WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp - Russia's Secret UFO Files

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

What do other world governments know about the UFO mystery? When the USSR collapsed in the early '90s, a brief window of opportunity opened. With the help of a well-connected Russian physicist, journalist George Knapp traveled to Moscow and interviewed high ranking Russian military officials and scientists about what might be the largest UFO study ever conducted. The witnesses, who had never before spoken with any journalist, confirmed the Russian military had conducted a ten-year nationwide investigation into UFOs and UFO technology. The Russians also knew plenty about what the US government had been doing with UFO investigations; Both governments had been lying to their citizens. In this episode, Jeremy and George dive into the Russian UFO files and we hear from some of the key witnesses associated with the Ministry of Defense program. 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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job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Secrets, cover-ups, and strange phenomena. 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 weaponized. Welcome back. This is weaponized. How you doing, everybody? Jeremy. Hey, good to see you, George. Hey man, so I'm excited about today because I heard that you smuggled classified documents out of Russia. Is that true?

That is true. Okay. Is that the end of the story? Yeah, that's it. Okay. So today let's talk about that. I've heard, you know, you've informed me a bunch about this, but it also known not only to intelligence agencies, but also to the public, that somehow you went to Russia at this opportune time and got a bunch of information. about their UFO programs. So I want to hear about that. Well, the actual smuggling part of it was exhilarating, exciting, downright scary, probably crazy, in retrospect, looking back at it now, if they had caught me what I was doing,

I'd still be in a gulag somewhere. We know what happens to Russian journalists who cross Putin. We know what happens to business people who cross Putin. An American journalist was recently arrested in Russia for espionage purposes. I can pretty much assure you that he didn't do what we did back then, but I'll tell you the story.

So in 1989 for KLAS, I'd produced this series, UFO is the best evidence. We did a follow-up series the following year in 1990. At the end of 1991, I had UFO disease pretty bad. I had a bad case of it. I was totally focused on UFO issues, wondering where I could take the topic. And I ended up leaving KLAS at the end of 91 to go to work for a company. called Altamira Communications. I took along a friend of mine who also worked for KLS. His name was Brian Gresh, great reporter and anchor. We went to work for Altamira in part because they owned a TV

studio. I wanted to produce UFO-related documentaries. They had a studio and they promised us it's yours to use. At the same time, I've been tried to figure out where the research could go, how to make progress, figuring out what our government knows. And there was an article that appeared in the New York Times. It was about Lee Harvey Oswald, credited with killing John F. Kennedy, assassinating President Kennedy. And the article was basically KGB files on Lee Harvey Oswald, proving he's not ours. We didn't do it. He didn't work for us. Here's the files. And it occurred to me, I wonder what else is in the KGB files. Could we maybe access what they know about UFOs? USSR was a giant superpower, as the U.S. was. We know that governments around the

world have studied this mystery over the decades, that there are secret files that have not been made public, maybe they know something. So I was looking for an opportunity to figure out how to crack the USSR mystery, and that market, in essence. And along came a congressman named Jim Bilbray. You might recall from the Bob Lazare story. Jim Bilbray was very helpful to KLAS and try to track down records on Bob Lazar. And his office had sent a statement when Lazare was in some legal trouble in support of how strange it had been that these government agencies who had records would not release them. So Bill Bray comes to me and his friend Don Williams, who owned Altamira, and he said, I've got this guy named Dr. Nikolai Kapranoff. He was a Russian physicist

who was in the United States. He'd been touring American nuclear weapons labs, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, giving lectures about nuclear disarmament. A heavy hitter. He said, Nikolai is coming to Las Vegas. He's about to go back to Russia. Does not know what he's going to do. I know you're interested in UFOs. Maybe you want to talk to him. So I did. I arranged a meeting with Nikolai. We met at a little bar near a house where I lived at the time. We had a couple of beers, and I started asking him about UFOs. Do you know anything about UFOs? Nah, nothing. Never heard of it. Hold on. Was that little bar the smuggle in? No, no. It was near there.

Same street. No, same street. All right. But it wasn't a bar where my future wife did work at the time. Okay. And so have a couple of beers with Nikolai. I'm asking him about Russia what he had done. He fills me in on his background.

And it's an amazing background. He had been a physicist. I had a PhD. He had been the national security advisor to the Russian parliament. He had taught Russian cosmonauts how to spot American nuclear submarines from space. When they're up there, here's what you do to spot our submarines. And he was, at that time, the National Security Advisor to Boris Yeltsin,

who'd taken over as the top figure in the Russian government after Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a tumultuous time, turbulent time. There were a lot of give and take in the Russian military, and they didn't know what was actually going to happen. It was a period of, we remember it now as sort of a golden age of Glasnost and perestroika. Russia had denounced the Soviet system. The USSR had crumbled. A lot of the former republics that were part of the USSR had become independent. And they were experimenting with capitalism, trying to learn their way forward and try to embrace ideals of democracy and the capitalist system.

So a lot of political turmoil in that country. I thought, well, this might be a window of opportunity to get to know what was going on, what they might know about UFOs. It occurred to me that if we could get the USSR, which I presumed had done some studies of UFOs over the years, if we could get their files, their experts, to talk about UFOs, we might learn more from them about what the American government knows on UFOs than we will ever learn from our own government. And that is how it worked out. So I met with Nikolai Kapanov. We went through the pastis, had a couple of beers. First he said, no, I don't know anything about UFOs.

And then he goes, you know what, wait a second. I got a friend of mine at the KGB who told me that there had been a report about UFOs that he had read. I said, well, do you think you could look them up and try to figure out if he could get a copy of it? He said, yeah, I'll try. And he said, you know what, there's a National Academy of Sciences that was looking at this stuff. I think I could talk to them too. So great, would you be willing to work for us? Yeah, he had no job.

He was going back to Russia. He had no job. Okay, let me back you up a second. So this is, in your career, this is a time when from news, reporting and all of this, you said you had UFO disease. So for people that don't know what that means, that means this subject is so interesting. And if you see opportunities to learn more, it just excites you. This becomes one of the most important things in your life. It's the implications of if it is true. So you have this UFO disease at the time. You're like, I'm going to

try to do something completely different with my life. And you went to Altamira to start creating this content. But this is also a time when the world is changing. So it's a time when there's this momentary openness within Russia from a country that was so closed and at war with the United States. And you thought, oh, what a great idea. I'm going to go there and start exploring the UFO topic. Well, yeah, pretty much that. I mean, there had been that story on Oswald that sort of stuck in the back of my head. Jacques Valet, Dr. Jacques Valet had been to Russia.

I think it was in 1990. He wrote a book called The Cosmic Samasdot, which basically Samasdod is an underground way of communicating. So people who studied UFOs during the Soviet era had to be very discreet in communicating about their investigations because officially the USSR had said, had decreed, UFOs are bogus. It was made up by American imperialists. They're trying to distract us, pay no attention to it. That was their official position. As we were to learn, their actual position was much different. Valet had been there investigating an incident called the Veronaise, where aliens landed in this big city walked around, these gigantic alien robots.

It made news all over the world. Mostly a Western journalist made fun of it. But I thought, you know, that rang a bell with me, that there might be something to it. In November 1989, Soviet attitudes on UFOs became abundantly clear. The official news agency, Tass, reported on the alleged landing of an alien ship in the city of Veronish, a 10-hour train ride north of Moscow. According to Tass, tall aliens and a robot exited the spaceship, walked around the park, and then left. The story was reported in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and on network news.

None of these major media outlets had their own reporters on the scene, so most chose the approach they normally take with UFO story. Earlier tonight, the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather included a report about the alleged alien landing at Veronish. Rather, Riley commented on the Soviet claims about 10-foot-tall aliens walking around a Russian park. The CBS Newsman added, don't believe everything you read in TAS. Within days, the Veronish story assumed almost surreal proportions. American headlines chortled about pinhead aliens. Follow-up stories claimed that the only witnesses to the landing were young children, and because the tall aliens described were different from the usual short, bug-eyed variety.

the Americans hear about, it was smugly assumed the Russians must be wrong. Prominent astrophysicist Jacques Valet was one of few Westerners to personally investigate the case by meeting with Russian sources firsthand. In Boronej, there were many cases, not just the case that made the newspapers, not just the case that was reported by TAS with the school students. The witnesses were not just kids. They were 18, 19-year-old kids, very articulate. And obviously they had seen something.

There were physical traces there, but there were many other cases. There are over 1,000 witnesses in all in the city of Voronez. Voronezsche is a large city. It's over a million people. What they showed me was, you know, the film, the physical evidence. They told me about cases in which, for example, an object hovered near a nuclear power plant in Voronez,

and a beam from that object melted the asphalt there, and that's what they are studying now. The story Americans read was much different from what the witnesses say happened at Veronish. It was an odd case because instead of just a landing of a spacecraft, you got actual like beings that come out, which is one of these rarities when you have tons of people talking about a being,

and they look like robots in Russia. Yeah, 10 foot tall robots. And actually, there were a lot of witnesses. Most of them were young people, but they were not just little tiny kids. They were teenagers. It was a really interesting case. So along the lines, those lines,

I started reaching out to see what existed in terms of Russian files in Western. sources. There's something called FBIS. It's a report that's put out by the CIA, and they summarize foreign press accounts. And actually, they had quite a few stories from Russian media that they had translated into English, and they sent out to intelligence agencies. And a lot of the information was pretty intriguing. So I knew somebody in Russia had been studying UFOs and collecting information. I meet with Kepernov, and he says, yeah, I know some people who were looking at this stuff. We asked him, would you, be willing to go to work for us. And he said, yeah. So I gave him a couple of instructions.

I said, look, I want you to find people who were in a position to know about UFOs, military or scientific positions, who are in a position to actually investigate, see the files, know what's going on. But I don't want to hear from anyone who has ever talked to to reporters, Western media, or Russian media about this at all. I don't want it contaminated. So that was his marching orders. And this guy's a, this guy's a serious guy. This is a guy that you got connected do because of his government. Why was he in the U.S. giving these lectures about, you know, taking away nukes and everything and talking about what he did in Russia? Why was that a thing at that time? Well, there were attempts by the Russian government and the U.S. government that had

started with Reagan and Gorbachev. Let's take it down a notch. Let's maybe not destroy ourselves and destroy the planet. You recall these amazing statements that Ronald Reagan had made, the United Nations and other occasions where he said, wouldn't it be something if we were threatened by an alien force, wouldn't we all start thinking of ourselves as earthlings and all our differences would disappear? I've often wondered, what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by an outer power from outer space from another planet? Wouldn't we all of a sudden find that we didn't have any differences between us at all?

Mikhail Gorbachev responded to that and said, yeah, that would be something. Reagan said it, I think, five different times mentioning aliens. We can go into the story about Reagan. That's an incredible story. People should know about that. I mean, that's shown all over. When people talk about UFOs, they show this thing of Ronald Reagan at the UN, and it's like this green background. He goes, imagine if we were all dealing with an alien threat, how that would bond humanity. Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bound. I hope and wish that would be true if that's what happens, right?

Yeah. But anyway, it's a very famous speech. So his whole thing was he'd said it a number of times, but do you think he chose that intentionally, like the wording? Oh, yeah, I think he and Gorbachev talked about this stuff. And Gorbachev responded in public saying, yeah, I agree with you. We should be on the same page on this. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. There had been some incidents where UFOs appeared and were detected on sensor systems of our country and their country that could have led to a launch of nuclear weapons, a mistake, that they would assume, the Russians might assume these are our craft or missiles, that we would assume it's Russian stuff, and who knows, World War III could happen if you make that kind of a mistake. So brass tax that for people that don't know.

So UFOs have been detected and filmed over. nuclear facilities, they have shot beams of light into them, shut down nuclear weapons, turned them on at times. We know that happened in the 70s, 60s and 70s, but it's a very famous case, Malstrom Air Force Base. That's one. It was so funny, by the way, the guy, Robert Sals, who came out, he said, oh, yeah, I got a call, and I heard it was going to be something I could talk about.

He started talking about it. Turns out he was talking about his case, but it wasn't declassified. It was another case that was, and they had mistaken. So there were a bunch of these events. So you know about these in the U.S. Did they happen in Russia to? Well, yeah, that's what I wanted to find out. So we send Nikolai back to Moscow.

We give him a stipend, the monthly stipend. We give him an office, a fax machine, and said, go to it. Took about eight months. And I have a thick stack of messages that came in from him, faxes and phone calls and stuff that I've saved to this day. How he was trying to find this person and that, there were a lot of hits and misses, you know. But eventually, he found the right people.

He's an honest guy. He's a serious guy. Absolutely serious guy. I mean, you know, he was at the highest levels of the Russian government as they're a national security advisor. So about eight months in, 30 years ago this month, 30 years ago this month, we went to Moscow and I spent 10 days there. And Nikolai had set up interviews with all these people. We didn't really know how it was going to go. Okay, hold on. What was that like, though? So this is right after the Cold War, right? I mean, this is right as, so what was it like going to, like, I've only seen movies, but what was it like at that time in Russia? What year was it? This is 1993. And so you go, tell me one story of what

that was like. Well, it was an incredibly tumultuous period. The 10 days we were there, there were massive demonstrations every single day in Red Square. There were Russian tanks cruising through Moscow. The whole country was on alert. On the day we arrived, Boris Yeltsin had ordered the seizure of Russian airwaves. The state took control of their media, which essentially, always controlled it to one degree or another. On the last day we were there, there were these massive demonstrations outside the Russian parliament. It was a really spooky time. I mean, no one was really quite sure where it was going to go. The Russians, I got to know so many of them during that visit and a later visit. They're just so much like us. They wanted to embrace democracy

and capitalism. Mother Russia is singing a new tune these days. The Berlin Wall has crumbled, and the iron curtain has parted, allowing the Russian people to experiment with a free market economy, and allowing the rest of us a glimpse into a world that was, by and large, sealed off from the outside for decades. Even the KGB has opened some of its files to Western researchers and journalists.

But what do Russians know about UFOs? It was assumed by Western uphologists that the Soviets were experiencing the same type of UFO encounters as the rest of the world, but isolated incidents were all outsiders heard about. As tensions cooled and dialogue began between the East and the West, the UFO issue was publicly breached. In a 1989 issue of the magazine Soviet Military Review, Russian military leaders argued in favor of an ongoing exchange of UFO information

with the West. In the view of the authors, without such an exchange, a UFO might one day accidentally trigger a nuclear exchange between the superpowers on the assumption that the UFO was an enemy missile. There's an image I have in my head driving along in a car with our interpreter. And there's a guy sitting, he's got a peach basket, and he's got these cans of something behind him. And he's got a little sign in Krillik and in Russian. And he's sitting in the middle of a mud bog. And I'm wondering, what the hell is that guy doing? What does that sign say? What is he selling? He's selling used motor oil. So the guy was trying to get his head around capitalism and how it worked. He didn't understand the importance of location because he was in a mud bog there, but he wanted to embrace capitalism and democracy and freedom.

And that was really the spirit of the Russian people at the time. So many of them wanted to be part of the world. They didn't want to be at war with the rest of the world. They wanted to be integrated into the rest of society and to embrace all that democracy and capitalism might entail. But there was still, there was a big contingent of the Russians who, were happy to have a strong figure like a Stalin or a Khrushchev in charge of the government. They didn't like the idea that all these other republics had been peeled off, that they weren't considered the biggest power in the world anymore.

And so every single day, there were these massive demonstrations in Red Square, pro-democracy forces on one side, pro-communism forces on the other side, and cops and tanks and things of that sort in the middle. It was an exciting time to be there, regardless of the UFO, Well, I'm just curious. So you roll up, I'm assuming, with some friends that they all look like FBI agents, and then a bunch of cameras. Do you just get a tourist visa at the time? We had to get an invitation. So we had to have an invitation from someone in a position of authority. And the people that invited us, the official proclamation, was from their National

Academy of Natural Sciences, which was headed by a retired Admiral, Admiral Perumov. They were interested in UFOs and they gave us the invitation and we got visas and went on over. It was myself, Brian Gresh, the reporter who had left Channel 8 with me and then Brian, Bryant Blackburn, who had been my photographer on all the Bob Lazar Area 51 stuff for years. And we went over and we were there for 10 days. It was an amazing experience. Even if we had not found all this UFO stuff, it was absolutely fascinating to be there at the time. But you did find UFO stuff.

I did. So among the first people we interviewed was Dr. Kupranov. He had been highly skeptical. He didn't know where this was going to lead. But after eight months of digging into this stuff and talking to high-level government people about UFOs, he realized, holy crap, this is real. Russian physicist Nikolai Kapanov, a national security advisor to the Soviet parliament, spent months making the crucial contacts with sources who would not otherwise be available

to Westerners and who almost certainly would never have been accessed. accessible to Western journalists. Capranoff had heard rumblings about UFO studies over the years, but he was far from being a believer, that is, until he started asking questions of people in high places. More and more I started to think that this is something for real. And there are facts, and I've seen some materials, one can't, you know, just drop.

What I learned about the UFO is that they're certainly for real, and that the UFO is one fragment. one fragment of a very diverse and strong phenomenon. The military people are looking at that very seriously. With Kepernov's assistance, our team succeeded in making contact with a previously hidden echelon of UFO researchers, dedicated scientists who had pursued their interest in alien visitors during the darkest days of communism and whose findings have never before seen the light of day.

So he told us, look, I didn't really think this was going to lead anywhere, but now, Now, I'm amazed to find out that there really have been these studies and investigations for a long time. The second person we met was maybe the most important person of all. His name was Colonel Boris Sakhalov. And he was from a distinguished military family. His father and grandfather had been high-ranking officers in the Russian military. And he was given an amazing assignment in 1978.

In 1978, there was an incident called Petrosavadsk incident. Petrosavatsk is a place where they're a place. they would launch missiles for satellite systems, space program, things of that sort. Something happened over Petrosovodzka in 1978. There's photos that I have that we got from the Russian military of this gigantic sort of jellyfish looking object over the Russian military base. The official explanation was, oh yeah, a Russian missile exploded. This was a mistake.

Sorry. That's not what happened. It was something unknown. And the reason we know that is because the Russians went ahead and as a result of that incident and other incidences that have been looked at, they launched a study of UFOs. And the order went out from Colonel Sokolov, who was put in charge of this amazing program, he said every unit in the vast Russian military empire, Army, Navy, Air Force, all of them. Anybody who sees an unknown ball of light, a mystery object, a craft, a UFO, whatever the

heck it is, you have to collect that information. interrogate the witnesses, put it all into a report, and it all has to go one place. And the place it went is Colonel Borosokalov's desk. First, an order was given to those pilots to chase the UFO and to shoot it. There were 40 episodes like this, like that. Hundreds of Sakhalov's most intriguing cases were compiled into this thick volume. Although much of the data is still being evaluated, it appears the Russians' accumulated a mammoth amount of information about UFOs.

The assumption that these craft were from somewhere else, perhaps outer space, became a foregone conclusion. Wow, and you were able to find this guy. But what is the jellyfish thing you're talking about? Explain that. This is Petra Zavats, because there's a fairly famous photo now of an object, these shards of light that look like a jellyfish. That was classified like as a UAP or UFO.

Yeah, the Russian government officially said, oh yeah, this is a rocket that blew up. But the fact is they launched a secret study of UFOs because they knew that's not what it was. It was something else. And they needed to get to the bottom of it. So the person they put in charge with Colonel Sokolov had a distinguished record. He was retired at the time we found him. And he was a little nervous about talking to us, but he warmed up to us. And like all the Russians that we met, you know, his abode was pretty humble. It was clearly he doesn't make a lot of money. His retirement benefits from the Russian military, he's not well off. But he's spread out a bunch of food. It must have been like a month's

salary for the guy he and his wife welcomed us into his home. We struck up a conversation. Eventually he loosened up a little bit and started talking to us about the program that he headed up. He put it this way. One of the interviews we did, he said, in essence, the entire USSR was one big UFO listening post, it was a tremendous experiment. It was, in all likelihood, the largest UFO investigation ever done in the history of the world, bigger than anything we've done. So Russia was studying sincerely UFOs for all those decades, and the world didn't know about it officially in any way. No, we had no idea. Maybe there was somebody in the CIA and knew about this, but it was kept very quiet until we came back with the goods. He said this study, that study lasted 10 full

years. Thousands and thousands of reports came in and some of them were really spectacular. And I was allowed to not only see the documents, but to bring a lot of them back. And I'll give you some highlight. You weren't allowed to bring a lot of them back, but somehow you obtained them in Russia, right? So what is that like? So basically you're talking with a guy who headed a UFO program in Russia, one of the probably the top dogs for the UFO study. Do you think it was one of the top dogs? He was the top dog. He was the top dog of UFO studies in Russia. during the Cold War. For a whole 10-year period.

And you're sitting down and having dinner with his family because you just had a hunch, maybe you'd be able to get something good. And he showed us some things and then later we made some arrangements to try to get some physical copies, the original. The original documents, not just copies. And starting with the orders, the orders that went out from the Ministry of Defense that described this, that went to every military unit in the USSR, or what used to be the USSR, and they all had to comply. comply. Now, there are some limitations on it. As Sokolov and others were to tell us later, some of the best cases during that 10-year period, very likely were siphoned off by the KGB. There was a

KGB officer assigned to pretty much all Ministry of Defense units at one point or another. So anything that was really tasty or interesting went to them first. A lot of that stuff went to KGB that I did not get to see, but the stuff that was left over was absolutely spectacular. He said there was thousands and thousands of cases. He didn't have to have the whole number, but he gave us some highlights. For one thing, he said there were 40 different incidents in those 10 years where Russian warplanes were chased after UFOs. The UFOs would appear in the sky or on radar. They sent the war planes after them to shoot them down. And I think I can quote them exactly. He said, a standing order was given to our pilots to chase UFOs and to shoot if necessary.

There were 40 cases in which our pilots chased UFOs tried to shoot. In most cases, the UFO would speed up and get away, but in three cases, the pilots crashed. Two of them died. After that, the order was given that pilots who see UFOs should change course and get out. All pilots agreed. We later, in a later visit when I went back to Russia, we interviewed General Bolzev, who was the commander, of the Russian air defenses, and he said, look, we put out that order because in effect, we concluded that the UFOs had, quote, incredible capacities for retaliation. Don't shoot them.

They will blow your ass out of the sky, which is what they did. They gave us photos of a couple of the planes that had gone down and other planes, or Russian war planes, that had crashed and that had collided with UFOs in mid-air. And their wings are broken. So, man, this is gold. This is great stuff. Do you have those photos? I do.

With you? No, I don't have them with me, but we'll show them. Yeah, let's show. I can bring them to you. March 1991, radar at the Leningrad Airport detects first one, then two, then three unidentified objects hovering over a nuclear plant. From a dead stop, the UFO zipped away at 2,000 miles per hour. The Ural's 1976.

A photographer clicks this. shot and later provides a more detailed drawing. May 1992, a military team in the Kola Peninsula tapes this spinning object. In Tbilizi, a crew shooting a music video, spots this overhead. Today, average Russians are free to discuss UFOs, but it wasn't always so. Through the 50s and 60s, the Kremlin declared UFOs a capitalist creation, thus a non-topic. But behind the scenes, Stalin and other leaders authorized secret UFO studies. Retired Colonel Boris Sokolov commanded such a study for 10 years. The study included 40 incidents of Russian warplanes encountering UFOs.

One mig had its wing damaged and a collision with the UFO. The other, maybe the other highlight for Sokolov was something he told us about a very dramatic incident similar to Malmstrom. He said in October 4th of 1982, in what is now the Ukraine near Usovo, there's a Russian ICBM base, a nuclear missile base. These missiles are ready, primed, aimed at the U.S. and the U.K., and they're ready to go. If it hits the fan, they're ready to go. So over a period of several hours in this base, UFOs appear, a gigantic UFO, and then much smaller UFOs. Some of them were in like constellations, some of them triangular. Big UFOs would split apart, then meld back together, zip around.

perform incredible maneuvers. This went on for four hours. All of the witness reports, they're all Russian military officers, captain and above, captains and lieutenant colonels and things of that sort. They all had to file reports, and that would be interesting by itself because we've seen a lot of American cases

where UFOs appear over nuclear missile bases, facilities, labs, things of that sort. This thing culminated with a very dramatic incident where the UFOs are over, over the base, suddenly the launch control officer, who's in charge of, in essence, pressing the button, says something entered launch control codes. All these lights on the launch control system light up.

The codes, the proper codes are entered to enable these missiles. The missiles are ready to go and they can't do anything to stop them. We are minutes away from World War III breaking out and they can't stop it. In 1982, a UFO hovered over a nuclear missile base the Ukraine for hours. Unexplainably, codes were entered and the missiles were ready for launch until the UFO vanished. And then suddenly UFO vanishes over the base, goes away,

their launch control system goes back to normal and they were flabbergasted. These are the original reports of the Ukraine incident, so the ICBM incident. So this is the Russian witnesses. You see there's official stamps on them. All of these witnesses who described what they saw were officers, captains and above. So they're not just a raw recruit. These are officers who had some credibility with their government

and they submitted this official report about these strange craft they had seen. And a lot of the descriptions are pretty spectacular. Right. And this isn't, you know, a tabloid getting reports by UFOs. This is a government. Yeah, this goes to their higher-ups. This is not a tabloid report. This went to their higher-ups.

And, of course, they're going to try to be as accurate and as truthful as they can. But some of that stuff is their descriptions are spectacular. And then here are the, these are the initial interpretations that we got, translations from the Russian stuff. on Anatoly Pavlovich. It's a, you know, most of this has never been made public at some, one of these days. Well, Colonel Sokolob gets the word that this happened, sends his team to Yusobo and this base to figure it out. They took the whole launch control system apart, could not figure out what had gone on.

I asked him, what does it mean? He said, well, we took it as a message from the UFO people, whoever they are, that this might be your most powerful weapon system. but really it doesn't impress us that much. We can control it. They were flabbergasted. Yeah. It's like nothing to us is kind of the message.

Did they think at any time that it was the U.S. with new toys that were doing this? Well, I think they probably somewhere in the back of their head would have had that in mind. They thought it was UFOs, not Americans. And I learned that from not only Sakhala, but other people that we came to interview. I asked Sakala, what's the point of studying this? Is it just scientific curiosity? he said, no, in one word, it's stealth. At that time, we had these stealth capabilities that they were just learning about. We could outdo anything that they had. They did not have the technology to compete with us on that level. And he said, we wanted to figure out the technology. We knew that these UFOs were real, that they could do things that not only even you could do, you Americans could do. And we figure if we could duplicate that technology, we could have an advantage over you in terms of stealth, set it flat out. That was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that, was amplified by the next witness that we got. His name was Dr. Romilly Abramenko. And he was a

scientist, physicist, who had worked on the Russian version of their Star Wars program. And even when I came into the room, there was this little funny looking blue plastic device sitting on the table. I'm wondering what the heck is that it. He comes in and he showed it to me and put a razor blade on top of it and he pressed a button and goes, bam. Oh, I remember that footage. You've shown that to me. Yeah. And it's a laser. It just blew a hole in this thing. I said, well, what's that got to do with this? He says, we call that the weapon of the aliens.

We've been working on this as well. That's us with Nikolai, me, Bryant, talking to regular Russians on the street. Bryant Blackburn. He was just such a great photographer, just a great guy. He was a roommate of mine for a couple of years, too, and then he passed on.

That is Dr. Ramilly Abramenko. That's the little device that he showed us, and he put a razor blade on that little device, and pressed a button and a blue hole in this thing. It was a laser device, which he called the weapon of the aliens. He had never spoken to reporters, not Russian reporters, not American reporters, but he spoke to us, and told us about the satellites since the earliest days of the Russian space program, that they had satellites up there that could detect things coming in and out. And he said, the Russians saw them coming in and out.

He knew that the Americans saw them coming in and out. There was no question that our government knew these were from somewhere else. And he was leading their program of SDI, Star Wars program, to try to duplicate the weapon of the aliens. And so I get his backstory. He had lived in one of these secret cities that don't appear on any map. He had never published an article. He had never spoken to a journalist.

He'd working in these underground facilities on top secret stuff, and he talked to me. And we went into the UFO stuff. He had been working for the Russian military for decades. And he said, among other things, he said, we know that you know about UFOs because we know about it. We know you've got the same systems up there and down here detecting these things that we've been doing. So basically he was, this is confirming what I had always. wondered about how much they know about what we know on UFOs. And he said it all right then. Let me see if I can find this. Yeah. So basically at this time, he's saying, we know that you

have satellite systems. We know that you observe UFOs. I mean, how can you not if you have these systems? And he's straight up telling you, he's straight up telling you that we have developed or reverse engineered a weapon system, a laser weapon system. And he had a little prototype, little model on his desk. We are trying to duplicate what we say is alien technology. He says, This is the quote from them. In 1959, the first good radars were made, and we could see what was happening all around the Earth. Recalled, the Russians were way ahead of us in the space program back in those days before our Apollo program. In 1959, the first good radars were made. We could see what was happening all around the Earth. We could count all the satellites easily,

but we also saw vehicles whose technical capabilities cannot be matched even today. We saw tens of these in 1959, and we know they must also have caused problems for U.S. defense system. He said that the Russians had learned that U.S. had 40 different satellite systems that were designed to detect UFOs. That was their primary job. 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. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Oh, instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. Hidden in the archives of the Ministry of Defense is solid evidence of Russian UFO encounters, on Earth and in space. What's more, the Russian government knows that the American government knows.

Because the Soviets got a jump on the US in the space race, they also had the first outer space UFO sightings. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, reportedly saw UFOs during his flight, but said he was not permitted to talk about it. The second Russian in space not only saw UFOs, but filmed them. One frame of that film, showing several UFOs dancing around the capsule, was published in a Soviet magazine years later. Scientists Ramily Avramenko, one of the chief designers of Russia's Star Wars program, says the Soviet government knew UFOs were from somewhere else since day one. of the space race. Times satellites in space were easily countable, but we also saw vehicles whose technical

characteristics we cannot match even now. We saw tens of these in 1959. Surely the existence of these vehicles caused problems for the U.S. defense systems, because you are faced with this information as well. These still classified Ministry of Defense documents, never before seen in public, reveal that Russian spies learned a great deal about UFO encounter. involving American astronauts. The Russians are convinced there were several direct encounters

with UFOs while American astronauts were on the moon and that the Americans haven't returned to the moon because we were told to stay away. Several high-ranking military and scientific sources confirm that the Russians knew much about the ongoing UFO cover-up in America. Retired Army Colonel Boris Sokolov was in charge of the Soviet's secret UFO projects for 10 years and says he knew that the U.S. military

military had constructed 40 UFO listening posts as part of its UFO research. It's almost as if we've learned more from Russia about the U.S. That was the point. That's what you told me once, and now I understand it. He was incredible. And I hope nothing bad has happened to him for talking to us, but I have not had any contact since. Third guy we talked to is Dr. Valeri Budikoff. He was a well-regarded scientist.

He had the Moscow Institute of Technology. He had degrees from there, taught there. his mentor was a guy named Sergei Korloff. Sergei Korloff was the father of the Russian space program, the Russian rocket program. He had built him. He'd designed him. He was their top guy.

He had been in that position since Joseph Stalin's day. So in 1947, something really interesting happened in New Mexico. There had been a crash of something that had been reported in the news media, a UFO, a flying saucer, something like that. Stalin calls Korloff into his office, said, What's the deal? What crashed out there? See what you can find out. And Korloff set about to try to figure it out. And the Russians at that time had all kinds of spies in New Mexico. Of course they would. We had the only atomic bomb wing in the world was there at Roswell. The White Sands Missile Base was experimenting with missiles. We had Los Alamos Lab. The whole of New Mexico was connycombed with Russian spies. So Korolov comes back in a couple of weeks, says, well, I've reached out to all of our specials. assets in New Mexico, and they told me, this is not ours, and it's not theirs. It's from somewhere else, and he points up to the sky, and Stalin tells Korolov, yeah, that's why I've

heard from other people, too, and then he dismisses him. Korolov tells this story to Dr. Budikov, his mentor, they were very close throughout the rest of their lives. Budikov tells us the story, and he says it's pretty well known in certain scientific circles, and he let us know, too. We got him on camera talking about it. It was amazing. So the Russians knew that what crashed in 1947 and Roswell, New Mexico wasn't a weather balloon. It wasn't something of ours. It wasn't like that crazy story we covered on another episode. It's not some Mangala style. Yeah, coming over. I mean, so they knew that this was extraordinary. They did for sure. Yeah, that's what they said for sure. Wow. So they have this gigantic UFO study that goes on for 10 years.

and then another one replaces it. And they're trying to figure out how do we duplicate that technology, which sounds a little familiar for stories that we've covered. The next guy we talked to is a general. He's a lieutenant general named Alexi Savin. And I didn't really want to delve into

remote viewing while I was there, but Lieutenant Savin really made a point to make himself available to us. He had developed, in essence, a remote viewing program, and he showed us some training films where they would take a Russian sailor who had been trained in this remote viewing protocols, put him down on the bottom of a ship, and then ask him to identify where other naval assets were around him without being able to look out the window and see them. Submarines, ships, and they were

really accurate, incredibly accurate, at least in this film. And then he decided that he was going to show that the technology, the techniques could be taught to anyone. So we walked in to our second meeting with him and he had a whole room full of women. Pretty good-looking women. They were all housewives, regular women, not scientists, that he had picked, hand-picked regular people

to show that this is something that could be taught to everyone, that everyone has some of these kinds of abilities. And he was showing this, in part because, A, the remote viewers, when they got good, would run into what he called cosmic intelligences. They would communicate with other intelligence

that wasn't from Earth. That's Brian and I with General Savin. And those are some of the women that he had recruited. They would just find him in grocery stores, housewives, and he wanted to demonstrate that anyone could learn to do this remote viewing. And his conclusion was that his remote viewers would inevitably end up in contact with what he called a cosmic intelligence. And he shared it with us because he thought that this shouldn't be something that the world would know.

So he actually took you in to a room to meet people that were being trained as remote viewers for their government, still, even during all the disruption and everything. And he took you to meet everybody. Yeah, he really wanted, he felt that this is abilities that should be shared with the world. Wow. He was worried that, depending on what was going to happen, which way the political wind blow after what was going on there, tumultuous times, that it might be taken back and stuck in a shelf. and the public would never get a chance to see it. He wanted to share it with the world because he had pointed out with these women that anybody could learn to do this to one degree or another.

And we put them through their paces. They had some pretty cool abilities, some tests. There was one lady who specialized in developing determining medical issues. She could size you up mentally and figure out what's going on with you physically. And she was pretty right on with me. I'm not going to go into details on that, but there's some things you can look at me and figure out without being a psychic.

But she got some stuff that she shouldn't have known. And it was spooky. It was impressive to you. But so one of the things, though, when you're meeting all these people that want this openness in Russia and kind of don't know what the future is going to hold and they're telling you about the UFO programs,

giving you documents, you're meeting all these people. What was the whole thing, though? You're meeting these remote viewers that talk about cosmic intelligence. That's way out for me. What does that mean? Aliens. Okay, but what are they, they're doing remote viewing and all of a sudden they run into other intelligences?

Yeah, so they're projecting their consciousness out into the cosmos, and then they run into somebody else who has a conversation with them or shares information with them or shares images. Some of them would write this stuff down, almost like channeling or draw pictures of what they were encountering. It's really very similar to things that I've read about Stanford Research Institute's program under how put off in remote viewing. this guy, this general, wanted me, made a point of making sure that I would communicate with people in our government so that they could establish a dialogue before it was too late. He wanted to have a line of communication that was open to our government before something would happen and he gets shut down or it all goes back into the closet kind of a thing, which I did. You were able to transmit that information to people within our government or intelligence agencies that needed it?

Yeah, I did. That information and other information. as well. There's a name that we mentioned some weeks ago on an episode of Weaponized Dick DeMato. Dick DeMato was with the Senate Intelligence Committee. He oversaw black budget programs. He was very interested in a remote viewing and psychic warfare programs. He defended them. Long after the Senate wanted to go away, he kept it alive for a long time. And I knew he'd be interested because I'd been talking to him in that same time period. And I shared that information with him. And then I shared the files and things. We'll go into that story a little bit later.

So the 10-year study had ended in 1988. Sokolov had retired, and he wasn't quite sure what had happened with all the information. Well, I found out. There was another program that came afterward. It was called Thread 3. And I got the documents for it, and it was classified at the time. And it was really interesting. I met the guy who had been in charge of it.

I met him. It was a scene right out of a Robert Ludlam novel or something in a back alley. He's wearing a trench coat with a hat pulled down and shades looking around carrying a briefcase. We met this guy and we exchanged information. I shared some things with him. He shared some things with me. And eventually I was able to get some of the thread three documents. And it was very clear from these documents. So I had them translated. I've heard of thread three. This is because people kind of leaked out the stuff that you brought back. You've kind of entrusted people because you were like, I'm giving this to people that need it, but don't spill the beans. But I've heard of this.

So thread three is something. That was a UFO program. It was a UFO program. So it took all those thousands and thousands of cases and additional information and analyzed it and tried to make sense of it. It was the proper implementation of all the stuff that had been gathered during that study. And the analysis was really interesting. It was clear from the document that I brought back that they, they paid a lot of attention to American euphology,

what appeared in American UFO reports, in UFO magazines, in popular press, in regular newspapers. They incorporated all of that into their own reports, and then they analyzed this stuff, and it was some pretty amazing conclusions. I took that stuff and shared with a couple of people when I got back, because I was worried what happens to this if somebody comes in and steals it,

or there's a fire or something like that, so I shared some with Jacques Bell. Because you have all these classified Russian documents at home in paper, original copies. What if they get lost or stolen, right? So you're thinking, and they had to be translated. Yes, had to be translated. We hired some Russians through Nikolai to do a lot of the translations, which were very, fairly crude, looking back on them.

And then I shared some of the information with Dick DeMato. I sent some files to Jacques Belay. There was another journalist named Antonio Heneas, and then there's Dr. Richard Haynes. They all got pieces of it. but I had the big pile. And, you know, it was kind of tricky deciding how to get it out of Russia

because I noticed something odd about the, we were there 10 days. We were stopped by cops or agents seven times in 10 days. And I had figured that somebody was coming into my room on the days when we were out shooting interviews and stuff. So I did a little setup where I put like a hair on my suitcase to see if somebody's coming in.

And sure enough, somebody was coming in there and going through my stuff. Yeah. Why wouldn't they? Journalists that come with a bunch of cameras to rush at this time. Americans, come on. Of course they're going to. So we, you know, had to figure out what I'm going to do with this stuff to get it back

because I was kind of nervous about it. Because it was all marked classified. Yeah. So how do you get that back without going to jail? Well, it was interesting that their system at that time, they only stamped, classified on the top page of the documents. The other pages didn't say anything about it. So I separated the top pages from the classified stuff, and I figured out a way to carry it out.

Were you nervous? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, very much so. Because, I mean, if you've ever been to Moscow's airport, you've got to go through a bunch of checkpoints. It's not just one TSA checkpoint kind of a thing. You've got to go through six or seven of them to get out. This is a real risk. Yeah, I carried it.

Was the United States happy when you got back that you got all this stuff? Well, yeah. I mean, it wasn't widely distributed, but the people who got to see it were still were happy. And there are people still who've more recently seen this stuff who've been happy. And then this is thread three. Thread three was the program that came after the 10-year-long study. So Colonel Sokolov headed a 10-year study, maybe the biggest study in the history of the world in terms of UFOs. And then Thread three is a much smaller program that came afterward and analyzed the results.

trying to figure out what they had. And some of those interpretations are also very spectacular and kind of scary. These are some of the documents that we translated. People are going to pause this video and read those. Is that okay? That's so cool, man. So I came back and there's a lot more to the story. So these are the military people that we saw.

There's a whole other group of people that I haven't talked about. about really in public the scientists who had put their lives on the line during the darkest days of the Cold War who study UFOs. Some of them did it with permission of the Russian government. You know, officially the Russian government said it's all a bunch of baloney. The American capitalists and imperialists have made this up. Nothing is true. But behind the scenes, they were very interested in it, as our government was. And they would authorize these scientists to study. And the other scientists had to study it on the on the day. down low. Their interest was kept very quiet and they would communicate to a small group of

people of like-minded folks and share their research. That changed during those three years, three, four years of Glasnost when we were there. They were more able to talk about it openly. And I think they hope that going forward in the future that they'd still be able to talk about it. And of course, all that changed. All of it has changed that we can talk about it some of the time. So I get the stuff back, I get it translated, I share it with a couple of people to get their impressions. Is this real? Do you think it's legit? And the answer is yes.

They thought it was legit, that this really was classified information, everybody who looked at it. There were some scientific papers that I had spread out to other scientists here to take a look at and get their impressions. But generally, we came back with the treasure trove. And in fact, we did learn more from the Russian government about what the U.S. government knows on UFOs. And we have learned from our government ourselves. That's the Russian White House. It's the head of their legislature. It's the equivalent of their Congress.

Brian and I are standing out in front of it. That's their Ministry of Defense. Pretty impressive building. Brian and I standing in front, I think I did a stand-up out there. But that's where Sokolov worked when he was headed up this UFO study that lasted for 10 years. Again, back into Red Square.

The architecture is unmistakable. Bryant and I, we got a kick out of talking to regular Russians. The ones who could speak English were so friendly and welcoming and curious about Americans. That's Dr. Valeri Budikoff. He was the scientist who worked with Korloff, his mentor, his friend and mentor of 40 years. Korloff was the father of the Russian rocket program,

the space program, who had spoken to Stalin about the Roswell incident. That's our interpreter in the middle. Let's meet with dark air. Again, that's Nikolai Kupranov, the Russian physicist, Dr. Kepernov, who had really was instrumental in setting all this stuff up, Dr. Boudicoff, interpreter, young George. This is from the Ministry of Defense reports, a lot of the accounts from the witnesses had drawings attached of the kinds of things that they saw. That is obviously not like any craft that we know of. Well, this is kind of interesting. In that same issue, there's a 1998 UFO magazine.

They have an article about a Russian UFO incident. What does that look like for you? Yeah, it rings a bell, didn't it? Yeah, these cylinders, man. It's like the tick-tac. It looks like a tick-tac. So what are the big, like after all this time, so you've had multiple trips out there.

On one trip, you meet with all these military individuals on another trip, and let's talk about that later, but you meet with a whole bunch of scientific people. But what was in this first trip, what were the big bullet points? What did you take away from it that you didn't know before? That their government, like our government, says one thing to the public and thinks something else in private, that they have studied this for decades, that they take it very seriously, that they're convinced this is an intelligence from somewhere else, that this technology is beyond what the Russians or the Americans had, that it's way beyond. And if either of us could figure out how to duplicate the technology, we'd win.

You know, the same thing that's going on now. And so from what I understand from what you said earlier is that there was an order to shoot down UFOs by Russian jets. And you said 30? Was it 30? 40 planes chased UFOs. Three planes went down. Two of the pilots died.

And was this said to you, conveyed to you just verbally? Or do you have photos, you said? I have photos. And I have reports. And it was set on camera. General Igor Maltsev, for seven years, commander of the entire Soviet air defense system, recalls a UFO flap over Moscow in 1990,

hundreds of visual and radar observations by military personnel. Maltsev confirms his standing order was, don't fire on the UFOs. But he declines to say much else. His boss, the former deputy defense minister, declined to speak altogether under orders. So basically, at one time they're like,

fuck this we're not going to shoot them down anymore there is now a new order to not shoot them down and basically hightail it out yeah they said it because the UFOs have incredible capacities for retaliation that was their words wow of journal maltsev now he's the guy i interviewed one of that back three years later and by then everything had changed that window of opportunity had closed the the hardliners were back in charge yeltsin had been moved out and um and it was a whole different atmosphere there. The hope, the embrace of democracy and capitalism had sort of died down. Russian thugs and organized crime had been on the rise. It was a totally different environment. All those people that we had interviewed on that first trip in 93 had changed. There are some funny

things that happened. I mean, we had an interpreter and a driver who took us around. We wanted to go to the KGB. Wanted to go to the KGB headquarters. It's a pretty famous building. And the three us get out. I'm going to do a stand-up up there. In front of the KGB. And then I said, hey, let's take a photo. Look, we're Nap, Gresh, and Blackburn. Photographer, Brian Gresh and me, KGB, Nap, Grasch, Blackburn. Isn't that funny? Let's take a photo. And our Russians who are with us, they're huddled in the car. They don't want to get out of the car. We're standing in front of KGB headquarters. And when I go back to the car, I said, hey, this is very funny, KGB, ha, ha, ha. We got a shot of KGB. And they go, yes, and KGB got shots of you.

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whether you're building it up for a full glam moment or targeting correction for a more natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touchups on the go. Get this new must-house. have Concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. So basically you kept all this context, but the country changed after that. Yeah. So the next time I went back, I did meet with some interesting people.

We could talk about that another episode. Sure. But three years later, there was a crew from the BBC. They wanted to reproduce those steps. They were not the first to ask this, by the way. When I came back, Brian and I had written a couple of articles. I made some public presentations. It made a little bit of a UFO splash in UFO world for a while,

but then it went away as something else comes along. But, you know, our government had been interested. Some of that information I shared with Bigelow, with NIDS, that information eventually went to OSAP, the OSAP and Bass program. They hired a bunch of translators to re-translate the documents that I had done to analyze it, and they, this has not been made public. The document has not been made public, but it's an amazing report.

They've been able to figure out and correlate a bunch of information that they obtained on their own about the structure of that UFO program. And it was big. It was a big program, a huge investigation, and then Thread 3, and there's another name for the group that analyzed this UFO material, and it went on for a long time. That OSAP report, I hope will one day be made public. Right now, it's in the DIA files, and we're not able to release it. there was some media interest for a while. So first call I got was from CBS.

I think it was 48 hours. They said, hey, we read this article about your trip to Russia. Can we duplicate that? Can we go? I said, look, I'll help you. I'm working for a CBS affiliate in Las Vegas. That'd be awesome because by the time, that time I was back working for KLS. And so I gave them some additional information.

They go to the Ministry of Defense. Ministry of Defense told them, we didn't have any such study. It didn't exist. And they went to Yosovo in the Ukraine and they said there's no ICBM base there. Well, they were wrong on both of them. And they gave up. Then the next call comes from ABC News. They said, oh, gosh, this looks great. We want to take you back to Russia and retrace your steps and do this whole thing over. Can you give us some contact info? All right. Yeah, that'd be cool. It's ABC Prime Time. I gave him some contact info. Colonel Sokolov, Nikolai,

they send the producers over there to try to retrace these steps and completely cut me out and did this big expose. ABC News has learned, blah, blah, blah, blah. They went to the missile base, found the base where it happened. We're blowing this open. We've got this exclusive story. Wasn't their exclusive story. It was my exclusive story.

And they pretended like I didn't even exist. And I went to take my phone call. So, you know, I was a little worried. wary of other media and how they might handle this stuff. And that's still the case. Wow, that's amazing, man. So, I mean, just the guts to go to Russia, just on this hunch, you know, that you might be able to extract some UFO information and then come back with those classified documents.

So you've learned a lot about what Russia knew about UFOs then. Do you think that they have, you know, current programs right now? Oh, sure they do. Yeah. Of course they do. Of course they do. You know, I've heard some pretty dramatic things from people that we both know. Yeah.

You know, you've seen some dramatic incursions by Russians where they just dare us to go ahead and shoot them down, where their planes fly really, really close to our warships, where their planes douse our drones and jet fuel, or they're just trying to provoke a response. I think part of the reason might be that they have developed something. They've had their own crashes. We were promised access to crash material and institutes that had studied crash material and the equivalent of the Russian Area 51 promised that multiple times, both leading up to and the eight months leading up to the trip

and in the months that followed after we were there, it never happened. I did go to a crash site. That was in the trip in 1996. This is the third media organization that called to me was the BBC. They were working on Discovery for BBC. This is a really great producer who convinced me they're on the up and up. They wanted to actually bring me back, retrace the steps, talked to other people.

And so I went back with them and spent another 10 days there. And most of the people that we had interviewed before, including Nikolai, who was a good friend of mine by that point, and Colonel Sokolov would not talk to us. Budikov would not talk to us anymore.

They wanted nothing to do with it because the political climate in that country had changed. The window had closed. I did find other people who talked to. And we took one trip from Moscow to Vladivostok at a little garden spot called Dalnageland. which is on the far eastern frontier of Russia.

It's like a 12-hour flight from Moscow. We threw through this brutal storm and then jumped on this helicopter to go to Downegoros, where there'd been an incident, some called the Russian Roswell. There had been an object that was seen over this Dalghorst in the middle of nowhere near Red China and North Korea, and it crashed in a place called Haight 611,

means Hill 611. And the scientists who'd got up the hill to collect materials of the crash site, Dr. Vigildi, Dijlini, Vladimir Dijlini, I think it is. He had collected all this really interesting material. Strange qualities, crash material, had sent it to a variety of different Russian institutes for analysis and never got it back.

That's a story for another time. Okay, we'll do that story. I brought some of that stuff back. I know, that's okay. You know, there's going to be a part two to this. And when you talk with all the scientists and everything, we'll talk about that. Have you seen that show on Apple TV, Tetris? Have you seen that new show?

My gosh, it's about a guy that goes to Russia and gets the rights for Tetris and what he had to do to go through all of those negotiations right when everything was changing. So it's really funny to hear this story from me because it's just like a movie that's out right now. Well, I love Russia. I love being there. I love seeing them. I love the Russians. They were so warm and welcoming.

They were cautious once you get past a certain barrier. You know, they wanted to know so much about America. They're so much like us. And it pains me to think of what their lives are like now that that window is closed and, you know, they live under a threat of who knows what. Yeah. It's an incredible thing that the UFO topic,

that it's so, this is something that Bob Lazar has always said, it's a crime against a scientific community. When you can't share this stuff, the reverse engineering, programs. It's not part of the scientific process to keep everything so compartmentalized. You know, we're not going to name them, but you and I both know a scientist who's been involved in a reverse engineering program that was from a Russian crash that has to do with lasers. And I think that's okay to say, but you're aware of what I'm saying.

I am. And that's what started to say is the Russian provocations where their war planes fly very close to us. I think it's related to something that they have developed from crashes. That is what I've been told is that they've developed a weapon system that they can't wait to use against us and that they came from somewhere else. Wow, that's crazy, man. Well, I guess that is the whole point of the secrecy if the UFO reality is what it appears to be. And if our governments are trying to study the UFO technology and if they are keeping it hidden from the American and kind of global public because of the reason that they want to get a technological, advantage. It really makes sense to me, and this is what we're both told over all this time of looking at this, that we are all in a race that people don't know about, but it's a technological

race, because anybody that develops this weaponization technology based on the material science of the reverse engineering of these UFOs, they win, hands down, they win. We can create a laser beam or something like that, but these weapons of mass destruction that can be created by reverse engineering the technology, if all of that is true, I get why some of the secrecy is there. You don't want this to get out. You have to hide it. Well, you know, it's not just speculation. We can guess about it right now what our government is trying to do in reverse engineering. The Russians that we talked to back then were very clear about it. They were trying to reverse engineer that technology from UFOs. That was their goal. That was the goal of a nationwide,

massively intensive UFO investigation for a decade and programs that followed, and I'll bet it's still going on. People talk about disclosure all the time, whatever that means. Like, you know, the public is told about UFOs. If anything brought us close to that, would you say this Russia experience of you coming back, getting all this information for you, was that a personal version of, holy shit, this is true? Absolutely. Yeah, I do. I think that. You know, I've said this. I've talked about it in public before, and we put out little bits and pieces,

from the videos that we shot from both of those trips. The second trip, I went with that crew. I met them on my own and took my own camera, shot my own stand-ups, and tried to be Mr. Newsman in Russia. It's very amateurish in the video quality of everything. But eventually, I want to put that all together, maybe a film we can do at some point. Sure.

Well, anyway, thanks for sharing that whole first journey of your trip to Russia. I think there's a lot. Hopefully you can show me tonight or something, some photos, and we can put that in. And we can put that in so people can see it. But man, it's so cool to hear that you actually did that work and got out there.

I think more people need to know about it. So hopefully this is a way to show people. Yeah. All right, thanks. Never has so few had so much to tell, but would say so little. Following this in a weaponized, the presentation of Jeremy Corvelle, George Knapp, Dark Course Entertainment, and Cadence 13 Studios.

Available now for free on the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your shows.