WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp - Russian Scientists Risked Everything to investigate UFOs

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

During the darkest days of the Cold War, leaders in the USSR publicly described the UFO mystery as a capitalist plot, unworthy of scientific study. But behind the scenes, communist dictators held a much different view. They authorized secret scientific studies of UFOs. For decades, individual scientists and academic groups throughout the USSR surreptitiously investigated UFO cases and incidents, at the risk of imprisonment - or worse. Most of their work wasn’t made public until the fall of the USSR in the early 90’s. Journalist George Knapp traveled to Russia twice in the 90’s and spoke with scientists who had never before appeared on camera to discuss their work. In this episode, he and Jeremy Corbell review the courageous work done by Russian scientists during dangerous times. GOT A TIP? Reach out to us at [e-mail] For breaking news, follow Corbell & Knapp on all social media. Extras and bonuses from the episode can be found at https://WeaponizedPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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UFOs and ideas that challenge reality itself. All these mysteries, all this time. Are we ever going to get to the bottom of these? My name is George Knapp. I dig into news stories that others can't or won't. I'm Jeremy Corbell, and for some reason people tell me things they probably shouldn't. And this is weaponize. Perhaps we need some outside universal trip.

Here we are, weaponize. Welcome back. weaponized again. I feel like we're going to talk again about your exploits to Russia and you stealing, taking classified documents from Russia to America about UFOs because the last time we talked about it, you told us all about your meetings with government officials, like how you infiltrated the fall of Russia and got these head UFO government people to talk with you. But You also talked with a whole bunch of scientists about their study of UFOs, a whole separate part of this. So in 1992, the USSR collapsed. In essence, it was gone. The Soviet, former Soviet republics became independent. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. Boris Yeltsin became top dog in Russia. They were experimenting with democracy and capitalism.

It's a period known as Glasnosed, Parasroika, a new openness. And I thought, but at that time, that was a unique opportunity to maybe find out what the Russians knew about UFOs. The premise being, maybe we could learn more from the Russians about what the American government knows about UFOs than the American government would ever tell us. And that is exactly what we did. We found out that there were similarities in both countries, that both of those superpowers had said one thing to the public. The Russians and the American governments had both said, move along, nothing to see here, no big deal, nothing to worry about with UFO. we got it under control, sent that to the public,

and then behind the scenes, they conducted secret studies. The Americans are still doing it. The Russians were doing it back then. We learned from a Russian colonel named Borosokalov that they had conducted what amounts to the largest UFO study investigation in history. The entire USSR, the entire military had a standing order to fully investigate every ball of light, every UFO,

every anomalous craft. All that information had to be collected, and sent to the Ministry of Defense. And I was able to obtain copies, some of them original copies, some of it classified information at the time of their investigative reports, the UFO incidents, thousands of cases,

some of them incredibly dramatic. We'd also learned during that first trip to Russia in 1993 that a number of scientists had been studying this in secrecy for a long time. Like this country, Russian scientists did so at their own peril. not only because they had to worry about ostracism from their colleagues who might think it's all the waste of time, but because the official position of the Stalin government and Khrushchev and governments afterward had said, this is a capitalist plot, there's nothing to it, pay no attention to it,

but we know that from Stalin on, they wanted to duplicate the technology to figure out how UFOs worked. They knew they weren't ours. They knew they weren't Russian. They were from somewhere else. This is advanced technology, If they could figure it out and duplicate it, they could beat us in terms of stealth. That's what Sokolov's study pursued. That's what subsequent studies pursued. And so we were trying to figure out who else knows about this. And during that first visit in 93 and then again in 96, when I went back, I got to interact

with a number of scientists who'd spent their whole lives studying this in secrecy. Sometimes it was done in secrecy in defiance of the government. They were doing it behind closed doors and hoped that the government would, couldn't find out what they were doing. There's a guy named Dr. Felix Siegel. He's like the Russian equivalent of Jay Allen Heineck. And he had a group of colleagues who would go out to landing site cases, places where witnesses said a UFO landed here, and they would go out and look for physical evidence, indentations in the soil, burn marks, radiation, effects on trees and vegetation, things of that sort. There was a group of them, maybe 20 or so of those folks, and many of them

continued for a long time. Before you tell me about the different scientists you met with and that whole thing, what was the, I mean, look, Russia and America were not sharing a lot of information at all at that time. Did you get a sense that because of the changes that people wanted to talk with you, they were eager to give you this information? And if so, why? Exactly.

Well, the whole country was changing. The world was changing. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the emergence of democracy and capitalism in Russia. There were so many examples of it, you know, that I've shared with you privately before. There was a McDonald's that opened up that was wildly popular. You'd go in there to order a burger or something. The Russian employees would stand 10 deep behind the counter to serve you, to serve customers. There was a pizza that had a salad bar on the inside.

They would serve pizza out a window to the Russians, and they'd serve a salad bar to Americans and tourists inside. And that solid bar consisted of, I think, six different kinds of beats. They didn't quite have the capitalism down. But they wanted to embrace it so much. They were so open and warm and friendly and curious about Americans that they opened their homes. And in many cases, they opened their secrets to us. It was really exciting time to be there. But it was also tumultuous politically.

As I told you before, a couple of weeks ago on Weaponized, we, every single time, day that we were there, a 10-day period in 1993, that were these massive demonstrations in Red Square, pro-communists on one side, pro-democracy demonstrators on the other, and the military and police in between keeping them separate so there wasn't a riot. Cooperation from friendly countries is one thing, but what about our enemies or former enemies? How do they handle the UFO matter? And is there any cooperation between them and us?

Shortly thereafter, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in response to repeated statements by then President Ronald Reagan told Western reporters that he agreed with Reagan. If the world were ever threatened by outside powers, our two nations would stand side by side in the defense of Earth. Reagan alluded to this potential threat in five separate public speeches, including an address to the United Nations. Suddenly, Russians were flocking to newsstands to buy the same sort of UFO tabloids that

Americans buy, filled with lurid, sensational stories of the United Nations. about nasty aliens and their dubious intentions. At the same time, UFO organizations, including respected scientists and military officials, were free to openly discuss UFO cases and issues. But still, little was made public about what the Soviet government might know. In March 1993, our investigative team traveled to Moscow to meet with current and former government and military officials

concerning UFO files. The journey was undertaken during a period of dramatic political and social upheaval in Russia, but few events could be as dramatic or as important as what was uncovered about UFOs and human knowledge of the alien presence, a government biologist who analyzes soil samples from UFO landing sites, a Moscow professor who was secretly directed a discrete organization of high-level scientists and military personnel interested in UFOs, an author and physicist who began studying UFOs in the 50s and who became a non-person when he refused to quit talking and writing about the subject.

An engineer in the Russian SDI program who asserts the Soviet military long ago determined that UFOs were interplanetary and who says UFO data has been incorporated into Russian beam weapon research and a shadowy man who currently heads the ongoing Ministry of Defense study of UFOs and aliens. The importance of these revelations is difficult to overstate. In Russia of all places, a country still experimenting with democracy, it is now permissible for former military men and government scientists to admit a long-standing involvement in clandestined UFO research. In America, the cradle of freedom, it's another story.

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They wanted, they were looking. Their country was a mess. The ruble was worthless, but they were hopeful about what the future might hold. And so they knew from everything that you've told me kind of privately in the documents and everything you've shown me and what you brought back, you know that it's very clear. Russia was aware that UFOs were not U.S. technology. They were not any technology from any known foreign nation. In fact, they went a step further in a lot of these documents, and the people you talk with said, we know they're not from here.

They're spaceships. They're from somewhere else. This was technology that was beyond anything they had. It was beyond anything that they thought the Americans had. They were aware of sensor systems that we had that were detecting these things coming in from space to Earth. They were from somewhere else. Okay, so that's crazy to me.

So what you're saying is all the way back in this era, they were aware that the U.S. had sensor systems to pick up UFOs dedicated, I assume space-based satellite sensor systems, and they're telling you this. We are now in, you know, 2003, we know that with the TikTok UFO event series, that we have tracked these things coming above, you know, what would be California area, and dropping down to sea level from over 80,000 feet over, meaning from space and coming down. So we have those systems now. They're probably more advanced. So some people within our National Reconnaissance office or whoever deals with our satellites,

they are fully aware of the UFO presence and reality. Exactly. So, you know, we give a lot more credence to government records, military records about UFO incidents than we do to say private citizens, private scientists who are doing their own research. But the fact is, in this country and in that country, and in other countries around the world, there are esteemed scientists who quietly investigate this stuff on their own. And I met a number of them in Russia. One of them was a guy named Dr. Yuleep Fomene.

He was a colleague of Felix Siegel. He'd been out on these landing site trace cases. He, for a while, investigated UFOs on behalf of the Russian government and did it very quietly. And he told us he'd give these briefings about his findings behind closed doors to Russian Party officials and then after a while he came into disfavor and they stuck him in prison for a while because of his research it was capitalistic it was it was playing into the hands of American propagandists he did some time the interview that we did with him in 1993 was the first one he'd ever done with western journalists or eastern journalists as well so this scientist literally went to was sent to jail because

of the way he was openly speaking about his scientific studies of UFOs which was for the government Initially, it was for the government, and then somehow he fell into disfavor, and they put him in prison for it, his research. One of his colleagues was the guy named Dr. Rem Verlamov, who was teaching at a prestigious Moscow Institute of Technology. He would also go along with Ziegle out to these landing site trace cases and collect samples. He did some really interesting analysis that he shared with us. He said, we conducted an experiment to see if the energy generated by the UFO could affect time. We synchronized two quartz timepieces, attached the opposite ends of a metal rod, placed one of the timepieces inside the UFO landing circle, and one was left outside, and inside the circle, time speeded up. We repeated the results with mechanical timepieces.

So the willingness to study these alleged landing sites is a pretty obvious example of the courage that some of these scientists had. And he said there was a time distortion effect at these landing sites. There was another guy who was- Hold on, hold on. Holy shit. I mean, so what, okay, I just want to make sure I understand. So they had these landing trace cases, which we know people have studied, but they actually found a temporal distortion between inside of that landing.

This was done by the scientist for the government. Inside, time sped up. So something about the propulsion system, if it's gravitational, had a residual effect. Yeah, there was a residual energy that distorted time that was left there at that site. Even more interesting was something that his colleague, a colleague of his named Dr. Yuri Simakov. He was a biologist. He worked for a government biological lab. We went to his lab, saw his facilities. He's a real scientist. He had gone out to these landing site trace cases as well as part of the team. And his specialty was looking for microorganisms in the soil. So he would go

through the soil meticulously mapping where these single cell organisms were in the soil. And what he was able to do is where these things sat down, these crafts sat down, there would be all these microorganisms right outside where it touched the ground. Inside, they were gone. It was completely bereft of life. What he said was, he told us that the single cell organisms simply disappeared. They didn't die. They didn't leave the sites. They did leave the sites as if they were forced to leave. We also performed experiments with, wingless, oh, shit, sorry. That's an amazing quote. Oh, shit, sorry. There's a page missing. No, but I get the, I, he performed an experiment with wingless flies. We put him in a covered dish, held the dishes over the landing sites.

The flies went wild. I think these insects have different receptors than we do and can detect fields that are not known to us. So he got so good at mapping where the single cell organisms were in soil that he could tell you, what the craft looked like that sat down, at least what the bottom, the landing site part of it, looked like. And the designs were pretty exotic. I showed you some photos of that this morning. Yeah, yeah, you showed me the photos in the hotel room.

So that's so interesting. So when these craft would land down, single cell organisms wouldn't be in certain areas, and they actually looked like crop circles. And they're really beautiful. Yeah. This is Dr. Yuri Simakov. He worked at a plant lab, a biological lab for the Russian government,

And he studied UFO landing site trace cases. And he was showing us he did some really interesting work. So he'd go out with these other Russian scientists where witnesses would say a UFO was here, it landed on the ground, and he would go out and study it. And he would dig into the soil. His specialty was digging into the soil to look for one-cell organisms. And what he found was over the years

and dozens of different UFO landing sites was where UFO sat down, the one-celled. cell organisms would disappear. So you look in the soil right over here is a bunch of one-cell organisms. Here, there are none where the craft set down. So he is able to eventually develop a system where he mapped out what these craft looked like. When they landed, he could figure out what they with the impressions that they made in the soil based on the lack of one-cell organisms. So some of these landing craft, the impressions they made on the soil were pretty dramatic. It doesn't look like anything that we fly.

And he shared that with us. He gave us all that information. And then he had found these little orbs, these little tiny perfect spheres. They were opaque. They were sort of reddish, orangish color. And he called them cosmic sperm. He thought they were some kind of a biological mechanism,

some kind of seeds. And he gave me half of the world's known supply of cosmic sperm, and I brought it back. That could be an effect of the field due to the propulsion itself that created that design. Have you ever seen those videos where they take a plate and put a whole bunch of particles on the plate and do different tones of sound through the plate? And different octaves or different sounds have different designs that they create on the debris that's on the plate.

So the vibration of those frequencies. So it could be when these things landed down and it looks like crop circles or whatever, that it's generated because of the propulsion system, right? I mean, that's my guess. That was his guess too. Yeah. Yeah. The other interesting thing that he found is at two different sites.

So one was a case right outside of Moscow, a UFO had landed. He goes to do his thing looking for a single cell organism is in the soil and he found something else, these perfectly opaque little spheres in the soil. He found them there at that site. He found him again at a UFO landing site in Kazakhstan, which is, you know, hundreds, thousands of miles away. a different, different part of the, what used to be the USSR, and the same kind of little spheres. And he called them cosmic sperm.

And he had them in a little petri dish there, and he gave me some of them. He gave me like half the world's known supply of cosmic sperm and said, take them back. He had the theory that they would sprout, that they were some kind of biological agent that they might sprout into either a being or animal or plant or something like that.

Gave them to me, said, take them back to the U.S., do some tests on them, know what you find out. So I did. I took half the world's cosmic sperm back to the U.S. And did you plant some in your home garden next to your tomato? I dropped them on my kitchen floor and I had to get down there and pick them all up. And then I gave some to a physicist who looked at them under an electron microscope. Pretty interesting, perfectly, symmetrical. But he said, look, these things were not biological. They were manufactured. There had some high heat instrument had been used to make them,

and he didn't know what the purpose was, or why you would find them at UFO landing sites in two such remotely distant places. But there you were. I sent them to a plant pathology lab at a Midwestern university. They concluded that it also was not biological. It was manufactured. Didn't know who would make it, what it was used for,

but it remained a mystery. There's another part to that story, were those objects, I gave them to the Atomic Testing Museum. I remember that, yeah. And they put it on display to be like, you know, these are artifacts from a spacecraft. They call them alien artifacts, which, you know, I don't know that they're alien artifacts. I never said they were alien artifacts. It just, that's that they were mysterious.

And the Russians didn't know what they were. They put them on display there. And they were on display in this Area 51 exhibit for a couple of years. I had given them all kinds of stuff, loaned all this, all kinds of books, and trinkets and memorabilia as well as some material that I got from a UFO crash site and Downegorse that we'll talk about in a minute. And I got all that back except for the little spheres. I said, hey, where's the spheres? Yeah, we don't know. So it's been four or five years now. They still haven't returned them to me. And all my inquiries to get them back have been unsuccessful.

Nobody knows what happened to it. The atomic testing museum straight up stole the world's supply of cosmic sperm from you. Yeah. Somebody there. took it. I got all the other stuff back, except for that. So did you ever, I mean, because my first question would be, if they're not biological and there's some alloy, you know, forged in a high heat, you'd imagine maybe that has something to do with the, again, the propulsion systems of the UFOs. Who knows? But did you ever have them elementally and isotopically analyzed? I did. You did. I did. I gave it over to NIDS. And NIDS passed those samples onto Bass, which was part of the DIAs.

investigation of UFO as part of the OSAP program, they did a complete analysis. They did a chemical analysis. I have not had the authority to go ahead and release that yet, but I hope to do it. There's no unknown elements in it. I'll tell you that much. There's no unobtainium in there. There's no element 115 or something. But the chemical composition was really interesting. They really could not figure out who made them, why they were made, what their purpose was, or how they ended up in the dirt at two alleged UFO landing sites. so far apart. Well, that's amazing, though. I mean, when you're able to actually get people like so NIDS National Institute for Discovery Science that was run by Robert Bigelow, so there's, you know,

funds in place, you have them elementally and isotopically analyzed. I hope people can research that. The whole point is that we share this information, but, you know, look, man, I've been down that road as well. You know, sometimes when scientists are baffled by something, you still can't identify what it is. You just know it was fabricated, that it's unique. but it doesn't go past that. Here's the other interesting part. So in 1993, I go and talk to all these place people. Military folks, scientists, investigators,

they're all very, very willing to share their stories, their investigations, their research materials. It was an exciting time. Three years later, I go back. Awakening to a young Bruce Willis spouting Russian is the first sign you're not in Kansas anymore. But then the ad for Ginzu Knives lets you know it's not Oz either. Western influence is far more pronounced here today than under the communists,

but capitalism and democracy are still hanging on by their fingernails. Just getting to Moscow is daunting in itself, up to 22 hours by air from Las Vegas. Even in early April, temperatures hovered close to zero most of our visit. Some 400 people froze to death on Moscow streets this winter. While the domes of the historic landmarks still gleam with gold, the vast majority of the population is dirt poor. Driving in this city is motorized Darwinism, complete chaos punctuated by traffic as solid as cold magma. Anyone with money is considered mafia, the generic term for criminals. Many of the newly wealthy made theirs in one of Moscow's 10 or so casinos,

which cater to Western tourists, but whose Spartan interiors and barren ads could use a little Las Vegas pizzazz. We were in Moscow to establish ties with military officials concerning secret UFO studies. UFO studies. The Ministry of Defense admitted to us three years ago that such studies were a top priority. Hundreds of documents and photos were made available to us. This time we interviewed the former Soviet Air Minister, the highest-ranking Russian to ever talk about UFOs with a Western journalist. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs

to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work,

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There was a producer named Jeremy Evans. I was kind of jaded by that point because I'd been burned by CBO. and ABC, that they wanted to retrace my steps in Russia. These guys actually did what they said they would do. They brought me back. We went to go see all these people that I'd interviewed in 1993. So hold on. This is your second trip?

Second trip. Okay. So, and that's why, I was always wondering why you went back after taking documents out, but you went back because you're trying to reconnect with all of these people. Yeah, to see what had changed. Well, the country had changed dramatically. Boris Yeltsin was no longer in power. There had been, you'll recall, I said, there were daily.

demonstrations when we were there in 1993, the pro-communists, the pro-authoritarian folks, the Russians who liked having a big brother-type government, they wanted to return to that. And by 1996, that was on the verge of happening again, the authoritarian folks who were going to regain power. After I'd come back from 1993 and publicize some of these findings, I wrote an article, and Brian Gresh wrote an article for Mufon. I did some public. presentations, that material that we made public gets back to Russia. And these Russian pro-communist newspapers get a hold of it, and they wrote some really harsh articles naming names of the people who had cooperated with me, Colonel Borisokalov, Dr. Nikolai Kapranov, the Russian physicist who'd

arranged this trip for us and introduced us to all these people. They named all of them. All the people who had cooperated with us and talked to us were called out as traitors. Traders did the home to the mother Russia. And as Nikolika Pranup, who was my friend, Russian physicist who had helped us set this up, he would not talk to us on that second trip. Three years later, he'd been our friend for a long time. He wouldn't talk to us, wouldn't meet with us. Neither would Colonel Sokolov. Neither would Dr. Budikov, the space scientist. People that we had interviewed back then, none of them would meet with us again. They were scared. And I don't blame them. These guys got squeezed, right? That's the whole thing.

threatened. To this day, I mean, you don't have communication. They were squeezed by their country, not to talk to you about UFOs. Nikolai Kaprana put it this way. He said, look, he had communicated. He sent us this article saying, boy, this is really serious. He said, if this had happened five years ago, I would have been put in prison. If it had happened 10 years earlier, I would have been shot. So he was done. And a lot of them were done. And then the revisionist historians stepped in. There was a guy we met in 1993, a scientist named Dr. Yuli Platov, and he described himself as a friendly skeptic. He was with the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He had done some UFO studies. He'd collected UFO cases for their Academy of Sciences, and I got those files. And he said he's a friendly skeptic in the sense that I'm open to the idea that these could be from extraterrestrial or somewhere else, that it's not necessarily earthly. But in fact, he was not all that friendly a skeptic. He was like the Phil class of Russia. He debunked everything. I think there was one case that we presented to him that he was not able to debunk,

and it was these Russian ice circles that it appeared on a lake. All the other ones he had debunked. Now, by the time I get back there in 1996, the friendly skeptic who had told me in 93, I don't know about any Ministry of Defense study. I don't believe there's ever been one. I've never heard of Colonel Sothelov. There is no such study. I don't think it's true.

By 96, he had a different story. He said, oh, yeah, there was a study. I was in charge of it, not Colonel Sakhalov. Sokolov is a ephologist, they described. He didn't find anything interesting. I, Dr. Platov, was in charge of this, and none of these cases are unexplained, which is flat out preposterous.

It is completely contradicted by the documents that were produced by the Ministry of Defense. Platov had nothing to do with the Ministry of Defense. He was unaware that there had been such a study. He didn't know Sokolov at all, and suddenly he rewrote history. And I'm not surprised. I mean, they were all scared.

So the people, not only would they not talk to us in 1996, but the history of their UFO program had been completely rewritten by that time. Yeah, this is propaganda, man. We see this all the time. You and I see this all the time. Somebody comes forward, they lift their head up and they tell you what's going on. And then the revisionist, the historical revisionist, or just people that want to discredit other, you know, people using, you know, character as a way to attack them.

His boss, the former deputy defense minister, declined to say. speak altogether under orders. And even Sokolov is now reluctant to talk, in part because he was attacked in communist newspapers following our 1993 interview. There's more than one kind of chill in the Moscow air these days. With the double political whammy of the revived communists and the scary nationalist, the Russian government needs a UFO expose like it needs a red, white, and blue paint job on the Kremlin. Science has received the message. Individuals and the Russian Academy are now downplaying their long-term studies of UFOs. Oddly, the KGBB has opened up,

including a release of this long secret film of a UFO. KGB adds it has no ongoing interest in flying saucers, although it does have several hundred files. You know, we see this even with the pilots, you know, Commander Fravor, Lieutenant Ryan Graves, it's like they come, they tell their story, or they don't know what they saw. Must have been system, you know, they couldn't read their systems.

People create all of these fantastical ideas of why they can discredit somebody who's a trained pilot or something like that. So we just see it all the time. We see it obviously with Lazar. They attack him saying all these lies about him as a way to dismiss his story. So from a government standpoint, if they want to try to discredit what was told to you, what these documents contradict, then they use this guy to do that. Yeah. Simple.

It was rewriting history just as happened in this country many times. So we're in 1996. I go back with this crew from the BBC. They're pretty disappointed. The people that I had told them we would talk to, who had agreed? They initially said they would talk to us. And then when we got there, they said, no, no, Nicarov, Borosokalov, Dr. Budikov, none of them would talk to us at all. They had said yes. And then they said, no, changed their minds. But they were not to be deterred. I tell you, this guy, BBC's Jeremy Evans, he was a hard-nosed reporter, investigative guy who found some other people at the time. talk to. One of those was General Igor Maltsev. General Maltsev had been commander of Russian air defenses for seven years. I mean, right at the height of the military there. He claimed he was unaware of the study that Salkalov had done, but he was aware of incidents that had happened. I asked him about the order. Did you give an order that says, stand down, don't chase UFOs? He says, yeah, I did. Wow. Because, and he's the one that gave me the quote, I did that because they have, quote, incredible capacities for retaliation. Don't shoot them because they'll shoot back. And we know that

there were incidents of that in Russia. Yeah, that's amazing. So he did confirm to you that the Russian government at first was shoot down UFOs. And then when that didn't work and they lost a few pilots, stop. Leave him alone. He told me a story about, and I did an interview with him on camera for the BBC. And he told me a story about an incident in 1990 over Moscow where there were a hundred, more than a hundred, confirmed contacts, radar and sensor contact with UFOs flying around over Moscow, performing incredible maneuvers. They'd appear. You could see them physically or not on radar.

Then you can see them on radar, but not physically. Doing all kinds of weird things, the kind of things that our military has documented as well. And he said that was really the final nail in the coffin. That's when they decided we're not going to shoot these things down anymore. They're not ours. They're not American. They're from somewhere else. That's what he told me.

Yeah, the fact that there's some sort of cloaking capability, which is one of the main things that the military says about UFOs is that, you know, you can see them sometimes on thermal, but not with the optics of the human eye, and sometimes vice versa. And we get those reports from pilots all the time. And I happen to know, and you happen to know, that there are Congress people that also hear directly from pilots that say, this is happening to us. They draw pictures for them of what these crap might look like. And there's nothing that we have in our. arsenal or any other arsenal. We also come to learn that a lot of those pilots end up scrubbing that data themselves. They're either told to or they decide to so that those UFO reports don't go up the chain of command, maybe because of stigma, maybe because they just don't want to get off mission. But we have a real problem with that where the information is not getting to where it needs to get to, like to arrow, hopefully if they're good, or just up the chain of command. There are so many bottlenecks of reporting UFOs within our military. It's fucking criminal.

to Russia. So, you know, a lot of the doors were closed slammed in our face. The people that we thought were going to be able to interview in 96 didn't happen. So we decided to take a little side trip. So we fly from Moscow to Vladivostok and to go check out what some have called the Russian Roswell case. And this is, this flight takes place during a blinding snowstorm. We're in this Moscow airport looking out at snow that is going sideways. I'm thinking, there is no possible way we're going to fly in this storm. And in fact, that same storm system further south, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce named Ron Brown was flying in that storm system. His plane crashed and he died that same night that we were there. And so we are the last plane

out of Moscow flying to Blat of Bostov, which is way over on the eastern edge of Russia. I think it's like 10 or 12 time zones that we flew through. We get on this plane, people are smoking and drinking and farting and belching and partying. It was a wild, rock a scene, nothing like any plane flight I have ever been on before. And I remember them coming to Russian stewardesses, flight attendants, bringing down, they served a meal of chicken and rice and red wine for dinner. And then it was like eight, nine hours later, they come around again to serve breakfast. and it's chicken and rice and white wine for breakfast.

So that's, you know, if you're ever wondering what the white wine is for, you know, for breakfast, that's it. I've flying in the wrong country, obviously, man. That sounds like a party. We fight about a Vostok. It's like a frontier town. It's so far removed from Moscow. It might as well be another country.

It's a rough and tumble seaport. It's like the law unto itself. We stay in a hotel that was like a bunker. And it was highly fortified. And they said, if you want to go into town, we're enough to send a security guy with you. No, I don't want to go into town. I'm not going by myself. We did go the next day, got some video of the bay.

And then we got on this helicopter, this ancient helicopter that they swore had been used by Mikhail Gorbachev, and we fly to a place called Dalmigors, which is a beautiful little garden spot next to Red China and North Korea. It's way out in the middle of nowhere. It's a mining town. no sidewalks, very harsh conditions. And we go there to meet a guy named Dr. Dijlilni. And he had been a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And in 1986, there had been a crash. An object had flown over the city.

And then it got real bright and blew up and crashed on this hill, height 611, they called it. And Dijlini and his team members climbed up this mountain and gathered samples. of the wreckage that was up there. It was this weird webbing-like material that covered the rocks and trees and soil. He gathered all this stuff up, tried to do some analysis, crude analysis in his lab, and then sent different samples,

along with his findings, to different Russian institutes. And it was very strange material. I think I had part of the report that he had written about this incident. And he said there were 17 different elements in it. Lead, silicon, aluminum, tin, molybdenum. It was a very strange combination of elements, but he said the really strange thing was the fact that there was no traces of sulfur or phosphorus in the fusion.

It's practically impossible to make an alloy like that in earth conditions, in his words, without phosphorus or sulfur. How do you heat it up? How do you make those alloys? You know, I had gone to a lot of Ostock with this crew from the BBC. There were total pros, great guys, and they put together a series. They took my material and retraced the steps from the 1993 trip. That's Bryant Blackburn and I out in front of KGB headquarters. We posed for that photo, the KGB photo, Nap, Grass Blackburn, which we thought was funny, which our Russian host did not think was funny at all.

That is height 611, Hill 611 near Downingores, where an object exploded and crashed. It's a story that I'll tell you about at some time, but a lot of the material from that crash was sent to various Russian institutes for analysis. Some of it was really strange, and the chief scientist for that Dr. de Jilny shared some of that material with me. I was able to bring it back, and we actually put it on display at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. But Moscow was only the first stop. After being busted trying to videotape a near whiteout at the airport, it was a nine-hour stormy jaunt at the end of the earth, Vladivostok, a crime-infested seaport where our hotel's room service menu offered bodyguard service.

The sarcastic reference is to our ride on this ancient chariot through snowstorms and vast emptiness, sometimes at tree-top level, to the gritty industrial town of Dalegorsk, where in 1986, some of the last year. something like the Russian Roswell occurred. Witnesses saw an object crash into this mountain. Scientists have analyzed the strange debris, but don't know what they have. Also had some interesting experiments where this webbing material, which has obviously had been some kind of high technology,

had disappeared while he's looking at it. Samples would just disappear. So we sent it to these Russian academies to be analyzed and none of it ever came back and he never got any replies from them. But what did come is, other craft, other UFOs in the days that followed, came flying over the mountain, shooting down beams of light as if they were looking for the wreckage.

Wow, wow. Yeah, that whole idea that there's some sort of retrieval program from the UFOs themselves, and that's pretty crazy, man. Yeah, we did talk to some Russian military folks who said that they had tracked UFOs in that same time period that had flown over down the gorse, that had disappeared from the radar sites. So chances are there are others that have suggested this is some kind of Russian satellite. But the fact is the Russian government never came looking for its satellite.

If it was a Russian satellite, you would presume that they would come and pick it up. They didn't. Dejolny had done the analysis, sent samples to these other places, gave me some of the samples of the rocks and trees that had been charred in the fire that followed the wreck. And I brought that back and that also went to the atomic testing museum as part of their exhibit. they gave me that stuff back, just not the Simokov spheres. Yeah, so they do have all of these programs to study these samples and do all this stuff. You just wonder, like, they've had crashes themselves. Do you think that Russia also has reverse engineering programs on whole craft?

Well, that's what I was told. We were promised a number of different times, both in 93 and in 96. I'd ask, do you have something like an area 51? Have you had crashes? Have you had advanced technology that's being studied? or analyzed in secret somewhere, and we were told yes, and we were promised a chance to go see that, and it never happened.

And I don't know that it ever will happen. So what's the takeaway after all these years when you went to Russia now twice, and you talked with all of these scientists, and you talked with all these government people, you brought back the documents, you shared it with certain groups that needed. You know, what is the takeaway of all?

This sounds like a form of disclosure, man. What's the takeaway? Well, I mean, I do. I think that, you know, we sat there, went there with the idea of learning more the Russians about what America knows, then we might get from the phone the American government. I think we did. I mean, they confirmed that they as a superpower at that time were doing the same thing that we were. They were studying it in secret. They were trying to develop the technology.

They wanted to get an advantage over their geopolitical rivals. Same thing that the American government has been doing. At the same time, they are telling their public, pay no attention to this. There's nothing to it. It's American propaganda. There's nothing. Don't worry about it. It's a bunch of nonsense, the public, the Russian public, like the American public, saw through it. They maintained an ongoing, if underground interest in UFOs. And then for that brief period there in the early 90s, they were allowed to talk about it in person in public events. On the day that I arrived, there was a UFO conference that I went to the first time in that first trip in 1993, and we interviewed a bunch of people who were there. I don't imagine that they're still having UFO conferences.

The only real good reports we get out of Russia anymore come from our friend Paul Stonehill who samples Russian media and reports when they have UFO incidents. But I think that window of opportunity that was open for a very brief time there in the early 1990s has now closed probably forever. Yeah, man. I guess one day would just be amazing if we could have coordination between governments to try to work on some of this technology. It's never going to happen.

Everybody wants a technological advantage on this reverse engineering programs. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. I'm amazed at the ferocity and ugliness of anti-American sentiments, now current in Russia. The grim assessment by former KGB General Oleg Collusion is at odds with a friendly face placed on U.S. Russian relations by politicians.

It was Collusion's job to direct an army of KGB spies stationed all over the world. Nevada was always a prime target of espionage, he says, and the KGB had intense subversion plans for this area, including the sabotage of Hoover Dam and the poisoning of our water supply. While subversion is no longer on the front burner for the Russians, the general says, the new Russian president seems to long for the good old days. Mr. Putin's heart and soul belong to the Soviet system. He admires comrade Joseph Stalin. Collusion should know Russian President Vladimir Putin worked directly under collusion at the KGB.

Putin openly admires even publicly toasts mass murderer Joseph Stalin. Can you imagine in Germany today any one of the political leaders drinking blessed memory of Adolf Hitler? Putin, he says, still has a spy's attitude about how to best deal with adversaries. vodka, blackmail and a threat to kill. Isn't it nice for the president of a big country? Even though KGB no longer exists, its successor still spreads fear, not only internationally, but at home in Russia. When this reporter visited Russia twice in the 1990s, most average citizens there told us they simply assume they are always being watched. With Putin in charge, that paranoia is reinforced.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, Russia's already huge spy network now operates with powerful new allies, mobsters. mobsters. Russian criminal elements are now omnipotent. I mean, they are everywhere. And the Russian security services may use criminals to settle scores with those who they find inconvenience. Local lawmen confirm there is already a strong Russian mob presence here, and collusion warns as long as Southern Nevada is home to important defense installations, spies will

always be here. I wouldn't be surprised. If there are some people who would be very much interest in ferreting out information related to the defense installations, to Department of Energy Operations, after all, DIVA is one of the crucial states. George Knapp, eyewitness news. You know, why don't governments come clean on this? Our mutual friend, the late Stan Friedman, used to talk about that. He would say, look, I mean, no government on Earth wants to admit that there's things flying around in their skies. and they can't do anything about it, flying around with impunity over sensitive sites, over nuclear bases, nuclear missiles, military facilities.

Does the president come out and say, oh, sorry, nothing we can do about that. He said that, you know, eventually, when this comes out, that we, earthlings, no matter what country you live in, might start thinking of ourselves as earthlings, as opposed to Americans or Russians, and no government wants that to happen. Yeah. I think that's true.

Yeah. So, I mean, we know that to be true within the United States programs that we are aware of, that whistleblowers are testifying right now behind closed doors that there are these programs and we've been working on it. But it sounds like unsuccessfully, I mean, I maintain what I keep hearing through all this time from people that are involved is that our material science needs to catch up to be able to fabricate what it is that these craft are built from. They can do, they said derivatives, right? We get a lot of derivatives. So you learn a lot through the process of interrogation of these either materials or whole craft as we've heard. But can we fabricate so that we can duplicate these vehicles themselves?

And the answer has always been no. And it's, you know, we've been told that over and over and over that it's not that we don't have the brightest minds on it necessarily. It's that we physically can't atomically layer and perfectly atomically layer to build these machines. I guess the derivative technologies is a big deal though, and that's a reason to keep the secret. Yeah, I think so. I think there are legitimate national security issues involved. It comes hand in hand with it. There's no getting around it, you know, as we have been told, you know, you can't tell your friends without telling your enemies. And this technology, whoever gets it, they win. You know, if, in fact, we can ever duplicate it,

I'm not sure that we're going to be able to. Yeah, yeah. People like to theorize that we are flying what we see as the TikToks. This is some sort of technology that we have created some leap on and it's U.S. technology. What? Bullshit. This stuff has been around since the beginning of history, but even just when we were seeing foo fighters, both sides of the war thought it was each others. We're seeing that now. So I wish it was a sad day when I learned that this was not our tech and I was sure that that was correct information. It was a sad day. I was sure we had made breakthroughs. Apparently we haven't. So that's where we're at, man. Governments lie about this.

They've always lied about it. They tell us to move along, nothing to see here. They're liars. They might have good reasons for lying about it. I suspect that there is a very small group of people who really know what's going on, that the rest of government and the military really have no idea. They believe that what they've been told, that there's nothing to it, that it's all misidentifications of prosaic objects.

But there is an effort to figure out the technology. We know now from some friends of ours in Congress that there's a lot of trying to get to the bottom of it, I wish them a lot of luck. But the people who have been keeping these secrets all these decades are a lot better at their job, I think, than people like us are at ours. And it's an uphill fight in America, in Russia, and other countries around the world. All we can do is journalists is keep trying to kick down doors and report the news. So thanks for sharing the Russia story with everybody. I think it's an important part of UFO history that the wider audience hasn't heard. You've shared a lot with me over beers or something like that,

but now people get to hear it. I'd love to go back. I love visiting Russia. There's not a chance in hell that I'm going to go back. I mean, you know, they just arrested an American journalist there, charged him with espionage a couple of weeks ago for what was obviously not espionage.

A lot of Russian journalists have been bumped off, like about one a month. They've been dying in strange ways, falling out of buildings. It's not something I think I would ever go back there unless there was a radical change in their government, but I'd love to at some point. But anyway.

Don't worry. Like normal. You'll send me in his bait someday and I'll go to Russia for us. Yeah, you can go. Let me know how it is. Never has so few had so much to tell but could say so little. Following this and weaponized, the presentation of Jeremy Corbelle, George Knapp, Dark Course Entertainment, and Cadence 13 Studios. Available now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your shows.