005 - Chris Mellon on UAP, National Security, & Government Accountability - The Anomalous Review

Episode Transcript
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(00:22):
Welcome to The Anomalous Review,the official podcast of the
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
I'm Michael Lawson, I'm a philosopher of science and
technology and the host of the show Today.
My guest is a fellow member of SU, Christopher Mellon.
If you've been interested in thesubject for a while, you're
probably already aware of who Chris is in the enormously
important role that displayed inthe field.
It's not an exaggeration, I think, to say that no history of

(00:44):
UAP subject can be written without talking a lot about
Chris Mullen from here forward. He's occupied some very high
level positions in the US government under both Republican
and Democratic administrations. He was the Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense for intelligence under Presidents
Clinton and George W Bush. He was the staff director for
the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and

(01:07):
he was deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for
Security and information Operations.
Now, the US government is prettybad at giving descriptive names
to the positions and its bureaucracy.
But what Chris's resume shows isthat he's been a long time in
positions where he had pretty much unfettered access to all of
America's most sensitive intelligence and secrets.

(01:29):
And it doesn't matter if it was from the CIA or the FBI or the
DIA or military, if there was a secret that America was in
possession of and Chris wanted to see it, he could.
And he used that access to push this subject into the sphere of
public attention. Now, you're probably already
familiar with the 2017 front page New York Times article that

(01:52):
kind of burst the bubble on the UAP subject and brought it into
mainstream conversation. That article featured 3 videos
of UAP that were pretty quickly authenticated by the Pentagon as
genuine UAP that were videos were taken by sensors that
belong to the military and thosevideos got into the hands of the

(02:13):
journalists. Leslie Keenan, Ralph Blumenthal
because Chris Mellon gave him tohim.
I didn't break any laws or breakany rules.
Those videos weren't classified,so it was not a leak.
It was just Chris's way of getting the subject the
attention he felt it deserved, because in the government, in

(02:35):
the military, the UAP subject was not being taken seriously at
all. He thought, and he's probably
right, but he thought it was a serious national security issue.
And after a lot of frustration, he decided the only way to give
it the attention it deserved wasto bring it to the public.
That's just the sort of public servant that Chris is.

(02:55):
It's a privilege to talk to him for this show, not just because
the important role that he's played in the UAP field or
because of the high level positions that he's occupied,
but because I genuinely think that Chris is one of the most
morally minded, sincere, transparent, nonpartisan public

(03:19):
servants that I have ever encountered.
And I really mean that. So in this conversation, I take
the opportunity to ask him the sorts of questions that other
people in his position might notanswer so straightforwardly,
including questions about thingsthat he's said in the past.
I really wanted to press him on.There is a talk that he gave at

(03:42):
the Sole Foundation about the USgovernment's messaging for the
UAP subject that I found, frankly, a bit disturbing.
And I asked him about that, and his answers were as transparent
and forthcoming as I think they could have been.
So I think that you, especially those of you who are interested
in the geekier national securityand intelligence aspects of this

(04:05):
subject, I think you will reallyenjoy this conversation.
So without further ado, here is my conversation with Chris.
Mellen, Chris. Welcome to the Anomalous review.
Thank you very much, Michael. I'm always happy to try to
support the ICU any way I can. Delighted to be here and try to

(04:26):
be as responsive as I can to your questions.
Well, I'm delighted to have you.So the very first questions that
I want to ask, there's sort of two set up questions.
The first has to do with the positions that you've held in
the government. You've held multiple positions,
but there's one and two sort of iterations of one position that
seem like they're the most relevant to our discussion and

(04:46):
the work that you've done related to this subject.
So the problem, though, is that the United States is pretty bad
at giving accurate, descriptive names of its positions.
So. You were the Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Security and Information and the
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence at two

(05:10):
different times, is that correct?
Correct. What are those positions?
Help us understand what those jobs or what was your portfolio
of responsibilities, what authorities did you have, what
access to information did you have?
Right. So the first position was Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information

(05:31):
Operations. And when that office was
organized, a gentleman named ArtMoney, who is the assistant
secretary for Command, Control, Communications and intelligence,
if you want to talk about an awkward title and name with very
wide purview. Together he brought his team in

(05:52):
and we divided the business areawithin the office into different
sort of domains and tried to make them clear as we could, and
usually reinforcing. So for example, in my first job,
I was responsible for reviewing counterintelligence and security

(06:15):
information assurance, you know,cryptography, those kind of
standards. And we also put information
operations in there, meaning offensive information warfare,
because we felt that the defenseshould be informed by what the
offense is doing. And when you look at some of the

(06:36):
things that we're capable of doing in in that world, in that
sphere, it helps you realize what adversaries may be able to
do and some of the vulnerabilities you may have.
And we wanted to make sure therewas there was a connection
there. When I moved on to become the
deputy assistant secretary for Intelligence, it was a different

(06:58):
focus. It was more on reviewing
collection and exploitation by intelligence assets.
It was reviewing sensitive missions.
The way I suggest people think about this is the Secretary of
Defense, because he has an absolutely enormous purview.
He's got like 40 agencies that report to him.

(07:19):
He's in charge of millions of people, hundreds of military
bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of sensitive equipment
and nuclear weapons and all these things.
It's an impossible job for one man.
No single human being could possibly get their arms around
all of that at a high level of detail.

(07:40):
So the secretary has a large staff that helps him shift and
sort and focus and manage all ofthat.
That empire. And I was in the part of his
staff that really looks at the intelligence and security part
of the Defense Department and advises him.
In many cases, he's the only person that can make a decision.

(08:03):
If you want to establish a policy of DoD, it has to go to
that one person or his deputy. Nobody else can sign off on it
in many cases. So the secretary, if you go into
his office, you'll see in those days at least, there was a huge
like table for a boardroom and it was row after row after row

(08:25):
of big packages waiting for his signature.
Each one of those packages had to do with a complex policy
issue or budget issue. There must have been hundreds
outside his office just lined upthat had all been coordinated
and staffed and were ready to go.
And that gives you some idea of the demands on his time and the

(08:46):
level of responsibility he has and why he needs so much help in
doing that. That's in addition to appearing
on Capitol Hill, going to White House meetings, meeting with
foreign government leaders and secretaries of defense and
ministers of defense and all of that.
So we were essentially his eyes and ears in a particular domain.
In my case, it had to do with intelligence.

(09:09):
And so the other thing I would mention is that many people
don't realize this, but 80% roughly the intelligence
community is in the Defense Department.
It's the National Security Agency, it's the Defense
Intelligence Agency, it's the National Reconnaissance Office,
it's the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

(09:29):
Only CIA is outside that, the secretary's direct control.
Now they kind of, he jointly managed that, manages that
portfolio with the director of National intelligence.
But those are DoD organizations largely staffed by military
personnel, largely functioning in support of military personnel

(09:51):
and military operations. So there is a, there's a lot
there that needs to be reviewed and all manner of budget issues
and technical issues and policy decisions and that sort of
thing. And so it's a very busy, very
busy place and people in those jobs put in a lot of hours.

(10:12):
So would it be fair to say that you are accurate to say that you
had under your authority or or at least access to 80% of the
intelligence work that was beingdone by the United States?
Yeah. You know, I had been also in the

(10:33):
Senate Intelligence Committee for many years before I came
there. And after serving the Pentagon,
I went back to the Senate Intelligence Committee as the
minority staff director. So I had very broad access to
those programs and budgets and agencies in both positions.
I had meetings every couple of weeks with CIA, with the

(10:56):
director of Central Intelligence.
In those days, DN is person at CIA headquarters.
I used to get people that would come over with, you know, a bag
chained to their wrists, sometimes with human reports,
intelligence reports. And there's a separate process,
though, for DoD black programs that the intelligence community

(11:19):
does not have access to. So there are hundreds of
programs that relate to weapon systems and Defense Department
requirements and operations and acquisition and other things
that are outside the intelligence community.
And many people don't realize that.
There's also the Department of Energy has its own world of

(11:42):
secrets and all the three of those, intelligence, DoD and TOE
intersect, but not much. There are very few people.
There's nobody that is deep across all three of those that
I'm aware of. Nobody in in in the government
who's really deep on on all of those.

(12:02):
But you were deep on the DoD. And and the intelligence side
and two of the three I also worked with, with DOEI had acute
clearance. I did some coordination with
them on policy issues and thingslike that, visited their
national nuclear test site and so forth.
But primarily my job was when I was in the Pentagon was

(12:25):
reviewing some planned operations that were sensitive
and reviewing budgets, proposed budgets, looking at big
decisions regarding acquisition programs, satellite programs,
our DOD's equities adequately represented as is this
appropriate considering our requirements of DoD versus the

(12:48):
Presidents or state departments or other consumers of
intelligence, that kind of thing.
It's part of your job and character, not your literal job.
But like when you're characterizing your work, is
there an instinct to downplay the degree to which you had
access to highly secretive and sensitive information that you

(13:08):
know could make for a good spy thriller or international
intrigue or things like that? The sort of things that people
wouldn't be bored by but but butwould have a a rational like
kind of interest in. Well, let me say that the great
one of the reasons that DoD black programs don't leak is,

(13:29):
one, because they're so few people are exposed to them, but
two, many of them are boring andmany of them are very, very
technical things that the publicwould have no interest in
whatsoever. They don't raise any policy
issues. They're, you know, we have a new
millimeter way guide seeker on, you know, some kind of missile

(13:50):
or we have a new way of making the armor on a tank more
resistant to explosions or all those, you know, those kinds of
things. So a lot of that information,
people are surprised when they hear that the president doesn't
know all this stuff. Well, it's not because he's not
clear. It's because he's got better
things to do. Yeah, it would be open.
There's too much. The ridiculous.
The ridiculous wasted his time to sit and doubt it's fit all

(14:12):
this time, briefing him on all these obscure technical black
programs and things like that. Within that, though, there are
some things that are extraordinary, and an example
would be the B2 bomber. You know, for a long time that
was a black program, the F117A. The public, as far as we know,

(14:35):
our adversaries didn't know we had this capability, even though
we did go on through design, prototypes, construction,
acquisition and actually deployment.
The F117, there was an active duty squadron at a remote desert
base, a secret desert base that was ready to go into combat.

(14:56):
And the public had no idea that we even had a plane of that
kind. So the Defense Department can't
keep secrets and does very well generally.
And of course, they're always pushing the bounds of technology
and trying to make technology our our ally in support of our
personnel and and our missions. And those people do some great

(15:18):
work and come up with some excellent capabilities.
The thing that's relevant about that to this discussion about
UAP is not that I encountered any secret UAP programs.
They didn't, but many of the assets developed in the
intelligence community are potentially pertinent to
collecting data about UAP. We have incredible space

(15:41):
surveillance capabilities and aerial and atmospheric
capabilities and oceanic capabilities.
And you know, even the ones thatare in the public domain which
the public unclassified, the public still generally is not
aware of them. If you look up the Space Fence,
for example, on the Internet or you looked at our solid-state

(16:02):
phased array radars, you might be amazed to see some of these
systems or our seat going. I believe it is X Band Radar,
which is this mobile platform. It looks like something out of a
sci-fi movie. I don't know, it's like three or
five stories tall that it can actually motor around.

(16:24):
It's just, it looks like a, an oil rig that it actually can
move around on its own and and get it underway.
It's steam and go parking itselfin different places, you know,
with this huge antennas on it and and So what?
Happening with sea floor is that.
The idea it's collecting intelligence on different things
like foreign missile launches and stuff like that.

(16:47):
So we have tremendous capabilities and it used to be
frustrating to me that there were persistent reports of this
phenomenon and nobody was payingattention, nobody was looking,
nobody was using these assets totry to under uncover what this
was, to see what's going on and these capabilities already

(17:11):
bought and paid for. We don't have to go out and
procure and spend billions of dollars for new stuff.
We might want to, as we identifycertain signatures, add to that
inventory of assets some, modifyit some, but the taxpayers
already invested hundreds of billions of dollars in
establishing these incredible capabilities.

(17:34):
And now that we're starting to look, lo and behold, we were
starting to see things and data's being accumulated.
And so we're starting to learn things.
It's none too soon, by the way, because as we can see in the
Ukraine, unmanned aerial vehicles, drones and more

(17:55):
sophisticated kinds of boats, insome cases missiles, all kinds
of autonomous vehicles with the application of artificial
intelligence that are increasingly intelligent,
increasingly autonomous, small, hard to track, highly lethal.
That is posed to be a huge and rapidly growing challenge for

(18:18):
the United States and and for any nation that operates it and
seeks to be a world power. So where other countries are
pushing the balance of this technology, it's not clear
sometimes what we're looking at,whether it's from an adversary,
whether it's an unmanned aerial system or whether it's something
more exotic. But it's certainly a time when

(18:41):
we've got to be laser focused onthose, on those questions and
figuring out how to identify these things and if they are
something adversarial, how to engage them.
So is that where your interest in this subject began?
You sort of didn't have any initial interest in it and then
started picking up instances of like strange data, you know,

(19:02):
encounters at SEER or whatever, and then that triggered it.
Or did you have a prior interestin this subject?
Tell us about how you became professionally interested and
committed to the UAP topic. OK, I think it's a two-part
answer here. I had been interested in the
subject since I was a young boy and the reason was because I saw
a home video taken by a friend of my school's headmaster that

(19:27):
showed in full color a UFO on a beautiful sunny day.
Cumulus clouds, blue skies show this huge disk like object, it's
appeared to be massive, flying through the sky.
It banks gently, it goes into a cumulus cloud and you see it
sort of disappearing behind the wisps of the cloud, which I

(19:49):
don't know how you would emulatethat or how you could faked that
in those days before computer generated industry and so forth.
It's hard to see how somebody would have done that.
And and this guy did not was nota sophisticated, you know,
computer or video or didn't havevideo, this sophisticated
photographer always say. And it emerged from the other

(20:10):
side of the cloud and went off over the horizon.
So that put a hook in me and I had followed this subject very
closely and read a lot of books.When I got into the Pentagon and
got to Capitol Hill, I would occasionally hear things.
A Davy pilot friend of mine called me up one day and said he
was at at the air base he was training and I think it was

(20:34):
maybe the Hurlburt Field was in Florida, maybe Pascagoula area.
But a Navy jet had been circled by AUAP and he was on the
runway. A lot of people saw it on the
ground as well. Apparently he was on the runway
when that pilot landed and therewas all sorts of excitement and
that pilot was trying to refuel.He wanted to go back up and

(20:55):
chase the thing again. Because I knew him in college,
he knew that my interest in thistopic, he called me up.
So things like that would occasionally come up and and
then I that's when this frustration would set it.
Why aren't we, you know, asking these questions?
Why aren't we trying to figure this out?
When you hear the stories about intrusions on ICBM site, it's an

(21:17):
interference with with nuclear weapons systems and so forth,
reports from credible people andyou have to say, how could we
possibly ignore something like that?
That just seems untenable and outrageous.
So, but I wasn't involved in it professionally until I learned

(21:40):
that this was happening on a regular basis off the East Coast
of the United States in multipletraining areas on a routine
basis. Navy pilots were seeing these
things over and over. They were sometimes getting
video. They were appearing on the
radar. They had no transponders.

(22:01):
They should not have been in that operating area.
They were creating a flight hazard.
They were creating a counterintelligence problem
because those carrier ballot groups are doing work UPS in
their, you know, rehearsing how they're going to fight in, in
combat and the systems they're going to use.
A, an adversary can collect a lot of useful data in an
environment like that. They can see what frequencies we

(22:23):
broadcast at, what systems we deploy and how we use them
together and look for different signatures and lots of things.
So it was a real counterintelligence problem.
It was a flight safety problem. And I was just amazed that
people in the bureaucracy were content then just let this keep

(22:44):
happening without reporting it to anybody, without
investigating it, without doing anything.
And the only person who was looking at this, the person who
brought this to my attention, was a guy named Lou Elizondo.
And Lou had been collecting information on this and doing
what he could to try to spread the word and, and get some

(23:05):
action moving. And when I learned this, I tried
to help him get to the Secretaryof Defense because nobody was
like a hot potato issue. Nobody wanted to touch it
because everybody's going to think I'm crazy.
And, you know, the stigma issue just was so pervasive that
people are willing to put the nation at risk rather than put

(23:26):
their reputations at risk. Hundreds, if not thousands of
people. So did this information come to?
Certainly people in the intelligence community.
What? Did this information come to you
as a somebody reporting a security threat?
Like they had compiled this information and brought it to
you? Or did it?
Did you notice it in some other way?

(23:46):
So I was an unpaid consultant tothe Office of Naval
Intelligence. I had retired from full time
government work, but as a consultant I got involved.
I still have my security clearances and Lou briefed me on
this because I had an interest in this topic and I was amazed.

(24:07):
He showed me some of the videos,including others that haven't
been released yet. He showed me some message
traffic from the fleet and then we met with some of the pilots.
I sat through debriefings with some of the pilots, F18 pilots,
for example. It became very clear very
quickly that this is very real. Whatever this is, it's something

(24:31):
that is appears on radar, appears on film, it appears to
be solid objects, it appears to be able to maneuver at high
speeds, does not have an obviousmeans of propulsion, and does
not have obvious flight control services.
So I just thought it was outrageously irresponsible to

(24:53):
ignore these violations of US airspace, Unfair to the pilots,
unfair to the taxpayer. Why are we spending all this
money on intelligence to guard our borders, to build all these
radar and air defense systems and then when something actually
shows up, it's penetrating in our airspace, but don't do
anything about it, Don't even tell the seniors.

(25:13):
Secretary of Defense didn't knowthis was happening.
Congress didn't know this was happening.
It was it was an unbelievable situation To me.
It reminded me a little bit of Pearl Harbor, where a Lieutenant
detected the incoming Japanese aircraft at a radar battery,
didn't report it about the chainbecause they thought, oh, they
must be just some of our guys coming back from a mission.

(25:35):
It reminded me also of 911 because at 9:11 we had CIA and
FBI not sharing information prevented that attack.
And in this case we had myriad agencies that were getting
information, bits and pieces, but it wasn't being assembled
anywhere. Nobody was sharing it, nobody
was even talking about it. So I felt that there was an

(25:58):
imperative from a national security standpoint to bring
this to the attention of policy makers so they could decide what
should be done based on their own estimate of the situation.
Whatever information they have, they might have decided not to
do anything, but they deserve tohave the opportunity to

(26:19):
understand what was going on. They needed to have that
opportunity. I mean the public or the the
Congress? I'm talking about the Secretary
of Defense, Congress, the policymakers.
I'm all for the public knowing too, and that's very, very
important. It's not just something that's
good to do. It is it?
It contributes tremendously to national security public

(26:44):
awareness, because public awareness turns into interest
and pressure on Congress, which turns into interest and pressure
on the Defense Department to address those concerns.
So it's critically important forthe information to get out, and
that's the way it should work ina democracy.
I was delighted to be able to facilitate the the article with

(27:06):
The New York Times and introduced them to Lou and
provide them some videos and which were deemed to be
confirmed to be unclassified. So you didn't break any law.
You, you've been there was an investigation about this and it
was determined you didn't break any law or violate any.
It confirmed it was totally unclassified.
Now, the, the thing that's disturbing concerning about that

(27:30):
is that they investigated this, confirmed that these videos were
unclassified, did not cause any damage to national security, In
fact helped national security because it made us aware of a
vulnerability we had which we could then start to address and
remedy, which nobody was aware of prior to that time.
So it actually helped advance national security.

(27:52):
Amazingly, a year or two later, they put together a
classification guide for UAP andthey said, oh, by the way,
almost anything having to do with UAP, including in videos of
exactly that same kind, which wejust said didn't violate, didn't
cause national security damage. Now we're saying that releasing
the same videos would cause grave damage to national

(28:14):
security. Well, that's just ludicrous.
That's not logical, it's not sustainable, it's not true, and
it's just an excuse for not sharing information with the
public. And it was.
Do you think that's just like the natural posture of
organizations like this is to constantly maintain?
That's what it was. That's what it was.

(28:35):
It was a career intelligence person, the old school person
feeling, you know, it was the typical intelligence community
mindset. You know, we should, the less
said the better. We should keep everything close
to our chest. And, you know, we talk too much
about intelligence. There's a lot, there's a lot of
truth in that in many cases. But you have to know where to
draw the line and what things are really important.

(28:58):
You know, they don't want to compromise sources and methods,
for example. But those were not.
And there was really no reason to not share that information.
And there were a number of reasons why we should be sharing
that information. And predictably, it did help to
get Congress's attention. The most persuasive thing was
the pilots, pilots themselves when they came in and met with

(29:20):
members of Congress and and the staff because of their
credibility and as as expert witnesses, first hand witnesses
their, their testimony is very, very compelling when you hear it
first hand. And I think that has been one of
the reasons throughout that I have been taking this issue so

(29:41):
seriously and been so forth leading because I met those
people. I know those people.
I trust those people. People like Commander Dave
Fraver, you know, he's one of those people.
If you were going to be, you know, in a lifeboat somewhere,
he's the kind of person you wantin a lifeboat with you, right?
Very level headed, very smart, very unflappable, not trying to

(30:02):
make ways or get attention or you have no ulterior motive
whatsoever. In fact, all these people were
speaking out were over. Their natural state was to not
talk about it. They really didn't want to go
before Congress, didn't want to talk to people about it, didn't
want the attention, but they didit anyway because they thought
it was important for national security.

(30:24):
Yeah, nobody showed its attention.
Nobody. Nobody wants to be like, dragged
in front of Congress and like presented.
Not many people. If you're the executive branch,
let me tell you, you know, people executive branch look at
testifying before Congress like,you know, being dragged before
the acquisition or something. I mean, it's it's something that

(30:45):
people want to avoid if they can't anyway, it's generally not
really not real pleasant. So you have all this information
in your head. You've had way broader and
deeper access to a lot of information on this subject and
on many subjects than than any civilian does.
And you take the position that more of what's in your head

(31:05):
should be available to the public.
Not all of it. Some of it would compromise
national security interests or compromise individuals that are
working in certain places, maybeyour or or whatever it is.
But you think more should be made public and even more should
be made aware to Congress. Is that fair to say?

(31:28):
It's absolutely fair to say, I think we're now at about 1500
official military UAP reports, most of those just from the last
few years and the initial reports, the majority involved
multiple sensor systems. And so I have every reason to

(31:51):
believe that out of that 1500, there's got to be a lot more AD
flare videos like the ones that I provided that equally were
from, not from sensitive barriers.
You know, it wasn't like they were overflying, you know, Iran
or something. I mean, they're operating in US
restricted airspace. So we're not creating any
diplomatic flap or anything. We're not violating sources and

(32:14):
methods. And it's information that
scientists can, can, can make use of to some degree.
It can be used for machine learning, for training systems
that are trying to automate the detection of the UAP and so
forth. I'd have to look at this more
carefully, but I don't see why more of the radar data couldn't

(32:34):
be made available for study. Now, that is a serious question.
We don't want to reveal the precise capabilities, but I
haven't, you know, you'd have tohave a review of that and dig
more deeply than I've been able to.
But my guess is that there's probably a significant amount of
radar data that could also be shared.

(32:57):
And then there's the question ofwhether we can clear some
scientific people, your pros andcons to that, whether there's
any value in doing that. The the intelligence community
once did that for studying global warming and environmental
change. And it really didn't contribute

(33:17):
to the scientific community because they they couldn't do
peer reviewed literature, they couldn't really publish.
And the sensors were not optimized for that purpose.
They weren't, you know, trying to track the retreat of the
glaciers and things like that. They had some imagery of that,
but it really wasn't, you know, a focus where they had a lot of
files on that topic and so forth.

(33:39):
So did they set up to excuse me were.
They set up to fail. Oh, not at all.
No, it was, it was coming from Vice President Gore.
This was Al Gore's initiative. And you know, he was genuinely
concerned about the environment.He was dazzled by some of our
intelligence capabilities and thinking, wow, maybe if we

(34:00):
brought us some of those to bear, they can help us figure
out climate change. Yeah, it was a understandable
thought, but it proved not to bevery helpful.
Scientists needed their own collection systems.
And. And there are a lot of them now
they're they're amply funded in many ways.
Not as much as they might like, of course, but NOAA has a lot of

(34:24):
very capable satellite sensors. They're measuring the
particulates in the air and smoke and, you know, the height
of the ocean, myriad things. Imagine, you know Tim Golodette.
I imagine you know Tim Golodette.
Yeah. But yeah, sure, I.
Don't know I would love to have a conversation between the two

(34:46):
of you because I think that youryour areas of interest and and
knowledge would, would play beautifully together about this.
But so we can we can say given the complexity I mean, there's
no there's no doubt that you really deeply appreciate the
subtleties and complexities of into implementing any sort of
practical solution to this problem, though you take it very
seriously and want to move forward in part of moving

(35:09):
forward. I think you consistently have
advocated for is more transparency toward the public
about what we know, whatever that may be.
You know, some of what we know that the public doesn't know.
But you are doing a great job asa public servant of keeping your

(35:30):
keeping your, I guess, obligation to to not just, you
know, wantonly disclose things. But given the fact that you do
advocate for more transparency. I don't like the term
disclosure. I think it's badly formed and
charged with all sorts of strange association.

(35:51):
So I when, if I ever use that term, I'm not using it in the
big D sense, just disclosing information.
But I think a lot about the question about what should and
shouldn't be made publicly available and, and why.
And so I wanted to throw a few questions at you since you seem
to be pro to some degree more transparency.
So currently the public seems all over the place regarding

(36:13):
their belief or knowledge about the UAP situation.
Like there's, I can detect no consensus about whether there's
a there there or whether there is or how much people generally
are educated about the, you know, the current intelligence
content of like publicly available intelligence.
But let's just say that transparency or disclosure,

(36:34):
whatever means that we're just informing the general public
about the nature of the situation, whatever that may be.
Is there a disclosure situation that you can imagine that
actually leaves the public on the same page rather than
producing even more division andsuspicion etcetera?
And is there a disclosure scenario that the second part

(36:57):
is, is there a disclosure scenario or transparency
scenario that doesn't trigger all sorts of enemy nation states
to produce counter messaging that's directly aimed at
undermining any sort of consensus or or faith in in the
message? Well, let me start a bit with

(37:21):
the second question, then go back.
If we were talking about a situation in which an
administration had compelling, perhaps conclusive evidence that
probes from some other civilization had reached Earth
and were operating here, I wouldthink that prior to announcing

(37:45):
that, they actually might well broach that with some of these
foreign leaders to mitigate. There are concerns so as to try
to put a united front forward tohelp reassure the public.
And that would, of course, have much greater credibility than

(38:05):
anyone single nation doing that.You know, we don't have a plan
to my knowledge, to how we wouldproceed on that.
One of the intents of the Schumer legislation was to
create a Commission that would begin to work on a plan for

(38:26):
broaching that kind of information if we do indeed have
it or when we acquire it. I don't.
I think it's very hard these days to get a consensus on
anything. I think even in a scenario like
that, there are some people are so wedded to conspiracy theories
of all manner of all kinds thesedays and things that are

(38:47):
completely implausible. And this is an area that's so
fraught with conspiracy theoriesalready and distrust of the
government that it's hard for meto believe you'd get anything
approaching unanimity. It's also an area where there's

(39:08):
a lot of emotional content, right?
So some people, people's perceptions of the world and how
they process information is heavily distorted by their
emotions. If you're emotionally deeply,
profoundly wedded to something, they're committed to something,
you're going to be looking for information and elevating
information consistent with thathypothesis or that belief and

(39:30):
diminishing information which threatens it and so forth.
This is something that plays a big role in in a topic that is
existential, as this is for manypeople.
For many people, it's terrifying.
They do not want to believe it. I always review saw it as
something exciting, interesting,matter of exploration and

(39:55):
discovery, and I didn't look at it that way.
And it wasn't until recent yearsthat I began to appreciate how
many people do and became more sensitive to the fact that they
really genuinely do have those fears.
Even though we're not seeing anyhostility, it's actually quite
understandable, I think those ofus who are.

(40:15):
Not fearful or probably a small minority.
So that. Those kind of fears are going to
interfere with people's, you know, beliefs and a lot of
people are not going to want to accept that even if even if
there's compelling evidence. No doubt, and a lot of people on
a completely different access are going to want to accept or

(40:36):
reject the truth of of a messagepurely based on who says it in
front of the microphone or who'sin in charge.
You know, I've often thought if Al Gore had not been the one who
had been a flag bearer for global warming, if it had been a
Republican, if it had been John McCain, for example, then a lot

(41:00):
of the people who are opposed toit now might be embracing it.
And a lot of conservatives are outdoorsmen and they're hunters
and fishermen and they're they, they want the the environment to
be cleaned and they appreciate wildlife.
And they couldn't just as easilyhave been on the other side of
the fence. But, you know, this partisan
mindset with which we're so manyAmericans are approaching so

(41:25):
many issues is really destructive and distorting and
could be our undoing. And intentionally distorting,
too, because Al Gore was the onewho was championing a concern
for global warming and probably simply because he was a
Democrat. The Republican response was to

(41:47):
get this strategist, Frank Luntzto think about how to reframe
the whole issue. And he did it using the term
climate change, which has becomethe dominant term now, to
deemphasize the the actual horrific truth that we're
facing. And that's actually one, I mean
that they're they're sort of rhetorical one.
And now and now we think of it as climate change.
And now that always invites the question, well, is it just, is

(42:10):
it just climates change over time or like is the, is the
planet actually getting hotter and it's going to kill
everything? But yeah, we lost that one
simply, I think, because one party wanted to win an election.
Not to say that one party is theevil one, but in just in that
particular issue. Yeah.
I mean, the other thing is, of course there's a lot of big

(42:31):
money involved, right? So the big oil industry and, and
my family's been involved in that, in that industry as well.
And they do actively engage, they have a lot of highly paid
lobbyists and so forth. And of course they had a motive
to an incentive to try to mitigate the perception that

(42:52):
their operations, their product was contributing to this.
So when you in our system, this is, you know, another one of the
fundamental problems of our system.
It's all based on money. We have a democracy of sorts,
but it's all based on how much money you raise.
And we're talking even for localoffices or statewide offices,

(43:14):
millions and millions of dollars.
And those people can't help but be beholden to the donors to a
large. I've worked on the Hill, I've
seen how it happens. I know how it works and special
interest groups and you know, wehave a Supreme Court that has
said you can give unlimited amounts and you can even, you

(43:35):
know, these political action committees and you can even do
it anonymously. So we've just given free reign
to distorting the political decision making process and and
putting it in the hands of people who have the most money.
Yeah. And so we have this like tragedy
of a common sort of situation where we've got several problems

(43:58):
that are just, the American political system is just riddled
with them. It's just rife with them.
And we all admit that they're a problem, but nobody wants to
actually be the one to do it. But you have suggested before a
sort of historical case study that might provide a template
for addressing lots of those systemic problems, including

(44:19):
perhaps the UAP subject. Because I get the sense that
there's a lot of people on the Hill who admit that this is an
interesting and important subject, but they don't want to
be the ones to personally champion it because, you know,
there's, you know, taboos and, and all all sorts of other other
things associated with it. So that I've heard you before,

(44:40):
and I don't know if you've suggested this, particularly in
the, in the context of UAP issue, but I've heard you before
talk about repurposing the strategy that was used.
That's called BRAC bases re. It's Realignment and Closure
Commission. It's realignment and and closure
Commission where after the end of the Cold War, we needed to

(45:01):
close a bunch of military bases and everybody agreed, but nobody
want nobody on the hill wanted to close the one that was in
their district. So they sort of outsourced the
decision making to a panel of experts that were appointed by
jointly by different parties, real estate people and, and, and
military people and, and, you know, accountants and whoever

(45:23):
expertise was relevant to this. And they said their decisions
are, are binding unless they're vetoed by the president, are
overridden by Congress. And eventually that went to the
Supreme Court. I think in 94 something in the
Supreme Court said unanimously, this is not an unconstitutional
abdication of congressional responsibility or authority.
It's totally, totally fine thingto do.

(45:46):
And you've suggested using that sort of strategy for like
campaign finance reform, which Iagree we it is necessary in
order to save the country from just devolving into some kind of
oligarchy. But could it also be used as a
UAP research solution? I was not thinking of UAP at all

(46:07):
when I put that proposal for it.I was thinking of the deficit.
I was thinking of immigration, Iwas thinking of campaign finance
reform. I have a lot of interest besides
UAPD and and if trying to engageon some of those other things.
And the beauty of this is that you get subject matter experts

(46:28):
who are not running for office. They're not taking money from
anybody, but they're selected bythe leaders of both parties and
you can make them confirmed by the Senate or not.
And there's a fail safe mechanism.
But what we've seen is when you get bright, patriotic people
together with a range of perspectives, they usually tend

(46:51):
to bond as they work through a problem together.
They all are motivated by the best interests of the country,
although they don't always agreewhat that is.
But they are generally trying toachieve something and given the
opportunity to do something great for America, something of
lasting benefit. I mean, people go into the
government because often, you know, large, do they want to

(47:13):
help the country? They want to do something good
and meaningful. To be served to serve on a
condition like that is an incredible opportunity to make
huge changes that can have immense benefits to this nation.
And I think there are a lot of people would be honored to serve
on those committees because theyknow it leads to something.

(47:35):
It's not producing a reporter that sits on a shelf.
We know it's constitutional. We know it's worked beautifully
in the past. It worked so well.
Congress has done 4 rounds of these commissions and they've
been frictionless, and they're saving us maybe $10 billion a
year. And the bases that closed, many

(47:55):
of them are now much more prosperous because they've been
repurposed. And now they're flourishing
airports, you know, commercial airports or ports or different
kinds of activities where they're actually employing many
more people now than they were before and they're really
needed. So it's a win win.
And we're, we're at a point where things are getting, it

(48:15):
might be desperate. If you don't adapt to changing
the world, you don't survive, whether you're a company or a
nation or a species. And we're not adapting well.
And the rate of change is increasing.
So we need something that is is viable, that is constitutional,
that can take the money out of the process and the special

(48:36):
interest, the excessive special interest influence and overcome
partisanship. And this occurred to me as the
one thing I could think of that was was viable and can work in
this difficult situation we're in right now.
Such a polarized nation. You could use it for a UAP

(48:58):
related issue as well. The Presidential Commission, it
was proposed by Senator Schumer and Rounds, for example, is of a
somewhat similar nature. You've got a Commission there.
In that case, they're making a resident a recommendation to the
president as opposed to proposing legislation.
But the president in that case, it's appropriate because he's

(49:19):
got the classification authorityto, he's got the authority to
unilaterally to declassify or decide what should be
declassified. But we're talking about things
that involve changing the law. We're talking about immigration
reform or we're talking about deficit reduction, those kind of
things. You have to actually change
statutes on the book. The executive branch can't do

(49:40):
that by itself. So that's why I propose that
I've continued to try to circulate that idea.
I think actually, if President Trump would come in and propose
that people might have said, youknow, he's a businessman and
he's an out-of-the-box thinker, what a great idea.
You know, they might have been able to run with it.

(50:01):
I don't know. But I think we're going to get
pushed in that direction regardless because as we as the
the clock ticks down and the debt time bomb, you know, gets
closer to going off and Social Security becomes closer to going
bankrupt and Medicare are those things, we get more and more
desperate. Eventually we're going to have
to do something. And if Congress can't come to

(50:23):
grips with this itself and pass legislation to reform and revise
that the program and make it viable, then this is maybe the
only other option. So I think you're going to hear
more support for this kind of idea.
Unfortunately, it'll happen in the future under more desperate
circumstances instead of in advance, where we can prevent a

(50:45):
lot of disarray and hardship. Sure.
I, I brought it up in the the context of the UAP discussion
because it seems with the death of the Schumer amendment and
with the clearly impending totaldysfunction of Congress, no
matter who wins the next election, that it's going to be

(51:06):
hard to for organizations like SCU to rely on the government to
place the legislature of Congress to help push this issue
forward. For those of us who think that
there's a, a real good reason, effort for the interest of the
country to to push UAP research forward.

(51:27):
So we talk a lot of you, but it's you about how on the
private end of things, or at least outside of the
congressional sphere, how we canmake progress here.
And, and it's not just because we think the government is
dysfunctional, which it very clearly is, but it's also

(51:49):
because the the government agencies or appointed groups
that are working on this, I don't think there's a huge
degree of confidence in them. And so let me, let me give you
an example and tell me whether you think the way I'm
approaching this is right. So like even the the few
government appointed or sort of ancillary organizations like

(52:16):
NASA's UAP study task group or ARROW, even those groups that
whose job it is to to investigate and make public
information about this have consistently made statements to
the effect that like everything we look at, there's no evidence

(52:36):
that these are extraterrestrial in origin, right.
I've heard that consistently from from both of those groups.
But I'm kind of horrified at that, not because of the content
or the conclusion or whatever, but for the following reason.

(52:57):
First, three reasons, I guess 1 is that's almost never the
question that's actually being put to these groups.
I, I don't hear a lot of journalists or people in the
press room asking are, are theseextraterrestrial?
So, so they're not even answering the questions that are
being put to them directly. To my knowledge, there's no
definition of what would count as evidence of extraterrestrial

(53:20):
origin in the data that they're looking at.
And thirdly, the data that they're looking at isn't even
the sort of information that in principle could determine
extraterrestrial origin. Like radar data does not tell
you where an object came from inthe solar system era outside of

(53:40):
it. So you couldn't even possibly in
principle draw that conclusion. So when like Arrow and NASA,
which are the the organizations that we're mostly looking at
come out and say things like this, it feels like intentional
obfuscation. And if the best thing that we
currently have is a gridlocked legislature and a few

(54:02):
organizations that are not even answering the questions we're
putting to them, but are intentionally redirecting and
obfuscating and trying to confuse the questions, we've got
to do something different. Am I being too pessimistic about
the current state of things? I think it's hard to be too
pessimistic, a bit large, you know, in the country at the

(54:25):
moment we're in fairly perilous times and and it looks like it
may get worse before it gets better.
And that's a whole separate topic.
But on the the UAP issue here, yeah, I was concerned by some of
those statements as well for a couple of different reasons.
One, I thought they were premature, you know, to come out

(54:49):
and they're, when they're doing this study and they're, do you
know, why would you announce theresults of the study before
you're done with the study? I mean, I kind of feel like, you
know, they were still at the stage where they should be
having, you know, expressing an open mind.
And we're collecting data. We're gathering data rather than
we're putting out conclusions already.

(55:11):
I had a second problem with that, with the approach to this,
which is that Arrow reports to the Defense Department and the
intelligence community, the director of national
intelligence. They're not in a scientific
organization. They're not a science shop.

(55:33):
They're supposed to be advising DoD and policy makers on issues
based on intelligence, tradecraft and standards.
Now, in the military and in the law enforcement community as
well, we don't have the luxury of relying on academic
scientific standards. You know, how would you, how

(55:54):
many people could you to convictin court if you had to have
definitive scientific proof? If somebody committed a crime,
how could you prosecute a battle?
How could you decide when to intercept a missile or when to,
you know, what the capabilities of the latest Chinese ICB Ms.
are, whether they pose a threat?We don't have perfect scientific

(56:16):
information. Whenever you know, we're not
likely to anytime soon, We can. Where we have it is great.
We would, that's what we want touse if we can get it, but that's
typically not available. So we take what we can and we do
the best we can with it and we give policy makers are our best
advice based on that. And unfortunately, I felt as

(56:37):
though this office era was changing the rules of the game
and they're suddenly now queuingto scientific standards, which
is a different standard. It is.
It's rather convenient, but that's not necessarily what the
president needs to be hearing orsee your policy makers need to

(56:58):
be hearing. If those pilots from the
Endemitz had said we saw Chineseor Russian Insignia on this
thing, everybody would have snapped too.
That would have gone straight tothe top and nobody would have
been people would not have been saying we don't have scientific

(57:19):
proof that, you know, that they that they were really Russians.
People would have, you know, been asking some follow up
questions. But when you've got for naval
aviators seeing something in close range and broad daylight
like that and you have multiple sensors on multiple platforms

(57:40):
with personnel tracking on radar, and you have an infrared
video from yet another F18 that went up to pursue this thing.
If the question was, you know, was there really a Russian or
Chinese aircraft there, in that case, it would have been hands
down, of course, you know, nobody would have doubted their

(58:02):
their testimony. And in fact, you know, we
routinely have situations where Russian aircraft come across the
Bering Strait. I mean, it happens every once in
a while. And we send fighters up to
intercept them and, and they seethem and, and everybody just
takes it for, you know, they reported face value that they're
Russian. And it goes into the newspapers.

(58:22):
And, you know, they may or may not have imagery with it, but
nobody questions it or thinks twice about it.
So I think they were applying a standard that is not appropriate
for an organization playing thatrole.
It's convenient if you want to minimize human testimony.

(58:46):
But if that's the case, why are we asking pilots to report this
stuff to begin with? Yeah, what's the point?
We don't trust. We don't trust them.
We don't think they're reliable.That's compelling information.
Why are we asking all these people, these pilots, to report
this stuff? Well, it's, it's not perfect
scientific information, but it'svaluable information.
It's important information. And it's information that the

(59:08):
kind of information we rely on in military operations all the
time, if we didn't trust our military personnel and what they
were reporting generally speed be very hard to function.
So I think I had some problems with those statements as well
from a couple of different vantage points.

(59:29):
So is it just to be clear, is it, is it that you think they
should draw or should not preclude the conclusion that
their extraterrestrial nature? Or are you saying that they
should, that they, they shouldn't just dismiss the, the
sort of validity of like some ofthese claims, like for instance

(59:52):
that the some of these craft canaccelerate to like 50,000 GS or
something like those things are also being dismissed as sort of
just empirical data. Yeah.
So I'm referring to a couple of things.
One, when the statement was madeby the director of Arrow that we
don't have any credible information of craft doing

(01:00:15):
things that we don't understand or know how to do ourselves.
That, to me, is completely ignoring and disrespecting the
testimony of many Navy officers.Would you characterize it as a
lie on his part or as simply? I wouldn't go that.
I wouldn't go that far as to sayit's a lie.

(01:00:35):
I wouldn't say he was using this, in my view, inappropriate
scientific academic standard. We're not in an academic
community in the government. You know, we go to war.
It's not an academic exercise. It's not a theoretical
proposition. The scientific community has
good reasons for those standards, and we need those and

(01:00:56):
they need to operate that way, and that's great.
But this is a different kind of operation over here in the
government. And the president would be
bereft of tremendous amounts of important information if we were
limited to stuff that was scientifically proven.
Might as well tell CIA to fold up shop and and so forth.
So. It doesn't, but for me it

(01:01:20):
doesn't get him out of the accusation.
He's being intentionally obfuscating because the academic
community doesn't have an agreedupon set of criteria under which
they would admit that a macro scale object had accelerated
50,000 GS without a Sonic boom. Like there are.

(01:01:41):
Our physical theories don't admit such to be drawn.
But to say that what we don't have any any evidence to draw
the conclusion that this is justto say that we don't have the
standards and but it's misleading.
He knows that. He certainly must know that
that's the case. But to not say the more subtle

(01:02:01):
thing and to just simply say that, oh, there's no evidence.
There could be evidence, but there's no evidence.
Seems to me like not the. I mean, I think a more
forthright answer would be, and we've heard this from the
director of national intelligence, and we've heard
this from former presidents who have all said, yeah, we see some

(01:02:21):
stuff sometimes that we don't understand.
It's. Kind of kind of crazy.
And, you know, I think someone in that office, assuming that is
what the data shows, should be forthright about that.
And I think it would be good to have standards maybe enunciate
more clearly what we consider evidence and what we're basing

(01:02:45):
our judgments on. I think if we can demonstrate
compellingly that you know, withsay multiple radars and IR
visual that a craft is doing things like breaking, breaking
the, the sound barrier without aSonic boom, without plasma at

(01:03:06):
extreme speeds under able to undertake, you know, right angle
turns or whatever. That's very compelling evidence
that somebody has advanced further down the line
technologically a lot further than we have.
And, and that narrows the the list of suspects quite a bit.

(01:03:29):
So that leads you to, you know, is it Russia or China?
If it's not, well, OK, what hypothesis can you put forward?
And the extraterrestrial hypothesis is makes perfect
sense. It's a perfectly natural fit if
that is in fact what the data shows.
But you've said before, I'm think I can quote you.

(01:03:50):
You say this isn't from your soul talk.
You say imagine your POTUS and you learn the truth.
Can you imagine a scenario wheredisclosing that info, say there
are these things flying around in our atmosphere doing bizarre
things, We don't know where they're from or, or who made
them. Can you imagine a scenario where
disclosing that information wouldn't lead to TOMO or where
the net result would be positiverather than negative?

(01:04:13):
You're not saying therefore don't disclose it.
What you're saying like this is the burden of those whose job it
is to govern, right? So there are these incentives.
I actually believe that long term we would all benefit if
it's true that we have compelling proof or or evidence,

(01:04:35):
maybe even definitive evidence that we're not alone in the
universe. I think it is in our best long
term interests. I think the difficulty for a
politician, for a president is how do you, you know, your
number one job and expectation is security of the American
people to protect them from all dangerous foreign and domestic.

(01:04:59):
That's job one for anybody. And who wants to hold a press
conference and say, yeah, ETS are here, but we don't know
where they're from. We don't know why they're here.
I can't protect you from them. Have a good day.
You know, nobody wants what kindof a rational politician wants
to hold a press conference like that.

(01:05:21):
So that's where you get into, OK, how do we then manage this
issue and handle it in a way that's consistent with our short
and long term interests and hopefully with the truth.
And that is what people were intending with the Schuber
legislation by creating that Commission.
They wanted them to develop a plan as to how you would roll

(01:05:44):
this out if when you acquire that information, how you would
inoculate the public, perhaps initially so that people
understand we're not seeing hostility.
This has been going on for a long time.
They, it looks like they may be,you know, somebody else's NASA
or a probe or something and gradually reveal that that

(01:06:08):
information, you know, if you doin fact have it.
So I do believe that it's a challenge how you for a
politician, how you would for any president, if that
information falls into your lap,how you handle that and what you
do with it. It would not surprise me if a
past president should, you know,if they were advised that they

(01:06:31):
chose to keep it secret, I totally would get that.
I think probably most people in that position would do the same
thing. But that doesn't mean it's the
right answer forever. I, I totally agree and I want to
push you on this this sort of subject, but I want to preface
it by saying that I think you are genuinely an exemplary

(01:06:55):
public servant. I'm really proud of you and I'm
grateful for the work that you've done.
And I, I say that as somebody who is like has the sort of
neuroses and self-destructive tendencies that don't allow me
to suck up to people that I don't actually respect.
So like I, I couldn't say that to you if I, if I didn't think

(01:07:16):
really highly of you Now, if it comes out in a few years that
you're like hunting people for sport in Cambodia in your free
time life, take it all back. But at, given the current
knowledge that I have, you've done work that's changed my
life. I, I wasn't into the subject for
years. I had no real interest in it
until there's some New York Times videos that came out.

(01:07:39):
And now I'm hosting a UUFO podcast, which is almost a
nightmarish thought years ago. But all that said, you've done,
you've taken incredible personalrisks and professional risks and
made principal stances. However, I think that I detect a

(01:07:59):
kind of cynicism in in some of the positions that you take
sometimes. And I imagine it's just the sort
of cynicism that inevitably getsbaked in after years and years
of working with bureaucracy. I mean, it's, it's not the
people, it's the system that sort of burns out whatever that
just snuffs out whatever light of of hope that that is in you

(01:08:21):
slowly. But here's here's where I hear
the cynicism in two places. 1 you say?
What? What?
President wants to get up and make that that sort of
announcement that, you know, I know my job is to protect you,
but here are these things in theatmosphere, we don't know where
they're from and what they can do and they're more advanced.
No president wants to do that. But we shouldn't just forget to

(01:08:46):
mention that the president's jobisn't to do the things that he
wants to do, right? There are no, I know, I know, I
know you're not. But I, I think that you aren't
going to be the one to interjectit because you just know that
the reality of the situation is such that that's how the all
these offices actually work. And so I want to say as a

(01:09:09):
citizen that the president's jobisn't to to just do what he
wants, that his job has principled obligations that he
has to fulfill toward the public.
And in a lot of cases, that's going and not not a lot maybe,
but in some very important cases, it's going to require the
president to come out and say something that may tank his
career and create a bunch of problems for him professionally.

(01:09:32):
You seem to have made a kind of decision like that yourself.
Are we too? I don't.
Is it too cynical of us to that we're that we're not expecting
that? No, I mean.
I think this is, this is a matter of weighing competing
interests. You've got 10s of millions of

(01:09:53):
children who might be terrified,10s of millions of adults and,
and people who are feel vulnerable, who might be
terrified. And, you know, you represent
those people. And there are times when leaders
have to make really tough decisions about trade-offs.
You know, they they don't want to lie, They don't want to

(01:10:14):
deceive. They also don't want to terrify,
you know, 100 million American children and set them to bed
having nightmares about, you know, spiders coming out of the
sky and, and eating their parents or something.
So these are just practical considerations.
And, you know, there are principles here, but what are

(01:10:35):
those principles? I mean, we have long ago as a
people agreed that the government can and should keep
secrets for us. And our legislators have passed
legislation concurring in that and laying around guidelines for
that because they realize that we can't defend ourselves

(01:10:55):
effectively in a Darwinian worldif we're not able to do that.
So, you know, I think it's we have to be nuanced, that we have
to understand. I wish everybody in this debate
could sort of get off a podium and just look at the facts and

(01:11:16):
stick to the facts and try to approach it more pragmatically
and dispassionately. There are a lot of.
The public wants to do, isn't it?
But we don't have the facts to maybe we wouldn't be very good
at, but we're we don't don't at least have the first step of
like the access to the facts that would help us to make a a

(01:11:37):
sort of practical decision aboutwhat to believe or what to do.
I I agree that's very hard and and the government is largely
responsible for that itself because it has violated the
public's trust on many occasions.
Specifically with respect to this, this topic, I mean
historically, no question that the government has engaged in in

(01:11:59):
disinformation, complex disinformation campaigns and
intended to make the the subjectseem.
That's right, silly. We had the we had the Air Force
saying originally they had a crashed spaceship at Roswell and
they said no, it wasn't. Then they changed their story
again. It was actually a classified
program that we didn't tell you about.
We have all kinds of shenanigans.

(01:12:20):
We have Colonel Doty or Rick Doty.
Was the Colonel actually from OSI saying that he was paying
MUFON, a MUFON person under the table to spy on other UFO
researchers, which is, to my best of my knowledge, grossly
illegal and inappropriate. So yeah, there are shenanigans.

(01:12:43):
And, you know, I understand why people are confused and, and why
people are skeptical, But the best way to proceed, it seems to
me, is for everyone to try to beas faithful as we can to the
facts and not leap to the conclusion that, well, because
this or that person said something that necessarily the

(01:13:07):
government's got a secret space fleet and physical acting
council and, and reptilians on the council are making these
decisions and telling the president what to do.
Or, you know, people extrapolatewildly and it happens on on both
sides. There are people that who are,
you know, attacking some of us because they think we're trying

(01:13:29):
to roll the curtain back on science or paranormal sort of
methodologies or something like that.
I wish, I wish people could, youknow, really try to stick more
to the facts and reason from thefacts and approach.
This is like, yeah, this is a real thing.

(01:13:50):
We're in this together. Let's try to figure it out.
I wish that too, but the government has created such a
vacuum of facts and that vacuum gets filled with speculation.
It's and you can't control it. When it's a vacuum, you have
some little control over what lines.
Are speaking and I think what's exacerbating it right now, which
is a totally self-inflicted wound.

(01:14:12):
It's true that the government could not just make everything
that it has public without compromising some very important
capabilities that that war fighters depend on.
But they certainly do not have an excuse from withholding that
data from Congress, from the oversight committees.

(01:14:35):
And as we know, there's a great deal of dissatisfaction on the
Hill. There's a great deal of fueling
by our representatives who are cleared these things and are
serving on committees that have oversight responsibilities.
And they're saying they're not satisfied with what they're
getting. My advice to Arrow is take all

(01:14:55):
the most interesting anomalous cases you have out of that 1500.
They're not interested in the 400 that you found out were
balloons. I mean, that's great.
You need to do that, but we would.
Expect you to find lots of. Yeah, we would expect you to
find a lot of stuff that's that's not the interesting
stuff, right? What they want to know is what
are you seeing that could represent a strategic

(01:15:17):
breakthrough by a potential adversary or could be a probe
from another planet. You know, they want to know is
there something going on that's really anomalous that really
defies our present understandingof science and that sort of
thing. Call those 1500 reports, take
the ones that are the most difficult to explain, the most

(01:15:39):
extraordinary, and brief them onthose.
And I've tried to suggest to some people on the Hill that
they might create some language that sort of helps to push that
and maybe requires a briefing orarticulates that desire to, to
get that sort of information. And they also need to make sure

(01:16:02):
arrows get into the information.There's a real question as to
what is being shared with arrow.And the real question in my mind
at least, I, I'm not convinced that there.
I know from the outset the Air Force was extremely resistant.
I know they were resistant to DAP task force.

(01:16:22):
I know they were resistant to initially to the congressional
request for information when they came out with a report, the
first report in 2021, which was something that I had advocated
for two years. And finally the the Intelligence
Committee did did pick that up that recommendation to go with

(01:16:45):
it. But when they came out with that
report, they said, OK, we've identified 144 incidents report
since 2004. None of those, maybe a handful
were from the Air Force. The Air Force said we don't
collect data on that. We don't have anything.
Yeah, they've been totally uncooperative.
They have nothing and they're responsible for aerospace

(01:17:06):
defence. They know that there's thousands
of uncorrelated tracks every year.
They launch fighters and scramble them from strip alert
to try to intercept these things.
You know we're. In our tracks, You mean we don't
correlate them to something thatwe already seen, like the FAA's
flight database or something? Right, right.
So we see something that doesn'thave a transponder, it's
approaching the United States ata high speed and doesn't, you

(01:17:29):
know, answer the phone when somebody tries to get them on
the radio and maybe they're heading towards a very sensitive
area, then we say we need to check that out.
And we know that there have beencases.
I interviewed a NORAD Colonel, retired, who was at Cheyenne
Mountain one time when a object at high speed started coming

(01:17:51):
down from the Arctic. And the commander of NORAD said,
I want that thing. The four stars said get that
thing. They were launching everything
they had in strip alert the EastCoast.
They couldn't get a radar lock on it.
They couldn't catch it. And yet the Air Force says we
don't have any information aboutanything and, you know, anything

(01:18:13):
unidentified. So there's a disconnect that of
course people are scratching their their heads a little bit.
How can that be when you've got the most powerful radars in the
world, the most powerful space surveillance capabilities in the
world, You're parsing, you know,untold numbers of gigabits of,
of data every hour monitoring all these areas and you don't

(01:18:36):
have any anomalies. You don't have any see anything
that you know is curious or doesn't fit the bill for a
conventional, you know, aircraftor whatever.
I mean, even private corporations have incredible
surveillance capability. I did some some good consulting
work for a company that takes these incredibly high definition

(01:18:57):
aerial photos of entire cities. Like 1:00 every second.
You can almost read a newspaper from you know, all the way up so
that they can do things like track a robber after he's, you
know, robbed a bank to see wherehe came from in the 1st place.
Like that level of civilian capability has to only be a
small fraction of the the power and scale of the governments.

(01:19:19):
And to say that that that to deny any information on
something coming down from the Arctic seems just preposterous
to me. So yeah, it's.
It's kind of makes you wonderful.
Does it go into a special compartment or is it, you know,
there's so much stigma that theyjust let it fall on the floor
and nobody follows up, which would be irresponsible in
itself. How do you know it's, you know,

(01:19:40):
it's coming across the Arctic? Well, the other side over there
is Russia and you know, is it coming from Russia?
Is it a Russian platform? I mean, this is not stuff that
that you would think you would ignore intrusions on ICBM bases
and facilities. It, you know, interferes with
nuclear commanding control. That's not the kind of thing
that typically, you know, you would ignore.

(01:20:02):
It's quite the opposite, right. So so it it is understandable
that people. They have a lot of questions and
a lot of skepticism, and it is largely the government's fault.
I think the best first step to correcting that is to be really

(01:20:22):
candid, as candid as possible with the public and with
Congress. And with Congress, they can
really get into a lot of the nitty gritty and the details at
at a classified level. So just a pause.
This conversation is going great.
I want to be respectful of your time.
I do have like 3 questions left.Do we have time for those on?

(01:20:43):
Your end. OK, All right.
Yeah, let's go for it. So, so you, you want more, more
transparency at least towards Congress and let them to be
maybe kind of a, a cooling dish or filter for what gets to the
public. Maybe that's one way of, of, of
setting it up. I'm fine with that, I think, but

(01:21:05):
the decisions about what to think or what to to say about
this to the public are still going to be there.
It once the information gets to the people who who leave the
country, there's going to be this question about like what to
communicate and why. And when I was listening to your
recent Soul Foundation talk, yousaid something that gave me real

(01:21:31):
pause. And I spent a lot of time on a
long walk trying to think through how to interpret what
you said. So I want to read back the quote
or or the quotes that you used. You referred to two people and I
want to tell you the the three ways I3 possible ways I came up
of interpreting and tell me which of those is the right way
or if some 4th interpretation isright.

(01:21:53):
So when your soul talk at Stanford, you quote, you've all
know a Harare and Ronald Reagan both to the same basic effect.
I think Harari says a common enemy is the best catalyst for
forging a common identity. And Reagan said something like
perhaps there perhaps we need some external threat or and

(01:22:19):
perhaps there is an alien threat, it's already among us.
And you were saying this in the context of like the possible
benefits of disclosing whatever the truth may be about these
things. I mean, it does seem like
there's some non human intelligence on the other side
of this phenomenon, whether it'sproperly characterized as
extraterrestrial or not. We can leave that off the side.

(01:22:40):
There's something there. There's some agency on the other
side. And these two quotes in that
context, and you were reading from a paper you had written.
You weren't just speaking extemporaneously.
These two quotes in that contextmade me shudder, because I think
we all agree that the question of who our enemies are isn't a

(01:23:03):
matter of choice. We don't choose.
We shouldn't choose who our enemies are based on what it
would benefit us to view people as enemies.
You know, we don't. There's something like deeply
Donald Rumsfeldian about that way of thinking like, oh, we'll
see, Iraq is an enemy because itwould enable us to do this or
get some resource or something. Who our enemies are is a

(01:23:26):
function of what their values and methods and actions are.
Let's say something like that. So the three ways that I could
think of of interpreting your one, that you didn't realize
that the internal logic of your statement was something like it
might be good for us to discloseand disclose whatever we know

(01:23:50):
because we could see them as an enemy and that would unite
humanity. That you just didn't realize
that was kind of part of the internal logic.
I don't think that's possible because I think you're genuinely
a subtle thinker and the the nuance wouldn't be lost on you.
The second option is that you, you knew that was part of the

(01:24:10):
internal logic, but that is justhow you think you are a sort of
Rumsfeldian thinker. And I don't think that's true at
all of you. The only other option I could
come up with for interpreting you and why you would use those
quotes in that context is to saythat you have access to a lot
more information about this subject than the rest of us.

(01:24:33):
And given what you know and whatyou've seen that came out as
your most plausible judgement ofthe situation, is there any way
of interpreting you other than that last one?
Well, I'll tell you what's behind that, and you can draw

(01:24:53):
your own conclusions. I am deeply, deeply concerned
and actually rather pessimistic at this point about the path
that we're on as a species on this planet.
There are so many issues that are on the verge of getting out

(01:25:15):
of control, including here at home where there's sort of
unprecedented craziness going onin partisanship.
We're not effectively addressingclimate change or global
warming. We're we've got to deal with
artificial intelligence. There's a huge new challenge.

(01:25:36):
We've got biotechnology offeringboth promise, but also peril in
terms of genetically modifying our species, in terms of weapons
of mass destruction capabilitiesthat are available.
That's also true with other kinds of weapons of mass

(01:25:58):
destruction like nuclear weapons.
And these, these problems compound each other and they
interact. And what we're seeing in Haiti
right now, the anarchy and the hell that's going on there is
not so different from what's happening in some parts of
Africa right now and Latin America.

(01:26:19):
And those trends are not, are not positive.
They're they're going in a negative direction in many
places. What's happening between US and
Russia and China is very perilous.
And so I'm just gravely concerned about the future of my

(01:26:40):
family, of my children, of of all of us.
And I think if we have to come to grips with these things
somehow. And my point is not that that if
there is a need to either enemies, but inevitably that
would be perceived as a potential threat and rightly so.

(01:27:02):
And so that would have the the effect of reframing
International Security, of reframing the worldview of
people around the world and their leaders in Russia and
China and here in ways that might help us actually overcome
some of these existential challenges.

(01:27:26):
So in the intelligence. You're talking about when I'm,
when I'm talking about these things, of course I'm also
talking to different audiences. And so when you're trying to get
people in the national security community to think more openly
about maybe there would be some benefit to be more open, maybe

(01:27:46):
it actually would be in our bestinterest if we have evidence or
proof that ET is here to get it out there.
You have to make a case. All they're hearing is arguments
on the other side. And their natural instinct is,
you know, don't share with the public, don't share with
Congress, don't trust them, you know, keep the secrets.

(01:28:08):
And I'm trying to find a way to help those people see an
alternative vision of that and an alternative way of thinking
about it. It might be consistent with
their values and perspectives asnational security officials and

(01:28:29):
people who are responsible for for our security.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but.
Partially, yes, it's partially there, but I do know that in the
in the national security and intelligence worlds, there's a
conceptual distinction between threat and risk.
And you use the term threat. Risk is a situation where just
for in public way of thinking about it is like you have some

(01:28:53):
element of the unknown and there's there's the possibility
of it's. It's not a threat in DoD
parlance because a threat is capability and intent.
Yes, that's. So we don't, we don't have
threat in that sense, but. It's from the UA PS subject.
You're saying from the Uaps we're not seeing any hostility?
I've said that many times. I've said we don't need to

(01:29:14):
increase defense spending. I'm not here trying to plus up
some aerospace contractors, you know, wallet or something.
But nevertheless, if it's true and we don't know their
intentions, we have to take prudential steps.
We can't assume that they're here to save us or because they
love us or something like that. So we have to treat it as a

(01:29:38):
potential risk or a potential threat.
That's just common sense. Agreed.
That's what that's what I'm referring to.
So I, I think I read you more subtly than you intended because
the term threat, it was a Hararequote.
And I know Harare, I think his work is great.
But the fact that you use threat, you know, it's, it's

(01:30:00):
inevitable when, when you're in a position where you know a lot
more than other people do, We'realways going to have to read
what you say to see what the implications are that are
unstated. And I think that there's
probably some small group of people out there who heard you
communicating that this is a threat, that from what you know,
your best estimation. Yeah, I've, I've said many

(01:30:20):
times, we're not seeing any hostility.
We're not seeing but you. Have to see hostilities just to
to characterize something as right.
You just have to know their intentions and their
capabilities. That's right.
And we don't have any way of knowing their intentions.
So we, you know, have to look atbehavior.
But what is disconcerting is to some degree is the interest in
activity around military bases and facilities.

(01:30:44):
And, you know, some people thinkthat UAP are humans from the
future coming back to look at usfor some reason.
And you know, my response to that is if you were a human for
the future, why would you want to come back and go to West 72
to watch jet hang out in a cloudto watch, you know, some jets

(01:31:06):
and Navy fighters pass by. You know, I do that all day,
every day, day after day revealing.
So, you know, we we do have a legitimate concern there why
there's so much interest in activity in our military
operations and activities and we'd be foolish to just ignore

(01:31:27):
that. We can't ignore that.
And. This is an observation
selection. It isn't necessarily.
It isn't necessarily anything extraterrestrial at all.
I mean, some of these things mayprove to be.
It probably will prove to be drones from China, for example.
In some cases, I've written about an instance in which at
Anderson Air Force Base in Guam,we had objects come over the

(01:31:49):
base and they went right to the most sensitive part of the base
on consecutive evenings and shone lights right down on the
one capability on the base we have that can intercept
ballistic missiles. You know, my guess would be that
was probably a Chinese throne. So there's a lot of stuff that
falls in this basket of strange things that are unidentified

(01:32:10):
that are flying around. And we've got a lot of sort that
stuff out, but we have to balance these these equities.
And that's why I say, you know, I wish people could appreciate
the the pragmatic aspects of this because it's really not a
simple, you know, the American public has the right to know.

(01:32:32):
Therefore we just tell them everything or, you know, it's
financial security. Therefore we can't tell the
American people anything. There's a lot of new lines,
places in between those two extreme positions that are
viable, in my view, that are appropriate that we can do
better AT and try to regain the public's trust.

(01:32:52):
So last few questions, if you had unlimited budget, unlimited
resources and unlimited authority within, you know the
the realms of the law to study this phenomenon.
How would you go about doing it?I think we've got a, a
reasonable start with Arrow. We're, we're promulgating
reporting requirements. We're, we're requiring now

(01:33:14):
military personnel to report. Ryan Graves and others are
working with Americans for Safe Aerospace to get commercial
pilots to report. There's some private companies
like Enigma Labs that are building apps for people that
can help collect data, MUFON andso forth.
I think where we need, and I've heard things that I don't know

(01:33:36):
if they're true or not. I've heard from some people who
are credible that we actually dohave some signatures that we're
able to. Some of these things, when they
hit the atmosphere, they give off a signal and we know what
that signal is. And there's a couple different
signals that we can track them. I don't know if that's true, but
so the first thing I want to know is what do we actually
really know? And what do we know about

(01:33:58):
signatures? And what do we have that can
detect those signatures to to track these things and get a
better handle on where they're coming from and what their
agenda might be? So for for the organizations
that already exists like SCU andArrow and UAPX and, and all

(01:34:20):
these other sort of civilian runorganizations, there's like, you
know, not a lot of cooperation going on.
And it seems like we're going tohave to take the helm moving
forward. And I worry that we're going to
devolve into the same sort of like siloed, partisan, unsharing
dynamic that characterizes a lotof the government bureaucracies.

(01:34:44):
And, and, you know, we'll each have our own set of data that we
don't share with each other. We'll see each other as
competitors. How do you advise us
collectively as that group, including UAP and all these
others, the Galileo Project and Sole Foundation, how do we all
move forward in a way that maximizes cooperation and and

(01:35:07):
and collaboration? Yeah, You reminded me of
something that relates to an earlier question.
You asked how I got involved in this professionally, and it
actually started when I joined the board of UAUAP Data or UFO
Data, it was called. And it was an organization
trying to raise money to build scientific sensors to collect

(01:35:28):
data and as a board member to try to get to some attention.
I wrote an article in the Huffington Post and a guy named
Tom Delong, who was crazy about the UFO topic, saw that and
called me up and he was poison people.
He had not loaded me on the path.
That actually eventually got me connected to Lou Elizondo and so
forth. So my point being, I have long

(01:35:49):
supported civilian scientific research on this topic when I
first joined the board of that organization.
So I think these civilian research efforts are, are great.
I think they're important all the more so when when the
government is not sharing information.
And the government also has a different perspective because

(01:36:10):
even though they're, they're using talking about scientific
criteria, DoD and intelligence community are not scientific
organizations that really they're not really what they do
or what they're about. And, and I don't think they're
going to really approach this asa as a science project.
I think they're going to approach it's a national
security project. So I think the civilian science
organizations. I took this interview because I

(01:36:33):
want to do whatever I can, whenever I can to support the
SEUI work with the Galileo project.
I've had some success lately helping them win a grant to
deploy sensors in another site. I try to collaborate a network
with everybody in this space that I can.
Ryan Graves and his organization, People, The
Debrief, George Knapp and Peopleon the Hill and everybody I can.

(01:36:59):
And I think if we all approach this in good faith and share
information, we'll learn from one another and we'll move
forward together more effectively.
So I know the SCU people are talking to UAPX and others and
talking to the government and I think that's great.

(01:37:21):
It's not what we'd like it to beyet, but it's a good start.
It's important, needs to be done.
OK, Smollen, thank you so much for your time.
This has been a fantastic talk and I, I think it's made a lot
of progress or well made steps of progress toward laying out
some of the intricacies of the subject and of the sort of

(01:37:43):
bureaucratic machinery that we need to understand in order to
appreciate the difficulty that we face in, in making progress
on this really mysterious topic that's mysterious and in its own
ways, but also is sort of mediated by a lot of rules and
bureaucracies and norms that arethemselves super hard to

(01:38:04):
understand. So I think you were the perfect
person to help us illuminate some of that, and I'm really
grateful for your time. Well, I hope I'm contributing
and as I say, I'm a big supporter of but Mr. Powell and
the SCU and all you guys are doing and eager to help anytime
I can. Well, we look forward to having

(01:38:24):
you back home. The Anomalous Review is a
project of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
It's hosted and produced by me, Michael Glossin and edited by
Kelly Michelle. Our theme song was written and
performed by Telma Crusante Communication and PR work is by
Preston Dykes. Our advisory team includes
Jennifer Roach, Robert Powell, Richard Hoffman, Joshua Pearson

(01:38:47):
and Larry Hancock. To find out more about SCU,
check out Explorer scu.org.

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005 - Chris Mellon on UAP, National Security, & Government Accountability

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}005 - Chris Mellon on UAP, National Security, & Government Accountability