk was accurate, but we're not going to know unless we decide to have a conversation. And I think I want to commend you and I want to commend other journalists because I know it's tough. I know you're taking a risk. Believe me, ask me how I know, because I took the same risk to have this conversation. But I do think history is going to look back and smile upon you and others who decided to make this at least part of the conversation.

And I think your audience has a lot to do with this as well, because your audience, if they're listening to this, that means that they're at least tangentially interested to some degree, at least superficially. And that's good. That curiosity should never be stifled. My recommendation to your audience is to ask the questions. Don't be afraid of it. Don't worry about the stigma and the taboo. Let's not worry about that. There was a time in the military, I grew up as a product of the military. It seems silly now, but, you know, of course, we had this whole issue about gays in the military. Nobody really, at least no one I worked with ever really cared. And it's not an issue anymore.

I think once we remove the social stigma and taboo from this topic, I think people are going to realize that there's real science there. There's really some good opportunity there. And yes, some of it may be a little bit terrifying, but remember the first time we sailed over the horizon, that was pretty terrifying too. This is just part of our journey, I think, as a species. Lou Elizondo, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Megan, it is truly my honor and privilege. Thank you so very much. Thank you to you. Thank you to your wonderful audience. Happy to do this anytime. Thank you for everything. All the best. And yes, to be continued. Yes, ma'am. Anytime. John Greenwald is somebody who takes his information directly from the federal government,

and they have produced millions of pages to him over the years on UFOs or UAPs. So what have they said? And what are John's conclusions about what they're saying now? That's next. Hey, Megan, how are you? I'm great. How's it going? It's going good. Thank you. I'm really excited about this. Thanks for having me. Me too. Okay. Please treat me like the dumb, dumb I am when it comes to the history of this subject in

our country. We just finished up with Lou Elizondo, who was talking about the military sightings and the more recent stuff and the Pentagon and so on. But the history of it, I'm pretty clueless on. I've heard all the Area 51 reports and why is it always coming out of Nevada? And it's, you know, these sightings are always in places where there's never a witness, right? Like that's about as much as I know about the history of this issue. So you are a guy who just decided you're an information gatherer. You're like me, you're a seeker. And when you

were very young, you started hitting the government up with FOIA requests to different government agencies, just seeing what you could find out about things that, I guess, struck your fancy. Was it always in the area of UFOs or UAPs, what have you? You know, when I started, I was 15. And yes, it was UFOs. But one of the toughest lessons I had to learn with the U.S. government, especially with the Freedom of Information Act, is they take their time.

And so what I did was I was just curious. I never had any experience or anything like that. I just wanted to know the truth behind UFOs. But while I was waiting for documents to come, because they don't come overnight, I was tackling every government secret you can imagine. And here I am, 25 years later, there's more than 2.4 million pages that I've received from the U.S. government. And yes, UFOs are a confirmed phenomenon, whatever you want to say they are, UAPs, they exist. There have been a lot of reports of people seeing them, whatever they may be. What's fascinating to me is UFOs has always been the most difficult, but also the most easily proven coverup by the true definition of the word out of anything that I've tackled. And I think that that's what keeps me going after all this time in that the government has no explanation for what this phenomena is. We know it's real. I mean, again, that doesn't mean it's alien, but rather the phenomena, whatever it is, is a mystery to the U.S. military and to the

U.S. government. That's not conspiracy theory talk either. That is by their own evidence that they will give you. And so what I did for this time is try and see exactly what they would give me. What evidence do they have? Does it prove the whole, this is explainable, there's nothing to the UFO phenomena, whatever it may be, or is there something more? And my conclusion is undeniably there's something more. You can conclude it's highly classified. There are provable incidents where the U.S. government and the intelligence community will not legally give out information on UFOs because if they did, they consider it a threat to national security. Classified at the highest levels, top secret.

And again, when you hear what they say at a press podium over the years and that there's nothing to it and Roswell's explainable and Project Blue Book, which is what they kind of blanket called their investigation through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. We did the investigation. There's nothing to it. Well, that's fine, but the evidence doesn't support what they have claimed for decades. The evidence as espoused in their own documents that you've been able to obtain. That's correct. Yeah. And I always stress that there's nothing leaked behind anything that I used to conclude that.

This is all stuff that in some cases fought for years and years under the Freedom of Information Act, but it is all stuff that I got firsthand from the U.S. government or the U.S. military. Why wouldn't they just be classifying anything that they thought proved the existence of a problematic craft, right? Why wouldn't it all have classified stamped on it and not turned over to somebody like you in a FOIA request? That's a great question. And the answer to that is a lot of it is still classified.

A lot of it does have that top secret stamp on it that they will not release. The National Security Agency is a prime example that I have written proof that I have fought for years and years now to get material from them. And although I do have a stack of hundreds and hundreds of pages from them on the UFO phenomena, most of which should not exist if you listen to what they say at the press podiums, they still have a small stack of top secret material that they will not give. And again, I fought for that for years, the last being about a year and a half ago. How do you know it exists? Do they have to tell you we have documents one through 1,000 being withheld because classified?

That's correct. No, you nailed it. So they have to tell you when they deny something. Some agencies will be a little bit more detailed than others, but they will tell you we have either X amount of pages or we are denying the material and they don't tell you how many pages for this reason and this reason and that reason. And again, depending upon the agency, some will tell you what the classification is. In the case of the National Security Agency, they put it in black and white. It is top secret material. It is 100% exempt from disclosure, and they will not give it. The topic was what specifically? What are they saying that in response to? In a request for UFO information. So what you do with the FOIA is you try not to be too specific because you can lose what you're going for.

But you also, in turn, can't be too broad because then they'll reject it. So you have to kind of skirt the middle. And so in this particular case, I was going for all UFO information that was collected by the National Security Agency. So, again, you can get quite a few hundreds of pages. I think the exact total is 900 and change, but you can download all of those, many of which are still blacked out from top to bottom. But in addition to those, there are also ones that are top secret that they will not release at all, not a single word that they will release. So those are exempt. And that they put in detail in their letter to me. Now, you mentioned Project Blue Book.

Touch on this very briefly with Lou as well. So this, as I understand it, is the old let's investigate whether we have UFOs and what they are project by the U.S. military, you know, decades and decades ago. And there's a guy who did he run it? Dr. Hynek, who I know you wrote about in your book. Can you tell us what was Project Blue Book and who was Dr. Hynek? What happened with him? Sure. So Project Blue Book is kind of the umbrella name for three different studies, Project Sign, Project Grudge, and ultimately Project Blue Book. 1947 to 1969, they did over 12,600 cases. And by the end of that 22 or so year study, only 701 or so they claim, 701 remained unidentified. This is our military.

That's correct. So it was headed by the US Air Force. So around the late 1940s, there was a lot of problems. There was a lot of issues when it came to people seeing these things in the skies. They couldn't explain it, and neither could the military. So that were fearful. The general public was fearful. So the military had to figure this out. And as time went on, they had Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He was the chief scientific advisor because the military brass that was heading the program, they knew that they weren't qualified to look at this stuff, the material. They weren't scientists. So they brought in various consultants. The most famous and essentially the top scientist was Dr. J. Allen Hynek. What's very interesting about him is that when he went in through the years, he was very much a skeptic. He was out there essentially debunking everything in news media stories. He would do essentially press tours, and he would

speak on behalf of the U.S. Air Force and say, there's nothing to this, but we're continuing to investigate. As the time went on, he flipped. He had seen enough on the inside to eventually start pushing for reopening past cases, and this is all supported by documentation, to reopen past cases that they had closed because he felt that they weren't doing their due diligence. And by the end, after 1969, he was so convinced that the phenomena was real, he, after the Project Luba closed, came out, started his own UFO organization, and essentially was a full turn from skeptic to believer.

So that to me... Sorry, I was just going to say, one case that you wrote about in your book that really turned him was a 1964 encounter in New Mexico. What happened there? Yeah, so that was the Socorro, New Mexico case. And this was in 1964, where a police officer in New Mexico by the name of Lonnie Zamora was on an actual high-speed chase, nothing related to UFOs. And while chasing, whomever he was chasing saw a craft of some kind, ended up breaking off the chase and pursuing this craft. He, as the story goes, had pulled over, had seen this craft come in, land some distance into a field that he was looking at,

and he saw two beings come out of this craft and walk on the ground, then go back in. The craft takes off and leaves. Well, that sounds like a pretty crazy story, but to add to it, what happened was they went out to the field where this craft had landed. They found impressions in the dirt. They found scorch marks from the propulsion system. So whatever it was, it was a three-dimensional object that landed in this field and was there. I mean, there was no physical disproof of what he was saying, meaning it wasn't a hallucination. Rather, there was physical proof of what he was saying, which fully supported his story. The Air Force investigated. They could not identify what the craft was. Here we are in 2021.

We still don't have an answer. And the police officer actually just recently died in the last five years or so. So he was convinced that this was something much bigger. And to Dr. J. Allen Hynek, after his investigation, ultimately determined there was much more to that case. And the Air Force essentially just didn't want to deal with it. They wanted to explain UFOs rather than investigate UFOs. And so that to me, that whole era was more about calming the nerves of the general public rather than actually figuring out the mystery. Well, it seems like the nerves were significant in the wake of Roswell, which also happened in New Mexico, I don't know, 15, 20 years prior to this, right? It was 1947. That's sort of the beginning of when people, I don't

really understand Roswell. I just know people are like, Roswell, and it's supposed to be code for like lunatic UFO person, right? I don't know what the hell Roswell's about or Area 51. Can you explain those? Sure. Sadly, I don't know what the heck it's about either. And I don't think the general public will ever ultimately know what happened in Roswell. And what I mean by that is, you know, here we are decades and decades later. And although there's a lot of pop culture popularity about it, there's a lot of rumors about it, there's even a lot of witnesses, many of which, though, have died off, but that came forward through the years and said that there was a crash of a flying saucer, there were alien bodies, and essentially that was the dawn of the UFO cover-up. Now, will we ever ultimately prove that?

Likely not. I mean, in the late 90s, when the Air Force was pushed yet again for them to explain it, because as they were changing their stories, none of which lined up, they changed their story about four different times over the decades on Roswell, the most recent in 97. And at the end of the day, during these investigations and trying to, again, address the issue, it was determined that many of the documents surrounding that incident were destroyed anyway. So with that fact that was uncovered by the GAO, with that fact, how do you ever really come to a conclusion? So you either believe the witnesses or you don't at this point. Who basically said that a UFO crashed on their farm.

Right. And that the sheriff, he contacted the military. And then what happened? According to whatever reports we have gleaned. Yeah. When Jesse Marcel, who was the military officer who went out there, essentially the original report that was written was that they captured a flying saucer at Roswell Army Airfield. So it crashed on this person's farm. They went out.

They did this huge, essentially debris pickup. And that was the original first day one press release within about 24 hours. That was completely changed. And they said it was a weather balloon. And that military officer, Jesse Marcel, had come out years later and said, no, I was essentially forced to take those pictures. What we saw was not a weather balloon. This was something much, much different. There's a famous photograph of him posing with the wreckage. And the question mark is, was that the wreckage that they had went out and retrieved? And he had said no. Over the years, his story pretty much stayed consistent that the debris had what he kind of described as characters or hieroglyphics on it. So there was some type of

writing that they couldn't decipher. It was definitely not a weather balloon. So you have those types of witnesses that were actually there. Sadly, Marcel has passed away, but his daughter is still around. She still talks about what he had seen. And so when you look at that, you realize there is much more to the story. But will we ever 100% definitively come to the conclusion it was alien? At this point, probably not. It's a lot of fun, but for me, I view it as a stepping point to then look at other possibilities and essentially how that cover-up unfolded after Roswell because the evidence proves that they wanted to cover this phenomena up. Alien or not, it doesn't matter, but there was a concerted effort to cover it up. Why? You ask a great question, and there's a

couple ways to look at it. If it truly is connected to extraterrestrials, and I'm not here to say 100% I'm convinced, but if it is, that is a huge national security problem. Because the moment that America, who is number one on the planet, technologically, military, across the board, I mean, we're the best of the best. When we then come out and admit that we are not number one anymore, that these UFOs are coming and going wherever and whenever they want, that in itself will create a 1940s or 1950s type hysteria with the general public. And I truly believe that because we feel safe and secure within our borders. But if all of a sudden, if there's this admission that there is something else out there that we just can't control, that we don't have any idea how to handle it, that to me, I think is one of the biggest potential national security risks.

The other part of it is they may not know if or if not it's extraterrestrial. And that's really being bantered about right now because of a recent New York Times article. But let's say they truly are clueless, which I actually lean towards this, not to be too disrespectful. The odds are good. Yeah, exactly. So the fact that they're just clueless about it, extraterrestrial or not, who knows, Chinese, Russian or not, who knows, if they really don't know, that in itself is a national security risk. Because all of a sudden, again, you're taking that top dog on the planet and realizing, okay, we're being outmaneuvered, outperformed. This technology, whomever is wielding it, is above and beyond us. And that in itself is a risk. So they have to

tackle this in numerous different ways, depending upon what the phenomena truly is. They have to look at it at different ways, because at the end of the day, all of those possibilities truly are a national security risk, whichever way you slice it or dice it. So it's a very, very sensitive topic with them. And I mean, I kind of feel it New Mexico incidents, but can we talk just for a minute about Area 51 in Nevada, which is supposed to be, this is a US military site where supposedly, you know, there's a guy named Bob Lazar, who's described as a conspiracy theorist. He says he was hired to reverse engineer a flying saucer there. Some say we buried a UFO there. Honestly, as somebody who comes to this totally fresh faced on it, I have no, that sounds like lunacy, but what the hell do I know? What do you think? You know, the Bob Lazar story, and I know I'll get hate mail for saying this. I truly believe that that's more just a legend and a myth versus he was actually out there working on a flying saucer. I mean, his backstory says that there were nine alien saucers out there and his story has been around for decades. The problem with it is, and I'll sum it up this way, when you talk about a highly classified situation like that or program, which let's face it, if they've got captured alien aircraft or spacecraft, you know darn well that that's

going to be the most classified thing within our military's arsenal, at least at the very top. You can't just go around talking about that and have nothing happen. Now there's rumors about his, you know, identity being deleted and this and that, but there's never been any proof of that. And he's nothing's ever happened to him. You know, he's out there doing lectures and conferences and television series using his real name. For me, that doesn't make sense. You look at someone like Edward Snowden, support his action or not, it doesn't matter. When you take classified information and you throw it out there into the cosmos, so to

speak, and just let anybody access it, there's a problem with that. There truly is. I mean, there's a reason why leakers like that largely live locked up in neutral zones because they want them back. They want to prosecute. And so when you have stories like this, which are talking about an obvious, very classified situation, if it were true, and they're just doing it willy-nilly and getting paid for doing lectures and stuff like that. To me, that's a huge problem. And I very much use history to kind of prove or disprove situations like that. And history shows that if he really was talking about a highly classified program, he likely wouldn't be around talking about it for long. I mean, I truly believe that there would be, you know, a lot of action against that.

You do have nuts out there. You know, you've got nuts. I've seen them on YouTube talking about how they got abducted by the aliens and they lost their virginity to some alien hologram at age, I was like, oh my God. So it's hard that those are the kind of reports that give an attempt to honestly understand these UAPs a bad name, right? It's like, you can say that's crazy town and still be open-minded to our military fighter pilots saying, I'm telling you that that wasn't man-made. Or, you know, that's as far as I know, humans don't have the technology to create what I encountered out there. One after the other.

It's not like one lunatic who's always had mental health problems came forward off his F-16 and said that. It's like one after the other. So as you're somebody who's sort of followed the strain over the decades with your FOIA request, trying to figure out what the government actually has in its files, you see the current reporting, the 2004 Nimitz, the 2015 incidents. What do you see as the through strain between all those reports? In the last couple of years, what I see as the through line with that is that it very

much echoes the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Highly trained military military personnel and outside of military also, but are experiencing a phenomena that still to this day cannot be explained. That to me is the through line. The press statements that I talk about, and you juxtapose that with actual evidence, they want you to believe that everything is explained, but the evidence shows that through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it was not. Same to this day. Those videos that were captured, or the video, I should say, in 2004, and then the videos

in 2015, I got the Navy to go on the record for the first time about those videos saying that whatever the objects were, the Navy had no idea what they were. And that was a huge revelation. I mean, that story ended up going viral simply because the military was never talking like that in the last quite a few decades since the close of 1969. It was pulling teeth to get that evidence pried loose from the intelligence community. And you name a federal agency, I was going after information from it. It was like pulling teeth. Now they're commenting on it. And the question mark is why, like, where are we going with this? And, and that is a real unwritten chapter of this saga that has gone on for 70 plus years. And it's all going to hinge on this report that's coming out hopefully

at the end of this month. But to go back to your question, that through line is highly trained, highly intelligent people are seeing this still to this day. The people that we trust defending our freedoms and our country, the men and women that are up there, are seeing this. And no matter what, alien or not, you can see a, I don't want to say fear because I don't want to make it seem disrespectful that they're scared. But rather, there's a concern that they're up there and so are these objects and they have no idea what they are. And they're performing in ways that they can't say, oh, well, that's another F-18. Oh, hey, look at that. That must be a law enforcement drone.

You know, they're not able to quickly identify it. So that that I believe is reinforcing decades and decades of cases and witnesses that truly have seen a nuts and bolts something that cannot be explained. Because that's Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, who was the one who flew with David Fravor off the 2004 USS Nimitz. She said, it concerned me that I didn't know how to defend against this thing. Right. It's like she was on the record. This is a very serious woman saying, like, you know, one of the thoughts I had was I don't recognize it. And how do I defend against it? Of course, because she says she's a fighter. OK, the conclusion to our episode is right after this.

Don't go away. In your book, you talk about how a lot of these sightings have been around nuclear plants, nuclear facilities, nuclear storage facilities. And you talk about how in the 60s and 70s, there were many, many sightings, people would describe what they saw as, I'm just quoting from you now, mostly round, though reports of oval slash cigar shaped and pencil shaped objects, no sound reported in association with any of these. Sometimes the reports were red lights or green lights. How do you see all of that comparing to the reports we've gotten more recently? Yeah. Minus the red lights and green lights,

I think you're leaning towards potentially more of a conventional aircraft, obviously, with FAA nav lights and stuff like that. But everything else that you mentioned are very much in relation to what's being talked about today. Today, the big buzzword is tic-tac. The fighter pilots, David Fravor and Alex Dietrich, describe this object as a tic-tac. Well, that obviously is new verbiage to describe a UFO, but in the past, they've used cigar-shaped, very similar shape, no signs of propulsion in many of the cases, no sound like you mentioned. So those are characteristics that are nothing new, that all these decades, caught up in learning what the top secret explanation for it was, meaning if this was some kind of drone that was being tested or other type of stealth aircraft or whatever it might be, generally we hear about it after 30, 40, or 50 years of development.

I think the going formula is the general public is roughly about 50 years behind hearing what they're actually testing and developing. And you look at the B-2 stealth bomber and the F-117, that's about true. They were developing that for decades and decades, flying stuff like that at Area 51. And then we learn about it decades after they're made. That's interesting. So after all these years, when you talk about the cigar-shaped UFOs and what Dietrich and Fravor saw in 2004, we don't have an explanation yet. And I think I broke the story in 2019, but in late 2019, then the US Navy is going on the record saying, yeah, we have no idea what the heck these things are. That's huge because they could have said we can neither confirm nor deny. And that's called a

Glomar response. Essentially, that's their safety fallback. If it is a highly classified piece of technology and they can't talk about it, a lot of times they'll give a Glomar response, which means we can neither confirm nor deny. But in this case, in the Dietrich and Fravor case in 2004, and the other videos in 2015, Navy's going on the record saying, yep, those are unidentified. We have no idea what they are. It's like, wait a minute, what? That to me was one of the biggest shocks, I think, in the last 25 years for me personally, because that, that generally is not their, uh, that's not their MO that that's not what they do. They either neither confirm or deny or just outright, you know, classify it. So what do you, I mean, having studied this, right? I mean, what do you think the science shows is the most likely scenario? I mean, obviously the most likely

scenario would be, is it a piece of classified technology off the coast of California where the Nimitz encounter took place? You have a Navy installation where I know that they test classified technology of quite a few different types over the years. Is there a connection there? I don't know. So the most likely, of course, Occam's razor, you can't just jump to alien right off the bat. I mean, you need evidence to support that. But the fact that the military is going on the record

saying, hey, we're clueless. We have no idea what these things are. Then you couple that with the highly trained pilots saying, hey, after all these years, we have no idea what the heck that stuff could have been. And they're out there on the record. That to me is really intriguing. That to me warrants further scientific study and investigation because we're only talking about one or two cases here, well, three or four, but we're only talking about a handful.

When the New York Times wrote their story, if it's accurate, there's over 120 cases that they are studying for this report. And where I'm going with that is there is so much more to this story than the general public knows. Yeah. It's not just going to be these couple of military pilots who happened to catch it on video. That's the only reason we're paying attention because finally, thanks to the technology, they got it on video thanks to infrared technology and we trust our pilots.

It's not some random truck driver in the middle of nowhere saying, I swear I saw it. You know, it's tough to dismiss all of these very credible people who had similar experiences in different places over the course of, let's say, 10 years. But I do think I'd love to ask you to put it in perspective for us, because in your book, you talk about the human crafts that we know are not capable of the reporting of the reported behavior that we're seeing. And so this is why people just if you're looking at the raw data, you need to pay attention because so far, as far as we

know, not Russians, not Chinese, not Americans, because our our military, as you point out, is now saying that's not our tech, we are not technologically capable of doing that yet. We can't do it because it's so extraordinary what they're seeing. And you're talking a book about Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. Can you put some meat on those bones about the extraordinary speeds and so on that we're seeing? Yeah. What I did in part of the book was look at the documented on radar with visual sighting. So again, that's something that a witness saw, but also was backed up on radar. They were going at speeds faster than the records that we were setting. Meaning whatever this phenomena was, it was being documented not only with the human eye,

because we can always make mistakes, but also radar confirmations going beyond what we were capable of doing. So again, looking at history, looking at that documentation gives even more credibility to someone like Fravor and Dietrich and Ryan Graves and those that have come forward, the fighter pilots that have recently come forward, that they are seeing technology that's outpacing and maneuvering them as well. That is a phenomena that has not been solved yet. Is it China or Russia? And those are kind of the buzz countries that we keep going and hearing all about. Sure, maybe. But at this point, I highly doubt it.

Because I think that after all these years of bantering about this in the media, somebody would say something or leak something that says, all right, look, this is probably what you guys were seeing in 2004. But nothing has really come close at all. And there's been a lot of analysis on the videos. And they're often referred to as skeptics and debunkers. And they go, well, we think this is glare or this is this or that or a balloon. And that's all fine. But regardless, I go back to that 120 plus case number where let's just say maybe one or two of these cases, yeah, they were mistaken. Yeah,

it was a balloon. That's fine. There's still too much overwhelming evidence to just put this aside. And I think that that in itself, again, stretching back into history and being supported by actual evidence. This is a phenomena that's been around for a long time, and it's one that they just cannot explain. Yeah. I know you pointed out that it wasn't until November 2004 that NASA broke a new record with their X-43 jet aircraft hitting speeds of approximately 7,300 miles per hour, 7,366 miles per hour. And our last guest was saying some of these miles per hour of these recent jets were estimated to be 13,000. You said some reports put it at 27,000 miles per hour. I mean, we set a record with 7,300. And if these are going 27,000

miles an hour, you can just see there's such a delta between our very, very best. And we've got the best in the world versus what these things are estimated by trained pilots to have been doing. So so what that leads me to the report that we're expecting as somebody who's been studying this and getting the FOIA requested documents and so on. When you found out that, you know, now the Senate Intel Committee was ordering this report, a serious report, though, in a very short amount of time, were you like, yes, finally? Or were you like, oh, right, they're not going to come up with anything in six months? Both, actually. Yes, of course, I was excited because this mandated the intelligence community to actually say something. What they're going to say is anybody's guess. I have my fear about what's going to happen, but I also have my excitement. I do hope that there will be something of note that will be revealed. But again, it's anybody's guess

at this point. Though part of me being very skeptical wonders what's going to happen here as the due date rapidly approaches. And I think I said this late, late last year. I think it'll be late. How late it will be, I don't know. Blaming COVID has been pretty much a fallback for the U.S. government and on everything. That's right. So will they pull that card? Maybe and delay it. I've been working on a couple of different stories and I've been reaching out to the DNI's press office trying to see, okay, look, are you guys scheduled this on time? Is there a certain day that you're planning? What's your distribution? And essentially, I can't get answers to any of that. They respond, but not answering any of that other than they are working on getting the report and fulfilling the committee's request. That's essential. I'm paraphrasing there, but that's essentially what they say. No date, no distribution method, nothing. One interesting thing, because a lot of people are talking about this, and again,

it stems from that New York Times article, the White House was asked this the other day in their press briefing room, and Jen Psaki had responded that the report's not done yet, nor were their conclusions drawn yet. So that was kind of an interesting revelation that here we are approaching mid-June on the month that it's due by month's end. And if the report's not done and no conclusions are drawn, does that mean it's going to be on time? I'm not sure. So I kind of feel the writing is on the wall that they'll delay it. But, hey, I truly hope I'm wrong on that one.

I mean, according to the reports, you know, thus far, because it seems to me that the New York Times, they got the leaked conclusions. So they're trying to get out ahead of this. They're trying to sort of set the expectations. We can expect a report that basically says, not sure. Can't rule anything out. Can't rule anything in. It didn't come from us. That's the one big headline. It's not American military or US government tech. But then the you know, the question is, do we believe that? I understand they're not supposed to lie to us, but like, do we believe that? Because they do lie to us sometimes. But they're never going to come out and say, it's alien spacecraft. And we shouldn't really be expecting that until unless and until we actually can capture one of these things

and actually, you know, manage to get our hands on it. And we all take a look at it as a country and say, oh, my God, let's, let's put our best and brightest on it. Yeah. I will say just to be a little bit of an optimist, even if they said that, man, we have no idea what it is and they pull that card, that to me is actually encouraging, to be honest with you. To the general public, it's going to be like a big letdown and a big dud. But for me, who's been involved with it for so long, they have been so adamant about saying that there's nothing to the phenomena. If they have come around to finally admit, well, the phenomena is real, we're investigating it. Or possible.

We don't know. Right. And then there's a lot of possibilities here. That to me is actually an encouraging development, as snoozy as that result would sound. And again, I think the public will be generally let down if that is the case. But for me, that's encouraging. Because if they put it on the record, the snoozy conclusion like, we have no idea, that we've looked at 120 cases, and we don't know. I don't believe there's any scenario after a conclusion like that where they could not fund an ongoing effort to continue investigating the phenomena, whatever it is. Because when you end in a question mark like that, and within that question mark, there is an entangled national security risk, a potential

national security risk that these objects are encroaching onto sensitive installations, technology, and outmaneuvering our military. And there's witnesses to back all of that up. If you end it with, we don't know, I don't see any scenario where they go, oh, okay, well, let's not really care about it then. Like, I just, I don't see any scenario where they go, oh, okay, well, let's not really care about it then. Like, I just, I don't see that. I think that from a national security concern, they will say, we need to fund this. Alien or not, it doesn't, that's not a question anymore. It doesn't matter. I mean, it does to us, obviously, but to the national security risk, that part doesn't matter. The risk is what matters. Alien or not, it doesn't matter. And so that's why I think it's an encouraging development because then moving forward, they will say, fine, 120 plus cases, you guys still can't figure this out over the course of

however many years those 120 cases span and you guys can't figure it out, then fine. Here's X amount of dollars, figure it out. Because I do think that there will be enough then public pressure to go to the Marco Rubios and the Mark Warners of the Senate and say, we, as your constituent, want answers and we demand it. And I think then the popularity will be so high and the demand will be so high, they'll have to fund it. I don't see a way out of it if that's their conclusion. Because not knowing is not an acceptable status quo. And now we have NASA saying, we want to work with you too. We're on it too. We're into it, which is helpful. What's exciting about it is it's just the beginning, John. It's not the

beginning for you, but this could be just the beginning of a real, real concerted effort to figure this stuff out. And thank you for all of the good work you've been doing on it over the years. You're a fascinating guy. I want to check it out, The Black Vault. And all of your documents are posted there. We can search for ourselves. Everything you've gotten is publicly available to us. Everything's free, publicly available. There's 2.4 million pages to read on pretty much every government secret topic you can imagine and all obtained from the Freedom of Information Act. Do you find time for fiction in your life? Or are you like my husband,

Doug, with the ancient aliens on the History Channel in all your free time? You know, as much as I, sometimes I'll watch movies. That's about as far into fiction as I go. When it comes to this kind of research stuff, I'm hardcore nonfiction documentation evidence driven. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for being here.

You're very welcome. It was an honor. Thank you so much. All right, well, don't forget to go and give us a review. Tell us what you thought of today's show on the Apple review website. It both helps our show because it will put us higher in the rankings and get us seen and listened to by more people. But also I read the reviews and I love your

feedback and I'd love to know what you think on this. Such a fun, also terrifying, but really mostly fun topic. Anyway, and give me a five-star review while you're there if you feel so inclined. And don't forget our next show because we have a woman who you're going to want to meet. Her name is Alice Marie Johnson, better known as the woman Kim Kardashian helped get out of jail under Trump. It's such a crazy story. She was sentenced to life plus 25 years for basically, she describes it as acting as a telephone drug mule like she was helping drug dealers connect with drug distributors which she realized this was criminal she takes full responsibility for it but it's non-violent she had never had a criminal record she lived an

upstanding life and they threw her away in jail and threw away the key locked her up and threw away the key and how she dealt with it, how she got out and the lessons she learned. And the moment she walked out of federal prison and what was happening with the women are already like in the prison cheering for her. We'll bring a tear to your eye and a chill down your spine. You're going to love this episode. That's next. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.