011 - How the National Security and Intelligence World Thinks about UAP, with Larry Hancock - The Anomalous Review

Episode Transcript
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(00:23):
Hi, welcome to the Anomalous Review, the official podcast of
the Scientific Coalition for UAPStudies, or SCU.
We're an organization working topromote the serious scientific
study and discussion of anomalous phenomena.
My name is Michael Glossen, I'm a philosopher of science and
technology, a contributing member of SCU, and the host of
the show. We're glad to have you

(00:45):
listening, and we'd love for youto check
thisout@explorerscu.org. One of the things that I, as a
philosopher, find most fascinating by the UAP subject
is that there are just so many different but interrelated
dimensions to it. One can study UAP in so many
ways, from so many different angles, just considering the

(01:06):
guests I've had on this show. There are people like Brandon
Wheeler, who's a historian at the US Naval Academy and who
studies UAP experiences through the lens of religious history.
Or there are people like physicist Kevin Knuth at the
University of New York, who studies UAP as physical and
technological phenomena. Or people like neuroscientist

(01:26):
Julian Mossbridge, who studies UAP through various theories of
how the mind works. And to add to these, I
personally know sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers,
biologists, geologists, statisticians, psychologists,
material scientists, literary theorists, and many other
specialists who are studying these phenomena through their

(01:49):
own disciplinary lenses. The number of angles seems
endless, and they're all equallyvalid in fertile areas for
interesting, productive research.
That's one reason why we at SU started this show, to showcase
the amazing variety of interesting work that's being
done on the subject. But this isn't the only reason
we wanted to make this show. Another reason has to do with

(02:12):
the fact that if you just don't happen to personally know a
bunch of academics working on the UAP subject, you could be
forgiven for thinking that the only people who have any real
interest in it are people in themilitary and national security
sectors. That's because a simple search
of the news headlines, for instance, will turn up quite a
lot of stories that consider thenational security implications

(02:33):
of UAP and not much else. You might find a few articles
about pieces of legislation thatmention UAP, or that mention the
language of non human intelligence, or that mention
UAP related whistleblowers. But even those stories will end
and justify the interest in the UAP subject purely in terms of

(02:54):
its significance for keeping thepublic, and usually here it's
the American public, safe from possible threats.
You'll have to dig pretty far into the search results to find
any coverage that treats the UAPsubject as historically or
philosophically or religiously or even scientifically
interesting in its own right. But as we've seen on the show,

(03:16):
it's not because there aren't serious scholars of history or
philosophy or religion or science working on UAP.
Why then is such a multi dimensional subject so
consistently portrayed as if it's really just a national
security issue and nothing more?This is a question I ask myself
and others in this field pretty often.

(03:37):
I think the. Answer to it is really complex,
and it would take a lot more than one discussion to lay out
that answer responsibly. The first step in answering this
question, though, is to acknowledge the fact that the
UAP subject has, at least for the present moment, been
rhetorically captured by a framework of national security
concepts and interests. And this isn't necessarily or

(04:02):
even probably the result of any nefarious intentions.
I think it's just a natural result of the way American
culture, and so global culture, tends to automatically frame and
evaluate nearly everything in reference to America's position
of global dominance in the worldand to the technologies of war
and the national security organizations that help maintain

(04:23):
that position of global dominance.
This fact lays the groundwork for some of the questions at the
heart of my conversation today, Questions like what is the
relationship between the UAP subject and the spheres of
government, national security, intelligence, and the military?
What's the history of that relationship?

(04:45):
When were UAP first considered anational security issue?
And how has that national security framework evolved over
time? And how can understanding all of
this help us to understand the present situation where public
discussion of UAP is dominated by stories of crash retrieval
programs, or congressional whistleblowers, or drone

(05:06):
incursions over military space, or legislation that references
non human intelligence? I can't think of a better guest
to ask all these questions to than my guest today, Larry
Hancock. Larry is a board member of the
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, which produces and
hosts this program. He did his formal training in

(05:29):
history and cultural anthropology before spending a
career first in the United States Air Force and then as a
strategic analyst and consultant.
After his retirement from that career, he returned to his
lifelong scholarly interests andto his nature as a document
geek. That led him to author several
books on the subjects of Cold War history, international

(05:50):
relations, and national security, as well as to editing
several collections of CIAFBI and military documents that had
never before been published. Larry's most recent works
include the books Shadow Warfare, which is on the history
of covert action and deniable warfare, the book Surprise
Attack, which is about strategiccommand and control practices,

(06:13):
and the book Unidentified, whichis about the central subject of
our conversation today, the national security and strategic
intelligence problems posed by unidentified anomalous
phenomena. I love talking to Larry.
He is one of the most delightfully interesting people
that I know, and I think you're really going to love this
conversation. So here now.

(06:36):
Is my discussion with Larry Hancock.
You've written a lot of books that are relevant in different
sort of tangential ways of this.And this is a pretty sprawling
subject, but I did want to startout the conversation by first
asking it, am I right to say that we are.
We're talking about national security and intelligence, but

(06:57):
we're not really talking about it from a national security
intelligence perspective. We're talking about it from a
historical perspective. So we're like two lenses out.
I want to understand how national security intelligence
people think about the UAP subject, but I also want to
understand how that way of thinking developed over time and

(07:17):
like grew in in different ways. So we've talked to Josh Pearson
before and he's like in that world, he embodies that way of
thinking. But you have like a step removed
from it. You've seen it, not just its
current iteration, but lots of iterations of it.
So maybe you can help us be aware of how not only we've what

(07:39):
the current way of thinking is, but how it started and and where
it grew. So what?
First of all. How do national security and
intelligence, how does that world first come into contact
with the UAPUFO subject? Is it Roswell or Kenneth Arnold

(08:00):
or earlier or what? No, the, the intelligence world,
security world actually came into, into what you would call
analysis, recognition, research of, of unknown flying objects

(08:22):
during World War 2. And, and if you think about it,
the, the whole point, the, the security world deals with things
that might be threats. So from that perception, prior
to that time during World War One or the there, there were no
aircraft. There were, there was nothing

(08:44):
that was really anomalous to theextent of being considered to be
a threat, certainly. But during World War 2, as as
that fight involved, interestingly enough, the
transition may have been very gradual in terms of during the
war, the intelligence community for the first time encountered

(09:07):
aircraft whose performance was different.
It was an advanced performance. I think probably one of the
first was actually the Japanese 0.
When the US encountered the Japanese Zero, it was quite
surprising. It was a high speed, very
maneuverable aircraft. And a fighter plane.

(09:30):
A fighter? Fighter plane?
Yes. Performing unfortunately very
well against American aircraft and it had kind of raised the
standard for fighter aircraft and it was a leap at that point
in time. So the intelligence community
was was kind of shocked when youyou encounter something that's
beyond the bet your performance boundaries.

(09:50):
OK, yeah, known aircraft are a threat.
But suddenly when one can outperform you, it becomes an
area of of study. So there was a big push to
collect information about their performance, debrief pilots, You
know, what are the let's first let's profile their capabilities
so we can compare them to ours. There was a big push to recover

(10:13):
crashed aircraft so that the aircraft could be not so much
reverse engineer, but compared, OK, what are they doing
differently than what we're doing?
And during the war, that kind offield intelligence work became
very important to, you know, pilots would report observers,

(10:34):
report a type of aircraft, a type of missile, something that
was unknown. And they began to develop
techniques to quickly collect data, set up teams, collect
data, assemble that data, recover if a possible.
One of one of the fascinating things about during World War 2,

(10:55):
it's we can now document that they actually did this so
effectively in Europe in particular that they were
writing intelligence profiles ofnew German weapons and
circulating it within the military organization in pretty
much real time. Very effective.
It's kind of like if if you see something like this, it may

(11:16):
match X. And if so, it has these
capabilities and here's how you could try to deal with it.
So it wasn't as we imagine, likeI, I have this image in my head
of like the occasional World War2 pilot coming back and like
sitting in the bar with somebodyand saying, oh, I saw this
really weird thing and then kindof like hush talking about it,

(11:36):
hush terms or something. But you're saying that this was
like an, an intentional network of information collection that
was already going on kind of from the start or from the start
of like the Japanese Zero. What was it that made the
Japanese Zero different or better?
Just out of curiosity? Engine power, wing
configuration. It was very light.

(11:59):
American aircraft have been built for to be relatively
robust and longer range. Japanese were they were built
for a different type of dog fighting.
Very light, very maneuverable, very high turn angles.
Because they're lighter. OK And another factor that made

(12:24):
some Japanese aircraft more maneuverable is they didn't
armor protect their fuel tanks, which made the aircraft much
lighter that we had a we could either use armor or rubberized
self sealing fuel tanks. They didn't use that technology,
but so once we found out that they weren't using that
technology, the guys shoot there, you know, so also.

(12:48):
Gives us strategic, you know, advantages like we know how to
take them out or, or help. Maneuver and and that's where
debriefings you you run into this a lot in in the UFO
discussion, but it became standard practice after a
mission to debrief your pilots, particularly on long range

(13:09):
missions when they're up in the bomber missions over Europe, for
example, where they're in there for hours and hours.
You know, what was it like, whatdid you see was did you
encounter any unusual Flack or anti aircraft fire?
Did you see anything? Because we were also wrestling
with different types of anti aircraft weapons.
You know, so the, the whole point was to get a good debrief

(13:32):
of did you see anything different and give me a profile
of it. And it, you know, pilots did not
necessarily love that because they're just coming back from
the mission, but it's like, OK, before you get to go eat, we're
going to do a debrief. That's just standard practice.
So I, I think that's the that's where what you were talking

(13:53):
about. No pilot.
Yeah. Did pilots talk about things in
the bar Eventually? But no, it was a much more
formalized practice of intelligence groups and field
offices collecting this stuff, sending to headquarters,
headquarters putting it togethernot only to do assessments of
possible new weapons, possible new aircraft, but to actually

(14:14):
start writing news letters and circulating them within the
community, kind of saying this has been reported if you see it,
we want more information. And by the way, and all that
boiled down to we now know that effectively, and I think this is
something that's rather strikingin regard to UF OS UA PS is that

(14:35):
during the course of the war, American pilots in Europe
described every new German weapon, whether it was a jet
fighter, a ballistic missile, whatever, a certain type of anti
aircraft flag, they described itand it came into the system
before we knew what it was. You had you had very accurate

(14:59):
descriptions of ballistic missiles headed towards England
before we knew what they were. This is kind of like a a field
experiment to test pilots abilities to accurately describe
strange objects in the sky. And you're saying that we can
look back and see that they did a really good job?

(15:19):
It's, it's fascinating because during the late 40s and early
50s when the UFO phenomena really surged, two things would
happen at one. For example, there was a
proposal within the Air Force that we could do should do an
extensive study to determine whether pilots can effectively
characterize unidentified objects.
It's like, no, you know, they can, you've known that for years

(15:42):
now. And you also had very senior Air
Force officers saying, oh, the pilots were just misidentifying
things and they don't know what they were saying.
And it was a glare and the no, you know, and by the way, do you
think about what you just said? These are combat pilots flying
air defense missions. And your faith in them is so

(16:04):
little that you don't think thatthey can characterize an
anomalous object. In that case, what are they
doing up there? You know, it's like, but no, we
knew that during World War 2 with with the record of these
observations during World War 2.So it's all it.
I won't call it humorous, but it's kind of frustrating that

(16:25):
that body of information is already there.
We know trained pilots and and observers can characterize
anomalous phenomena. Even if they don't know what
they're saying, they can describe it and they can
characterize it. So that makes World War 2A
pretty interesting starting ground for the encounter with

(16:47):
UAP, because not only are they actively searching for the
things that we eventually do fine, not just like terrestrial
technologies or like familiar German technologies, but there
also isn't this stigma against having seen a strange thing.
There's like an expectation thatpilots are going to come back,
or at least a hope that they'll come back and say, yeah, I did
see something really unusual andhere's my description of it.

(17:10):
So they they saw a bunch of German tech.
I guess Germans were experimenting with rockets and
and different plane designs and and the Japanese were.
Rocket propel, rocket propel fighters, jet propel fighters,
air to air weapons, radio guidedweapons, radar guided weapons,
television to sky, dozens of different types of missiles and

(17:33):
rockets for air defense, for ground attack.
So there was a host and, and I think what you're, what you
really should gain to that is that it's being taken seriously
because you are in an adversarial environment.
You know, there's a threat. There's no question about there
being a threat. It's just, can you catch on to

(17:53):
that threat before it hurts you too badly?
So there was quite a motivation that there's no, oh, Gee, that's
interesting. It's no, that's interesting.
To the extent that if I don't get it right, it'll kill me.
It's a very different scenario than we have now with, you know,
airline poplets or something. So this is when we start

(18:14):
encountering Foo Fighters. Are those then like the first
not UAP? I mean, I guess German rockets
were a UAP at the time, but these are one of like the
lasting UAP that are that continue to be you unidentified
or or whatever anomalous. Foo Fighters kind of tend to
stand, stand out in the mix because they're nighttime

(18:36):
reports. So they're largely lights.
Whereas if I get AI, get a British Recon pilot flying a
photo, photo Spitfire over western France and he observes
AV1 guided rocket launch and describes it in daylight.
It's it's unknown. It's, it is anomalous, but it's

(18:57):
not, it's obviously solid. You know, it's obviously it's
not just a light, so it's it's easier to deal with.
Whereas the flu Foo Fighters kind of remain mysterious.
But the the Foo Fighters got andthe Foo Fighters tended to get
more press attention because of that, you know, like, and

(19:19):
because it is kind of sensational.
We have no idea what it is. It gets talked about a lot, but
there were some very solid studies on the Foo Fighters from
a military standpoint. Even then of you know, is this
real or is this a psychological effect?
Is it? And they started doing some.
There was some interesting analysis of, you know, where the

(19:41):
Foo Fighter sightings began. Tell us where, where do they
begin and what are? The they began in in Germany, in
in Germany, basically air aircraft flying over France
towards Germany for for nighttime attacks.
But they they moved on and. The the Foo fighter effect, if

(20:04):
you will. Then there were reports from
Italy and then ultimately there were reports from Japan.
So again, it's a it's it's one of those things where you never
it was taken seriously on all the fronts, as it were, but it
was never really resolved. You know, it just and it to it's

(20:28):
interesting to the effect that the intelligence community got
frustrated with it. Unlike these other reports where
we can accumulate the data and profile it, feed it back into
the system and have people looking and see more of what
we're looking for. That never happened.
And then the the joint intelligence bodies who were
consolidating the data started pushing back and saying, look,

(20:50):
I've got I've got serious thingsto do with serious threats.
Has anybody ever seen a Foo fighter attack anything?
OK, Do I have any reports for certain?
One or two. OK, I've got, you know, 500 Foo
Fighters and maybe one or two where it actually appeared to be
hostile. Don't send me anymore if it's

(21:11):
not hostile. That's not my major problem.
Consistently not hostile. That's the the pattern.
Right. And so, so it's sort of like,
again, it my job is to focus on threats.
If this doesn't fall within a threat profile, it's not that
it's not interesting, but it's clogging the channels.

(21:31):
And, and even at that point in time during the war, the
pushback was I'm getting so manyreports of Foo Fighters
mysterious lights that I can't do my real work.
And so I don't want to hear anymore.
And until you see, tell me they're hostile, you know, don't
disturb me. Was there?
A theory of the case for them about what Foo Fighters were

(21:53):
once they got to well. See there, there's so many,
there's so many. It give you, it give you an
example. On these nighttime raids, the
bomber streams were dropping numerous types of flares to
guide the bomber streams. OK.
And so you've got lights coming down from the the bomber
streams. The Germans are dropping flares

(22:14):
to highlight the bomber streams and make them visible to night
fighters. You've got new anti aircraft
weapons of all types that you know are blowing up, producing
lights, fragmenting producing lights.
You have things like the new German rocket powered fighters.
OK, you've got jet fighters on afterburner.

(22:37):
I mean, there's so many things that create lights if that's all
you've got and the lights themselves don't do any that
it's, they're just reported in the distance or maybe they're
close to the aircraft or or maybe they come close to the
aircraft, but you also have ionization effects or whatever.

(22:58):
The point is, there was nothing.It's the same thing that we're
stuck with now to some extent. There was never enough data to
profile a, you know, a single Foo fighter that you could
associate with hostile action ifthat had occurred.
Yeah. Were there were there incidents?
I'll give you an example. There were incidents of pilots

(23:20):
that reported like little balls of light dropping on on the
aircraft and impacting the aircraft and causing damage.
Well, then they determines the the Germans had developed aerial
mines. Oh, interesting.
Like, yeah. And they're.
Just on balloons or something, not a parachute.

(23:41):
OK, I. See if you think about it to
some extent, if you've got a stream of bombers and you can
fly over them. So the Germans were trying so
many different things that in self was a confusion factor.
So some they did resolve but others they didn't.
So to answer your question, no, unlike the the V ones and the V

(24:04):
twos and the rocket fighters andthe jet fighters, which all got
profiled and essentially resolved in the end, the Foo
Fighters were never resolved, you know, generically speaking.
And at the end of the war then? Well, so I guess first the
question is, are Foo Fighters the only unresolved class of UAP

(24:25):
that come out of World War 2? Correct.
From from an intelligent security standpoint.
Now of course there are there's another class of and by the way,
what I the common term for The Jets and the Rockets and EU type
of anti aircraft weapons and allthat sort of thing that the term

(24:46):
that is used for that generally is called wonder wafa.
In other words, German wonder weapons, basically.
So we knew that there were theseout there rockets.
And we and we started recoveringthem as the troops advanced and

(25:06):
that sort of thing. And it and the Germans were
experimenting with so many different designs because
development within Germany was so fragmented between different
bureaus and different political factions.
There were dozens and dozens of things that never got anywhere.
In fact, during the last few months of the war, the Germans

(25:27):
were trying desperately to shut down projects so they could
concentrate their efforts. I don't need twenty types of
anti aircraft rockets. Give me two that really work OK
in some quantity. That's what I need.
So. But the reason I say that is
there were also, and not at the time, but later on, there were a

(25:48):
number, another class of wonder Wafa weapons that were written
about that became the precursorsto UFOs in the late 40s and 50s.
In other words, these were German weapons that maybe were
concepts that were developed to some extent.

(26:09):
They never got fielded. Rumors, gossip, you know, the
same truth, the same, you'll find it in the literature, the
fact that the Germans had atomicweapons.
You know, we're now at the pointin time if you want to find
anything about World War 2, there's so much that's been
written that so I've got to discriminate what the
intelligence community actually identified and dealt with versus

(26:32):
what you will find in books about German wonder weapons
that, you know, nobody actually wrote about at the time.
But a few years later it's like,well, we had anti gravity.
They, you know, they had anti gravity.
They had you're. Saying they had anti gravity.
No, no, sorry. You're saying that you can?
There are authors that write about the fact that they this is

(26:53):
what they had and that became the UFOs that a milder case of
that. If you go down in time when the
first sightings occurred in the late 40's, the Intel, the first
intelligence community appraisalwas because what was being
reported were very high speed aircraft with a certain profile

(27:19):
that the assessment was that these could have been, this
could have been advanced German air technology that the Germans
never actually implemented operationally that the Russians
took and implemented. And so we're really looking at
advanced Russian aircraft based on German technology that that
was a primarily the Horton brothers delta wing craft with

(27:44):
jets on them. That, that was a very real thing
in the intelligence community. This other stuff that I just
mentioned. No, that was that's in the
that's in the speculative UFO literature, let's put it that
way. So this other class of UAP that
you're talking about, these are the window buffa, the swept wing
aircraft and things that do lookreally weird.

(28:07):
I mean, if if anybody wants to look up a brothers plane, it's a
bizarre looking craft as one wing that just goes through the
whole thing, which could look dislike.
So when we come out of the war, it seems like we do have a kind
of nascent concept of UAP. But it's not a serious issue for

(28:32):
them, right? Because we've won the war.
We think we know almost everything that we saw.
We know what it was, except for these lights, these strange
lights things. And it sounds like you're saying
at the kind of high level of theintelligence world, the theory
is just like they are weird lights in more There's all sorts
of flares and stuff. So we don't really have to take

(28:53):
it that seriously. If it had been a technology, it
would have done some damage to us or we would have found one on
the ground or something. Exactly because we found so much
on the ground. I mean, we brought we brought
back V twos, we bought back ballistic missiles and we're
testing them at White Sands. You know, we bought brought back
jet fighters, we bought rocket fighters back.

(29:16):
So we kind of think that we understand the advanced German
technology. We brought back tons and tons of
material and sent it to Wright Patterson.
So there's a huge body of. Recovery programs are already
exist, yeah, at this point we'vebuilt this infrastructure for
recovering not only their technology, but I guess our

(29:39):
technology because we want to recover like spy camera
satellites and cartridges of film and things like that that
might have landed. So how do?
And that, that is a good point that continued, like I will say
this, this recovery program continued.
We during the Korean War, we hada very active field intelligence

(30:02):
effort to recover, say the firstRussian jet fighters that were
being used in Korea. You know, we not inside Russia,
but they're using, you know, if they're, they're sending stuff
to Korea to use it, we want to recover that.
And that those programs continued and continued on in
time. Later the Air Force would have
teams that were devoted to recovering satellites overseas.

(30:25):
You know, wherever it crashes, you've got to be in there and
try to revolt covertly if if at all possible.
So field recovery efforts and teams that that started during
World War 2 but continues to current day.
I mean, that's just that's the way you do it for intelligence
collections. And if if you you always the

(30:46):
best way to do it is to get the other other guys technology
without them knowing you've got it right.
So that's a, that's a, a thing that's still going on in the
intelligence world for tech recovery.
And it's still classified. And I think now Kevin Randall
did a great job of writing articles on the evolution of

(31:09):
various units within the Air Force over time during the 50s,
sixties, how those units, different groups were tasked and
organized to do those kind of crash recoveries.
I mean, crash recoveries are real, but crash recoveries of
real stuff are real and documented.
And yeah, there were teams that were set up to go do that.

(31:32):
So that that definitely is continued.
Now, I'm sure those teams still exist, but when you pass a
certain point in time, those documents are no longer, you
know, in 50 years, we'll know what they are now, right?
So take this up to the end of the now start at the end of
World War 2. We're getting close to like the

(31:52):
first what we think of as a UFO is Kenneth Arnold and Roswell.
Like where it starts and where does the intelligence world
become actually interested in what we now think of as UF OS?
It's it's kind of interesting because post World War 2,
actually the intelligence community, the first exposure is

(32:13):
not in the United States, it's in in Europe.
And it's the first, there's a strategic intelligence group
before the CIA, before the Air Force is even formed as a unit,
before it's the Air Force, whileit's still the Army Air Force.
We're we're in an interim periodpost World War 246484546 early

(32:36):
47. And suddenly there are the spate
of spate of reports of things that sound very much like these
German weapons, ballistic missiles, jet powered missiles,
V ones, V twos and their landingin Denmark or they're being
observed in Denmark and Sweden and they're being observed, you

(32:56):
know, some something with a longtrail behind it that looks like
a missile, something that crashes into a lake.
You know that. And, and the US, because we're
interested, obviously the localsare interested too, but both
Britain and the US become very interested in those because the

(33:18):
immediate question is, Gee, whatare the Russians?
We know what we're doing with the German technology we
captured. What are the Russians doing with
the German technology they captured?
Are they going to be ahead of usor, and, and are, are they
actually have enough nerve and enough confidence to launch
these things into neutral countries?
Is that what's really going on? And so we there, there were

(33:42):
covert intelligence projects that are that are right about in
my book actually between both Britain and the US to go in and
examine what was happening in those.
These were called ghost rockets.This is called the ghost rocket
era of of UF OS if you will. And to deal with this and do
intelligence assessments and thefirst formal assessment of these

(34:06):
strategic of this new strategic intelligence group pre CIA was
that they were indeed the Russians were indeed testing
these things. And in some cases they were
going off course. But it what was being reported
was most likely Russian testing of new of German technologies

(34:26):
and which kind of sets the stagefor the US to be worried post
Kenneth Arnold in 47 and 48 is OK.
If they were gutsy enough to be testing them over neutral
countries in Europe, are they gutsy enough to be testing them
over the US or flying them over the US or what?

(34:47):
You know, how far might they have advanced this?
And you actually see one report that's referred to within the
intelligence community that the the Soviets might already have a
fleet of several 100 Horton jet powered long range flying
bombers, and that if this reallyis true, they would be in an

(35:12):
excellent position. Again, the fear at the time was
that the Red Army was going to move West and that they were
building an Air Force and advanced Air Force to support
that. So there was, there was grave
concern on the, I will say the intelligence estimates during
that period of time and the concern was Russian.

(35:33):
And that's a public concern, too.
That's not that's totally withinthe Air Force again that you and
you use the word lens. There's there's two totally
different views of threats always again, as I say, the
military and security community is only concerned if it's a
threat, if it's a scientific phenomena.
This is not our problem. It's only when we consider that

(35:56):
it might be a threat. It's our job, right.
So you'll find and trait you cantrace 2 totally separate streams
of communications, one inside the Air Force and by the 50's
the CIA and and totally looking at it seriously as the
possibility of it as a reconnaissance, which is what

(36:18):
they assumed it was, especially reconnaissance of atomic sites
by the Russians. And a whole series of
communications through Air Forcepublic relations that says it's
all misidentifications and, and the generals are lining up
behind it going, oh they are pilots are just seeing
reflections in the windscreen, you know, so totally

(36:40):
compartmentalized streams of communications.
You don't. The big concern by 1952 is if
the public gets to be too sensitized to this and too
scared about this, what they're going to do is the same thing
that happened to us with the FooFighters in Germany.
There are going to be so many reports, so much garbage

(37:03):
introduced into the the system that we won't be able to tell
the real from the not real. And that is dangerous, which
reports are, you know, and it essentially becomes a tool of
your enemy when you can't discriminate real reports from
misidentifications. So that's always the dichotomy

(37:25):
that emerges. That happens in 52, right when
the, when we have this swap overDC, the like the telephone lines
get tied up with so many people reporting out of some anxiety.
And I guess at that point the public anxiety over Russia or
Russian weapons or something might have existed.
Not the people are freaking out about it.
And that's what really triggers the is that what triggers the

(37:47):
the security state to care aboutUFOs because it it has this
potential to be like the American people can be hoaxed by
it or something like. Yeah, it opens you up to two
things. It it over, it overrides your
channels with noise, so you can't respond if there's a real
attack, you know? And it also is a form of

(38:09):
psychological warfare that you're conducting on yourself,
adding an element of uncertainty, doubt, you know,
can we defend ourselves? Should we increase the, you
know, nobody begins to. Well, can we really trust the
Air Force? We, we saw, I saw 1.
And I know it's real. And they keep telling me it's
not. And I know what's real and what

(38:30):
isn't. So you begin to mistrust the
official lines of communication too.
So it's a, it can be used to say, a form of psychological
warfare. In fact, you know if if you can
play the cards right, you can doa lot of damage without even
having a real weapon. So is the intelligence world
trying to like, suppress a serious interest in UAP because

(38:54):
they don't want to put themselves in the position of
just like, freaking themselves out over nothing or not knowing
what to be freaked out about? Is that kind of one of the
incentives? There well that by 1952 that's
what happened now during the interim period that wasn't that
wasn't the real thing. That wasn't the real concern.
And you and you warrant didn't have that many reports.

(39:17):
I mean, you had hundreds of reports. 1952 becomes a year
where everything goes off the charts.
And so suddenly, if you're intelligence, you're going,
well, wait a minute. Were were these prior years,
were they just preparing for this?
And now they've opened the floodgates And now really, are
we going to see this in 1953? Are we going to see it?

(39:39):
And is this a precursor? You know, is this actually a
warning? But no, in, in the interim years
47 to 50, it was. And it's more like trying to
main maintain control over the information so that you if if
there was a new Russian development or whatever, you

(40:00):
could see it versus the noise. Clearing the signal from the
noise was all their concerns. So they they want, it's not that
they don't want a good signal, but quite frankly, that's why
the signal that they expect to see comes from within the
military community, within the people that are most likely to
be able to. And differentiate what is

(40:22):
anomalous from what isn't. So it's not that they didn't
want, that's that's why they setup a reporting system within,
you know, so it's not that they didn't want reports, false
positives. That's what they are trying to
avoid is there's a ton of false positives so.
And and that's why they set set up officers at almost every

(40:43):
military base. At least some poor Lieutenant
would get assigned to being the first filter points.
Like, OK, you got it, you know, don't, don't report it to Wright
Patterson unless, you know, you've got to fill out this
worksheet. But it was a very structured and
organized way of collecting information.
And of course, you had to open it up to the public, to it at

(41:04):
that point in time because the public was concerned.
So you, you had to give the public a place to report it to.
Kind of interesting to contrast it now, because here 70 years
later, we're back in the same phenomena and AARO and yeah,
we've, we set up channels to collect reports again, which

(41:25):
didn't exist for the last three decades.
Now we're collecting them again,but pretty much only from the
military. You know, it's like, no, we, we,
we haven't gone back to, it's not open anymore.
And you can imagine these days to some extent, why that's true.
You know, if I can report an incident by the Internet, you

(41:46):
know, that's all it takes. And that's the my first field
point. You know, tomorrow afternoon
I'll have 1000. And how can I deal with them?
Possible I can just write a program that'll spam the
reporting portals? Would you would be swamped and
you know, more reports that's not necessarily good.
So anyway, so that is something that's different.
But going back to the time period we're talking about,

(42:09):
they, they were, they were concerned.
And it's interesting, the first assessment I think got to be on
record, the first official intelligence estimate of the
situation from the Air Force at the end of 1947 is that what was
being reported was real. These were real objects with
anomalous flight characteristics.

(42:30):
And they actually in the memos they publish the profile.
So yes, they're real. And, and by the way, let's go
look for these because this is what we need to, it's a new
collections directive. Let's go find it.
And the interesting thing is in 1948, they were absolutely
certain they knew where to find it.
They absolutely were certain they would find it in German

(42:53):
tech taken by the Russians. And they went to look for those
Horton flying wings and they, they, you know, they took the
investigation because they trulybelieve that's what they were
seeing jet powered or rocket powered Horton aircraft.
The only concern was how would they have the range to get over
the US? You know, did they have secret

(43:15):
bases, whatever. And, and so that's, we have a, a
project, you know, at at first it's a, it's called project
sign, which everybody says there's no meaning to these
names. But it's kind of like, well,
intuitively they have a sign, they have a signal and they're
following it and they can't findit.

(43:37):
They, the people that are probably, they can't resolve it.
And so by 4849, sign has become Grudge, which I still don't
think is sheer like, you know, circumstantial because everybody
that was involved in in project sign gets reassigned to other
tasks. The scientific advisors kind of

(43:59):
have to have their careers tanked.
And suddenly we've got a new setof people and it becomes very
clear. And this is written with remarks
from people inside Blue Book, which evolved from this later.
It's kind of like you really understood that if you wanted to
keep your job and your rank, youwould find reports that you
could identify. Nobody is really looking for

(44:22):
problems anymore. This is not a sign
misidentification rules. So if there's any possibility at
all, you know, don't feed stuff into the system unless it you
know if you can filter it out, filter it out.
So it's a really perverse incentive, like you don't want
to create an institution that incentivizes your people to give
you bad information just becausethey're afraid of losing their

(44:45):
rank or like never being promoted again.
And what am I going to do? I'm, I'm a Lieutenant at Wright
Patterson and I just heard the general at in Washington, DC
say, well, these are all mistakes our pilots are making
and they're what am I going to do?
I'm sitting here, it's kind of like, Sir, I have this new
report for you. No, no, not that just doesn't

(45:06):
make sense. So that would that takes us kind
of from 1947 through 1949. And then it just kind of assumes
the life. It's all the, the numbers go
down and, and the interesting where the, the higher quality
reports do start being generatedfrom Los Alamos and Sandia bays

(45:31):
and you know, the atomic development sites.
They don't want to hear what they have to say.
Actually, you, you can trace thething in the documents where
local army contingents, Army groups, scientific personnel,
FBI are writing letters to the Air Force saying we really think

(45:55):
you should look into this. And it's like nobody wants to
hear them. And you, you start it's, it's
fascinating phenomena. But that that's what's going on
is as the reports are getting better, the response to the
reports is getting worse. So how does I'm surprised we
haven't talked about Roswell, How does Roswell fit into this?

(46:16):
Like it's your theory, just thatwhatever happened there, the
intelligence world was like, notinterested.
It's got to be a mogul balloon or whatever.
Roswell. As as far as we can determine,
Roswell had no impact on anything.
In the intelligence world. There's just, there's nothing in
the system. Yes, it was.
It was reported, you know, whatever, whatever was picked up

(46:39):
there, certainly, certainly it didn't change the response of
the intelligence system. The system didn't take reports
any more seriously, any less seriously.
You know, there's no sign that it there was, it was just one of
many and and it was one of many,I will say, where crashes were

(47:00):
reported, the materials were reported as being collected.
And in almost in all cases they were misidentifications, a lot
of hoaxes, but some just literally misidentifications.
And Roswell. Roswell was treated officially
as some misidentification. The one thing I will say is,

(47:23):
and, and I think it has to be there, there are obviously pro
and con books written around Roswell, but the con books
contain some interesting reportsthat would suggest that Roswell
was indeed covered up because what was recovered was a Sona
Boy. You never heard what a Sona Boy

(47:45):
is. Sona Boy is actually a an
acoustic detection device. It's used to pick up submarines.
It's something the Navy would normally deploy to track
submarines in that era during War 2, post World War 2.
So it's it's a sound monitoring or wave monitoring device, if
you will. So is this the project mogul

(48:05):
explanation? Like I I knew that the that
explanation is that there is a device that was being used by
people to detect like. Exactly, that's exactly it would
be part of project Mogul and there are actually reports that
like former report says that a ateam that was associated with
Mogul that was flying back into Wright Patterson where they were

(48:26):
stationed out of was actually advised that somebody had
recovered one of their Sona boysAnd they went oh geez, you know,
somebody at the press gets wind of this.
Somebody is 1 going to ask why we were testing a Navy acoustic
device out in the middle of the desert.
You know, that's interesting. And they'll they'll tumble to

(48:47):
obviously what we're doing that we're we're looking for.
So there was there was a good deal of concern that if that got
into the press, you would have real revealed one of, you know,
like at the time it was felt that this was probably going to
be your best tool to detect the first Soviet atomic explosions.

(49:08):
Now we know that it wasn't. But then you know, right, You're
in the middle of. This didn't work well.
Is that? The that what we found the IT
what it proves is this these airchannels, the at certain within
the atmosphere. We're not conducting the waves.
You you could detect the waves just as easily with other
instruments through seismic, youknow, brown seismic monitoring

(49:34):
it, there was nothing particularly unique about it.
It was thought that there was and unique layer of the
atmosphere that would conduct these waves better than anything
else. And as it turned out, compared
to actually doing air sampling, you know which actually you
could seismically, you could detect the blast and then you
could pick up the samples you. Mean like radiation.

(49:57):
Yeah, well, not just radiation, but particulate matter, which
allowed you to determine how thebomb was built and really what
quite kind of bomb it was. What was that nation method it
used or something, right? Is that what you're saying?
Like we could not? Yeah.
So I, I only tossed that out to your question to say at the time

(50:18):
Roswell appears to have made no impact.
It was just another report. And I think the interesting
point is from this standpoint, it would have been a report of
something real that was covered up with APR effort.
You know what, What was shown tothe public wasn't what was
collected, which is the story about Roswell, right?

(50:38):
So you can have it either way. There was a cover up.
It just depends on what you're covering up.
Yeah, there's no, there's no noncover up theory of Roswell,
right. But whatever it is, it's a cover
up of something. So that's always the toughest
thing. It's kind of like we know
there's something suspicious going on because there's a cover
up now. What was it?
Yeah, so, OK, so 52 is where yousay it kind of everything hits

(51:01):
the fan. Is it just the flap in 52 over
Washington DC? Like why does it the fan and
what are the effects on the? Intelligence, it It started
early on in 52, well before Washington DC In fact,
Interestingly enough, Project Blue Book, the Air Force had
been advised early in the year that it might see a wave of

(51:25):
reports, a real burst in reportsbecause there were some large
scale air defense exercises planned for the East Coast.
And of course, whenever you're flying bomber, you know, it's
kind of like people are going todo misidentifications.
So to some extent they were expecting it.
But what started happening was they started getting reports

(51:47):
from the East Coast that weren'trelated to the defense exercise.
It's just like, wait a minute, OK, We thought something was
going to happen if something is happening.
But they're all of these radar tracks over New York City.
I mean, up and down the East Coast, lots of interceptors

(52:07):
deployed, lots of attempted engagements, lots of UFOs
reported by pilots well before DC.
It's just that it, it only got local newspaper coverage, but it
was building. It's kind of like this, this
visibility to UF OS is building during the first six months of
the year. But part of the effect is also

(52:32):
an understandable, the Korean War was ramping down a lot of
the interceptors. I mean, in 52, we had a level of
radar deployment and interceptordeployment in the US,
continental US that we had neverhad before because in the
earlier years, 50, you know, that stuff was all going to

(52:53):
Korea and Japan because we're inanother war now.
We're bringing it home. We're setting up an air defense
system. So you would expect there would
be more reports and more intercepts.
We're really getting organized with a a much better air defense
system. So you'd expect you would

(53:14):
generate more reports. OK, fine.
So how does? The reason go.
Ahead, sorry. The the reason that DC stood out
literally because it was the capital, two things was the
capital and because the Air Force air defense response was
so poor that it got a lot of press coverage.

(53:36):
Hey, this is it's like the headline is, you know,
commercial pilots and military pilots see UF OS over the
Capitol and can't deal with them.
It's like, wait a minute, they're not only being reported.
As it turns out, the Air Force, because of some runway issues,

(53:56):
whatever was not getting gettinginterceptors over the Capitol
for an hour. Like.
Did it? Should this not worry somebody?
Should the president not worry? Should, you know, like these
things are reported and we can'treassure you because a, they're
by the time they're getting here, they're gone.

(54:16):
Or if they get here, as soon as they get here, they're gone.
And you know, you sort of would worry because nobody is
effectively dealing with them. In a way.
It's sort of like Fast forward to 2024 and we have drones over
Norfolk, we have drones over Langley, and nobody's dealing.

(54:36):
I mean, to some extent, it's almost like if there wasn't a
lot of other stuff going on, we should be doing a revisit of
1952 right now. Sure, because there's so many.
Drowns it out completely. The political world rounds it
out. Yeah, but it's sort of like the
chief of NORAD yesterday announced that in since 2022,

(54:58):
we've had over 600 drone incidents over our military
bases. And in no single incident has a
a drone like a UAP been engaged and brought down or effectively
responded to in any way. Now, in 1952, that sort of

(55:22):
statement would have caused an utter panic.
And now it's so swamped by the political news, it's like, oh,
OK, fine, not a problem. Should I be worried?
Well, can you tell us the just quickly tell us the the story of
the 1952 flap so everybody understands what we're talking
about? What really happened, this

(55:43):
occurred in July 22 separate days over two or three-week
period is starting with commercial airline pilots,
because obviously DC and New York, it's a metro area, has a
lot of air traffic control, lot of the flights coming and going.
So commercial pilots started reporting lights.
OK, we're back to lights at night.

(56:05):
But unlike those lights, they'realso tracked on radar.
And in many instances, the radaroperators are tracking what the
commercial airline pilots are reporting.
So now we don't just have a light, we have a light that's
being tracked on radar. There's something you would
think a physical object there. And the radar operators are all

(56:27):
highly professional and that it will swear after the fact that
what they're saying is not it's not an atmospheric effect.
It's it's it's real. These are real things, OK.
And so because the airline pilots are reporting them, it's
getting it's going to get to thepress, you know, they're being
they're being seen. And it's a aircraft safety

(56:50):
hazard. You know, it's an air defense
problem and the and the Air Force isn't coming up with an
answer. It has, it has no good immediate
matter of fact. The Air Air Force flies the head
of Blue Book repelled down to DCto brief the head of the it's
like, tell me, tell me what's going on.

(57:11):
And he has no answers and he never has any answers because
they can't solve it. OK, now here's the interesting
thing. So after a while, there are no
more reports. And as usual, the news story
dies down. But what we know actually
happened at that point, because we have the document, is the
president called a special meeting.

(57:35):
We don't know what was said in the meeting.
It would be really fun to have atape of that.
But the the title of the meetingis Defense of the Capitol.
Now you got to think when the president calls a meeting and
calls the Air Force into a meeting called defense of the
Capitol, somebody is going to get their butt chewed.
I mean, there's just no doubt about that.

(57:56):
Like, you know, guys, what do you what do I tell the public?
Well, Sir, we don't know. We really don't know.
Can you make me feel better about this?
Not really. So following that, the, you
know, he obviously ask them for a better response, they go away
and don't really come back with much of a response because they

(58:17):
they come back and they go back and look at the RIP bridge
report and they're coming back with the same stories,
misidentifications, you know, a radar, atmospheric conversions,
it was all temperature inversions, but that.
Doesn't. Create operators.
That that would create could create a a radar signature.
But so you don't have any real theory that explains why you

(58:39):
would see both the radar signature and lights at the same
time? Are they in airspace that
they're that nothing is supposedto be in?
Or is this normal civilian airspace?
This is space that it would be struck strictly under air
traffic control. Nothing is supposed to be in it
unless it's in communication with air traffic control.
And this isn't a period of time you've got to remember where we

(58:59):
have air defense zones set up around the nation.
No flight goes anywhere, commercial or private, without
filing a flight plan with that. And if it, if it's shows up at a
place and time or, you know, interceptors get scrambled, you
know, we're taking air defense seriously.
Because quite frankly, the firstatomic attack strategic

(59:23):
intelligence had predicted 2 years earlier that the Soviets
would stage a preemptive atomic attack in 52.
Why? Then it became 50.
Yeah, why would that? I mean, that's that's terrifying
that this was obviously wasn't public knowledge, but.
No, it was not public knowledge.We we have all it's all

(59:45):
documented that that was based on predictions of a when they
would have built enough atomic weapons, B when they would have
had enough long range bombers and, and we know they had both
and and how do you make assumptions about what they can
do? And the assumption was that
they. Would stage an attack to at

(01:00:07):
least take out our nuclear capability because in terms of
parity, they had absolute superiority in ground forces.
Our only defense was our military atomic shield.
So if they could take out our atomic weaponry and the major
parts of our strategic StrategicAir Command, we would be back at

(01:00:30):
parody. They felt themselves under
threat. We felt ourselves under threat.
You know, that's the way the game gets played.
But no, that's why the Air Forcewould be taking it very
seriously. And that that's why this immense
air defense system had been put into place.
Absolute rush. You, you see the old films and
they're building the radar stations across northern Canada

(01:00:53):
and up in the Arctic and spending extraordinary amounts
of time and materials and to build this shield against a
Russian attack. And yet we're doing all of this.
And I just saw the news reels about the DEW line up in the
Arctic and what are these thingsover the capital?
How did they get here? So the president is taking it

(01:01:16):
very seriously. The Air Force really doesn't
give him any kind. All he really wants to know is,
is there a real threat or is there not?
It's a good one way or the other.
He's not comfortable with what the Air Force says.
He hands it off to the CIA. The CIA assigns their technical
intelligence group to it, and their first response is to agree

(01:01:39):
with the Air Force. It's misidentification.
It's not real. But then when they start
studying the data and looking atthe patterns in the data, they
come back and the head of that group says, yeah, there there
are patterns of UFO activity over all of our atomic bases in
the Southwest, Hanford, Los Alamos, Kirtland.

(01:02:01):
And we're really worried. And in fact, we're so worried,
director of the CIA, you need totake this to the Joint Chiefs.
We're going to need a crash program to deal with this.
And the director of the CIA says, well, OK, you OK?
Yeah, At this point time, you agree with the with the Air

(01:02:26):
Force and we're going to take this.
Did we just lose our signal? Yeah, I don't know what's going
on. Can you hear me?
I can hear you OK, now you're back.
Strange. I don't know what that was.
It got blurry all of a sudden. We might have had a little power
glitch but nothing went off anyway.
OK. OK, so, so let's let's let's

(01:02:47):
just back up. So you, you were saying that
they, they call a pro, they calla meeting with the Joint Chiefs
and say. Well, that that's the the CIA
director is advised that that should happen.
He is his people are telling himthis needs to be elevated to a
level of a strategic threat. OK.

(01:03:08):
So that would mean normally thatit would be taken to the Joint
Chiefs. Well, everything's still even
complex. It's more complex today, but
back then the Joint Chiefs has its own intelligence advisory
group. So the CIA director has got to
take it to them and they've got to agree to it before it puts
on. It goes on an agenda with the

(01:03:28):
Joint Chiefs and, and the pushback is we'll accept your
recommendations for a study. If you can bring along
scientific advisors that will confirm that there's something
really anomalous in play. It's it's not now you would
think like, OK, the fact that this could be Russian

(01:03:50):
reconnaissance aircraft or whatever would be enough.
But they, they want to push thisfurther.
It's sort of like, wait a minute, we want it.
We want it. You're saying that these
devices, this UUFOS, are actually not just plane regular
aircraft, They have capabilitiesbeyond anything that we're aware
of and they might not even be terrestrial.

(01:04:12):
What were the? Capabilities that we're seeing,
what made them draw that conclusion?
Basically the acceleration, the speeds, the maneuverability,
quite frankly, the same things that were profiled back in 1947
that haven't changed any. They still have all those.
There's not an interceptor that we have that can stay with them.

(01:04:34):
I mean, a classic case out of that period of time, someone
reports a UFO coming over the Canadian, Canadian border out of
the out of Canada, could have come across the Arctic.
Whatever it's, it's moving at a very high rate of speed.
It's being racked on radar. It comes down and we launch
interceptors to engage it. The interceptors approach it.

(01:04:58):
It immediately reverses course. And when I say immediately, I
mean immediately. Interceptors go on full
afterburner and can't stay with it.
It's leaving them and these are our best interceptors, OK, The
interceptors have to turn back because they're on a full
afterburner. They've only got minutes.

(01:05:19):
So they turn back and UFO turns around and starts following them
back towards their base. We scramble another set of
interceptors, same thing happens.
So this would be there's a whole, there's a whole series of
incidents like this where these,whatever they are, UFOs have
speed and maneuver. They just have capabilities.

(01:05:44):
They're either. We don't know what they are.
And it seems like if it was justone, one capability that was
perplexing. We could think that it's some
advanced technology that somebody else has figured out.
But when it's an object that cannot only accelerate, you know,
orders of magnitude faster than you can, that can maneuver in

(01:06:07):
ways that you don't understand, and they can stay aloft for like
extraordinary amounts of time without refueling or whatever.
You kind of think that it's really improbable that one of
our, you know, enemy states has made all these series of
technological breakthroughs because it's possible that they
made one, but this would requireseveral.
And no, no manned aircraft that we know of made out of the

(01:06:29):
materials that we know could survive that kind of the
deceleration and acceleration, you know.
Oh, right, yeah. So it's, it's pulling so many
G's that it should like tear itself apart or something.
I think like a like our fighter jets can, can survive like 12 or
13 G's, yeah. I mean, certainly we can, you

(01:06:50):
can look at an artillery shell or something like that that can
take thousands of G's. That's enough.
That's, you know, we built anti aircraft rockets like that
during World War 2. But these are very dense, very
compact devices with solid-stateessentially.
But you know, they're not a manned aircraft.

(01:07:11):
They're they're not a. Lump of material versus A yeah,
an engine that's got to like have sensitive parts and maybe
people in it, you know that's that seems like a.
So the the problem is, if I'm going to take this story of the
Joint Chiefs, they're going to ask me what kind of a threat is
it, these Russians? And we're going to say, I don't
really know because it doesn't, we don't, we have not found

(01:07:33):
anything that the Russians have that can do this.
So we don't know who it is. And they're they're going to
laughably say, so it's aliens, right?
And we're going to say, well, I don't know, politically
speaking, this is not a good dialogue to have.
So the the advisors to the JointChiefs say, all right, director

(01:07:54):
of the CIA, we'll put you on theagenda if along with your
briefing people, you will bring us some credible name brand
physicist, scientist who will confirm what you're telling us.
And then we then we get the Robertson panel, which is famous
to everybody who knows UFOs and the the CIA and the Air Force

(01:08:19):
try to slam together this panel.It's very long story.
But in in the end, the point is they can't get any physicist or
scientist who will put their reputations on the line with
this story. And so it goes no further.
It doesn't go to the Joint Chiefs.
It doesn't go to strategic intelligence as it were.

(01:08:39):
It stays within the Air Force. And Blue Book continues to do
what Blue Book was doing before.You get a report, you treat one
report at a time. You get another report you and
and there's no strategic analysis.
Strategic strategic threat and warnings analysis occurs way up

(01:09:00):
on the pyramid under the Joint Chiefs and the CIA threat and
assessment warnings. They're special teams for that.
They never get tasked with this and and so blue book can.
So there's no long term pattern analysis.
Interestingly enough, the CIA, the the Air Force and the CIA
both were convinced by the fall of 52 that they had seen enough

(01:09:23):
data just in the last year or soto see patterns that were of
concern. And they they did look at it and
they said, and by the way, we really want to track these
things. We need to set up instruments
out there in New Mexico, do thisor that.
But that also went away. So no further high level pattern

(01:09:45):
studies were kicked off so. Because the high level people
wanted confirmation from like persuasive scientists who were
famous and who didn't have like a a stake in the military sort
of world. No scientists were willing to
like take on that job. So they say what you're saying.
It's probably not Russia. We don't have to worry about it

(01:10:06):
in that way at least. So go back and treat one report
at a time and the incentives arethen file each report as a
misidentification because nobodywants to like be stuck in their
job forever because somebody's mad at them that they said that
it was. AI mean they're really two
things at play. One is it's an institutional
problem. Nobody wants to at rest their

(01:10:29):
reputation without absolute concrete proof.
Where do you get it and can somebody challenge it?
And as as Doctor Hynix said, there is no UFO report that will
ever be generated of an object in the air or whatever that
somebody can't come up with a possibility to explain it.
It. It's just sort of like even

(01:10:50):
during the even during the continent Commission in the late
60s when academics signed it there, one of their reports says
this describes a phenomena that has never been reported prior to
this and is unlikely to ever be seen after.
It's like, wait a minute, hold on.
How could you know that? Yeah, that's that's so

(01:11:10):
frustrating. It's, it's like somebody can
always come up with an answer, even if it's that kind of
answer. And so basically, for whatever
reason, institutionally, that was kind of the end of that era
of take of of 1952 led to the fact that the concern that came

(01:11:32):
out of the Robertson panel was what we talked about earlier.
You know, if we allow this to continue, 1953 could have even
more reports. We could truly be setting
ourselves up for a Russian surprise attack.
And by the way, maybe that's what they're doing.
Maybe they're trying to set us up.
Maybe. So we've got to dial down, if

(01:11:54):
anything, we've got to dial downthe reporting.
We've got to dial down the sensitivity.
It was looked at as a psychological potential,
psychological warfare, not as A and the other thing that went
along with it. We've, we've got to, to be fair,
is from the Air Force's standpoint and from the military

(01:12:16):
standpoint in general, these reports in Toto did not
represent a threat. Nothing was being attacked.
Not yet. Were there aircraft losses?
Yeah. There were interceptors that
went up in bad weather, especially all weather
interceptors that came down in pieces or were lost and not

(01:12:36):
recovered. So it's not that there weren't
losses, but actually connecting them to hostile action.
No hostile action can be confirmed.
And it's just kind of like with the Foo Fighters that we
discussed over a period of time.If no hostile action is
confirmed, I can't classify it as a threat.
And if I can't classify it as a threat, it's not part of my job.

(01:12:59):
I got to worry about the things that are threats.
This is so you're helping me piece this together, too,
because my initial thought was like, well, if you are stuck
with the conclusion that there is something that is more
sophisticated, more advanced than what we have, and you're
really worried about Russia, howdo you ever stop worrying about

(01:13:20):
the threat? But it seems like the answer is
at least partially that this flies in the face of our theory
about Russia's will to be aggressive or or will to like,
destroy us. Because if they were in
possession of this, they would have already just taken America
out completely. So it can't be Russia just.
And if that, if that was the counter argument, it's sort of

(01:13:42):
like if they have atomic weaponscarriers with these kind of
abilities, a first strike will be child's play to them.
So no, they haven't done it, youknow, so it's probably not them,
you know, so and we have no other sign that it is them.
You know, we haven't identified these things, where they're

(01:14:03):
coming from. They're showing up in places
that we wouldn't expect Russian craft to show up.
They're coming from Canada or whatever.
Like, yeah, it just does not fitthe Russia theory.
So like at an individual level or the people who have looked at
all this evidence, are they juststuck with the conclusion that
like, there are aliens flying craft around on Earth and we're

(01:14:24):
not going to do anything about it because that's not our job Is
that's got to be a crazy situation to be in, but for your
career. And to some extent, like Doctor
Hynek, who was a consultant to Blue Book, overtime reached that
conclusion that he just, and he became for a long period of
time, he was just a scientific advisor and his job was to find

(01:14:47):
reasonable explanations for. And you can't, we know that 90%
or better, these are quick, reasonable explanations.
But he came across enough that we're not reasonable that he had
to conclude that, yeah, they're they're alien.
Now what alien means, I don't know, but it's it's not our
technology. Not human.
We didn't make this. Nobody's made is there?

(01:15:09):
Is there any theory that that itcould be human technology?
Because some societies are working like they're doing
science in such a different way.Like to give an example, the
Soviet Union is like an explicitly non religious
society. They in that that impacts the

(01:15:32):
way they do science, right. They were doing ESP research
because there's not a taboo against it.
Because if if it's all just matter and no spirit, then maybe
ESP is just like electromagnetism or something.
And so we can do this research without feeling silly about it.
Whereas in America, you do that research and you kind of get
associated with like, you know, the spiritualist movement or, or

(01:15:52):
people who have these these taboo beliefs.
But those taboos don't exist in Russia.
So they can do science differently.
Is there a worry that like some group of people that we're not
even really paying attention to,like in Borneo or, or I don't
know, it's the place that's not even on the map, has made like
some scientific breakthrough that we don't understand?
Is that ever considered? It's interesting one of the

(01:16:16):
fascinating in science fiction story short story error rate at
one point in time follows along that line of thinking because
they they call several physicists into rooms at
different places different timesand they show them a picture, a
movie of this guy with a harnesson and he's flying it's flying
it's anti gravity clearly OK andthey're going you know, we

(01:16:39):
collected this this fellow wroteus a letter said that he had
made this great scientific discovery and he wanted to share
it with us and by the time we follow it up on him it was dead
he passed away heart attack whatever.
So all we've got are a few notesand his bookcase.
You know, we we don't know what he, but with this film, we can

(01:17:02):
prove to you he found something.So you guys need to go out and
find it. And it kind of goes.
So that blasted their preconceptions, right?
I saw in the movie it can be done.
And so three years later, these guys have got a 20 ton device
that can lift itself 5 feet off the ground, OK.
Because they know it can be doneand it's going to get better.

(01:17:25):
And then they're told, well, we fool with you.
We, we knew that if you could get the blinders off, we knew
that you could do it. But that's the whole premises,
which is what you're talking about.
Was that ever seriously considered?
I don't think so, because this is just Speaking of physical

(01:17:46):
objects. You know that clearly we're not,
they're not atmospheric craft, if you will.
They're not back playing the basic principles of
aerodynamics. There's something going on
radically. You just mentioned the fact that
they can, they can perform this over long periods of time.

(01:18:08):
So whatever fuel source it is that, you know, they just, if
you look at the whole big picture of what they can do,
it's, it's not, it is, it's all physical, but it's, it's way
beyond anything we can see goingon in Russia as far as their
defense industry, the material space, there's just no

(01:18:29):
correlation with the rest of their hard science.
But you're, you're talking aboutsome areas from remote viewing
on. That's, that's a different
story. But these, these are real
physical objects. I mean, they're detectable on
radar, You know, they're reflecting.
So something's going on. So that doesn't work as well
when you're talking with a physical object that is truly

(01:18:52):
anomalous in terms of how it's, it's how it's lifting, moving,
you know, what energies are involved.
I mean, we do have reports, radiation reports there that
there's, there's something goingon with hard science that
there's no evidence that the Russians or anybody else has or,

(01:19:15):
or kind of like what we're seeing or we would see it.
I mean, why would you keep that sort of thing secret, even from
a commercial standpoint? Why would you lose any military,
you know, conflict that you wereinvolved in if you had this?
And if Moen or Lockheed could dothis, surely they would sell it
to somebody, you know, even if it's we would know about it,

(01:19:36):
right. OK, you know, But be that as it
may, there are all sorts of conspiracy theories that go
there. But I, I, I would say within the
intelligence community, it really was even for those people
working in the military, it's in, it's in two classes.
It's kind of like almost all of this is misidentification and

(01:19:57):
what isn't is a non threatening,threatening, non hostile
phenomena. It's just not my job.
And it doesn't matter how crazy or like metaphysically
groundbreaking worldview shattering the truth may be, my
job really is just to consider national security threats.
And we've made the assessment that this isn't 1.

(01:20:19):
So like, it's just, I can't do anything about it.
That's the position they're all in.
And and that's their, that's their, I don't want that is
their day job. When they write memos and make
reports and appear before meetings, they know that they're
going to be evaluated in the jobthat they're supposed to be
doing. Not I mean, they may go off.

(01:20:42):
It's interesting. There are a lot of these people
that were associated with the intelligence community or Blue
Book or whatever that joined NYCAP national investigative
phenomena, Pharaoh phenomena. They were interested in it, but
that's their not day job. They can they're perfectly free
to to go and be very interested in it on their own.

(01:21:04):
One of the one of the first really active research groups to
investigate it where there were two of them.
One were physicists from Los Alamos who were absolutely
consensed. They were anom anomalous
devices, probably alien, that set up their own research
community, set up their own tools and their own systems, it

(01:21:25):
was called. Know about?
This probably not it's it's amiable, honest.
It's in the Los Alamos Bird Watchers Association was acute
important. There was another group that
formed in among the aerospace community in Los Angeles and
repelled that Blue Book would goout and meet with these people

(01:21:46):
because he you know so but that was not their day job that that
that's and at the time the political system was that.
Well, you've got some interesting data, but I don't
think it's going to be enough tomove the pendulum.
And by the way, do you have anything that shows they're
hostile? No, just that they're really
strange. And when, when Blue Book was

(01:22:09):
closed in 1969, again, we've allgot to be aware of what the Air
Force really said. The Air Force really said, hey,
I don't have concrete proof. The scientific community is not
going to step up to this becauseit doesn't have concrete proof.
And most importantly, we do not have a single instance of a

(01:22:30):
verifiable hostile action, so it's not our job.
Now it's forward to 2022-2023 AAROS meeting, and what do they
say? Exactly the same thing.
We have reports, a few of them are interesting, none of them
are hostile, and the worst it gets, the only reason we're

(01:22:50):
still looking at it is some of them pose accidents, some of
them may involve aircraft. There may be an aviation risk
looking at them, not because they're threats.
So this is kind of disheartening, but I guess on

(01:23:11):
the one hand, you really do wantan intelligence community that
is just solely focused on questions about threats and you
don't want them to be sidetracked just because
something's interesting that that's a good and.
Their day is full. I mean, it's not like they don't

(01:23:32):
have enough threats to worry about, right?
You know, is it Russian ICBM or Iranian drones or Chinese drones
or, or does somebody have any technology?
What about a hypersonic? You know, it's not like their
budgets not spread too thin already.
So, you know, you've got to givethem that too.
If I, if I'm a manager, it's sort of like I got a list of 100

(01:23:55):
threats going here. You're really going to have some
proof to make it 101 because you're going to want to budget
if you do that right. And I'll need personnel, and I
don't have any to spare. And so, so that's that's one
part of the one sort of pillar of the the situation is that you
do want this intelligence community that cares only about

(01:24:16):
threats and ignores anything else.
But then you would you would want, what you would want is
some other community that is interested in the stuff that
aren't threats but are still interesting.
But it seems like that just doesn't exist.
It's not like the people who arein the intelligence community
who are like, look, I'm convinced that this is something

(01:24:37):
so bizarre and new and interesting that I want to like
just switch and study that. So I'm going to go over here and
do it. There's no here to go to.
There's not no government officeor civilian organization that
has a budget and has access and all the things that it needs to
do it. So it's just not an option.
Like it's like our only option. The the the rationality of our

(01:24:57):
system is such that the only option is to see if it's a
threat. If it's not, you just shove it
off the desk and focus on the the things that are real.
What they were saying, what theyhave said in the past is if it,
it could be, it a phenomenon, could be, you know, just a.
Atmosphere. It could be whatever.

(01:25:20):
That's up to the scientific community, that's what.
They Yeah. And and by the way, it could be
alien anthropologist, but that'sstill up to them.
You know, they need to do research grants that it's not
like they don't, it's not like there are not a lot of
universities that have millions of dollars in grants to do

(01:25:41):
physical research and have extremely expensive equipment.
It's not like that community doesn't exist.
So the defense community would say if it's non threatening, it
should be really interesting. You know, we thought it was
really interesting and you know,you guys should look at the
cases that we think are truly anomalous and go for it.

(01:26:03):
And but the academic community again, because of its, there's
certain institutional issues there as well.
I mean, you got to look at the grants, where the grants come
from, what the grants are for. A lot of the grants are for
basic research that will go intocommercial applications, whether
it's medical or now. Some of it is, it's pure science

(01:26:26):
grants, but these days a lot of it is also environmental.
So there's a lot of competition for those grants.
And, and, and even, you know, I was talking to one of our, our
SCU folks and like, if we had toget, if we had to fund a grant
for a top tier physicist to lookinto, you know, hyperwarps,

(01:26:49):
space warp, but actually space warping to get a technology
profile, what would it take? And he's going, well, first of
all, they're going to expect a three, three years, OK.
And then here it goes through. Then I'm sort of like, and OK,
so if you can come up with a grant of, oh, $300,000 a year
for three years, you can captureone of those top tier people

(01:27:09):
who's going to do that? You know, it's not like they
don't have things to do. They're, they're doing their own
grants, so it is expensive. The other, the other hurdle to
that, there are two pieces of hurdle to that.
The academics would have to collect their own data, or
private citizens would have to collect their own data, use

(01:27:31):
their own instruments, whatever.Because DoD in most cases cannot
share data with them. Because sharing data is our
classic problem. If I share the data, I also
disclose the capability of what data I can collect.
My collectionability. The other guys know what I can
and cannot see and I that's, that's, I'm not going to do

(01:27:55):
that. So you're on your own.
I can, I cannot share that data with you, whether it's, you
know, satellite or whatever, I can't, I can't share data.
And it's even worse if you want me to share data on something
that I'm still evaluating as a threat.

(01:28:15):
These drones that we're talking about here, I can't give you any
more because I'm still evaluating them as a threat.
So there's a real door wall there between the data they're
collecting and what we're going to get.
So it really is, unless the scientific community stepped

(01:28:37):
into it for a relatively few cases, you know not and had a
way to parse those cases and look at it there.
There really is a wall, as you say there.
The pillar that you might expecton the other side is not there.
I mean, it has the potential of being there, but it it would

(01:28:59):
have to there would be somethingthat would have to bring it into
existence because right now, just like with the defense
folks, focus on the threat, the academic research community is
already committed. You know, it's not like there
are any slots waiting to be filled.
They. Have things to do, they have
years worth of plans for their research and nobody's like

(01:29:22):
looking around waiting for a UFOresearch.
I mean, maybe there are a few people, I'm sure there are
people who would take it up, butin general that's just not how
academic research works. You want.
To make, it's going to have to be very Advanced Research, like
I'm saying, you know, and even the instrumentation not may not
be there. One of the things you're
wrestling with is like, OK, whattechnology signatures do I have

(01:29:47):
to collect to determine, you know, what this might be?
How anomalous is it? What energy levels are in play,
What's going on? It's got to be a pretty complex
program with extremely complex instrumentation.
And then it's got to be lucky enough to be in the right place
at the right time to do it, you know, and, and how many

(01:30:09):
department managers after they walk through that little
exercise? So what are your odds of
actually, you want, you want me to invest in, you know, 3 grad
students and, you know, maybe 3 postdocs and, you know, $20
million worth of the equipment. And now how many of these
incidents, what are your odds ofactually getting an incident to

(01:30:31):
study? Well, Sir, here's the
distribution. That's a no, I don't think I'm
going to do this. And by the way, once you get the
first one, what are your odds ofa second one?
So I mean, do like, do you know where they occur?
Can you, can you control the experiment?
No, no, I can't. I'll just have to get lucky.
So we we focus pretty granularlyon the history up until like the

(01:30:54):
Robertson panel, and it feels like we just kind of zoomed
forward. Is that just because that's the
situation has stayed the same the whole time?
That that's pretty much it. I mean, when, when the Robertson
panel left Blue Book in play to do what we were talking about
case by case by case. And can you ever find the

(01:31:14):
perfect case? And as Hynek said, you can't
ever find the perfect case because even as with the Condon
project, if they find it, they'll say, well, it's a one
time phenomena that occurs every20 million years.
You know, OK, what am I going todo?
So Blue Book is gone. There's no there's no longer the

(01:31:36):
Air Force is not investigating it here.
Here's what happened after that point in time.
It from a security and military standpoint, there is no body
that's collecting a even the AirForce, a body of incidents that
they're reviewing on a one off basis.
They're not that's not even occurring.

(01:31:57):
If something really exceptional happens, let's say it's a report
over an ICBM silo at Montana. What happens is a report goes to
no red, a situation report, a sitrep, something like that
because because and we forgot tomention it.
The one thing that's not changedover this whole time is there is

(01:32:20):
a directive in play that was issued first in 1948 and 1950
that says it's it's a Jane app reporting recommended that there
is a protocol in place that if you observe anything that is
estimated to be a threat to the United States, you got to report
it. And it nowadays it would go to

(01:32:42):
NORAD and it would go to the National Military Command Center
in Washington, DC, which works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
So if something critical occurred within the military, it
would get reported. But it's treated on a one off
basis. Is it, you know, we have UFOs
over the ICBM base? Did they come back?

(01:33:04):
No, they won't. Well, they came back a week
later. Did anything get attacked?
No. So it's treated just on a OK,
how do I respond to it? Do I deploy helicopters?
Do I deploy troops or do whatever?
Yeah. What do you do?
It's. Not continual.
You don't. You don't respond.
So that remained in play. That's in play in the 70s and

(01:33:24):
the 80s and 90s. That stays in place.
So we do have miscellaneous incidents that get reported.
The only way we learn about themis researchers do Freedom of
Information acts. They go through no red data.
They, you know, but there's no more centralized reporting
Privately there are, you know, organizations exist and so on

(01:33:47):
and so forth. But the intelligence slash
security community is out of thepicture except for these
situations. OK.
And that goes for that brings usall the way into this decade,
you know, until the whole thing is retriggered by a series of
incidents with military aircraftthat get enough political

(01:34:10):
attention and to to restart the process, as it were.
And we're still not back to where we were with Blue Book
because the last time I know AROis said that they're going to.
But even when they started out, they did not have the process in
place to collect reports from all the military services or

(01:34:34):
Homeland Security or the different.
We have so many more agencies now, you know, and they have
very small staff, I would say, you know, and now last year it
was well, we're only actually looking at incidents that were
over military bases, which you can sort of understand, right?
I mean, if we can't handle these600 drones over the military

(01:34:56):
bases, do I need more? I like I've got my hands full
already. And I, I should cite the profile
the, the no Red Chief this morning was talking about over
Langley, OK, outside of Washington, DC He to quote, he's
talking about there were a wholeseries of these drones over a

(01:35:17):
period of time in 2024. We know that they were about 20
feet long, pretty good size. We know that they were flying
over 100 mph at 3 to 4000 feet in altitude.
And they were coming in, in a parade one after the other after
another. Now you've got to say that's

(01:35:40):
probably it's worrisome. But with that that on their
plate, you know, you can see whythey're pretty tightly focused.
You know, they've got drones forms over Navy groups operating
off San Diego that, you know, you can see why they've got
enough on their plate not to ponder the most anomalous

(01:36:01):
incidents that we might come up with.
They're not just sitting around like kind of, you know,
considering the metaphysical implications of.
And not a single one of those incidents, he pointed out.
Not a single one. No, Red itself has no direction.
All it can do is identify. It hands us over to another

(01:36:23):
group called NORCOM, North American Continental Defense
Command, essentially, which has the operational responsibility
to respond to it. But the way we're structured now
is each and every military base has to defend itself.
That doesn't seem like a good. This is not a happy thing.
He's not happy about it. Nobody is happy about it.

(01:36:46):
But we have not had any continental wide air defense
system in place since the end ofthe Cold War.
That's one of the reasons 911 came about.
You know, we, we're just not setup with an air defense system
since the end of the Cold War. Interceptor bases all over the

(01:37:06):
place, anti aircraft, anti, you know, it's, it's just not there.
Now we're learning the lessons from Ukraine and and Russia of
how dangerous that could be. But just consider how much money
it would have to be invested to set up defense over every
military base, much less civilian power plants.

(01:37:31):
And you know that. Sort of thing.
It would be like to have to havea a system where it wasn't every
military base for itself. You'd have to have like meta
military bases that that defended other military bases.
And where does that and? You start, are you going to
start putting, you know, air defense guns and barrage

(01:37:53):
balloons? And I mean, it's, it's strange
that we're seeing the, the worstpossible case of what could
happen with attack drones overseas.
And now we're before it was just, oh, we're going to, we're
worried about defending against,you know, half a dozen
hypersonic missiles. OK, how about 5000 drones?

(01:38:15):
So are these drones anomalous and are there are there flight
capabilities anomalous or do they seem like terrestrial
technologies? These seem like terrestrial tech
generally speaking, these seem like real world drones, Not now
One of the worrisome things about them in some of the
incidents like over I think thisis over Phoenix, the police did

(01:38:36):
launch helicopters, police helicopters and the drones, they
couldn't catch them. So even at its Max speed.
So we don't know how good they some of them might be, not all,
but so the the characteristics that that we are observing are
not anomalous, but they don't need to be if they can.

(01:38:59):
The most recent series of drone events is over the Norfolk Joint
Base Navy, Air Force, our biggest base on the Eastern
seaboard, and we didn't touch one of those suckers and so.
The period that they're just trying to to see how well they

(01:39:20):
can penetrate our airspace or that they're, they're there to
observe things. I'm not there's not much that's
been written on that and I I'm sure they're defense people that
are writing papers and it, you know, doing it now, because this
is a very tactical thing. This this would be their day
job. Absolutely.
As far as the no red fella, he their position at the moment is

(01:39:43):
the especially the onesie 2Z things are private.
They're people that are playing games for whatever reason who
knows why they're doing it but certainly that stream of drones
over Langley seems improbable tobe private.
The the stream of drones off theNavy attack group off San Diego

(01:40:04):
clearly was not private, but I so I guess we're trying to bring
this all forward in time and theand the strange thing is that
we're almost we're back in 1952 again and these things are but
even even. The UFOs that were cited off
Washington, DC, we're not going at amazing speeds.

(01:40:29):
They were just there and they weren't, you know, maybe they
were, but we could measure it. You know, we, we know that's a
characteristic. Because we couldn't catch them,
but they weren't. But we couldn't catch them up
and down the East Coast, the UAUFOS that were being
interceptors or sent, they were not able to engage with them any
more than we don't appear to be able to engage with these

(01:40:49):
drones, even with something likepolice helicopters.
Now, is it disturbing that the no red, you know, I, I don't
know, we don't know what did Is it really true that over this
period of time, nobody tried to engage with those drones over
Langley, that they've truly didn't do it?

(01:41:09):
Never. Shot at them, you mean that's.
That's not just at least put aircraft up and and intercept
them and follow them back to their you know, it kind of
worries me. It's sort of like you can track
them going over the base, but you couldn't put up an air
aircraft and follow them to where they went.

(01:41:30):
The same thing happened with thedrones off San Diego.
The swarms. They finally did a seem to
associate those with a couple offoreign flag ships, which is
very suspicious. But you know, we don't know what
they know. I guess so I get.
But the real answer to your question is with these
incidents, we're not seeing truly anomalous behavior.

(01:41:51):
That doesn't mean that some of them are not capable of it, but
we're not challenging them. At least back in the 60s, we
were challenging them enough so that, you know, OK, now they
accelerate away from the jet. We know something's going on.
Now we're not really even engaging at all.
All we have figured out so far is it appears that our jamming,

(01:42:12):
electronic jamming, it doesn't have much effect because we now
know from documents that were released that the Navy deployed
portable jammers and, you know, electromagnetic guns and so on
and so forth. That did not seem to have any
effect. So.
SO11 technology that seems like it might have some application

(01:42:34):
here that I know exists. I don't know how it's being used
yet. Are these really high altitude
balloons or planes that just take like a super high
definition photograph like every30 seconds or something of a
really big area? And then you can, I think police
departments use this sometimes. You can basically like see where
a robbery happened, then just scroll back through the photos

(01:42:59):
and see where the truck that didthe robbery came from and then
just go arrest them, right? Why don't we use that?
Or are we using technologies like that or like satellite
imaging, I guess? Nobody has talked, nobody's
talking about do. Are we not doing satellite
coverage of our own bases? You know, that's kind of
interesting. Interesting question, But
remember the balloons that came over the the US supposedly

(01:43:22):
Chinese? At this point in time I think
out of four Uaps that were reported, we've only seen video
footage from 11. Of them, yeah.
And two or three of them were brought down by the Canadians.
We've not seen any remains. We've, you know, we don't know.
So to answer your question, thisis a big hole.

(01:43:44):
I, I suspect that from a security standpoint, we know a
lot more that's being shared that would tell us one way or
the other. But no, we're not seeing that
information. But in even in that that
situation, I agree that has to be the case.
There has to be information thatsomebody has that they're not
sharing with the public. But even in that situation,

(01:44:05):
you're saying the the structure of our, the logic of our system
is such that the only question that's really being asked is, is
it a threat? And if not, it's being pushed
off to the side. So what is the future of the UAP
subject? Are we stuck in America, at
least in this sort of system where we'll never be able to
really study it directly as anything other than a threat?

(01:44:27):
What would it take to change that?
What would he have to like change the structure of our
government? Because I can I imagine a
dictator could just say, yeah, go study it just because it's
interesting. But in a democracy that has
that's funded in the way that weare, threat seems like the the
prime concern. You would almost have to find a
foundation. Now we know Avi Loeb has been

(01:44:50):
able to range a huge amount of money to study a particular, you
know, subject. You know it.
It almost has to be. It has to be foundational.
There's going to, you know, there have to be NS National
Science Foundation grants, Carnegie or whatever Rockefeller
there. They've got to be a major pot of

(01:45:12):
money that is made available andpointed towards the academic
community to fund people that are actually interested in this.
And and we know there are peoplethat are that would do this kind
of research if they if it were part of their day job.
And so I guess what we established is we know it's part
of, not part of the day job of the intelligence security
community. We have to make it part of the J

(01:45:34):
job for the academic community. I think that's the only thing
that would change it. And that's going to be a lot of
money. It's got to be on parity with
medical research. It's got to be on parity with
climate research. Like hundreds of millions or
billions of dollars. Then yeah.
I think that as an academic or former academic, I'm not

(01:45:55):
teaching right now, but I can say that part of the logic of of
just how academics think, is that OK?
If there were say a three-year fellowship for me to go work on
UAP, that would be really attractive to me.
But I would also want to know what happens at the end of that
three years. Like do I just maybe I'll have a

(01:46:19):
really good time, but will I getdone and then their funding runs
out and then I have to go back to the sort of normal academic
job market and justify why I wasted three years in their view
studying UAP. So it's like you don't just need
funding for the moment. You need to create a kind of
self-sustaining ecosystem of this research so that people can
say it's just going to be my career and I'm not going to have

(01:46:40):
to worry about like. What is what is the career?
I mean, you, you would also think that there there certainly
could be career paths in, in in physics, There could be career
paths certainly in aerodynamics.I mean, there are some there's
some studies areas of study thatthere are career paths, you

(01:47:03):
know, if material science or oneof the one of the obvious ones
is multi spectral collection devices.
You know what, what do I advancing our ability to collect
frequencies? You know somebody I need a
career program, a 20 year program for somebody to build me

(01:47:25):
a tabletop gravity wave detector.
OK, that would be pretty cool, you know there, but that might
be the most obvious one that would would be broad spectrum.
If you could pause that, there'sphysics going on here and say I
could, I can make a whole careerout of developing the equipment
and measurements and devices needed to, to determine this.

(01:47:50):
Certainly within astronomy and astrophysics got to be within
astrophysics. I mean, we're doing, if we can
look at black holes if we, you know, so there are, it seems to
me there are some disciplines that natively could have a
career path. What you've got to make do is
make them real. It's sort of like, you know, if

(01:48:12):
I go into geology, I pretty wellknow where my career path is.
Where's the career path? As you're saying, if I go into,
you know, advanced physics instrumentation, it probably is
a career path. And, and, and, but if you're
right, you'd have to have a whole series of, it's not just
one grant. It's going to be over and done

(01:48:33):
because I, I know I've heard enough from academics, kind of
like, oh, I've got a grant now and then the first priority I
have is looking for the next grant.
Yeah, it's an awful life to to know that there's like a clock
ticking all the time and that you would be homeless if you
don't come up with another grant.
Well, and that's why the foundations I think would be
key. You'd almost need to found

(01:48:53):
foundation commitment that everyyear we're going to have this
many grants funded at this levelin this area of interest, you
know, to show that kind of a commitment to convince, not just
not just convince the the grad students and the masters and,
you know, no, yeah, you want postdocs, you've got to, you've

(01:49:14):
got to get something that looks real enough to the postdoc so
that they're going to build their career around it.
And it, it seems like it's in all the, the scenarios that we
imagine, though studying these things is still kind of enslaved
to the logic of the economic market.
Like you have to justify it by saying that there's some pay off
in the end. That doesn't have to do with

(01:49:36):
just answering an interesting question.
That to me makes you a study of EP seem like a humanities
course, because that's, that's like what we do in the
humanities. We don't, we don't guarantee
we're going to like come up witha better bullet or something.
We just think this stuff's interesting.
I'll give you an off the wolf one on that one.
Let's let's, let's talk about climate.

(01:49:57):
That's what I will give you one thing for everything we're
seeing about the true UAPS implies that they have an
element of energy that they haveaccess to, whether it is fusion,
particle annihilation, vacuum energy that we don't we have

(01:50:19):
some physics to go to conceptualize it.
We don't have any technology andand I will tell you, look at the
last 40 years and where is the least advanced been.
Not that I don't love wind energy, but wind energy is not a
technological advance. Solar energy, to some extent, is

(01:50:42):
not a technological advance. Windmills for a really long
time, so. We're we're not making any
advance at all on real solid, serious next level energy.
To me, if you're going to deal with climate, if you're going to
deal with infrastructure, if youwill, how critical is look at

(01:51:02):
what Ukraine is going through now.
If you really want to address the crisis, addressing energy
generation is the key. You've got to have
breakthroughs, which we have nothad any of low a low energy
fusion efficient reactions, all of that stuff, it's hanging

(01:51:23):
around and there have been papers and that sort of stuff.
But I, I think to me that's if you really want to get at the
core of the UPAPS, it's clear that they have some access to
highly portable energy sources. That's way beyond us because all
of their other technology would come out of that.
What I could do with that energy, you know, could I?

(01:51:44):
Createspace warps if I had vacuum energy, Yeah, and I knew
how to. But so I guess to me in just in
brainstorming about fields of study within academics, how much
money is actually being put intoenergy development?
And I think within engineering and physics, I'm going to have
to bet this is where there's an institutional what's going on

(01:52:08):
now is money being made to make things better, that we already
have more efficient, lower overhead, whatever makes solar
more efficient, make wind more efficient.
And that's where we seem to be stuck.
So just kind of raw brainstorming.
If you really wanted to look at a a foundational change that

(01:52:32):
would address both Uaps and, youknow, the long term career and
society self-sustaining, it would be an energy.
Yeah, but energy doesn't. I mean the the search for free
energy is actually like, not an economically promising search
because the goal of of the capitalist economy is to keep
money circulating. But it doesn't have to be free.

(01:52:55):
It could just be controlled. I guess that it doesn't have to
be. I know it's called free energy,
but let's again be off the wall.If I could get vacuum energy and
literally and unstoppable energytap at this point in time, it
can't be free. I mean, I could destroy a planet
with that level of energy. So it's going to have to be

(01:53:17):
controlled and structured. So I I think free energy has
been kind of a misnomer. But even super cheap energy is
not great for the way our economy works.
Like making everything cheaper is kind of like bad for an
economy that needs money to kindof keep circulating.

(01:53:38):
So I'm not sure who it incentive.
I mean, the physicists want to make it like everybody who works
in physicists would love to makethat discovery.
But companies are are not like pining for free energy for the
most, you know, very, very, verycheap energy.
But that's where I get back to the foundations.
You were talking about the humanities.
The humanities are, you know, the foundations that fund the

(01:54:02):
humanities are not profit. They're not putting the money in
for profit right there. There are lots of disciplines
and grant programs that are not associated with, you know,
commercial revenue. That's kind of it.
It would have to be the right foundation.
It would have to be a foundation, a seeding

(01:54:24):
foundation. But yeah, I mean, you brought up
there, there are lots of grants that go to the social sciences
that have nothing to do with, you know, an economy, an
economic solution. So it's kind of you'd almost
have to be asking one of the humanitarian foundations to fund

(01:54:46):
physics research. How hard is that?
Well, maybe slowly we're making the case.
It seems like the the thing I'velearned the most is this whole
narrative shows that there's like a pervasive logic that
doesn't suppress in like a conspiratorial way, but but
suppresses by its own logic and concerns.

(01:55:10):
Genuine study of these phenomenain the way that you and I want
to in favor of studying them just to see if they're just to
answer the question of whether they're a threat to security or
not. And then once it's deemed that
they're not, we just kind of putit off to the side and we need a
different, an organization has adifferent logic to it and a
different set of goals in order to seriously study these things.

(01:55:36):
There you go. OK.
We are having thunderstorms here, so I could.
But yeah, at last, I I totally agree.
It's from one point of view as asystems issue, from the
intelligence and security standpoint, from the academic
thing, I see it as a institutional structural thing.
It's, it's in neither sense is it conspiratorial.

(01:55:59):
But that that's why I think of it overall as a systems problem.
The systems on either side, the two pillars that you described
are just not set up for this. Yeah, we don't you don't need a
conspiracy when systems work with their own internal logic.
I mean, people think that if something looks intelligent or
looks like the the product of ofintelligent choice, that it must

(01:56:21):
be somebody running things at the top.
But systems have their own logicand and values that they
continually replicate and force upon the world without anybody
at the steering it at the top. And it seems like we've kind of
this subject has gotten caught in in a system that isn't
designed to handle it. It's not designed to answer
questions about what's out thereand.

(01:56:42):
It's in between. Like we we built the two pillars
to do something and each does itrelatively effectively, and this
is in between. Neither.
We need a third pillar. Larry, this has been a
fascinating conversation. Thank you so much.
We're going two hours. Is there anything that you want
to plug? I know that you've got several
books on this. Tell us what books you've

(01:57:02):
written about this subject. I would I say in regard to the
history that we were talking about how the evolution of the
the evolution of the problem within the intelligence
community. I did do a book, hold it up.
It's called unidentified, the national security challenge, the

(01:57:24):
national security problem of UFOs.
And it does start during World War Two, goes through the ghost
rocket phenomena. And one of the things I do, it's
kind of that I thought was kind of interesting was I go through
the history of how the intelligence community reacted
both internally and externally to the civilian community.

(01:57:46):
And then an end posed the problem of, you know, could
somebody actually have looked for a pattern in all of this?
If if the Robertson panel had, you know, not ended up where it
did, what if this had been handed off to a strategic
intelligence group, how would they have handled it?
And I actually go through how they would likely have handled
it, reaching the conclusion thatno, it's not the Russians.

(01:58:07):
No, this it's not over 30 years,it's not the Russians.
So we need another answer. But so, yeah, I think most of
the history I, I, I would say ifyou're really history, that kind
of detail in the history, I would, that's what I tried to
capture in the book. Unidentified Valerie Hancock, We
will have a link to that book for Amazon or wherever else you

(01:58:30):
can buy it in the show notes. Larry, thank you so much for
being here today. Oh, it's a pleasure.
I enjoyed talking with you. Always love talking to you.
The Anomalous Review is a project of the Scientific
Coalition for UAP Studies. It's hosted and produced by me,
Michael Glossen and edited by Kelly Michelle.
Our theme song was written and performed by Thomas Rosanti.

(01:58:51):
Communication and PR work is by Preston Dykes.
Our advisory team includes Jennifer Roche, Robert Powell,
Richard Hoffman, Joshua Pearson,and Larry Hancock.
To find out more about SCU, check out Explorer scu.org.

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011 - How the National Security and Intelligence World Thinks about UAP, with Larry Hancock

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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;}011 - How the National Security and Intelligence World Thinks about UAP, with Larry Hancock