Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Richard Dolan: UFOs, God, Disclosure, Alien Encounters, Totalitarianism, Faith

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

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Richard Dolan, welcome. Please catch us up to speed. What's been going on in this field for the past few months? Hey, Kurt. It's always a pleasure to be here with you. I enjoy your podcast. I enjoy your interviews with many other people and it's always a treat for me to be on here when I get the chance. So thanks for having me here. Thanks, man. UFO field, UAP field. You know, the last few months, what are the big themes? For anyone who's been following it, we kind of know. It's all about

congressional initiatives to achieve some form of disclosure or as they like to call it these days, transparency in government. In fact, I think there was just something that happened at the European Parliament just a couple of days ago, which was kind of an interesting attempt to discuss the UAP subject in that venue. I don't know how many times they've done that in the past, but that was a new thing. So we're in a place in our public discourse where, you know, we hear a lot about the ongoing investigation or debate around UAPs, the potential existence of non-human intelligence, I guess, we're at that point. The role of the government, the role of the Pentagon in studying these, release of classified briefings. And you hear a lot about the need for rigorous, unbiased investigation. This is an odd thing for me to hear this because I'm hearing a lot of these calls coming from

government people who are talking about we need to have reliable data and understanding this phenomenon. I will gladly tell you why I have a little bit of a problem with the way that that's being discussed. But that's really where we're at. It's my view, it's good that we're having a public discussion about UFOs or UAPs to some extent, but my take is that all of these conversations are mere, they're tip of iceberg types of discussions. Like, there's so much of an enormous reality behind all of these conversations that is still never discussed, that is vastly greater profundity than anything

that is really being discussed in the public realm. And it really makes me wonder, are we ever going to get to the real depths of the UFO reality, the ET, alien reality, if we can call it that. And I just have this sense that we're really not going to get there for a very long time if ever But we you know, there's a lot going on That is still interesting and there are still a lot of unknowns in the months ahead, so I mean I take all of that as as

Interesting that it's certainly a place where we have not been in the public realm for a long time, if ever, for some of these things. So we're in a lot of new ground. The one thing I just wanna say about this emphasis on we must have good data. Sean Kirkpatrick of formerly of Arrow made such statements several times.

The recent Arrow report, which just came out, that's one of the new things, it came out in the last month, of course, emphasized this need for rigor and data, rigor and transparency. Here's my problem with all of that. The one implication that you get from all of these people is that we have not had good data on the UFO subject. What we have are these reports that you can just see they dismiss with a wave of the hand.

And what I'm talking about are the thousands upon thousands and more thousands of eyewitness testimonies of UFOs over 70, 80 or more years. That just gets dismissed. That's not considered data. That's considered, not even considered anything. So as if it never really happened. And that's horrible because when you're talking about data, the human eyeballs and the human brain

are the key data receptacles that we have as a species. We're quite good, in fact, at seeing things. We're quite good at hearing things. We're quite good as a species at perceiving the external world and making judgments based on it. We're not infallible, but we're pretty good.

We've had very good success as a species in trusting our eyeballs for obtaining data. And so when you get these government people talking again and again about we need better data, I know what they're talking about, and we all want the best level of data that is possible. That includes all forms of electronic acquisition data. Yes, no question, but to ignore,

which is really what we're seeing, the mass of profound numbers of UFO experiences that people around the world have all the time. To me, that's not a good sign. And I think responsible research needs to find a way to cut through that and to be able to resuscitate what the things that have made the UFO subject so powerful for the past 80 years, which are the actual experiences that people have. That has gotten lost in the shuffle.

And I'm including things as dramatic as personal encounters as well, including abductions or alleged abductions or alleged contact experiences. All of that. All of that is part of the picture. And it's really, you've noticed in the last several years, been sort of pushed to the side in terms of the whole UFO subject. I mean, that's just become a non-starter for conversation in the public realm. What would it look like from the government's perspective to not push those aside? Like,

what does not ignoring that look like? So here's an example. Someone says, hey, I've experienced so-and-so, I've been abducted by so-and-so, or I've witnessed so-and-so. Then the question is, okay, I've listened to you, I've recorded it. Now what? So like, what does the next step look like? Well, the next... You've asked it. That's absolutely the right question to ask, because when you think about it, the next thing that it looks like is pandemonium and paralysis on the government's part itself. Because once they acknowledge this as an issue, now from a government point of view, they're going to be expected to have to do something about it. That's the big problem. And this is an old story. You know, 40 plus years ago in the US there was a huge wave of cattle mutilations that was being discussed in the 1970s.

And this actually got the attention of some of the local governments of say the state of New Mexico, state of Colorado where a lot of these were happening. And this is a real problem because ranchers, you know, down-to-earth people, they're losing cattle, lots of heads of cattle. It's expensive as well as a crime against these animals. And so there was a call to get the FBI to investigate this. The FBI just said, absolutely no way. We don't want to touch this. The state of New Mexico did an official investigation. And I remember when I studied this some years ago, it was kind of a sham investigation. I guess I'll just leave it at that. But what could they have done? What would the

state of New Mexico have done if their investigator had said, yeah, these mutilations seem really, really strange from an agency that we don't really know who they are, but they've got very, very advanced like portable lasers that we don't know how they can do what they're doing, the types of cutting, how they take the blood out without it being like, this is a mystery. For them to say that puts them in an impossible position politically, because now they become responsible for solving it. And realistically, there probably wasn't a solution that was readily available. And I think the same kind of problem exists today. If the government were to acknowledge that

there are abductions, alien abductions, let's just get right down to that, what can they do about it? Well, what it would do is it would open the door to a lot of other questions that some people might ask, like, have you known about this for a while? Have you made a deal with these other beings? Rumors have discussed this over and over again. It leads to a Pandora's box of questions that there are not any good answers for. And so you can see like their motivation is absolutely to keep as tight narrative control over this as possible for their own ability just to deal with this in terms of the public. So I understand that. But from the public's point of view, people

still want to know what is true and what is not true. So there's a real difference of motivations on the part of the people, the people who are experiencing this UFO reality and the government agencies that, you know, their concern is maintaining public order, certainly maintaining their control over society. That's really what they want to do. They want to maintain their control. over society. That's really what they want to do. They want to maintain their control. And this doesn't help. So, you know, this is one reason I think there's very little likelihood that we're going to see genuine forward movement coming from government sources on the matter of true UFO, UAP transparency. It'll go so far.

The other problems are just as difficult. I mean, I've said this before, listeners, if they've heard this, forgive me for saying it again, but we're living in an era in which you're seeing all around you centralized digital control over populations. And it's coordinated. This is not just one nation. You can see there's obvious centralized global coordination of many, many nations to digitally monitor, minority report as it were, their populations for a kind of soft version of totalitarianism. It's an environment in which you are not supposed to believe in conspiracy theories. That's considered definitely out. And so to acknowledge the true depths of a genuine UFO conspiracy, the mother of all conspiracy theories, what is bigger than the UFO conspiracy? You got JFK, you got 9-11, you got COVID, and there's aliens. I might think the UFO is the biggest of them all. So for a government agency or a president of the

United States to go out and say, well, we don't want you to believe in conspiracy theories, except well, the UFO one, yeah, that's true, but none of the others, like that's not a good place for them to be in. So we're at a place where the tendencies of the modern world that we've created, I think, are strongly mitigating against open public discussion on this that will take it to a place of genuine truth. So it's a real problem. Like we're in a situation where we've had 30 plus years of internet. We're kind of used to being good researchers.

The Internet's made people far better at research than we ever were before the 1990s. So there's that. But at the same time, you can see over the past quarter of a century, at least, governments have seen this and they don't like it. They don't like that. So there we've seen a kind of reaction against the freedoms of the web. Tordis attempt to control narratives. We see it with you know collaboration with big tech we see it still with the legacy media and so you've got these two different forces at play. And it's kind of tricky like if we were still in the era of the 1970s, it would have been a lot easier for governments to do what they are trying to do. But the fact is, we've, many of us have expanded our worldviews dramatically over the past

few decades and we know how to do good research. And so it's not going to be that easy for governments to crack down. What they can do is call you a conspiracy theorist, call you, I don't know, far right this or that, or engaging in hate speech or disinformation. They'll do all of that. But the fact is it's very difficult. We've got two fundamentally different motivations and directions now that have emerged in our society, where the people have a very definite interest, some of us anyway, in researching and getting to the bottom of the UAP subject, whereas there's an inherent interest by senior bureaucrats, government agents, private black budget people to do exactly the opposite

and maintain strict control over that narrative. And that's the drama that we're seeing today. And I suspect that will continue to play out. So you mentioned that the government doesn't want to admit to there being cattle mutilations because then they'll have to answer to why we don't have the power to find out more about them or how long have they been covered up? What about the government admitting that there are objects in the airspace that we don't own, we don't know who owns them, we don't think it's Russia,

we don't think it's China. It's my understanding that that's been admitted to. So is that a step in the right direction? Well, it's been admitted to behind closed doors, yes. That is definitely, I think we can say that has happened. So there have been classified briefings with members of Congress in which these types of realities are definitely being discussed, but not publicly. I mean, you have some members of US Congress who have gone on the record to say, yes, this

looks pretty, pretty far out there. But that's not the same as disclosure. That's a kind of semi-disclosure. From actual government employees, like Pentagon people, for example, they have not done anything like that, not even remotely. The most that they've done is to acknowledge that there are some UAP out there that they haven't been able to explain. But you know, you listen to the Pentagon spokespersons, Kurt Patrick and many others, who have basically come back to saying, well, maybe China, maybe Russia. They leave this open as if some foreign adversary, some other country

is behind some of these without really bothering to get into the details. Like, who's going to get into the details of looking at the 2004 Nimitz encounter and actually legitimately try to explain that as Russian or Chinese technology? It's absurd. So, no one does that, but they kind of leave this implication out there. I'm not really seeing a lot of emphasis by actual government spokespeople to acknowledge that this phenomenon is real. And I think they're going to continue to fight against it for as long as humanly possible.

I don't see any motivation on their part. You mentioned that there's this tip of the iceberg that's being explored, but that leaves the hole underneath the iceberg unexplored, and you weren't a fan of that. So the tip of the iceberg, I imagine, is just stating that there are some objects in the sky that are of unknown origin and in some nuts and bolts manner. And further down in the iceberg is cattle mutilations and abductions, etc. So if it is the case that there are government recognized abductions and government recognized cattle mutilations, et cetera, then

would it not be... Like one has to start investigating from some perspective. So there's always going to be some tip of the iceberg that's just there and when feeding a squirrel you go, hey, do you want a do you want a little nut, Vicki? You don you go, hey, do you want to do one a little nut, like, you know, go, hey, do you want a nut? Or like when, when courting when courting a girl, a woman, you don't ask, can I marry you right from the get go? You say, okay, do you want that? That's a nice painting. What do you think of that painting? Like super indirect about it. So in some ways, this indirect is like, okay, well, there has to be some natural entry point. Do you feel that we're not at the natural, that there's a superior entry point?

Uh, that's another excellent question. And it all depends on how we perceive the motivations of those people who have actually have access to the information and are parceling it out. So if we were to assume the best of intentions on the part of our governing structure, I would say that this very, very slow acculturation is probably a smart approach. I've spoken to a number of other folks who are very closely associated with some of these efforts, and I think some of them have good motivations,

and I think this is what they believe. It's like, look, you can't tell the public everything at once, which is kind of what you're implying here. And I think we all agree with that. The reality of what we are talking about is undoubtedly of such a profoundly different kind of understanding of life, the universe, everything, as Douglas Adams put it.

It's such a radically different understanding that, yes, we would wanna go slowly. The question that I guess I keep asking is, is that actually the motivation or is it more just delay, delay, delay forever? And I do suspect it's the latter. I don't believe that there's an actual disclosure plan that the United States government really is promoting. I think that there is a disclosure plan

that a few members of Congress have offered to put out there. Whether that's going to go anywhere though is a whole, wholly different question. So my feeling, my guess, if I could just say that, is that this process will be dragged out for 50 years or 100 years or for 500 years if they could do it, drag it out that long. In other words, the idea is it's too much of a liability for government agencies to

truly come clean on this. There's just too many questions. If we have that as an engaged public, that's willing to ask the questions. If you have a genuine disclosure, people will want to know, how did you manage to fool us for so long? What does that say about the institutions that we're

supposedly trusting in? Our media, have you controlled our media? Or about our politicians? Have you blackmailed or controlled our politicians or our academic institutions? Like all of them would be complicit and all of them would have to be a lot of repercussions as a result of that. So there's that. And then on top of that is simply the question of, what does it say about hidden technology that you have? Can we have some of this hidden tech? Do you have free energy? Maybe they do.

Maybe they don't want it to release the free energy for all kinds of reasons that they might consider legit. A, they may lose money because if they own huge swaths of the petroleum industry, there's that. But there's also just the disruption, global disruption. I think these are things that they fear, any kind of dramatic changes. So no, I just have this sense that there's not going to be a genuine honest disclosure. But if you just look at the United States, when, really, when has the United States government ever truly been honest about anything? I mean, I'm not trying to be difficult here, but the United States government lies about

literally every single thing of importance. Why should this be any different? So I just have very little faith or trust in the governing institutions to think that they're going to be acting in the interests of the people. I don't think they act in the interest of the people in much of anything that I could think of. But in general, I would say, yes, if you've got this huge secret, you want to parcel it out bit by bit, but they're really not doing that.

They're not parseling it. Anything that's come out has been against their wishes, not as part of a plan. You have a faction within some members of the classified community. That is true. A lot of them are retired, some are not retired, and they have always believed in some greater level of information coming out on this subject. That has always been the case.

That's been the case for decade after decade and generation after generation. There's always been such people. And it just so happens that they have had enough success in the last few years to get some of their message out there. That does not mean that this is a formal, is formally sanctioned by the actual United States government, the actual powers that be. I don't believe that that has been. So you're just basically just looking at a battle that's going on within the national security apparatus and we're seeing that battle

play out to some extent in the public realm. But to say that what we're looking at is a part of a long-term disclosure plan by the government, I would disagree with. I don't think that's what we're seeing. Yeah, I think they're continuing to resist. Basically, I think that the strongest powers in the government are still resisting any kind of genuine disclosure. I elucidate a Canadian like myself as to how the US government works, because it's my understanding when people say that we need more transparency from the government, the government needs to reveal so-and-so. They're saying the government as if the government is a unified whole.

From the way that I see it, there could be sub-factions, you mentioned the word faction, so just sub-elements of the government, many of which are competing with one another, many of which don't have, well, maybe none of which have the entire one another, many of which don't have, well, maybe none of which have the entire picture nor control over it. Rather, it's a multi-dimensional game of tug of war. So firstly, do you believe that there's some faction, sorry, some subsystem of the government, some sub-department of the government that has the largest idea of what has the largest picture of this phenomenon? And then secondly, like, where is the transparency coming from? Like, from where within the government? I'm not sure about that the second part of that question, but we'll come back to it. The US

government is an empire running institution. So it's managing a global empire. That's one thing where it's different from the Canadian government or any other government. The United States is like ancient Rome. It's running the world or it's trying to run the world. It's finding that power is fracturing and breaking in every direction it looks right now. But that is the goal. And just like with ancient Rome, by the way, the original institutions that developed out of ancient Rome, i.e. the Senate, were really not able to manage that empire effectively. The Roman Senate was designed to rule Roman people in Rome, and that's what they were about. Once Rome had this world empire, it became very difficult. And you see the same thing with the US.

So the US institutions are not really running that global empire. That global empire is run by collaboration of private money, ton of private money, private corporations, contracting through the classified network, within the DOD, within the Department of Energy, within the US intelligence community, and they run this American empire. They run this American empire in conjunction, obviously, with international finance, banks, and everything else. And that's the actual government. It is a labyrinth and it's got competing factions as all empires have always had.

You've always got competing factions. It's too big not to. And so, you know, when we're talking about where are the actual levers of power where there are many depending on the subject that we're talking about where are the actual levers of power where there are many depending on the subject that we're talking about. So within with the UFO subject, we know a couple of things. For those of us who've studied, for example, Eric Davis's notes from his conversation with Admiral Thomas Wilson, which he wrote more than 20 years ago, which were leaked to the public in full in 2019.

Um, something I was very, very involved with for a number of reasons. When you study that you can, we'll get to that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to talk about that, but you can see that, uh, you know, Wilson talked to him about, uh, within the department of defense within the Pentagon structure, there was an office called the, um Program Oversight Committee, SAPHAC, within other parts of the Pentagon structure where these black budget special access programs receive their funding and

some level of oversight. But it turns out the oversight is very, very limited. From what we could gather with how Wilson described it to Davis and what other researchers have learned just of that structure in general, Congress almost has zero oversight over most of those programs. And even within the Pentagon, you've got the smallest handful of people who actually even know vaguely what's going on in some of these programs. For example, this program to reverse engineer an alien craft, which was what Davis and Wilson were talking about.

It was a program that was buried within another special access program within that whole structure. And there was limited, if any, oversight. Wilson, who is, you know, deputy head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time, demanded to be let into the program so that he could provide proper oversight as he understood it. And he was just completely blown off by the program managers of this program, the gatekeepers as he called them. And these are, you know, these are in a private corporation.

You're talking about the program manager, the security professional and the accountant, or no, the legal, the lawyer for the program. It was those three who denied him access. He said, well, I'm just gonna go to my superiors in Washington, DC, and I will complain about you. They said, go ahead. We're not really afraid of your complaints. And he did try to complain, and he was simply threatened with his career. So those guys were right. And that was a private corporation. So the structure of power, I mean, this is a roundabout answer to your question, but it's very complex.

It is labyrinthian. It's like a labyrinth. And I often refer to it as a system of legal illegality. So it should be illegal, and by rights, it seems to be illegal, but it's got legal sanction. We've got a whole massive system with it, ton of money going into it with essentially no oversight. And that's the American government. So there is no the government. And within that whole structure, one has to ask, what does the United States president, where does the president factor into this?

Does the president even know about this? You think about it, you got a special access community. How many deep special access programs are there, whether it's UFO related or beyond? There are undoubtedly hundreds. There have been a lot of people who tried to estimate this and no one really knows, but probably a lot of people who tried to estimate this and no one really knows but it's probably a lot Does anyone honestly think? That the president is going to be briefed on all of these he's actually gonna know

Do you have to be briefed on all or is there just the top ten that are most important Yeah, well how many of them are actually strictly legal? I Mean, you know seriously, you know back in the early 60s, John F. Kennedy learned about something called Operation Mongoose. This was after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he inherited, by the way, from the Eisenhower people. And, and that was a whole, that was a great mess. We could talk about that actually.

But so after the result of that, Kennedy was absolutely pissed at the CIA, decapitates the leadership of the CIA because he considered them dangerous. But that didn't stop the CIA from continuing on with this obsession about regime change in Cuba. So they did this thing called Operation Mongoose. Kennedy was not initially told about this. And it was. Basically, a series of terrorist actions

that the agency was sponsoring against Cuba. Explosions, like blowing up schools, hospitals, damaging Cuban sugar exports, all of these things to disrupt Cuba. Kennedy finally learned about it in I think later 1962, and he was furious. He was able to get it shut down at that time, but that's just one thing that he learned about because it was relatively high profile and word got to him. But you look at that, that was 60 years ago, and they were engaging in all kinds of utterly illegal crazy activity.

And that one they didn't get away with eventually. But look, let's just fast forward to the world of today. There's constant intelligence activity going on that the president clearly can't be briefed on because they have to have plausible deniability. President can't know. So he'll wink and a nod and, you know, his advisor will be like, Mr. President, you know, you don't really want to know about this. Just just trust me on this.

Because there's too much going on for the president. Now what difference? Sorry, sorry to interrupt. What difference would it make if the president did know? Do you think the president would shut something down or disclose? The president has to be able to lie plausibly. You know, I mean, just because the program is illegal, they still want to do it. So another example, this is another one from old history.

So back in 1954, the US government was furious at the government of Guatemala. There was a government led by a guy named R. Benz. He was socialistic. He had expropriated briefly United Fruit or kicked them out, which basically owned the country. And he said, yeah, well, look, all the land is being owned by United Fruit. We're going to have Guatemalans own the land. Well, that's great if you're Guatemalan bad if you're the United States Empire. So CIA was, was angry about this. Eisenhower was fuming. Alan Dulles, head of the CIA essentially says, but, but don't worry about it,

boss, not another word. We got this. So when they did regime change, which they did, Eisenhower could say, if he were ever pressed, I had no knowledge of this. This wasn't something that I knew about. You have to have plausible deni... He has got to be able to deny something plausibly. ́вье, вы смотрели Су́ксеши́шн? Yes, that was a very good show on Netflix.

Or is it Prime or wherever. Yeah, so spoiler alert. But at some point, either in the latter half of the first season or early half of the second season Gary is that the young kid's name? The young kid. You had Kendall was the oldest. Yeah, he was a bad... No, the nephew. The nephew that was always there that yes, he vomited in the first episode. He was hilarious. I forget what whatever his name is. He had to deal with something without telling his superiors because otherwise it would be quote unquote ish on their hands. And he didn't want that. Exactly. Well, I mean, this isn't a spoiler so much, but the company did something highly illegal

that he learned about that all the people above him were like, this is nuclear. We must not, this must not come back to us in any way. So we're like, you have to, oh, Greg was his name. You have to handle this, deal with it. And by dealing with it, they meant destroy all evidence. And so yeah, that's, you know, that's, they handled that exact concept on that program. That's a good catch. But the US government is like that times 100 You know, especially when you're getting into the world of secrecy and intelligence and all the when the empire

managing an empire impinges on the actual activities that we learn about in civics class like in grade six and seven like You know, we have to elect our members to Congress and they vote on laws and if we don't like their laws we can vote them out. You know all of this stuff that people are told is how the government works. None of that works when you get into the actual nuts and bolts of it because we don't have that system. It's like in the, what was it, the movie Alien, where the alien comes out of the guy's chest. That's us.

We have a system, it's dead body. The system we have is a dead body. President, Congress, Supreme Court, whatever. It's dead because this other system has grown up outside of it and within it that's taken it over. I used to call it, I still call it the national security state. Can call it a lot of things. It's a system that has taken over.

The problem is that we're attached to the old forms, the old systems of government. And we want to think that those things are still viable. And it's important for governments and states to convince people that those institutions are still viable, so it keeps people content. So here's a question that I'm sure you're asked plenty. If the government is as interested in keeping a lid on this and then there's someone like you who has a wide-reaching platform who's exposing this or exposing the odious nature of the government, why given that they're so powerful do they not just shut people like you down?

Well, their absolute attempts are being made all the time to shut people down who go against the narrative. For someone like myself, yes, I do have an audience, but it's not an enormous audience. I mean, my view counts are actually lower than yours on YouTube. I have people who buy my books, and I mean, I get out there on network TV and I'll do interviews for ancient aliens and places like that. So I do have a little bit of reach, but it, but I don't think it's anywhere nearly so significant

that it threatens their narrative. I mean, when people do have a reach that is large enough and they threaten that narrative, you see government agencies going after them all the time. Not to arrest them, not to throw them into prison, that's considered old hat. You just destroy someone's credibility in any way you can. Those attempts go on all the time. I've been lucky that I have not been shut down in the way that you're referring to,

and I hope that I can continue to navigate that process very well. Yeah. So my last UFO interview, well sorry, my last interview with a UFO big wig was eight months ago and in part the reason for the lack of frequency with these with this topic is because I've backed away. I've backed away why because I'm disappointed and I'm dismayed. So the reason is that there's always the promise of some tangible governmental or scientifically sanctioned data that's just around the corner. There was the rumor of 40 new whistleblowers coming forward. It never panned out but even if it was 140, then it's the next question is so what? Because there's only so much that that talking can do. And I see that

I see acrimony developing in the people who are involved in this scene. So I went to the Soul Foundation, the Soul Conference, and the most euphoric people there were the attendees. And the most euphoric people there were the attendees and like the the rest of the people who are actually involved they're they're calloused they're embattled and I I see this this this Dispeptic attitude also growing on the part of the UFO community for people who have been in it Like you can can actually tell how long have you been in it by how bitter are you. So I see this jadedness developing in myself as well. And luckily I can identify it before it becomes something significant. So I've just backed away.

And there's just something about this topic that's not right, man. There's something about it. So it's always been like that. Yeah no I feel your pain, I get it, I get what you're saying. I'm trying to figure out like- I've also been burned, I've also been burned so I don't know maybe I'll keep this in, I'll keep this in or maybe I'll take this out I don't know but the approximately one or two years ago there was this Canadian government association, something that was supposed to develop between the Canadian government and the USA UFO people who have knowledge. I won't say who, but Grant Cameron was involved in this and people, if you're watching, you can look, you can ask Grant

himself. It's just not my place to speak about this, but there was an MP called Larry Maguire who wanted to host a panel, again, between the MPs in Canada and then the bigwigs. And I was part of the Canadian government requested that I be a mediator because of my background in physics and the fact that I'm Canadian and then that I know somewhat about this topic while not being a ufologist. So if anything, I'm a mathematical physics researcher who dabbles sometimes in the phenomenon. They liked that. They liked that.

They felt like it was grounded or analytical for whatever reason. Then they set up with, I believe it was like two meetings and I was there. Again, you could ask Grant Cameron. And then it was shut down because of some of the people who were involved on the US side. They didn't like that. They didn't like that if I was to be in some of it was my fault. They didn't like that if I was to be involved, it would somehow be on YouTube. And then it would be UFO tainment. They didn't want it. They thought it would be too popular. They wanted this.

These meetings to be done in a more clandestine manner. And that left a sour taste in my mouth. to be done in a more clandestine manner. And that left a sour taste in my mouth. I'll look into it. We can maybe even talk privately about it. I can't talk to Grant. Look, I mean, the thing is, you got me thinking. I don't know how jaded I am compared with these other folks you're discussing. Well, one of the reasons, sorry to interrupt you,

interrupt once more Richard, is one of the reasons that you may be my last UFO interviewee for a while, you're not embattled and orgulous. At least I don't see you as embattled and orgulous. Well, it's funny because I'm one of the most blackpilt people that I know. Like I have very little confidence

in the future of human civilization. I'm not an optimist. I could be wrong. At least that's not my impression. Well, I am, I'm a happy person. You know, I mean, I try my very best to have a positive personal philosophy, which has done me good over the years. And also, I mean, I love, I'm actually, I'm interested in this subject, not because I love, I'm actually, I'm interested in this subject, not because I think that I'm gonna change the world. I don't, I don't believe that it would be nice,

but I don't think so. And actually, I don't know if it would be nice. We all think that we've got the ability to know better how the world's supposed to be. And usually we don't. And that includes me. I'm so glad you said that. That's something that I don't hear many people saying.

It's such an arrogance. It's like, this is a complicated world. And, you know, spoke about this very intelligently. Another Canadian, Jordan Peterson, who I very much admire. And he's often said this. It's like, you think you can fix the world? Well, first of all, fix your room.

Clean your room. This is very good advice. Fix the world around you. The world out there is very complicated. And if you change one thing, you're going to have a series of reactions that you probably cannot foresee. And I think that's exactly right.

But for me, I'm engaged in this subject, honestly, because I'm intensely curious about it. I follow my curiosity. And I find the UFO, UAP subject to be incredibly interesting. And it just leads to so many fascinating questions about what is going on in our skies, in our oceans. I'm doing a book on that right now. What does it say about us as a species?

It's one of the most important implications of this. So to me, I see myself as an explorer of this subject. And on that basis, I'm 61 now. And I feel unbelievably lucky that I am able, at the place that I am in, in this life, to be able to pursue a subject full time that is utterly fascinating and important. But it's fascinating and it opens up a whole array of questions that I know I'll never ever fully get answered by the time I check out of this mortal coil, but nonetheless, it sure beats getting a part-time job at Target to make some extra money. I'm no good for that. I'm only good for one thing in this world, and it's delving into questions like this. So for that reason, I do feel that I've avoided becoming overly jaded because I love exploring

this subject. There are definite political ramifications of it. Yes, they're important, and I study them all the time. But I don't really base my entire life's worth on whether or not I think that we're successful in getting all of the transparency and disclosures that we think we want. I mean, if that's what we're going to base the success of our lives on, and we're going to be in for very big disappointment, there's much, much more going on here in this world. And in this world and exploring who we are. And the UFO subject is one significant way actually to explore who we are. To me that's about. Yeah, I appreciate that you're cognizant enough of your own psyche to understand that your

motivations come from fascination rather than something like something that I'm similar. My it's like a fanaticism that I have. And I find it virtue signaling when I hear people say I'm in this because I'm finding the truth or seeking truth. I just I don't trust any of them. I don't afford any extra respect or regard to someone who claims to be a truth seeker. I used to, but now it's almost the opposite.

Well, I still kind of, I mean, I still want to know what is true. Like that's still very important to me. My reason is that truth seeking has a genealogy that's been corrupted since the 1700s and is progressively worsened. So what people mean when they say truth seeking, they mean fact seeking. And that's such an impoverished view because there are far too many facts. So you have to have some selection mechanism of this. This is called relevance realization. And furthermore, finding more and more facts is, it's an unthinking endeavor that requires little IQ.

So what you can do is just take some atomic facts and apply rules of deduction like good on you, your chat GPT. So what's difficult to me, what I respect is goodness seeking. Forget about truth seeking, like that you have my admiration for. And a goodness seeker identifies the selfishness and the inimical jealousy in themselves. Like, show me that you've gotten to that stage, man. Don't tell me you're a truth seeker. Show me that you're a goodness seeker.

Yeah, well, everyone's got the angel on the one side and the devil on the other. Everyone. No one is immune to that. So everyone's got a little dark patch inside their soul. It's everywhere. Everyone's got it. Which means that everyone can be an angel and everyone can be a devil.

So we have to recognize that. And if we pretend that that's not the case, then we're just deluding ourselves. So yes, goodness seeking, I firmly agree with what you're saying. I love that. Truth seeking still has a lot of value to me. It is something that actually, I would say, is genuinely important. But I hear what you're saying. It becomes virtue signaling within this community of ours very easily. It's funny you mentioned this 17th century or 1700s in science. It made me think of the philosopher, I don't want to get too derailed here, but the philosopher

Immanuel Kant, who was, you know about Kant, so he's the guy who really first said, it is through our minds that we are filtering this reality. That was all Kant. He was following up on some questions left by another genius, David Hume, but Kant really was saying, we perceive space and time through the filters of our minds. And so the actual objective reality of this world is not something that we're actually even really getting. We're perceiving it through the filter of our senses and through the filter of our cognition. And so Kant ever since raises the question of, well, how are we actually getting the

information that we think we're getting? It raises the whole question of what's called epistemology, which is kind of what you're sort of getting at. Talking about facts is one thing, but facts without a proper organization can be very deceptive also. But you know. Yeah, I'd like to jump on that if you don't mind.

So this is exactly like you hit the nail on the head I don't know if we're both hitting the same nail from the same angle So let me let me point out a different angle Another reason that I've backed away from this topic is because of something called the hermeneutics of suspicion So this is a concept people can look up and what it is is that Since the 1700 since Immanuel Kant, sorry, prior to Immanuel Kant, in the ancients believed that truth, beauty and love were tied. You can't separate them. And now, formally speaking, what Kant did was he disembroiled them.

So Plato would say, look, there's the unity of the virtue. You can't have courage without telling the truth. You can't tell the truth without some vulnerability. You can't be vulnerable without humility. You can't be humble without wisdom. You can't be wise without justice. And you can't have justice without patience, etc. They all bleed into one another and they come together at some point that's akin to God. The more you explore each one, the more you have to incorporate the other. So then, Immanuel Kant did away with this. And then we've been lost since this. Nietzsche and Freud and Karl Marx took the ideas from Kant and developed it to the textual analysis that's called hermeneutics of suspicion, implying that there's always some information that's hidden

from you and you're supposed to be suspicious. And this leads you to the to cynicism and misanthropy and mistrust and acrimony and there's a permanent state of dissatisfaction. Why? Because you'll always be suspicious of the facts that are revealed to you. And then it's become this since the enlightenment the individual is myself so I need to evaluate the facts. Some readings of Christianity, this is shown to me by a friend of mine named Matthew or maybe DC Schindler or John Vervecky, is that the smallest unit of the individual isn't you, it's the family. So it's the mother, father, child triad, and that you're not a whole person until you're a part of that. And that truth is something you participate in. It's not a proposition that you believe. It's not something

that's factually the case. So this is why I think that Luis Elizondo may be more right than he knows he's right when he was asked the question of, what is it we should do? Like we're people who want to know more about the phenomenon. What is it we should do? And then he said you should hug your family. I think he's profoundly correct. I agree with that philosophy 100%. I also think that what you say that hermeneutics of suspicion was not a phrase I knew. It's been a while since I even thought about Herman Unix to be honest with you. But it actually makes sense. This whole idea of the kind of suspicious society that we live within. There's good reasons why people are suspicious because we've learned that the ideals we were taught about, the way our world world works are not in any way relevant to the actual workings of the society.

I mean, I went through this whole thing in my 20s and 30s when I studied the covert world in all different ways, even before I got into UFOs. So it's easy to become disillusioned. When you are raised with certain unrealistic ideals about how the world is and then you learn the truth, yeah, that can make you jaded for sure if you're not too careful. The idea about, you mentioned Nietzsche, you mentioned Freud, you mentioned Marx, I've

studied all of them in great detail in my earlier years, every one of those guys. And I would just say it's true when you look at our, look at the UFO community is actually a perfect encapsulation of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Elizondo comes out six years ago with, you know, along with Chris Mellon and they're talking about TTSA with Tom DeLonge. And there were folks in the UFO community immediately throwing rotten tomatoes at those guys. They actually got video declassified that no one had been able to get declassified. They got them out.

Not through collusion with the highest up, by the way. They were able to be, they were a little bit sneaky, a little bit coy. They were able to get those things out there because they were smart and they were able to get them declassified. And people accusing them, along with the Pentagon accusing Elizondo of all these things that were not true. And so there's this suspicion and here's what I wanted to say. You have people focusing on what they believe are the hidden motives. This goes back to your point.

What's your actual motive? Well, you're actually working for the CIA. You're actually working for the deep state. You're actually doing this and that. People love to infer what they believe are the motivations of someone that they don't even know. Rather than the only thing that you can do infer what they believe are the motivations of someone that they don't even know. Rather than, the only thing that you can do as a detached, objective person is listen

to what they're actually saying and watch what they're actually doing. And you ask yourself, is what he's saying true to the best of the ability that I can to analyze it? And if what he's saying is true and if this other thing seems to be true, and if this is true, well then great, let's just work with that rather than, you know, disparaging these people because you don't trust their motives. Which I mean, I've seen this all over the place.

So this culture of suspicion, on the one hand, look, I'm totally sympathetic to it. We have every reason and right, and there's a lot of wisdom in being suspicious of the people who are actually at the apex of the structure of power as it exists on this planet. At least that's my opinion. But it's also important like,

for us to keep our eye on the ball and not to cast every single person who has ever worked within that government structure, for example, as worthy of our suspicion until we actually study what they've had to say. There've always been people on the inside who have divergent opinions. There've always been factions throughout all of human history. And so I like this idea of this hermeneutics of suspicion can prompt me to study it a little bit more. We're done.

So I would say that instead of being, I'm not suggesting that you're just wholeheartedly accepting a fact. It's almost like a different mode of being in the same way that Eric from I don't know if you've heard this concept from Eric from Fear of freedom author. Yeah that you could have the having mode or the being mode. So the having mode is external objects I need to have that I must have more power. I must have more truth. I must have more more Christmas gifts I must have I must take I must acquire Versus the being mode.

So being in an appreciative mode or being in a heartful open mode. Those are different modes. It's not, okay, so if I'm not going to have computers, what else should I have? It's like, no, no, the answer isn't about having. It's an entirely different orientation. Well, that's a philosophy that a very wealthy and affluent society can afford to have. I mean, most of human history we've read on the verge of starvation, just barely able. We've spent millions of years, literally millions as hunters and gatherers, figuring out how

we're going to get our next meal. So people have, we are genetically predisposed to that having mode that Eric Fromm's talking about. Like it's built in, it's baked into the cake. So to think that we can just get rid of it is an illusion. We are that way. And by the way, that having mode is what's allowed us to conquer the planet.

It's what has allowed us to become the apex predators of planet earth and to be able to go out into space and do all the things that we do. Like that's what we are. We're a violent, aggressive, territorial, greedy species. That's what we are. That's in our core. That's, if you want to get into original sin, that's what it is. And it's never going to come out. Never going to get that out. But what we can do, I would like to think, is become aware of the primal drives that are within us and

recognize within the current society that we have right now that some of those drives are maybe counterproductive to our overall happiness and we can do our best to consciously not to mitigate. You mentioned Freud a little while ago. One of Freud's best, my favorite book by Freud was called Civilization and its Discontents which he wrote in 1929. It was really a smart book. It was a brilliant book. Freud is looking at the development of human society.

The conflict as always has been between at the development of human society and the conflict, as always has been between our primal urges and the demands of modern civilization as existed at that time. And that's kind of where we're at. Like it's, you know, I think we're foolish to deny that fundamental state of our being, that desire to have and grab and take and to defend

our territory and to ensure our next meal and to create wealth. Again, it's baked into our genetics at this point. Not going to get rid of it. I understand and I too believe the same until I read about, well, Victor Frankl has this book about man's search for meaning. And in it, it's effectively saying you can be grateful in a gulag, you can be thankful in a tyranny. And Maslow's hierarchy is upside down. What should come first is your alignment.

And you see people who are monks who have nothing, who actually voluntarily give it all up to just to orient themselves properly. I agree with you. And actually, Victor Frankl is brilliant and that book is amazing. And what you say about the monks, that is all true. But it's still all predicated, I would say, on a foundation of already acquired wealth. Like if you, who is it, was it Napoleon? Always listen to what Napoleon has to say because he's always on target. I think he said, you know, society is always just a few meals away from total anarchy. I think that might have been him. And it's true. You know, you start missing some meals, start going hungry, start losing the roof

over your head, and then ask yourself, how complacent, how happy am I going to be with nothing? Now, I do agree with this attitude that we want and we really need to cultivate. this attitude that we want and we really need to cultivate. This is very much a Buddhist idea, frankly. We want to cultivate this sense of being like you're talking about. And we want to move away from this constant grasping. This is what the Buddha was talking about. Every Buddhist will say pain is unavoidable. Suffering that's your decision.

You wanna suffer? Your suffering is your choice. That is, you know, bitching and moaning and complaining about how unfair things are, how terrible things are. That's the suffering that Buddha talked about that we want to, like that is unnecessary. You're gonna have pain, you're gonna have loss, You're gonna have pain, you're gonna have loss,

you're gonna have disease, you're gonna have people who let you down. You're gonna let people down. You're gonna fail at countless things in your life, but you don't have to suffer. If you are, if you have the proper mindset, you don't have to suffer needlessly. I agree with that.

I think that's extremely wise. And so I kind of like a lot of what you're saying here. Tell me, tell me what books influenced your heart. So I know that many books have influenced your intellect and influenced your philosophical outlook. But let's say what books, whether nonfiction or fiction, have influenced you? So my favorite, I've got two favorite writers. They're both Russians. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. They're my top two.

Right. Yeah. And they trade places. I don't know who's number one. I go back and forth. Maybe lately Dostoevsky, because I just recently reread The Brothers Karamazov, which is just an amazing, beautiful, absolutely beautiful book. I read that book first time in my early 20s and I actually cried at the conclusion of it. It was so beautiful. And I just reread it less than a year ago. An amazing book. So I love Dostoevsky because I totally convinced this is a man who knew the human soul. And he, like me, was like a good Russian of the 19th century, understood Western liberalism and liberal values,

but developed this aversion to a lot of it. And like what you were saying earlier, understood that the human being is part of a community. It's part of family, it's part of a community. You're not just this isolated automaton that can just decide what your identity is going to be if you decide to have, like, it doesn't work like that. There are things baked deep into you

Into your soul that that we need we need to recognize Dostoevsky to me is the great and he had the most profound psychological insight of people Tolstoy same level same amazing Tolstoy is incredible Tolstoy is this guy who I amazing. Tolstoy is incredible. Tolstoy is this guy who, I mean, you can read one page of War and Peace and you read it very, very slowly. You must read War and Peace very slowly and you just let it soak in because every page is like a nuclear explosion of something incredible happening. And I say this because he had the ability to look at the deep, wow, something incredible happening. And I say this because he had the ability to look at the deep, deep, deep details of everyday life

and to see the universality. And it's a typical conversation in the way that someone moves their head. It's crazy. Tolstoy, in my opinion, if anyone was gifted with the ability to be omniscient and to know what's going on inside everyone's head, Tolstoy and Shakespeare are my two votes. I think they both had that ability.

So they deeply influenced me, and Shakespeare also very much influenced me. I don't know, books that really just speak to me. I'm a big fan of Marcus Aurelius' meditations. I feel like I've been friends with Marcus Aurelius for 40 years, like I've read. I love the poetry of William Butler Yeats. I haven't read him much lately, but he very much influenced me. Tell me about that. Explain. Oh, Yeats was, he's beautiful. He's amazing. So he was born in the 1860s and was really, he was Irish. And I think what I love about his writing

is that he had this connection to this classical lyricism of the English language where he still believed in the beauty, the beauty of the language as comes through loud and clear with the aids. The beauty of the language comes through loud and clear with Yeats, but he had this very modern sensibility about many things. And so he talked about fundamental issues of life and death and growing old and all of these things

with a modern perspective in many ways, but he had this absolute perfect ear for the beauty of the English language. And to me, that's always meant a lot. I like beautifully expressed language. And Yeats is just, he's like next level with that. Whereas we get a lot of the 20th century poets, some of them are amazing, but they're a little bit more abstract or a little more difficult. Yeats comes out of that tradition, I guess romanticism really, where he follows up on some of that tradition, which I'm very fond of, like Yeats, Keats, John Keats, and William Blake.

I love those guys. I'm a big fan of that period of poetry. But I don't know what else has influenced me so much, you know, I can't even, it couldn't mention it all. So explain to me some way that you view the phenomenon that is non-standard. I'll give you some examples. Like some way that you think that most people are viewing it that's incorrect. So in physics, the standard way of conceptualizing what physics is, is you think about initial conditions and then you evolve forward in time by means of the laws of physics, which just means you have something that's inputted and then you have some evolution. That's the laws of physics, the dynamics, then you have some output. That's the standard approach since

Newton. You have some initial data and then you predict. Another way is that you think about what is possible and what is impossible. So the second law is one such law where it's like, okay, it's impossible. It's not, this is not technically true, but it's impossible to lower entropy globally. It's like a no-go theorem on on physics. So one is initial conditions or boundary conditions plus plus evolution. Another is well let's think about in terms of what's possible impossible and let's see if we can formulate a theory of everything from there. So that's called constructor theory. Constructor theory is fairly new. So that's what Chiara Marletto or David Deutsch would say is their new way of approaching physics

Which is completely different than other people's so another example would be in in this UFO phenomenon most people either view it as it's nuts and bolts or it's spiritual and Like it's it's those are the two Options to me. There's a third way Well, okay. Thank you for explaining that. I'm going to start by giving, we're going to have to ease into this. So I'm going to start by giving what I currently think is my overall conception of what is

actually happening. Great. And let's see how deep we can go here. So what I will start by saying is, I believe it is no accident that we are experiencing an enormous amount of UFO or UAP activity today and in the modern era. I think it is contingent on the development

of ourselves as a species. I think the predominance of this phenomenon is intimately related to what we as human beings are up to, particularly since the age of science. I have been trying my very best to track the prevalence of UFO sightings throughout all of human history. I definitely believe that people are way, way too accepting of every single claim about ancient aliens that's out there. I think that is radically overstated. So if that's one thing where I'm gonna disagree, I have a minority position here.

I know that I have a minority position within the UFO community. Because I think most will just reflectively say, oh, they've been here forever. They, whoever they are. And I'm like, who are they? Is it the gray aliens? Have they been here forever? Really? And what, on what evidence do you make that claim? When you, when you see the evidence that people end up using for the prevalence of ancient sightings, it's pretty damn weak. It's pretty weak. Now I'm a huge fan of the book Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck.

It's one of my favorite UFO books. I have read Wonders in the Sky cover to cover, probably close to 10 times, between five and 10 times. It's one of my favorite nighttime readings. Because it's nice, because it's like case after case and I can just read until I fall asleep. But I've gone through that book countless times. And it's an excellent book. I commend them. But a couple of things. So A, when you go through that they go through all these ancient UFO sightings.

There's actually not that many. Like, you'll go 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years between sightings from ancient times, which of course makes sense. Literacy was not nearly as widespread back then. Sightings did not get recorded commonly. Yes, we understand that. But then when you actually read the sightings, a lot of them are, can easily be interpreted a whole bunch of different ways, rather than just aliens. I mean, that's just the reality. We've got to be able to look at these things carefully. And the other thing is that there's very little understanding that people have. And I'm including Jacques and Chris in this, and I admire them both. I know them both. But there's often a limited understanding of the cultures that they're writing about

when they describe these cases. So, and I'm talking about like political or social upheavals happening at the time, where particularly in medieval Europe, a lot of these sightings that people speak to, medieval Europe, a lot of these sightings that people speak to, you have to understand the specifics of the society of the time. You must, or you're never going to get anywhere understanding these things. So anyway- Can you give an example?

Yeah, I'll give you a perfect example. So one, and I don't want to single out Jacques and Chris on this because I don't actually know if they even include this case. A 1661 sighting of an alleged UFO. I did this in my USO research because I'm writing a book on USOs. Object comes out of the River Severn near Bristol, England in 1661. And it's described as looking like a kite. Kites were actually flown at this time.

So someone said it resembled a kite of the kind that young people fly these days. So you read it and you're thinking, okay, so maybe it's angular, unusual, coming out of the river. That's quite unusual as well. So you go on and you read this and the person says it then transformed into this grim looking person who had, I think he said, a grim countenance. So it was a vision, an apparition that looked like a man.

And then that apparition changed to a gallant man on horseback. And then that apparition changed to a beautiful woman in a gown. Now, the guy who wrote this in 1661 said this was seen by a party of individuals walking along the river, and he stressed that these are not religious crazy people. These are very normal down to earth people. So you read that and you're like, that's very interesting. Until you actually understand English history of 1661. In 1661 English history was Oliver Cromwell had just recently died. The Lord Protector, the man who overthrew Parliament, who overthrew the Crown. And they were in the early period of what was known as the Restoration, where the royalty was being brought back, you know. And so, what does it signify?

So the guy with the grim countenance is clearly the Puritans, who had just been thrown out of power. The guy on horseback, on the cavalier, was King Charles II, who was a good horseman and was known for this and was very popular. And in Bristol, by the way, which was a seat of royalist sentiment, they certainly were very happy overall with the return of the king. And then the woman is peace. I mean, it's clearly symbolic. And the story, I'm just going to say right now, I don't believe that that vision happened. I'm never going to believe that. That is a story. And the thing that people have to understand is this is how people often worked back in

those days. And it's not like they were lying intentionally, but they were creating their truth, as it were. And this was very much the norm. This went all through the period of American journalism through the 19th century, the so-called yellow press. We talk about the airships of the 1890s. Same thing, by the way. Most of those airship sightings were spurious. So I'm getting off track here, but I'm pointing out that it is absolutely crucial when we're looking at these old UFO alleged reports that we have some understanding

of the society out of which they come. We have to. It doesn't mean that we use that, therefore, to debunk all the old sightings. I'm not suggesting this. Well, at some point you have to separate wheat from chaff. By doing so you strengthen the wheat. Yes, that's absolutely the case.

So here's what I'm saying to give you my basic theory of what I think is happening. I do think that there is reason to speculate, to think that there's been a long-standing observation of us. I think that there's enough of the ancient sightings, when I read them, they pass the smell test, I guess I'll just say that. I can't know for sure, I wasn't around back then and there was no move on to interview the witnesses and to get all the details of the case. But some of them smell right. They look good to me. And it makes sense to me. It makes perfect sense to me. Here's the thing. Any observing intelligence is going to know that once homo sapiens developed complex language, let's say 50, 60,000 years ago, 70,000 years ago,

roughly is when anthropologists believe that we had like the beginnings of complex grammar where we could have complicated conversations about things. Gave us a tremendous advantage. It allowed us to share information in a sophisticated way with other people. It gave us power as a community. You're not just one person with a good idea. You can share it with your whole group of 25 people and now you can act together in concert. That's powerful. So I firmly believe that any observing intelligence, if there was one, I think there probably was, once they saw 50,000 years, that's how many generations is that? That's 2,000 generations. Not that long.

If you're looking at a longitudinal study, like 2000 generations of mice is not that long, right? So 2000 generations of human beings, that's 50,000 years basically. I now believe that a very intelligent, perceptive civilization could easily predict that those people, now that they've got the key, the key is creating a system of abstract thought, the ability to share that information in a sophisticated way, to share information. That is something that takes its own logic. It has its own logic. You could be a Primate you could be an insect you could be a dinosaur you could be a bird once you learn the secret of

Complex grammar and logical communication like that that is literally the key to the kingdom and from there it's only a matter of time before you discover complex science and Mathematics and things like that. That leads directly from language. This is my opinion. I can't, I wish any papers on this, but I feel very strongly that this is correct. So that it's all predictable.

It could have been predictable maybe from when we discovered the use of controlled fire, who knows? But certainly with language, language is a major milestone. So it's all been predictable. But the fact is, an intelligent civilization would know that ancient archaic humans were in no position to even begin to understand where these other beings were coming from, obviously. There'd be nothing that they could really give us except let us develop the way we have developed.

This is what I think. And so we've been subject to a kind of a low level monitoring process probably for a long time, until the last couple of centuries, when it's clearly bumped up. And I can say this because I've studied the history of UFO sightings, probably about as well as anyone that I know.

So I've studied all the ancient sightings and I have read thousands and thousands and thousands of UFO sightings through the 20th, through the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries. So now part of it is that we have a much better ability to record them and that has absolutely helped to amplify the quantity of reports. But the fact is, I am convinced that if we'd had anywhere

near the density of sightings that we're having today 200, 300 years ago, we would have known. I think people would have noticed. And yet no one was really talking about it. Those are smart people. 300 years ago, they were highly intelligent. There was no mystery of people talking about what are these objects in the sky. So there is in fact something different about the last 200 years? Yes, absolutely.

Something very dramatically different in terms of the quantity and quality of sightings. There is no question. The quality, the specificity, and the detail. Like, I don't know of a single archaic ancient sighting that clearly and unequivocally describes a metallic mechanical craft that I would say confidently is technological.

It's possible, but you don't really get those descriptions. There's a few that could potentially go that way, so I don't rule it out. But in terms of quantity, you start getting a lot of them starting in the 19th century and then of course really picking up in the 20th century and especially with the Second World War. It just goes through the roof with the Second World War. And that makes perfect sense logically. Put yourself in the position of these other beings

They're watching us It's only a matter of a few generations where we were you know for thousands of years We've been a society of horses pulling wooden carts and then suddenly we got electricity we get airplanes We get radios we get televisions. We get guided missiles. We then develop computers We're now splitting the atom by the 1940s. Like that's fast. That's super fast. Because the people who were involved in splitting the atom in the 1940s, their grandparents were living in covered wagons. Okay, so it's really fast. So it's the new is the development of nuclear bombs? What is it specifically

part of it? It's also the development of radar, it's the development of computing technology. You know, Alan Turing is just as much a part of this as Robert Oppenheimer. It's computers. I think people in the 50s were too overwhelmed with the nuclear reality to realize there's other technological reasons also that these ETs would be watching us not just what specifically about these technologies Is it so in the nuclear case it could be said that it would destroy the world So is it always about self-destruction? No, it's no yes and no The nuclear part of it is important Because we do have the ability to destroy every single bit of life on this planet with a nuclear holocaust

That's a terrifying reality and that has to be of interest But no just more generally the technological transformation that we have gone through during the 20th century and it continues All was totally predictable in my opinion. They knew this They knew this long before we knew this, that this was going to happen, that we were going to transform into a highly technological society once we discovered a few principles. And that's what happened in the 20th century. Now, we may have gotten a boost, maybe, Now, we may have gotten a boost. Maybe, as some have argued, the transistor, which was patented in 1947, came as a result

of prior acquired tech. Is it possible? I don't rule it out. Not talking about Roswell, but maybe Cape Gerardo from 1941. Maybe, but be that as it may, our trajectory was totally predictable. And so what that means is that they knew we were about to jump into their world anytime. Once we developed a certain, because this is not a normal incremental progression, this

is a leap, this is a new paradigm. We're not just incrementally progressing here. Take a few steps back and compare our world to that of the wild west of the 1880s. It's not even remotely similar. It's only a few generations. We're in a fundamentally different reality in which we're now looking at transhumanism, genetic manipulation, CRISPR tech, nanotech, strong AI, quantum computing. I mean, the sophistication of our data management, digital data management is we take this for granted but it's off the charts.

So all of that has made qualitative changes in human society that I believe were totally predictable by an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization that's gone through the process. So what I'm saying is we are under intense observation right now for this reason. And now let's get into what else is going on. Would any visiting intelligence, and I believe that there are probably multiple ones, by the way, as part of what I believe, would they be interested in monitoring

or guiding as they might look at it, or we might look at it managing or controlling our transition process, because this is what it is, it's a transition. We're basically going from natural human to artificial human. And that, by the way, terrifies me personally, but who cares what I think?

Doesn't matter what I think, it's happening. We're creating, we've already been creating an artificial environment for many, many, many generations. We live in artificial homes and houses. We don't live under the skies. We live in very, we like to control our environment. So we've had some practice at this, but we're now going to a point where we're going

into virtual reality, augmented reality. Like what is even going to be real? We don't, a society of total digital surveillance and monitoring and control, essentially a totalitarian system in which there's not going to be any privacy forever. How is that going to change human psychology? Probably quite dramatically. We're going through just a fundamental transformation that, again, I would also say was probably predictable. Probably. I hate to say that because it makes it sound inevitable, but

you know, that's what I think. So they know this. And do they have an interest in managing that process? I'm sure some of them would. I'm sure some of them would. So I do believe that there's been a kind of, here's where we go off into the deep end, but I'm just gonna say this. Has there been the possibility of an infiltration by some of them into our world? I think the answer is yes. Has to be considered as possible.

You'd be a fool to pretend that it's impossible. And so then what you look for is, are there, what evidence could be used to support this? And the only evidence that I could use to support it is the research of various UFO researchers who have developed and collected their own stories of interaction with human-looking nonhumans. There's a lot of those. I've encountered a few of them myself from people. They're quite compelling. I do think that there's a...

Just a moment, you've encountered a few... I've spoken... ...human-looking aliens? Not me personally. I've interviewed a number of people who were quite credible to me. One was a retired US Air Force Colonel with a PhD who had a hell of an experience. I've talked about it from time.

I can mention it here. I spoke to a woman who actually I liked her story even more. Housewife from Western Pennsylvania. I met her 15 years ago at a conference. She came up to my table, I was selling some books, you know, with her husband. And she said, I just want to tell you this crazy story that happened to me in 1965 when I was 15 years old. So I said, all right, go. So, she was in church with her mother in this tiny little town in western Pennsylvania where she said everyone knew everyone, especially in church, she said. And so, she's with her mom and she said this couple walked in to sat in front of her. She

said they were like supermodels. They were absolute male-female. She said they were like supermodels. They were absolute male, female. She said they were just like gorgeous Hollywood blonde. She said they had this most perfect blue clothing that she had ever seen. And she, I think even implied like as a 15 year old girl, I was kind of obsessed with fashion, you know, all that. But she's studying the fabric of what they were wearing. She said it was the most amazing, like they were the most amazing spectacle in this church

and she said, I was shocked that no one was looking at them. She said, I was mesmerized by them. I couldn't take my eyes off them. And they seemed like they didn't quite fit in. And then she said to me, and that's when I could hear them in. And then she said to me, and that's when I could hear them in my mind. I said, well, what do you mean? She said, well, I could hear them thinking to each other. They weren't talking. I could hear them thinking.

I said, well, what were they thinking? She said, well, it was kind of like one was saying to the other, well, we appear to be fitting in pretty well here. And then the other one said, yes, except for the girl behind us who can hear us. This is what she said to me. And I'll just, I'll pause and I'll just say,

this woman was eminently believable to me. It's absolutely credible. So to continue, she hears this telepathically, I guess, and she was kind of shocked, who wouldn't be. And she said at that point, though, I didn't hear anything else from them. So, it was as if they knew this security breach and they shut it down. So, they go through the rest of church. This is a Catholic mass, by the way.

And she was almost amused by the fact that they didn't seem to know how to This is a Catholic mass, by the way. And she was almost amused by the fact that they didn't seem to know how to act within a Catholic mass. I grew up going to Catholic mass. So sit, kneel, do the sign of the cross, you get up, you do all these different things, all these motions. They were looking around to try to do it right. So anyway, mass ends finally, and she's fascinated by them, of course, and they get up and they, they're out of the church immediately. They jump ahead of the crowd and they're gone. And she gets in her mind that she is going to follow them.

So her mother was sitting next to her, oblivious to the whole scenario. The young woman who's telling me the story gets up and she works her way through the crowd. Her mother is yelling, get back here young lady, where do you think you're going? What are you doing? What's going on? And the girl just goes. So she gets to the front of the church and she sees the couple and they've walked across this big parking lot and they're going over this little crest of a hill and she sc walked across this big parking lot and they're going over this little crest of a hill. And she scoots across the parking lot. She gets to the top of the hill. She sees them. They're walking down this field toward a wooded area. And she starts down

after them. And then she stops dead in her tracks because she sees a third person. This is crazy, but I swear to you, this is what she said to me. Said there's a man standing at the edge of the woods. She said, do you remember the character Lurch from the Addams Family TV show? Tall, black suit. She said he looked kind of like that guy. He looked like Lurch.

Very tall and it intimidated her, it frightened her. And where did this person appear from? From the edge of the woods. He was waiting for this couple that was walking to him, the couple that was in church. They're walking across the field toward this guy, according to the woman. They walk into the woods with the guy. He turns, he walks into the woods with them. And that's the end of her story.

That was the whole thing. So it was a crazy thing. It's like, who are these people? Who is Lurch over there? What was this? It's very bizarre. It seems like you've got this group of blonde, blue-eyed, Pleiadian looking, I'm not saying they were for the Pleiades, but these individuals that were very unusual, that appear to have a telepathic capability, and they're going into the church for some unknown reason. They didn't drive there in a car. They're coming through these woods. What's that all about? I got a similar story from a retired colonel, and I'll make this very brief, but basically the same type of story.

He told this to me with his wife who was present. They were at a Las Vegas casino hotel when this happened. They were with a third friend and they see this woman that they are convinced was telepathic and an alien. And the reason was the friend that they were with, apparently according to this colonel, was a psychic, a friend of theirs. Who knows what that means?

But the psychic stopped and she said to the colonel, that woman there is not, she's not like us. And the woman was this absolutely drop dead, beautiful blonde woman in a blue outfit. Of course, it's Las Vegas, and you're gonna get that in Las Vegas. But nonetheless, that's what this psychic said. So the psychic and the wife went down an escalator

to get away, they were nervous. The Colonel stood behind, he's observing the woman. And he said to me, she was maybe 50 feet away. He said, like she turned slightly toward him and he heard her in his mind, he said to me, just like what this other woman said. He heard this woman in his mind and the woman almost sounded like a police officer on the beat, essentially, nothing to see here, go about your business. This is not anything for you. Like that's what he heard and it startled him. He's thinking,

what's this all about? And then at that moment this equally beautiful man, blonde hair, blue, maybe they were in Cirque du Soleil, who knows really, but he's conferring with her. He can't hear them. They then walk toward the escalator where he's standing and he's thinking, good he's thinking, good, I'm going to confront them. I'm going to say something. And they walk right by him. He says nothing. And then he follows them down the escalator. This is actually hilarious because as they're going down the escalator,

the wife interrupted his story to me. And she says, oh my God, my friend and I were hiding behind a slot machine, peeking behind a slot machine, peeking behind the slot machine, watching these two. That is a comical element to this. So it was good though that she was there to kind of corroborate this story, you know? Anyway, the couple gets down to the bottom of the escalator and they just walk off, unmolested,

they go about their business, that's the end of them. But what's weird is that the three of them are talking about this afterward. And the psychic friend apparently also did some kind of hypnotherapy, regression, who knows? Like there's a lot of people that will do that. And she says as a colonel, I could regress you and maybe you can remember better what some of the things that you may have heard. I think that's what they were getting into. And he goes to do this with her.

And when he does the regression, this is a couple of days later, every time she's trying to regress him, he hears, they hear construction noise outside the house, jackhammers and noises. They go actually to check and there's nothing there. So they give up. He says, look, I'll be back in town next month. Maybe we can do it then. So he calls a month later and says, hey, I'm going to be around. I want to, let's try that regression again. The friend says, what regression? He says, the regression that we did last month, don't you remember? According to what he said and the wife,

she had no memory of that. So, she had no memory of the event. So somehow in the subsequent month, her memory had been tampered with by some unknown group. I think that's a pretty crazy story, but I had no problem believing this colonel who told me this and his wife who was there to corroborate critical parts of it.

So what are these people? Who are they? Are they just regular human beings who've just got gnarly powers and they can get inside your head? Well, maybe. Or maybe there's something else going on. Maybe there's a,

a faction of beings that are just very quietly hanging out here for whatever purpose. I tend to think that that is true. I don't think they all look human. I think that there are definitely beings that do not look human. And I think that as far as what's the general scenario, I've been taking a long time to get to that and I apologize. But I think that we are and our planet are subject of great, great interest right now. I do think there's probably a lot of life in the universe, but I still maintain, I think planets like our own are quite special and unique and not a dime a dozen. And when you have, we don't just have life here, we have complex, incredible life that's everywhere. We are exploding with all kinds

of genetic diversity. So that's got to be of interest. And then where we are as a species are of interest. Where are they coming from? Are they coming from another planet or another dimension? Are they physical or are they spiritual? I'm going to say I think that they are physical. They may have the ability to manipulate what we would consider dimensions. And I think that's where the interdimensional

aspect probably comes in. I don't know that I would call them the ones who are landing in craft, the ones who are entering oceans or coming out of oceans or coming in from an altitude of 200,000 feet down to land on the ground, tracked on radar. I don't think that they're spiritual entities. I think they're physical and they come from somewhere.

I assume they come from another world, that they're quite advanced. And figuring out the agenda is really very, very important. And I don't know that I've got all the answers to what the agendas are. Are they benign or are they malevolent? I think it's a real fallacy to say that a species that is inherently much more technologically advanced is inherently more ethical than ours. I mean, a lot of the new age community, think seems to believe this that these ets are are all ethical and

Why do you think that is why do you think they believe that they're naive? They're just very naive. They're idealists. They don't know any better. I Mean, that's really what I believe. I think It's really pretty simple. There's there's a lot of naivete in our society about this. Now, I'm not saying that these other aliens haven't figured out a way to manage their society in a way that they can prevent themselves from destroying themselves. They probably do that through some form of totalitarian control though. Hive mind, that seems to me the most logical way that they would do it.

You have to control. But I mean, look, if they come from another planet, you have to assume a few things. That they, like us, became the apex predators of their world. They would have forward-facing binocular predatory vision. They are used to manipulating the environment. To get to the point of being the top species on their planet,

that meant that they had to subjugate other species to do their work for them, which is what we do. We subjugate plants, we subjugate animals, we make them work for us. We take it all for granted, but we wouldn't be able to do what we do without controlling all the other species of the planet. We take it all for granted, but we wouldn't be able to do what we do without controlling all the other species of the planet.

And so they must have done the same thing. And they must have gone through a period of extreme violence to do so, which is what we've done. We've only succeeded because we're violent. That's what they must have done. Now, maybe they're not as outwardly violent anymore, but that doesn't mean they're not used to getting their own way. I'm sure they're used to getting their own way because they're quite good at it.

And so they're here now. So what does that mean? Well, they're used to getting their own way. Now they may support our development. They may have problems with our development, they may understand many, many things that we have not even begun to understand. I'm sure that's true. But does that mean inherently that they have what we would say are our best interests at

heart? I don't know that for an instant. I don't know that for an instant. I don't know that for an instant. I have to assume they have, as long as they have physical bodies, as long as they need to eat food and have a shelter and reproduce, then I have to assume that they have their own interests. And those interests might coincide with ours to a certain extent, or they may diverge from ours to a certain extent, just like any intelligent species would have divergent interests.

I thought that most likely occurred to you is that if these are intelligent beings, not us, and in this 15-year-old story case, the 15 year old girl at the church. So presumably they want to be surreptitious. So why would they be so conspicuous? They're so much more advanced than us. It should be relatively straightforward to understand what would stand out. In other words, for them not to look so beautiful or not to be, to wear such amazing clothing and like, look, I know it's... I have the problem that it's hard for me to not look beautiful.

So, I understand. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. That was an old TV commercial. But what do you think? What do you make of that? Like look, there was obviously the, on the opposite end, that lurch looking guy. Right. So, they can make two ends of the spectrum.

It seems improbable that they wouldn't be able to make some middle part of the spectrum. That's a good question. I don't know if I have the answer to that. I don't know. I would love to be able to ask them, why are you guys so good looking? That's kind of scary.

Like, why do you have to look better than us and give us an inferiority complex? If I ever get the opportunity to ask, I will make sure that I ask on your behalf. But in all seriousness, I don't know. It's a good question. Maybe they should have better genetics. Maybe that's it. Here's a theory, just tossing it out there. Let's say you're an alien species that's been here for a certain period of time, long time. You might want your own humans to like work for you, to be your avatars.

You may not be able just to walk around on the surface of the planet. It's not safe for you. Too much solar radiation or too little or too much gravity or too many microbes that are harmful. Like there's a whole bunch of reasons why an alien extraterrestrial species would strongly hesitate before they come walking around on

Earth. Maybe they can't breathe the atmosphere very well, probably. So what you would want to do is take some of these humans who are, you know, they're pretty clever. They could work for you. They could work their way up to middle management, perhaps, and you have them and you genetically enhance them. You've got your own version of CRISPR technology, of course.

You can make them live many hundreds of years, perhaps. And why not make them beautiful? Sure. Why not? So, in summary, many people ask, hey, Richard, you've been in this for 40 years. You're one of the most seasoned people. Not quite.

Like you've mentioned. Right. For several decades and I know you just turned 32 a couple of days ago. Yeah. So what is your perspective? You also bring a unique perspective because you can integrate history, like you've mentioned before with the Jacques Vallee story of 1661 if I'm not mistaken. Okay. So is a correct summary that language is a nurse crop which leads inexorably to the development of the devices for our artificiality. So okay. And that's something significant.

It's my current theory. Yeah. So, okay, and that's something significant. It's my current theory, yeah. I mean, I don't know how to test it. And I don't really know if other people involved in human origins have speculated along these lines. I try to understand what they're saying. This is just my own line of thought, but I think it's true. I think language is the key. Artificial structure of information like that.

The ability to share the information. You're kind of duplicating brains, as it were. So I think that's the foundation of our real power as a society, as a species. Partly when I hear stories about some physical body or even the grays and people will say, well, there's so much more advanced. I'm always thinking, why do you think that's more advanced? So our science fiction stories and even okay. So our stories are that we develop artificial intelligence. We manipulate at the atomic scale and then there could be something like gray goo. I'm sure you've heard about gray goo.

And it's not clear to me that the gray goo is less intelligent than some human for it or some probe that can go out, some sphere that can have all of the intelligence of the person. The gray goo could be intelligent. Yes, exactly. That's a good point. Or a Dyson sphere that an actually sufficiently intelligent alien looks like a Dyson sphere. It could be. Or just like, or just a marble or some, or maybe a cube or whatever it may be. But when people say like, look, we're going to develop slits as eyes or slits for noses

or much larger eyes. How do you know this? To me, it seems like if we're going to, if the singularity is going to happen and we can mind upload, then the future human wouldn't have any of this. It would be firstly digital, if we're going to, if the singularity is going to happen and we can mind upload, then the future human wouldn't have any of this. It would be firstly digital, if anything. And secondly, maybe it would look like this blister. Yeah, Ray Kurzweil said the same thing many, many years ago.

He said, look, why would you have aliens in big ships when they could, you have intelligence the size of grain of rice that could just sit around and you wouldn't need big clunky spaceships. So what's funny is that there's this guy named Scott Aronson, I don't know if you know who that is, he's a professor of computer science and studies quantum computing. I was at this conference and he was on stage, he said like the most hilarious line at this conference, so he's been hired by OpenAI to do something called watermarking. So how is it that you can tell when ChatGPT produces something? Well, sometimes it says as an artificial language model, as an AI model, so and so. So that's a clear giveaway.

Are there other ways that you can, as OpenAI, engineer it so that if someone gives you text, you can say, okay, with 90% probability, this came from an AI. So he works on that problem. It's called watermarking. with 90% probability this came from an AI. So he works on that problem. It's called watermarking. Okay. So one solution is actually that you get it to say certain words with a bit more frequency

so that you can tell when it puts the in front of box more often than not than it's an AI or something like that. Well, I mean, you're talking about like sophisticated linguistic analysis, it sounds like, and absolutely like it's currently very easy, in my opinion, to detect a chat GPT output from normal human right. It absolutely has a certain feel to it and a look to it. So anyway, that's the problem that he works on because it'll get more sophisticated eventually. Yeah.

And okay, so he said at this conference, he's like, look, I was watching South Park and in South Park, what happened was the people were using, the kids started using AI for their homework. The teachers started using AI to grade the homework. Everyone's using AI to text one another. And then what they had to do is bring in this wizard who has a Falcon on his shoulder. And the Falcon will just call when it sees AI because that's the only way you could tell. I have to see that episode. Yeah, him telling it was hilarious and then he's like, what's funny to me is I've now become that wizard. Man, geez. He then said, Scott Ayrnson said that, yeah, so remember how we all made fun of Ray Kurzweil, like the academic

community? He's like, actually Ray Kurzweil has been the only one that's been right out of all of us well Yes, and no so Kurzweil's objection We could talk about Kurzweil. I'm very interested in him but his objection to UFOs was because it didn't make sense in terms of his Idea of how how advanced intelligence should

operate. Which, I'm like, okay, fine, I take that, but what am I supposed to do about thousands and thousands of these UFO reports? Do I just pretend that I never read them? That's the problem, is it's anti-empirical, ultimately. You can say the UFO subject makes no sense to me because it shouldn't make sense. And that's true. According to everything that we think we know, it does not make sense. It should not be here. But it is here. It's here. There are sightings

of craft. I don't know why they're not the size of a grain of rice. Haven't figured that part out. But there are definitely sightings of craft of various sizes, including humongous. So what am I supposed to do with that? I can pretend I never read the reports, but that's not really very satisfying either. So the difficulty of this subject is getting into the weeds and looking at the actual data.

And this is what Kurzweil won't do, of course, because he's above all of that. He thinks, I've got this figured out. And he doesn't. He doesn't have it figured out. He's too busy and consumed with becoming a god. That's all these people want to do. They're dangerous people, by the way. But they are convinced that they want to become like gods and shed these human bodies and these physical contraptions that we're in and become digital. And good luck with that.

You know, let me know how that goes. So do you believe that there's some imminent future event? I'm sure you've heard this from people like Leslie Keene and others that within the next five years or so, sometimes the year 2027 is echoed, but within the next decade, five years to decade, there's some cataclysmic event that we need to prepare for. Have you heard this? Well, all the time we hear about these, there's always something in the rumor mill. I mean, I've been hearing this my entire adult life. For 30 years, every two years from now.

Yeah, it's a constant refrain. And the fact is, we do have cataclysms that do happen periodically that transform the world. I lived through 9-11, you did too. I lived through the COVID revolution, which still infuriates me every time I think about it. I lived through the propaganda psyops of all kinds of operations going on in the world today, every day. It's filled with more and more lies

that surround us all the time. So will there be another crisis, whether manufactured or accidental, and both will happen. There will be manufactured crises. And that is, I think, you know, ultimately we're looking at a situation where you've got a, I'm putting my conspiracy cap on, forgive me, but you've got a very small group of people, maybe with collaborators, who knows, who are convinced that they have to corral the world in a certain direction, one of total control. And the only way to do that is you're not going to do this by persuading people that this is how it has to be.

You've got to frighten people. You have to terrify them. So anyway, the thing is these crises that are coming. So could there be something in 2027? I don't have, I have no confirmed knowledge. I heard someone telling me that some crazy stuff is going to happen later this year in 2024. I don't know. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. I don't know. But something's going to... All I hope is that GTA 6 gets released beforehand. Oh, Graf the Oak. That's all I hope, man.

The world can end two years later. Just give me a year and a half with that game. You know, one of these days I'm going to have to start doing some computer games. I have the only computer game I ever played and really loved. You're going to laugh at me. You're allowed to laugh. It was one from over 20 years ago called Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay.

That's the original first person shooter game. Andot, toot, toot, toot. Yep. And it was a cool game. I have to say it was a cool game. Well, if it was so cool, why'd you stop playing games after that? I had too much other stuff to do. Like I can't spend my whole life playing video games. Like I would love to.

Can't do it. I don't have the time. I can't. If I could find an old computer and dust off the Wolfenstein. I'd play that game again. That would be fun. Yeah. So here's something I thought, and tell me if it's a reasonable thought.

David Grush submitted something called Dopser, and you can also expand on what that is for people who don't know. So David Grush submitted something called Adopser Report or Adopser Request. I don't know the actual terminology, but in my understanding, it's something where he says, I want to say, so I want to come forward with this,

with so-and-so, and then some people have to approve it and say, yeah, go ahead. It's my understanding that that adopts or report has not been released. So my question is, is there a reason that that is not released as far as you know, like some reasonable reason? I know of this also and I don't know. I don't know much more than what you have said about this. But I have suspected, I would say this, there's no question that in my mind, David Grush is the real deal. He has interviewed the people he has said he's interviewed, many of whom have had, we're

talking certain Nobel level individuals within the classified world as well as other people with just deep, deep knowledge of what's going on within the classified world relating to ET tech reverse engineering. He's done that. And he's also highly intelligent, clearly a brilliant man. And I suspect that what he's got in there is some very explosive material. I know for sure that some of the things said within the classified setting to members of Congress are quite shocking. I mean, I know this.

The members of Congress have been shocked by some of the things that they've been briefed on. Now, what are the specifics? I can guess. I don't know for sure, but I can absolutely take a wild guess. We got real alien craft in our possession. Hell yes, of course we do. There are alien beings and bodies. Some living, some dead.

Yes. No doubt about this. And they've learned this. So if you're a member of Congress And you feel that as a member of Congress, it's actually partly under your Domain that you have some knowledge of this because you're an elected representative of the American people and crazy as it sounds Some of them seem to believe this So you might think well hell like I like we should know more about this. So it's a shocking thing.

I think their worldview has just been rocked by some of the things. So I assume that's some of those types of contents are in that report by Gretchen. It's my understanding that all of what was in the report was just check mark, yes, you can go and speak about this. That there wasn't a part that was redacted and said, okay, you can speak about A, B, and C, but not D and E. Okay, well.

That's my understanding, but I don't know if that differs from yours. No, I don't know. I don't think that contradicts. That's just another piece of it. So I don't know. I mean, I've heard of this report as well, but I don't have the details on it. Okay. So I have some questions here from the audience. Someone wants to know, firstly, does Richard read the comments on his YouTube page? On occasion. I sometimes do. Yeah, I sometimes do. Yes. I really should do that more, but people have to understand. I do appreciate the comments and I appreciate the very like wonderful support

that so many people offer me and it helps me. But it's hard for me to go into all of the comments. It's very difficult. It's hard to do that. I assume it might be similar with you. I don't know, but I mean, when I look at my emails, I look at people trying to message me, you have to understand it is a nonstop overwhelming flood.

It's a barrage that never ever goes away. And I have got to find a way in my life to put up a wall. I have to do this at times. Like for example, I don't really engage in social media any longer. Other than YouTube, I will look at YouTube comments. I have people who run my social media and there's no other way I could not survive.

I could not survive if I were to follow my Facebook page. Are you kidding me? Never. That's the quickest way to go crazy. Like, I mean, first of all, social media has been linked accurately to mental instability, mental illness, anxiety, depression, all of that. It's true. And I just want to keep that out of my head. I got off of Facebook on a regular basis around 2016 or so, actually with the election, the country just lost it. I just had to get out. So I have people running my Facebook and same with my Twitter.

I will occasionally, I will tell my social media people that I want to tweet this or that or the other thing. Like I will do that, but I don't engage. I don't do it can't That's it. That's the quickest way to go down Into crazy land and I just can't back in the 90s when the internet was brand new Before there was even the web before there was graphic user interface There was just the bulletin boards and you'd see what were then called flame wars break out. I don't know if people remember that. And it was a new phenomenon in the early 90s.

And it was, you could see how easy it was to just lose your shit in a discussion with someone. And you could see that the tempers would, and I was easily able to see you could lose your whole life in this and then therefore get nothing done. You could cease doing all actual work. My favorite people are people on Reddit. When I read someone responds with three paragraphs, then someone will reply and then quote a sentence that you said this but so and so and then another sentence you quote, and then quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote. Yeah. That's the way the internet actually started in the 90s. Reddit is awesome. And Reddit is a really excellent recreation of that original community that existed in

the 90s with the bulletin boards. Usenet as it was called. So Reddit is good. But for me personally, for my own sanity, I'll let other people engage in the fighting and all of the endless scrolling. So to answer that question, I mean, I try and I do up to a certain point and then I just, but I don't engage. Like I don't, I almost never will reply. Very rarely will I. Explain to me your views, how they've changed from when you first started in this, in the phenomenon, investigating the phenomenon. So examples would be you additionally believe them to be more physical or I don't like this word. This word that needs to go interdimensional.

Interdimensional is just this, it's this nonsense word that people use because they're attempting to sound scientific. Yes, but they end up betraying that they're Lacking of a basic physics background. That's just my physics. Yeah background saying it's just that's a nonsense physics word but describing something physical or Spiritual or you believe there to be five of them and now you believe there to be five of them and now you believe there to be two of them. Walk us through how your views have evolved and where you are now. Well, I started in this field about 30 years ago, 31, 32 years ago, very early 90s. And at that time, I was, A, I didn't believe in grand conspiracies.

I believed in little conspiracies. I believed in corruption. I knew there was a lot of corruption going on in the world. But I don't know that I was persuaded that there is an overarching level of global control that existed. And I see now that was really my own ignorance and my own naivete, but I was of that opinion because I had been indoctrinated in that belief set through my own graduate program in history where that kind of thinking is hammered into you. There are no grand conspiracies. Historians absolutely are trained not to believe in those types of things.

And so that was me. So I was in that place. In terms of the phenomenon itself, oh my God, I started out very, very conservatively. In fact, I didn't even want to study weird. I used to actually jokingly say but truthfully I said well I'll study UFOs but I don't want to study the weird stuff like crop circles or abductions. I did not want to get into abductions. I did not want to get into the really out there like even remote viewing. All that seemed too far out for

me. I wanted to be very, very ultra conservative in how I approached this subject. And, but the problem with that was I liken it to going to the ocean, you're at the beach and you put your big toe in the water and you say, that's it, that's all I'm gonna do. I'm going back to the beach now. I'm not going into the water.

Like, that's kind of silly. The UFO subject is an ocean. It is an ocean. And at some point you have to make the decision to go swim into the deeper areas. And that includes all of the weird things that actually go along with the subject. So I explored remote viewing early on,

long before I met my remote viewing wife. Abductions, I've taken more and more seriously. I have no problem believing that now, that's for sure. It's weird because there's always a danger of just believing everything. And I don't believe everything, but I believe a lot more than I used to, that is for sure. So I've been, my resistance has been broken down to a lot of the things where I kept up a pretty strong wall for a while. In terms of people who believe that they've had contact, for example,

I used to not really take that very seriously in my early years. And I do think a lot of folks who, you know, talk about contact are simply seeking publicity and they're not necessarily stable. I do believe that, but I think there's some, you know, I'm inclined to believe. So I think our world is much, much stranger than I did 30 years ago and 20 years ago. I would say that it's a lot stranger. It's a lot more interesting. So someone wants to know what were your personal surprises from your USO research and what's your view on the Rosicrucian worldview? Oh wow, the Rosicrucians.

I want to finish one last thing for the previous question, which is that I now believe I'm much more of a determinist than I've ever been in the past. And I'm not saying I don't believe in any free will, I think I do, but I think we're a lot more constrained than I ever thought before. I think my understanding of space and time has been radically transformed over the last even couple of years. I'm lucky to say that I'm friends with Russell Targ,

who of course is, Russ turns 90 this month. He's one of the people who created the SRI program of Removio. I'm also friends with Hal Puttoff, so both of those guys. But Russ, Russ, I just love, and I've had some pretty interesting conversations with him even of late on space and time and causality and something called retro causality,

which is kind of mind blowing. So all of that has affected my understanding of reality. Now to the current question, what was the first one? What were your personal surprises from your USO research and what's your view on the Rosie Krushen worldview? Okay, so USOs first. So I am in the process of completing a two-year project in which I have collected more than 600 USO cases historically,

and I've got them in a collection. I've also created 15 categories for every case. I've done a lot of breakdowns. I've created a global map of all the cases, and I've tried to breathe life into this phenomenon. I think it has succeeded, and I'm looking forward to publishing this. It's the longest book I've ever written, by far. It's longer than any of my other books. So it's fascinating. So a lot of things. I mean, it's too many to discuss

here. One, though, is that the United States Navy, I'll tell you without any hesitation, is deeply, deeply, deeply concerned about this phenomenon. Because just like we hear about stories of UFOs and nuclear weapons, well, these objects, they are very interested in United States Navy aircraft carriers and battleships, as well as Russian and Soviet ones, to the extent that they have the ability to shut these ships down, like literally shut them down. I'm talking communication systems, weapon systems, and even a time the engine can be dead in the water.

There have been too many accounts that I have come across from former US Navy guys and former Russian Navy, Soviet Navy, that this is real. So that's one thing they can, and if you are the Navy, I can't imagine anything more important to you than your fleet of nuclear powered, nuclear weaponed aircraft carriers. And if something is able to interfere with their operation, even for 30 minutes or

longer, that's going to be a prime interest to you. There is no way that they do not know all about this phenomenon. They know everything about it. And I think it's a serious concern. And I think it's a serious concern. So when you have these people in the Pentagon saying things like, well, we believe we have the ability to identify and if necessary mitigate these phenomena, I'm like, you are full of it. You don't have any ability to mitigate these things. None, zero.

These things operate way beyond our ability to deal with them. So that's one interesting thing about USOs. I mean, there's more, so much more. The book that I'm working on will be out. I think I have to publish it in two volumes simultaneously because they're too long. But I'll have that out this year. I was trying for May.

That's probably a little too ambitious, but it'll be out soon. I'm very excited about it. Rosicrucians, I'm no expert, but they're interesting. Essentially, you're talking about a religious order that we know has existed consistently since the early 17th century in England, very likely with roots going back several centuries earlier than that.

And, you know, look, I've read a couple of books by and about Rosicrucians. That doesn't make me an expert, so I'm not going to pretend. But you're talking about an order that absolutely believes that that tradition, the Rosicrucian tradition comes from, well, basically the East. We're talking partially India, we're talking partially Arabia, maybe a couple of other places. And they are incorporating deep, yeah, let's say deep spiritual realities into their worldview. And I think have had to probably be very careful about how they have portrayed themselves to the rest of the world,

because for most of these centuries that they've been around, you damn well better appear like you're a full on Christian or we're gonna have trouble with you. So I think that's always been the problem that they've had because ultimately there, I would consider them more of an Eastern philosophy in a lot of ways than out of the Western Christian tradition. They may have some relationship to Gnosticism, for sure. But what are the Rosicrucians? I think they're very interesting. And

I talk, my wife and I will sometimes explore what they are about. I think they're interesting. That's what do you mean? You will explore what they are about. Well, you know, there are some different books that you can, you can read by the Rosicrucian. So I'm just interested in, oh, I mean to say that you would read up on them. Yeah. I see. Yeah. It doesn't make me an expert. Okay, so here's a quite lengthy question. Building upon the notion of humanity evolving in ways that might seem anti-human, and considering the metaphor of building one's house upon a rock from the teachings of Jesus, what do you perceive as humanity's rock amidst these evolving complexities?

How can we ensure that this foundation remains unwavering amidst the rapid changes and challenges of our modern world? That's really great. Additionally, why do you think the Rock is not Jesus? Who says I don't? I'm very, I mean, I have, it's hard for me to talk about my personal spiritual beliefs here, but I will just say that I have gone very deep into Christianity over these past several years. Now, does that make me a biblical Christian, maybe the way this individual is?

I mean, I don't know, maybe not, I don't know. I've read the Bible many, many times, many, many times, and I take it quite seriously. I think the teachings of Jesus, frankly, are, let's just talk about the ethical teachings, are the best attempt ever made at Trying to have humanity play nice in the sandbox and not kill each other Because this whole human society thing is it's all messed up. We're not really designed to live in cities and towns. We're just not You and I we are all psychologically designed to live with a group of 25, 50 people because for hundreds of thousands of years, that is how humans and archaic humans lived. And so that goes into your genetics.

You are optimally designed, probably for your greatest happiness, to live in a small group of people that you know and that you deal with for your whole life, probably, because that's how we have actually lived. So once we started living, starting with the agricultural revolution into larger communities, that's when you can see all of these really seriously socially maladaptive behaviors come to the fore.

Murder, not that we didn't murder before, we did, but now a lot. Cheating on your spouse or stealing money, stealing possessions, all of this, this is what happens when you start getting human beings starting to live anonymously in larger communities where they could really engage in some nasty behaviors. And you look at all of ancient history,

of recorded ancient history, and it is a story of unmitigated violence, like nasty, cruel, terrible violence. And then you get certain spiritual teachers, you get Buddha, you get Jesus. What does Jesus say? He's like, love those who hate you. Right. Like, what is harder to do than that? I'm going to say probably nothing. Yeah, you spoke about the last bit of Brothers Karamazov.

Yeah, that's right. And how it made you weep. That's right. And just you can think of even that one, just love thy enemy. And you can think about that and one, just love thy enemy. And you can think about that and you'll weep. Yeah. Aliyasha was the youngest brother in that story and he was a very devout, pious young

man. And he gives this message. That's his message. So, I think the Christian message is the hardest and most profound spiritual, ethical message that I've ever encountered. And as such, it's the best – like, is it attainable? Well, go back to Dostoevsky. You know, in that same book, he had a passage called The Grand Inquisitor in which the atheist brother creates this story. It's like Jesus comes back to Seville during the period of the Great Grand Inquisition. And how does the cardinal

who runs the town deal with it? He has him arrested. He has him brought to him. He says, look, we don't need you anymore. Your teachings are way too difficult. Your teachings are for the very, very few elite. Most human beings can't do what you're telling them to do. We've got it figured out. We've instilled some fear, instilled some obedience. They come to us with confessions because they screw up all the time and we make them, you know, we give them, they repent and they go about their way and they sin some more. And that's just how it is. We don't need you.

So that's the grand inquisitor. And there's truth to that too, right? Like, those teachings are difficult. Now the true Christian teaching is not love your enemy, that's part of it, but the true Christian teaching is that you will never, ever, ever on your own be good enough for actual true spiritual grace. You're never going to be. You're always going to have dark shit inside your soul. No matter how hard you try, you think you can do this on your own, but you can't. So a Christian would say,

and this is the difficulty, a Christian would say, and this is the difficulty, a Christian would say, you must submit to Jesus, you must submit to Jesus who is God, and you accept him as your Savior, and by doing so, now you've got to mean it though, you can't just say it and then keep going on living your life the way you did before, so that's the thing, it's got to be real. So, really what it's about is repent. You have to feel bad about the bad things you've done and you submit to a higher authority, the authority of God. What is God? Who knows? I don't really know what God is. It's a faith. It's a belief, but it's a way to orient your life ethically by having a shining spiritual ideal above you.

It's actually something that we all really need. We desperately need it. When you throw that away, you're in serious danger of ruining your life because you think, oh, well, I can just run things on my own. This was me in my teens and 20s. You leave home for the first time and you're like, I don't have my parents to tell me what to do. Well, yeah, that's when you start screwing up real bad.

I did more than my share of that because I thought I was able to run my life, but actually I desperately needed an authority to say, ah, no, no, no, no, you still, you're not quite there yet. And that's, I think that's what we all really do need. We need a, an example of in our own world of what we would call spiritual perfection, even though you never reach it. Yeah, and this is the foundation that the question is about, I think. We need, we do need a foundation. We, and this is part of the problem of modernity is that we've removed that foundation. We don't really know what to believe in. Many, many, many years ago, I used to read the writings of a sociologist named Max Weber. I wrote about this a little over a century ago.

Weber was a really highly brilliant man. And he said, you know, look, the ancient peasants or an ancient person had a world that made sense to them. They knew their place in that world. It was the world that their previous generations had lived through and everything made sense. He says, the modern person, we don't have that. The modern world is filled with endless possibilities and decisions and you can do this, you can do that, you can believe this, you can believe that. And he said, the problem is that we lose that rootedness, we lose that foundation,

which I think is what this question is referring to. And I think Weber saw it exactly right. That's I said the problem is that we lose that rootedness, we lose that foundation, which I think is what this question is referring to. And I think Weber saw it exactly right. That's what the modern world has done. It is removed, it's cut the floor out from beneath us to some extent. And, you know, I mean, I don't know what you can do about it.

Like the difficulty for a person who has a lot of education or is very intellectual, which is, you know, that's been your life, that's my life, is like it's easy to think you're above these little fairy tales, these religious fairy tales, which is what they feel like. I mean, I totally understand that because they are, they come from ancient societies that create stories that when you look back at them historically, feel like fairy tales. But the thing that I think that I'm trying to learn, I'm trying to understand is that there are far deeper, there is deeper spiritual wisdom in those stories.

And I'm just glad I lived long enough to glean some of that and I'm still on my path, you know, I'm not done with wherever I'm going. One reason I may not be as jaded as some other people you've spoken to in this field is I, miraculously, I have found a kind of spirituality to my own life that allows me, despite the terrible nature of, in many ways, of where this world is going, in my opinion, I'm able to get up in the morning and face the day and hang out with my wife and play with my cat and enjoy the sunny days and go for walks and enjoy things. And it's because I've developed some spiritual orientation that works for me. I mean, I think I honestly, this is probably where I don't know if this is what a Christian

would believe. I think that there's literally a divine intelligence that permeates everything around us. I mean, I'm not a physicist, I'm not an engineer, but I wonder if intelligence can reside not simply in the confines of an organic brain, but can it exist elsewhere? You've got people like Kurzweil thinking intelligence can exist within silicone chips. Okay, maybe it can. Can consciousness, however we understand what that is,

exist in a non-brain? Yeah, why not? Actually, I think it can. We talk about non-locality. I've talked to too many excellent remote viewers who are somehow, they are able to perceive things outside of ordinary modes of perception. I do no longer need persuasion that that's the case. So I think intelligence can reside, can intelligence reside in energy? I guess is where I'm getting

at. And if it can, well, there's theoretically energy all around us. What could God be? God could be a lot of things, I don't really know. But could God be an omniscient intelligence that permeates our reality that does not, that is not constrained by the limits of our neurobiology and neurochemistry. If you can create, because what is intelligence? It's simply organized information, organized data that has a logic to it and could you, I mean I'm clearly showing my ignorance. I'm sure there's some neuroscientists who are like, he's totally full of shit.

But allow me to, I mean, this is just my own theorizing. But could intelligence exist in a non-physical, purely energetic form? And you know, maybe it does. Maybe that's what is all around us. Maybe, you know, you have a soul and I have a soul and when we die, these souls will join that field again like an ocean, like a drop going back to the ocean.

Yeah, I think that's what I believe. I can't say that I know, but I don't think it can make sense to me. So I'm going with it for now. I had a talk that I gave at this conference called polymath and it's about this topic actually that you mentioned, we have a lack of hope in our culture, a lack of a unified goal. And you see this with many people saying, hope is for the weak.

And that's such a cynical phrase. Oh my God, I've not heard that and I'm glad I haven't. Hope is for the strong. Like it's extremely difficult to be hopeful. It's extremely difficult to be enthusiastic as well. Some people with their sarcasm, they shut people down and they make people feel horrible for feeling, for looking up to something. We don't look up to anything. Well, that all comes out of their own fears. I mean, it's so very transparent.

When people do that, it's all fear. They're afraid. Because it takes bravery, actually, to put yourself out there and to actually hope in something or to believe in something. It's far easier, and it's the cheap way out to just say, ah, it's, it's all nonsense. I'm above all that. You don't, you don't get emotionally invested in something. You're ultimately afraid of being disappointed.

I think that's the core psychological driver behind the hermeneutics of suspicion is because you have this skepticism that turns into dogmatic skepticism and a denial of any of the facts that come before you. Yeah, because it's safer psychologically. Because you don't have to commit to something. And technically you can always in a rational manner doubt. And that's why I don't think that rationality is all. And even Feynman had this great, so you've talked about people who are intellectual,

they doubt that there's anything more to religion than just the foolish stories of an ancient people who are misguided. And it seems like there may be some Dunning-Kruger curve where the more... I don't know how to... I don't want to say this in like... Okay, so the society at large that the intellectuals would consider unintellectual would believe in religion or believe in some religion. And then you become educated and enlightened and then you cast away your irrationalities. But then if you speak to people who are extremely bright, extremely, extremely bright, they're far more open and far more mystical. So Ed Whitten is considered to be the top scientist, top physicist, sorry.

If you listen to his words, scientist, top physicist, sorry. If you listen to his words, he's an extremely mystical person. Richard Feynman also said that logic is not all one needs heart to follow an idea, and that the greatest problem of our time is where is the modern church? Where are people to go? Because we need these institutions, but then we're modern people. We're not going to go to Catholic mass. We're not going to go to a temple. We just don't feel right there. So what's the modern home for these ideas?

Well, you have to start. You start with the recognition that it's what Socrates said, I know that I don't know. You have to profess, you have to recognize that you have a tremendous amount of ignorance. Look, if you were to time travel back 5,000 years, go back to the Egyptian Nile, talk to someone who lived on the Nile and ask them, what happens when the sun sets? He would say, oh, well, that's the God Bra. And when he sets, goes below the disc

of the plane of the earth, he's fighting the forces of chaos in the underworld. And you better hope he wins, by the way, because if he loses, the whole universe is going to end. So that's what an Egyptian believed 5,000 years ago. So we could look at that belief and think, okay, well, that's wrong for a lot of reasons. But we tend to have this idea that now we've got it all figured out. We know reality.

There are no more fundamental questions available to us. But think of it this way. That's so foolish. I had an epiphany 40 years ago, 41 years ago. I was feeding my dog, dog food. I was 20, 21 years old. By the way, at that moment, I was an atheist at that point in my development.

So I was like that. I thought, well, I'm too smart to believe in these little fairy tales. So I'm feeding my dogs. My dog knows I'm getting a can of dog food out of the cupboard and he's watching me and he's excited because he knows he's a smart animal. Like I'm gonna get fed and I'm opening the can and he's watching me and he's excited because he knows he's a smart animal like I'm gonna get fed and I'm opening the can I'm watching him and I was watching him

eat and I thought okay so he knows a lot of things he knew I was about to feed him he knew that that the can of dog food had something nice in there he knows a lot of other things like he knows who I am and uh but he didn't know here's the thing he did not know how the dog food got into that can like that we have factories that make dog food he didn't know, here's the thing, he did not know how the dog food got into that can. Like that we have factories that make dog food. He didn't know, cause he's a dog. Like how's he supposed to know that? He doesn't know that he's been taken out

of his natural environment to live with human beings. He doesn't know what the moon is if he's howling at it. Because he's a dog. And I thought, well, gee Richard, you think you're so smart. So your dog's here, you're here, what's here? Right. There.

Right. There are limits to what we are able to understand in this reality. And so for us to think, I'm going to dismiss any form of transcendental reality because it doesn't make sense to my understanding of science as it is right now. You talk about arrogance, foolishness, pride. It's just stupid. That's really what it is. To think I will dismiss, I'm a logical positivist and I will not accept any form of information that I cannot absolutely quantify.

And like, come on, stop. You have your, you've got severe limits. We all have limits to what we're able to understand. So that's the beginning of wisdom. It's, it's the humility to realize, okay, let's just take a, take a breath and recognize. There's a lot I don't know here. Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favorite, I love Emerson.

He had a brilliant essay, many of them, one was called Circles. And he identified, he said, our knowledge is like a circle, it's like an ever expanding circle. So what you know is inside the circle. And the boundaries of the circle are the boundaries of your knowledge. And the more you learn, the larger the boundary becomes. The larger the boundary of the unknown. I thought it was beautiful. And I think there's truth to that. So we can learn to disabuse ourselves

of some of these scientific dogmas if we just recognize we've got some limitations as well. There's a lot we still don't know. This is why like when Kurzweil says, well, UFOs don't make sense to me because it doesn't comport with what I think they should be. Or when any other scientist says, well, I can't quantify this data,

therefore it doesn't exist to me. I'm like, well, okay. I understand this. Scientists work on a principle called falsifiability. You've got to be able to falsify. That is to be able to have the opportunity to prove something true or false for it to be valid. I could say to you, I know for a fact that all of this universe is actually a little pea on the dinner plate of a giant and When he eats that pea, we're all gonna die and you could know that that's a lot of BS But how do you prove that I'm wrong? Like I could say well, you know, this is what I know So it's not falsifiable. Therefore, it's not valid could be true

Probably not true. But the point is scientifically it's not valid. It's not falsifiable, therefore it's not valid. Could be true. Probably not true. But the point is scientifically it's not valid. It's not fair. So there's elements of the UFO subject that seem hard to falsify. They seem difficult for us to get the proper data on. And there's a reason for that too, by the way. We scientists, when you're running a scientific experiment,

your assumption is that you're in charge. You're studying a virus. Okay, I can study the virus. I'm in control of the virus. I can set the parameters of the experiment and all of this. But what if the experiment involves an intelligence that's beyond yours and you're actually not controlling the experiment.

And what if furthermore that intelligence doesn't really feel that you should know everything about it, and it's able to withhold information because it has a mastery of space, time, and dimensions that we can't even conceive of, which is what it looks like to me. Well then, in that case, you're not going. Your scientific tools are not always going to be as effective as you might assume. So a little bit of humility is a good idea. I think of the UFO subject as like, imagine, like visualize a wise spiritual master living in a cave. And you want to learn from that master. So you trek all the way up to the mountains of Tibet and you go up there and you find this master and you then you say,

tell me everything you know. Well, he's going to be like, get the hell out of here. Come with a little bit of humility and you have to take your time because this is there's a lot that I need to teach you. That's the UFO subject. The UFO subject is the spiritual master living in the cave and you must approach it with some humility and some patience and do not expect It'd be like going to Ludwig von Beethoven and say tell me everything, you know about counterpoint It's gonna be like get the hell out of here. This is difficult You're not just, I'm just gonna, I'm not gonna tell you everything because it's too much. It's too difficult. Have patience, have humility. So I don't know what got me into this whole thing,

but there's a little bit of my philosophy of life and truth and all of that stuff. What makes you happy, Richard? philosophy of life and truth and all of that stuff. What makes you happy, Richard? Ha ha ha. Ah, great conversations like this, actually. Because they expand the mind. Like, you're getting me to discuss things that are fascinating, and I did not wake up this morning with this on my mind per se. I didn't really know what we were going to talk about. So anytime I get to explore fascinating ideas with

an interesting person, like I'm pretty happy. That's actually really good. I'm definitely happy when I spend time with people I love, most importantly my wife, my kids, good friends, all of those are very important to me, very important to me. My extended family, so all of that matters a lot. But a lot of little things make me happy in a way that I'm really glad about. I think I've gotten, I finally have gotten to a point in my life where I feel, I actually feel really grateful for every healthy and good day that I have. I mean, my health is still pretty good,

but I'm also in my sixties now and I've realized, life is temporary. At least this life in this incarnation is temporary. And whatever happens after that, great. Hopefully it's something really awesome. But right now I've got this gift. I have this life that I can live where I am so lucky I'm so lucky that I get to explore interesting things for a living, no less. Boy, I lucked out. I hit the jackpot there. So I'm very happy that I'm able to explore these issues the way that I do and to try to explore my curiosity about so many different things.

Not limited to the UFO Scenario, by the way, I'm interested in a lot of other things and I get to explore that So we started off by talking about some aspects of this world that you're afraid may be true and I want to end with What's something you hope may be true. Well, I'll even go further and something that I, I should say I believe is true or that I have faith is true. I'll just go there. Um, I, I believe I believe that there is, let's call it God. I mean, what is God? I don't have the ability to even understand that concept fully. An intelligence that permeates all of reality, knows everything.

But I actually think that there's something like that. I think that that's real. So I believe that. And I believe that we actually are all really part of that. I mean, everything. My coffee cup. I mean, everything, my coffee cup, you, me, everyone listening, watching. We're actually, when mystics say we are all one, I believe that. I think that we are. I think that we are all one. When you really step back, we're all various iterations of a universal call in spirit, a universal energy, whatever. And so to me, that's a beautiful way

to understand the world. And it has the additional advantage for me that I think it's true. I think that we are. Can't say that I know, I mean, never going to know, but I think it's true. So to me, that's know. I mean, never going to know, but I think it's true. So to me, that's, that's awesome. Um, in terms of the way the physical world that we live in is set up and what is going on. Um, what I would like to be true is that this transition that the human species is going

through is one that we can make peace with and that we can live with in a very positive way. Like I'm hoping that there are many, many good things that can come out of it. I do think that there are some dangerous things that can come out of it. I don't that there are some dangerous things that can come out of it. I don't know what I think about a hive mind for humanity. I don't know what I think about

a 24 seven digital surveillance and control system. It doesn't seem like that's something I wanna be part of. But, you know, I would like to think that after maybe a few centuries of a transition, that we figure out a proper stasis for this new mode of existence that we as a species will undoubtedly be part of. And I would like to hope that that is something

that is actually positive and that future our descendants feel is beneficial. I would like for that to be the case. And I hold out hope that that is the case. I mean, you know, I feel that like if there's an extraterrestrial society that's come here, and I do think that is the case, they've gone through this process. They've gone through some kind of transition. I don't know if I like where they've gone with it, but it may just be an, this just may be how, I'm going back to my theory of language leading to inexorably to science and where we are today. I think it's true.

And so that what really we're seeing is we're evolving primarily because we are following the imperatives of, I'm not saying this well, because this is still not a clear idea to me, but we're following a kind of imperative laid down by let's call it the law of information, the law of data, the law of intelligence. Like once a species gets the key to abstract information, abstract knowledge, and especially if you have the ability

to have opposable thumbs and you can manipulate your environment, you do that. You are probably on an inexorable path to splitting the atom and creating AI and creating trans species of them and transhumanism, whatever. Like I think that's the inexorable path and it's probably an inevitable path. And I am willing to bet that that is what other species

have already gone through. They've mastered or they've discovered this. It's an inexorable thing. they've mastered or they've discovered this. It's an inexorable thing. Like it's inexorable for us because once we discovered language, because we are hyper aggressive, hyper competitive, hyper territorial, we're competing with other human groups, that immediately is going to create competitive developments in weaponry, obviously,

and in all different ways of social organization. What's the most efficient manner of social organization for a species that has to work together to create abundance so that they don't starve. Like that's really what it's all about. So we put ourselves on this path of constantly tweaking what we know and how we organize ourselves vis-a-vis each other and with ourselves.

And so, yeah, it's been an inexorable development. And I think it was inevitable that we would end up where we are. I think we may have gotten a boost from collecting some ET tech, but we would have gone there no matter what. I think that just sped us up. I don't think it changed anything. So with that being said, if there's a certain inexorability of where we're at, that actually – you could say that might give a little bit of hope.

So you could say this is just part of the natural order of things and what we're going through has happened many, many other times. So that might be a cause for hope. Richard, I want to touch briefly on the statement that you said about you're not... you suspect there's a God, but you're not sure if you know that there's a God. And I want to tell you a story about Tolstoy quickly. Please! So Tolstoy was excoriating his left leaning friend.

There's a... I'm paraphrasing this. He was telling his friend like, you say that you care about society, you don't care about society because you don't know society. You know Jeff and you know Bob and you know your mom and your son, but you don't know society. And then you claim that you care about the state, you don't know the state? What is the state to you? You don't know it. It's not here. And then the friend retorted saying to Tolstoy, who was a Christian, a Christian anarchist actually, saying to Tolstoy, yeah, but Tolstoy, like you're saying, you just keep abstracting and you know less and less abstractions, but your highest abstraction, God, you claim to know that. How can you?

And Tolstoy stopped and said, took his hand and put it on his friend's heart and said, you know, you have it backward. God isn't the most abstract. God is what's right here. You feel it. That love that you feel, that's God. Yes.

And so you know God. You just don't know that you know God. Yeah, he wrote, I'm so glad you told this, and I didn't know that story. In his later years, he did write a number of moralistic and spiritual tracts. One of them, which I did read, is called The Kingdom of God is Within You. That's Tolstoy, which is, of course, a statement out of the Bible, something Jesus says, The Kingdom of God is Within You. And Tolstoy did a whole booklet on this. And it's absolutely brilliant, by the way. And he makes the point, incidentally, that there are no Christian nations, but they call themselves Christian,

but he says none of them are. He says it doesn't exist. He said, because anytime you have a state that engages in punitive actions the way that all states do, sorry, but that's not Christianity. He said, Christianity, you want to take it, boil it right down, it's a sermon on the mound. It's what we were saying earlier. It's like, love those who hate you, love your enemies. And also serve those below you. Like Jesus, right before he knew he was going to die, he washed the feet of his apostles. Just think about that. That's right. That's right. And he was very explicit. He said the feet of his apostles. Just think about that man.

That's right. That's right. And he was very explicit. He said, look, I'm doing this because I want you to understand that this is what you must do. You must care for each other in this way. The first will be last, the last will be first. It's remarkable because there's the question, like, why didn't the Jews believe that Jesus

was the Savior? And so at the time it was thought that Jesus would come down like King David and conquer. Right. Kick out the Romans. Be this rotamante man with bravado, not some hobo from podunk nowhere. Exactly. Yeah. Meek as well because that was considered to be weak, weakness. Absolutely.

Healing, taking the ear of an enemy and then putting it back on and saying, no, that's not what you do. You heal your enemy. It's incredibly advanced spiritual ethical teaching. And that's why I keep going back to that question about from the person who asked, like, what is the proper foundation? That is the proper foundation. I don't think there's been a better one. And, you know, people, no one's perfect. Like, this is why it's easy to criticize, like, the hypocrisy of Christians. Because, yeah, there's hypocrisy all over the place there.

It's inevitable. You're talking about a teaching that is very difficult. It's very, very difficult. And even the most well-meaning of the followers, like they're always going to fail. And this is why the concept of grace is so important to Christians. They will say this over and over again. It's like, you're never going to succeed. You think so? You're never going to master that. You're never going to be good

enough. So give it up and recognize your flaws, recognize your failings, and have some humility so that you... I mean, really, doesn't it make sense? It's like, otherwise you're the person who says, hey, my shit doesn't stink, pardon my language. But when you start getting into that attitude, you become sanctimonious and you think you're above everyone else. Well, that's the opposite of what the proper teaching should be.

It's like, yes, humble yourself, see your failings because they abound. They all do. No matter how hard we try, we all have many, many personal failings. I mean, it embarrasses me to look back over my life and to see how many times I did not really act in my best authentic self. You know, I wish I had done better in many, many ways, but it is what it is. But the thing is, at least we can try to see the things that we've done that don't measure

up to what we want. The story that we like to tell ourselves about who we are. Because, right, that's really all we ever do. We're telling ourselves a story like, I'm really good at this, I like to do this, I'm a good person, I'm a very good person. We love to tell ourselves that. Well, yeah, you're a good person when things go your way. You're a good person when you get that promotion

or when you get that girlfriend or boyfriend or when you get that whatever. It's easy to be a good person then. It's when things don't go your way that we see where maybe we don't really measure up. I also think that people talk about consciousness like I've been to two UFO conferences, Seoul and then one other, and people say consciousness is the answer. And I don't know. I think that love,

love may be, and love is about not only serving something that's better than you, you have to conceptualize that there's something better than you and not just above you, but like better than you. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. And then also that you serve anything that you think is not better than you, like you serve what's below you. This is the whole point of why a genuine religious faith really is so important. That doesn't have to even be the Christian faith. Any, I mean, Christians might disagree with me, so, but I mean, a faith in which you are subjecting yourself. You subject yourself to a higher, better version of yourself.

How else do you become a better person? We want to have, we benefit from the example of something that is always there, that you know is always there, that is an example to you in those difficult moments of where your morality might go this way or that way, right? We've all been there. So I think we all benefit from, how I visualize it in my mind is of a shining star, a shining example that I can follow that is there.

And I'm not alone and it can help guide me in my darker moments, which we all have. Richard, thank you for spending so much time with me. Flew by. I have just loved this conversation and I love doing the show. I think you're really unique, Kurt. I mean, there's a lot of other good hosts out there who do really good interviews, And I love doing the show. I think you're really unique, Kurt. I don't know.

I mean, there's a lot of other good hosts out there who do really good interviews, but there's something special here. And I did not expect even remotely to go into some of the places we've gone. So it was a lot of, it was very enjoyable for me. I hope, I never really, I have no perspective on myself. I'm not I don't know how to. So I just hope it came across well to the viewers and listeners and just leave it at that. But

anyway, you got you got my most honest answers that I could give on a lot of those questions. Thank you. I appreciate that. Same. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad that that my last conversation on the UFO topic at least for a while is with you. Thank you. Oh, well, I'm honored. I appreciate it because you have a very discerning intellect. You really do. And I'm glad that at least there's one UFO researcher who you're okay with so that's good for me. I also, Kevin Knuth and Beatrice, I also like them but they're more on the physics end. Oh well, I interviewed Beatrice myself, big fan of her. She's not really a UFO researcher. Exactly, exactly.

She's a cool lady. Kevin Knuth, I need to reach out to him because I really like him. All right, I hope you enjoyed that podcast with Richard Dolan. I assume you have given that you've watched all the way until now, unless you've scrubbed forward just to see my dashing good looks and who could blame you? You should know that there is another podcast with Richard Dolan. It's linked in the description. And there's a UFO playlist of other podcasts of every UFO guest that's ever been on the Theories of Everything channel. If you enjoyed today's episode, I believe you will enjoy those. Take care. Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymongle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon,

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