John Mack vs. The Inquisition : UFOs, Harvard, and the Search for Truth - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 2)

In the second half of an extended interview Jeremy and George are joined by New York Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal, co-author of the game-changing 2017 UFO story. The trio dive deep into the life of Dr. John Mack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist who dared to take alien abduction seriously - and paid a steep price for it. The journalists unpack Mack’s desperate fight to preserve his tenure during a secret Harvard 'inquisition' in the 1990s, his courageous expedition to the African town of Ruwa, Zimbabwe, to investigate the astonishing 1994 close encounter witnessed by 60 schoolchildren, and his provocative theories linking UFO incidents to paranormal experiences. Blumenthal pulls back the curtain on a man who saw a universe far stranger than we’re told, from abductions to crop circles and beyond. But the story doesn’t end with Mack. Blumenthal shares insider perspectives on the modern UFO frontier - why whistleblowers still fear coming forward, and the uphill battle for full disclosure in a skeptical world. This episode is a call to arms for independent journalism to uncover what’s really out there, revealing the challenges of reporting the unreportable and the relentless pursuit of the unknown. Follow Ralph's work here : https://RalphBlumenthal.com GOT A TIP? Reach out to us at [email protected] ••• Watch Corbell's six-part UFO docuseries titled UFO REVOLUTION on TUBI here : https://tubitv.com/series/300002259/tmz-presents-ufo-revolution/season-2 Watch Knapp’s six-part UFO docuseries titled INVESTIGATION ALIEN on NETFLIX here : https://www.netflix.com/title/81674441 ••• For breaking news, follow Corbell & Knapp on all social media. Extras and bonuses from the episode can be found at WeaponizedPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

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• 0:58Speaker 04

  This is the biggest government secret of all time. It dwarfs the Manhattan Project. Presidents have not been let in on the secret.

• 1:08Speaker 05

  In part two of our interview with former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  Explore elements of a psyche under hypnosis, by the way. And he did realize that there was some kind of paranormal world out there that he couldn't explain.

• 1:22George Knapp?

  You go down the rabbit hole. You think you're chasing flying saucers from other planets. That leads you to other things. Taken together, these phenomena tell us many things about ourselves and the universe that challenge the dominant materialist paradigm.

• 1:36Speaker 04

  As we now know, you don't have to believe in... They exist. You don't believe in the moon. You don't believe in the ocean. They're there, and UFOs are there. The question is, what are they?

• 1:58Speaker 04

  John Mack had a woman onstage reliving her abduction screaming. And he was at Harvard, and he didn't care what they thought. And he was kind of surprised when they called him in and said they were going to investigate him. He actually went in first without a lawyer, thinking, again, naively, that he would just answer their questions. And his nephew told me, he actually confronted John and said, "You've got to be out of your mind. You can't go into a procedure like this without a lawyer." So then, John got himself, you know, a wonderful pair of lawyers, including one guy who had broken the priest abuse scandal in Boston.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  So anyway, so he got himself good lawyers, but they, Harvard was very concerned about its reputation. They were hearing from alumni that this was very bad for Harvard. It was making Harvard into a laughing stock. And so they convened this, what I call it an inquisition, because they told John, when they called him in, "This is not an inquisition." So, being a psychiatrist, he said, "Well, why are they using a word that they're not doing?" So he fastened on that, and it was an inquisition. They were inquiring into his finances, into his beliefs, and it was all secret.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  And, but, and by the way, to this day, Harvard has never laid out the documentation for this investigation. I was able to document it through all the emails and the reports back and forth, which were never made public. But they called him in for a bunch of sessions. They called in his colleagues, and some colleagues supported him, and said, "He's a very good scientist, and he's pursuing this the best way he knows how." And others were saying, "This is a crock, and John is ridiculous, and he's making Harvard into a laughing stock." So he had, you know, people testifying for him and against him.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  But, so Harvard put this together for, as you said, you know, over a year, two years, and... And in the end, they had to conclude that he wasn't really doing anything wrong. He was a little too enthusiastic, which Mac admitted. Yes, I was. I was a little intemperate. But he went at it in a very rigorous way. He brought together these groups of so-called experiencers, people with stories about abduction, and he interviewed them at length and studied them. And he did what professors at Harvard are supposed to do, go into uncharted terrain and look at it.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Harvard, as you said, Harvard had been doing this for ages, looking into things that were controversial. But this, they couldn't really stomach. He rubbed Harvard the wrong way. He was provocative, and they cracked down on him. Until the end, when they basically said, "Okay, you didn't really do anything wrong. Just stop doing it. Whatever you did, don't do it anymore."

• 5:22George Knapp?

  Somewhere in there, there was a leak, right? Was it Sheehan who leaked the inner workings of this inquisition?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Well, Danny Sheehan, who was one of John's lawyers, with a distinguished background, really, in investigating the Klan and Iran-Contra. But he was kind of a loose cannon, Danny, and you know him, I'm sure. And he kind of jumped the gun. What he did was, he saw John being railroaded by Harvard, by the medical school establishment, and he sent out like an emergency email appeal to friends of John and others in the field, and said, "John is in danger. We got to rally to his support." Well, this was supposed to be a secret inquiry.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  So when that got out, it became kind of public that John was under investigation. And Harvard said that John really broke the secrecy of the procedure and, you know, had violated the agreement to keep this, you know, kind of quiet. So Danny did that and John fired him. Basically said, I can't have you doing this and, you know, you, um, he, John respected what Danny Sheehan had done for him. He was a very good lawyer and real activist, but he, he was out of control. So it did leak out, but the whole investigation didn't leak.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  I mean, I had the actual reports that the committee put together and the emails back and forth. That part never saw the light of day, except in my book. So, um, um, so, you know, that's really what happened there.

• 7:10George Knapp?

  Did the leak help, do you think, in a sense? I know Dr. Mack was horrified, but did it, in fact, it put Harvard on its heels, didn't it?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Well, yes, I guess it did because Harvard was, was counting on the fact that this would remain secret and they could kind of do whatever they want. You know, hold this inquisition and, and subdue Mack. And now suddenly it was going public, which is the worst nightmare. Um, so I guess you could say it did, it did help Mack, although Mack was, as you say, was horrified that this was coming out. He didn't want to leak it. He could have leaked it. He didn't want it to leak. He wanted to keep it quiet. Um, so, but I guess, um, uh, you know, in a way it did, it put a little scare into Harvard that they couldn't get away with the secret inquisition.

• 8:01George Knapp?

  Jeremy?

• 8:04Jeremy Corbell?

  Um, yeah, I'm, I'm just curious. So you've spent so much time working on the John Mack story and, and seeing it kind of just directly through his eyes. What do you think the implications have been now that he is kind of, he broke the mold back then? He made it something, he was on Oprah Winfrey, like he, he made it kind of pop culture. You know, do you feel that this is all happening now in the same way? Do you think there's anybody that can pick up where he left off or was he kind of one of the, one of a kind?

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was one of a kind. I mean, people have asked me, is there anyone doing what John Mack did? And I, I find it hard to, to find anybody like that. I mean, there are, you know, there were Stanton Friedman, there were others, um, certainly who came forward. But Mac, first of all, he had the, you know, the ability as a psychiatrist to approach this in a mental way and say, "We don't recognize this phenomenon at all. It's something going on that is totally foreign." He was, plus he had won a Pulitzer Prize writing about Lawrence of Arabia, so he had, you know, the cred, the academic cred, although he had a lot

• 9:14Speaker 04

  of jealous academics also who couldn't stand it, that he was, they won a Pulitzer Prize and they didn't. So it's hard to imagine. Also, remember, this was a little, a different world. Now UFO news is coming out of Congress, there are hearings, you know, it's become a mainstream subject, which it was never then. It was always kind of fringe when, when John was, you know, championing it. So, but it's hard to think of, of, of anybody who's picked that up. By the way, I want to say that, to his everlasting regret, John Mack never saw a UFO. Oh, my gosh.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  So he, you know, he couldn't speak from experience. And in a way, he realized that kind of helped him because it was not like he, he was, you know, talking about something that happened to him. He, he was always a little jealous that it, that he hadn't seen a UFO. He did not have an abduction experience. It would have been great to, to have him experience it firsthand. He had some weird experiences, by the way. He, he put himself under hypnosis for various, for professional reasons, and he was kind of curious. And he

• 10:38Speaker 04

  did explore elements of his psyche under hypnosis, by the way. And he did realize that there was some kind of paranormal world out there that he couldn't explain. He always had feelings that, his mother, who died when he was eight months old, that he could imagine himself in the womb, struggling to be born. And he was able to tap into this.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Paranormal world to some extent, but he never saw a UFO. He never went into an abduction experience. So.

• 11:14Jeremy Corbell?

  Did you ever find in researching him and having all his notes, did he ever have any contact with intelligence agencies? Was there any government interest in what he was on to? Did you ever get a hint of that at all?

• 11:26Speaker 04

  No, not at all. I looked through all his papers. There was never anything suggesting that government people were interested in his experiences or that he was some kind of plant by the government. You know, this world, as you guys know better than anybody, is full of conspiracists. There are people who think that everybody, including probably me, is working secretly, you know, with the intelligence services. They think that the government leaked the story to the Times because it was the right time to do that.

• 11:58Jeremy Corbell?

  Right.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  I can tell you categorically and emphatically, we dug that story out. Leslie happened to get invited to a secret gathering and she put it together and it was not a leak. You know, there were people who were unhappy about it. Anyway, so please, let's, you know, get that straight, that this was not some kind of... I've been a journalist long enough to know that, you know, this conspiracy stuff doesn't explain, you know, how a journalist gets a good story. It wasn't leaked to us. We dug it out and you guys know that too, that you have to fight for every exclusive you get. It's not to say that there aren't

• 12:44Speaker 04

  interests involved at different times, but in my 45-year career at the Times, I don't think I ever got a story leaked to me for some, you know, deep dark reason.

• 12:55Jeremy Corbell?

  It just doesn't work like that because you follow up, you talk with other people, you get a sense of not just one individual coming to you. And that is a huge misconception with me and George as well. You know, how did they get this footage? How are they putting it out? You know, they're all claiming it's some... and it's not. I can't tell, obviously. How George and I obtain and release things, but it's so laughable to me if people really understood. Let me take you to another place, though. I do want to ask you about current events and about Congress, but I think we'd be remiss to not talk about Ruwa, Zimbabwe, because that's how I first got tuned in to John Mack's work. George and I were able

• 13:37Jeremy Corbell?

  to meet two of the primary witnesses, Liesel and Salma. We were in Oregon with them, and we got to kind of talk with them over a number of days. What a powerful story. And I don't know that our listeners really know a lot about that, so maybe you could tell me about John Mack's influence in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, what that was about. To me, it was a big deal that this Harvard psychiatrist comes and actually investigates this with the BBC. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's really one of the best observed cases of a landing. I mean, along with the Betty and Bonnie Hill case, which really started off the whole abduction cycle. And by the way, you know, it seems to have started in the 60s somehow, for whatever reason, why we don't know why. Abductions seem to have surfaced then, just like the first sightings started in, you know, 47 with Roswell and, what's his name?

• 14:40Jeremy Corbell?

  Kenneth Arnold.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Kenneth Arnold. Anyway, so what happened in 94, John was in the middle of his Harvard inquisition, and he gets a text or a fax, I guess it was the technology then, from Zimbabwe, from the BBC correspondent, who said that there's all kinds of furor going on in Harare in Zimbabwe about some kind of flyover of UFOs.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  And it was on the airwaves and people were talking about it, people had seen stuff. And so John was intrigued and then, very quickly, what happened is information surfaced that children at a school outside the capital of Harare had been at recess, sixty kids at a day school, a mixed group of kids, black, white, and they were at recess and they witnessed a landing of a craft and two or three black-clad figures who emerged and gave out telepathic messages to some of the kids. And the kids were talking about this. So John packed up

• 15:56Speaker 04

  in the middle of his inquisition and flew to Harare and started interviewing the kids. And it was very interesting because, as I said, first of all, John was an expert child psychologist as well as a psychiatrist. He'd written a book on childhood nightmares. So he knew when kids were fabricating stories and he was experienced. I mean, this was something he was professionally equipped to examine. And he had a very good way of talking to the kids. We know this because it was captured on newsreel footage and video. And he would literally get down on the kids' level, kneel on the floor, and talk to these kids and ask them what they had seen and could they draw pictures. And they drew consistent

• 16:39Speaker 04

  pictures of a craft and little figures. And they told stories about getting telepathic messages from these creatures. And the kids were scared and they were puzzled and, you know, they felt an empathy with these figures, all kinds of different reactions. And John examined this at great length and...

• 17:03Speaker 04

  As I said, he knew enough to know that 60 kids couldn't be making up the same story. And by the way, no adults witnessed this, which is curious. And somebody asked John, why, whether the aliens had planned this at a time when all the adults were tied up and only the kids were at recessed. And John said, you know, I'm a human psychiatrist, not an alien psychiatrist. I cannot analyze, you know, their motivation or whatever, you know, thinking. In other words, it's one of the mysteries of this thing. Why was it just done when there were no adults? Excuse me. Who were present then?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  It's one of the many mysteries. But as you know, from interviewing Liesl and the other girl. Oh, yeah. These kids had wonderful composure and they told a consistent story. And John, you know, followed it and it became a documentary later by Nickerson and Randy. So, but it's a wonderful case study of, you know, a group of disparate individuals, in this case, children, who recount an experience that has no other explanation.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 19:01George Knapp?

  You know, after the Harvard Inquisition and he gets essentially cleared, he doesn't back off, he doubles down. Is that correct?

• 19:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was not scared off. Others might have been, but as, you know, as Campbell lays out in The Hero's Journey, which I took as kind of a template for John Maxing, you know, he goes out, has all these experiences, life-threatening experiences, career-threatening experiences, and comes back with a boon for mankind. In this case, a story about a phenomenon that to this day defies explanation, but none of the explanations that have been offered suffice. So he continued, and he was continuing when he was run down in London. He, you know,

• 19:54Speaker 04

  he was continuing to write and to go on programs and to, he never took anything back. So in that sense, you know, he died with his, you know, his convictions untouched, unmitigated.

• 20:17George Knapp?

  His research led him to a disturbing but broader concept of reality. There was a quote that I used one time of his, talking about where his research eventually went. "Taken together, these phenomena tell us many things about ourselves and the universe that challenge the dominant materialist paradigm. They reveal that our understanding of reality is extremely limited. The cosmos is more mysterious than we have imagined. There are other intelligences all about, some of which are able to reach us. Consciousness itself may be the primary creative force in the universe, and our knowledge of the physical

• 20:56George Knapp?

  properties of the physical world is far from complete. The emerging picture is the cosmos that is interconnected, harmonic, vibrating with creativity and intelligence to which separateness is an illusion." That's pretty ambitious.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, you know, what's interesting is that after...

• 21:18Speaker 04

  His experience with the abduction accounts of all these people, he sort of wandered into other areas of paranormal experience that intrigued him. He got interested in crop circles. And he went out to England to investigate crop circles. And he actually felt the energy. People who were with him then on the trip said that he, you know, he laid down in the crop circle and he was talking about the energy that he was feeling. Now, some of the crop circles, we know, were man-made by hoaxsters, who like to, you know, trick people and to muddy the waters, okay? So they would go out at night with, you know, farm machinery

• 22:02Speaker 04

  and make these strange patterns in the wheat fields. But others can't be explained. So he got interested in that. He got interested in the rune stones of the Vikings. These are stones that supposedly, you know, predict the future. And I tell in the book the story about how he would start off his meetings. This is kind of woo-woo stuff. But he would start off his meetings with people putting their hands in a bag of rune stones and drawing out a stone. And then there was a guide to the stones, explaining what the stone they picked meant in terms of predicting the future. So he pulls out a stone and it's blank.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  And that's the worst thing that you can have, you know, a blank stone. And it was shortly after that that he was killed. So it was kind of interesting that, in retrospect, that he pulled that stone. But he was looking into all these other things because he realized that it's not just alien abduction that's the mystery. There's all these other things that are mysteries, that we don't understand. You know, what about precognition? People who, you know, dream of things and then they come true. What about people who wake up in the middle of the night and their partner, you know, life partner has just been killed somewhere? So there were all these experiences that could not be explained by, you know,

• 23:28Speaker 04

  normal science at this point, today.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  And he, so he was very much interested in not only in alien abduction, but other paranormal things that were mysterious. And it's kind of interesting. And the ultimate mystery, of course, was something he got intrigued by at the end of his life, which was survival of consciousness, life after death. And he got very interested in the story of Russell Targ's daughter. Russell Targ was this physicist who really pioneered with remote viewing, how people, everybody actually, but certain people have a particular gift to envision things thousands

• 24:15Speaker 04

  of miles away, including behind the Iron Curtain, helping the CIA put together pictures of Soviet facilities. And Targ's daughter, who was a Russian speaker and an expert and a psychiatrist like Mac, had a lot of paranormal experiences. And then she died of a brain tumor. And according to her family and friends, she, you know, she, her spirit came back in some way that they could recognize. And Mac was very intrigued with that story after she died, and he was investigating it.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  And it was said that when he died, people afterwards, his circle around him, felt his presence return. And I end the book with those accounts. Again, you know, can I prove that? Can anybody prove that? No. I mean, it's just what they said. But it's just kind of interesting. First of all, that Mac would become interested in a wider range of paranormal experiences and recognize that it was not just alien abduction that is the mystery, but a lot of things are mysteries, including death. What is death? As you probably know, Whitley Strieber and his wife really were intrigued by that and

• 25:37Speaker 04

  thought that death and the alien abduction experience are somehow related. When people are abducted, they see dead people. What's that about? Well, we don't know. But... Mac was very intrigued with that when he died.

• 25:56George Knapp?

  It's kind of the way it goes, you know, you go down the rabbit hole, you think you're chasing flying saucers from other planets, that leads you to other things. It's the, it's the journey Robert Bigelow made, it's the journey that I made, that Jeremy has, that, and Mac believed there is a connected, call it a unified theory of weirdness or something, that all this stuff is related somehow. You think about Kenneth Arnold, we know Kenneth Arnold saw strange objects flying in the sky. Most people don't know that for the rest of his life, he was haunted with poltergeist type activity in his house.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  Exactly, that's another thing, um, that, uh, you know, these, these phenomena, as you, as you reported in Skinwalkers, they follow you home.

• 26:36George Knapp?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  Um, and, you know, Lou Elizondo has said that, that, you know, he investigated UFOs for, for the Pentagon, and he had orbs in his house, uh, you know, what's that about? Um, so there are a lot of things, um, as you said, it's a rabbit hole, the more you get into it, the more puzzling it becomes. And my big quarrel, you know, with the skeptics is that they claim to explain it all. And, uh, at least, if you're a skeptic, spend time in, in studying the field, because there's so much information, there's so many accounts of otherwise normal people, uh, that can't be explained. And, um, uh, it, if anything,

• 27:18Speaker 04

  the mystery gets deeper, the more you, you get into it. Uh, so we're just, you know, we've just touched on, on the beginning of it, and this is gonna take a long time, uh, if, if, if not forever, to figure out. But, um, there are things going on that just do not lend themselves to, uh, conventional understanding. And by the way, physics itself is evolving. I mean, um, if physicists know that they have not discovered everything about the way the natural world works, the way the universe works, clearly, we don't know how, you know, are there other universes behind this universe, how did the big bang start, why did it start, you know, are, are big bangs just, you know, recurring?

• 28:02Speaker 04

  Was it just one that started everything? Or do they happen periodically? I mean, all these questions, which are huge, you know, unknowable things at this point, should give us a great humility about things like, you know, flying saucers and abduction.

• 28:25Jeremy Corbell?

  Jeremy? Yeah, I wanted to look a little bit modern day and kind of into the future. Ralph, I've come to the conclusion that your New York Times article initiated a new government UAP program that has kind of been whispered, and it's going to be talked about a lot more. Congress was asking for whistleblowers, and in good faith, George and I brought some of that information and some people into Congress about a program called, or an operation called, Immaculate Constellation. Are you tracking what that is independently? Are you tracking that?

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Well, I followed it in the, you know, the last congressional hearing when it came out. And, you know, Leslie and I are aware, as you are, that there are other whistleblowers, probably a lot of whistleblowers out there with information, but they are afraid at this point to come forward because some have been retaliated against, like David Grush. But, well, there's clearly a lot more to the government program than we know, I mean, than has come out. We get whispers of it, you know, crash retrievals, Jake Barbour, you know, talked about, you know, retrieving an egg.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  And so, you know, there are all these stories, again, with varying degrees of documentation or backup. But I'm sure you guys know a lot more than I do about that program.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 30:29Speaker 08

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• 30:58Jeremy Corbell?

  Yeah, I mean, hopefully, we'll be bringing more out. But that program, Immaculate Constellation, was initiated in its form that we reported on right around after you put out the New York Times article. It was almost like a response. So there was accidental exposure to that program by a whistleblower. And that individual was talking about how it's a catalog system. So in all the classified servers of all the footage, you know, basically, they're going in using AI and pulling all that source video and collecting them together to study it. Now, if that's the case, that's just another UFO study program. But I was just curious if you're tracking it because I feel like we're going to hear a lot more about that soon.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're only the beginning of that. You know, Arrow now has new leadership, the anomalous, you know, whatever, A A R O. The last guy didn't seem to care much about UFO. He was a debunker, Bradshaw Kirkpatrick. So now, maybe, under new leadership, they'll get cracking. And there's still a lot of debunking going on in the Pentagon. As you know, their official line is, there's nothing to see here, folks. And... So that's a problem. And, you know, I don't know. But now there's a revived Congress congressional interest.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Interestingly enough, the people who are most involved in Congress in pushing for congressional action are people, for some reason, very affiliated with President Trump. Now, whether President Trump is going to take any kind of an active role in, you know, being more forthcoming as to what the government has in its coffers, whether, you know, these guys in Congress, Burchett and Paulina Luna and others, are going to make any headway, that could be very interesting. Because Congress, according to Grush, has been lied to.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  Congress is supposed to know about these programs, and they were kept in the dark. And money was spent, our money, taxpayer money, for programs that the government never disclosed properly to Congress, covered up. And so there remains a lot of good reporting to be done on that. We'll have to see. But as you know, a lot of, you know, this stuff is covered by confidentiality, top secret clearances, restrictions, so even members of Congress can't talk about it. That's a problem. Leslie and I ran into this all the time, that whenever we got close to something interesting, it was covered, it was, you know, covered by classification, top secret.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  And no one wants to get put in jail for revealing, you know, for violating their oath, including Lou Ellesando. He's been very careful. His book, by the way, which we broke in the New York Times.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Goes a long way to really clearing up some of this, but he's also still under a lot of restriction and knows exactly what he can say, what he can't say. But that's going to be, you know, whether Congress can get to the bottom of this and get more of this information out. You know, there is an alliance between the Defense Department and defense contractors, who are not amenable to FOIA's. And so, they are not talking at all, the defense contractors, and they have material, we understand, we're told, that would go a long way to helping us understand what's going on in terms of retrievals and reverse engineering.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  But they ain't talking about it. So, that's a problem.

• 34:48George Knapp?

  You know, I do give credit where it's due on that New York Times story. Because it's in the Times, other mainstream media, big media outlets, covered it as well, for a while, anyway. That gave a cover, sort of an umbrella of respectability, for members of Congress to ask questions about this. Senator Harry Reid told me that, in the days after your story broke, he got calls from colleagues on the Hill, "What the hell is this about? Is this really true? Has this been going on?" They start having briefings, closed-door briefings, in the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee. Suddenly, they become a hot-ticket item. Elected members are making public statements.

• 35:32George Knapp?

  I think that all is traceable to your story.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Well, it's nice to think that. I mean, Harry Reid was very courageous to come forward. Yeah, we sought him out, Helene flew out there to talk to him, but, you know, he took kind of a risk in going on the record, talking to us about that. And he knew more than he acknowledged, of course, but he at least said that, he gave credence to the topic and gave cover to other members of Congress to come forward. As you said, some of them were genuinely mystified, others were afraid. They wouldn't, you know, when Jimmy Carter said he believed in UFOs, he was ridiculed. And by the way, I misspoke. I shouldn't say "believe in UFOs."

• 36:15George Knapp?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  As we now know, you don't have to believe in, they exist. You don't believe in the moon, you don't believe in the ocean, they're there, and UFOs are there. The question is, what are they? But it's not, you know, I'm often asked, as I wrote a piece about in the Times and Leslie, you believe in UFOs? You don't have to believe in them. These objects are there. They've been observed, they've been measured, they've been tracked, they're on radar, they're on video. So, anyway.

• 36:48George Knapp?

  Not a religion, it's a story.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, you don't have to believe, you know. Who was it? The anthropologist Margaret Mead, who said, she made a whole point of that, you don't have to believe. And she said, that's the most ridiculous question, believing in UFOs.

• 37:06George Knapp?

  Jerry?

• 37:07Jeremy Corbell?

  Yeah, so Ralph, what's the path forward here? We're all interested to learn more about this. We're all interested to report on it. We're all interested to get to some sort of consensus reality that matches maybe an actual reality when it comes to the UFO mystery. So what is, in your mind, the path forward? As a reporter, I mean, you and George have done so much work on this, I'm catching up, but you and George have done so much work on this. You know, what is the path forward? Is it more whistleblowers? What do we do to move the ball forward?

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question. Look, Leslie and I are working on this all the time. And it's not easy to get into the New York Times, I'll say that. First of all, today, it's more difficult than ever because of what's going on, you know, in the country. The country's focused completely on, you know, what Trump is doing, and the, you know, controversies over shutting down of agencies, etc. So you're coming in with a UFO story, that's not going to, you know, carry much weight these days. So that's the first problem. And the Times has a very high threshold, as we saw. You know, a lot of stuff gets talked

• 38:18Speaker 04

  about, you know, in social media, and there's all kinds of people in social media, people who know what they're talking about, people who don't know what they're talking about, so-called skeptics. And it's a wilderness, it's the Wild West, you know, with people putting forth claims. So in order to, you know, sort through that, and again, to put it on the record, you got to get people talking on the record in a field where so much is classified. So.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  It's extremely difficult, but I think more whistleblowers remember that Grush himself never put his hands on a retrieved craft. He admitted that. His accounts were all second hand. So where are these retrieved craft, if they exist? You know, who's holding them? Where are they? That's one thing. What other records of encounters are there? I mean, we know from Dave Fravor and others that Ryan Graves, that they've been, including a lot of near misses with these objects, Navy pilots and these craft. There are supposedly excellent

• 39:29Speaker 04

  videos out there of these objects. So, you know, where are they? Why? You can understand that the government is protecting certain technological information if we want an advantage, let's say, in reverse engineering, but it's really not giving away any secrets if you say that we know that this certain technology exists. So I think, you know, the American people, and actually people all over the world, have, are entitled to know more than they've been told about what the military has learned about these phenomena. Because we respect the military. The military's in a class by itself when it comes to sources

• 40:14Speaker 04

  of information. That's what we've been focusing on, Leslie and I, much more than getting individual accounts from random people, because the military has access to a higher grade of information, let's say, and they come with more credibility. Not that other people are lying or making it up, but between an account from, you know, the military and account from a random, you know, passerby, we're going to go with the military account. So those are the accounts that we still need to pursue and see what Congress can find out and reveal within the constraints. That's the way forward. There are a lot, as you

• 40:56Speaker 04

  said, there are a lot of whistleblowers out there who have been afraid to come forward. What do they know? Take the information a step further. Jake Barber put forth new information in his. You know, appearances on media with Ross Coulthard and others. So I think that's the path forward, but it, you know, I don't think it's going to come with quote disclosure, the big D, like suddenly there's going to be one moment where everything is revealed. It's going to come in fits and starts. You know, this is the biggest government secret of all time. It dwarfs Manhattan Project.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Presidents have not been led in on the secret, a lot of presidents. It's stove piped, as you know, it's, the information is held by very few special access programs, squirreled away in different little corners of the government. And it's not amenable to information. People, according to testimony in Congress, people have been killed. That's another interesting aspect of this, which we haven't really been able to learn more about, but it's been, it's been stated that people have been killed to protect the secret. Right. So this is the number one secret of all time. And it demands to yield to reporting, but it's not easy.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  Again, if you want to do it as we have to do it on the record, people who stand behind their statements, very few people are willing to do that. They don't want to violate their oath, or they don't know. The people who don't know, talk all the time. The people who do know, don't talk. So there you go.

• 42:39George Knapp?

  You know, I think there's, the three of us don't doubt that there are, is crash retrieval materials, maybe entire craft, maybe bodies. I think there's a lot of substantiation for that. But what is not substantiated is, is that we really understand it, you know? I don't know anybody who, even if they have these materials, that doesn't tell you where they came from or why they're here. Even if they have the bodies, it doesn't say where they originate. Maybe that's part of the reason for the secrecy is, there's no one who really has the ultimate answer. So when the public demands the truth, we can handle the truth. We're not sure, A, anybody knows what the truth is, and B, we're not sure what the ultimate truth is, so. Maybe we can or can't handle it. We don't know.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, it would be refreshing for the government to say, yeah, bodies were retrieved, but we don't know anything about, you know, where they came from or why they're here. That would be a huge breakthrough. And it wouldn't necessarily give our adversaries much information to work on, would it? I mean, if somebody in the government would say that. But I think that's an example of information that's being withheld, for whatever reason, if it's true, by the way, I mean, you know, people, including people like Dave Grush have alleged that bodies have been recovered. So it's not just, you know, anonymous people saying that. But, you know, what happened to the bodies?

• 44:02Speaker 04

  You know, how were they treated or examined, etc. You know, millions of questions. But it's gonna come in fits and starts with reporting like what you guys have been doing. But it's not easy. It's not easy.

• 44:17Jeremy Corbell?

  Yeah, I think it's gonna be hardcore independent journalism without all the hurdles. You know, you have to be fastidious with your work. But if you're a good reporter or a good journalist, you know, using your own platform to get stuff out, because ultimately, there is a lot of resistance, there is a lot of control within a lot of types of mainstream media. And I've tried it. I've tried it the right way, the easy way, or, yeah, basically the easy way, bringing whistleblowers into Congress. And there was so much fuckery. When Jordan and I have attempted to do that, to testify, to give information, to bring documents, to bring people in, it was so managed, so controlled, they boldly, just boldly lied, bold-faced lied about certain things, that at this point, it's gonna be the hard way for them,

• 45:02Jeremy Corbell?

  which is, I think, people will trust independent journalists to handle their stories correctly, whistleblowers coming forward, and then the world can dissect it. But I think that's the path forward. I'm kind of fed up, to be honest. And I think at this point, we just have to do our own work, put it out, and let the world decide.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  Right. No, I agree 100%. And if we could get access to some of these whistleblowers, and again, when we, you know, put forth the story of Lou Elie Sando, and we put forth the story of Dave Grush and the debrief, we talked about their credentials. And, you know, and again, anyone who comes forward with a story, we have to vet. But if their story checks out and their military credentials check out, like Jake Barber, for example, we would love to put out a story about somebody else with maybe even more firsthand information than Dave Grush. But so far, as I said, as you know, the people have been reluctant because, first of all,

• 46:01Speaker 04

  they want to talk to Congress first, they want to stay anonymous, they're afraid of retaliation, because despite the whistleblower statute, people have been retaliated against, we know that from Dave Grush, and according to him and others, people have actually been killed for speaking out. But that is the way forward, more firsthand, verified information, and maybe Congress can get it. And then, you know, if we have it, journalists like us, like you two and me, people with, you know, credentials, and we can get a mainstream, you know, news organization to print it,

• 46:44Speaker 04

  that's another problem, because they're very skeptical, properly so, and they're very preoccupied these days, but if we can get the information, verify it, bring it to a reputable news outlet and convince them, then we'll have a very good story, and that would really move the needle.

• 47:02Jeremy Corbell?

  Yep, that's the path forward, man, we've got to do it ourselves, it's not working through the systems of government, I have direct experience of that with the last hearing, so now it's time, I think, we put stuff out, we try to get the bigger outlets to pick it up, and look, if they're slow to the game, that's their problem, you know, we can report on it, let them pick up after, but if it's a story, it's a story.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  Right there.

• 47:23George Knapp?

  Ralph, one last question, do you ever meet a source who says they know the answers to this stuff? I can tell you, these aliens are from Krypton, or they're from the parallel dimension, or anyone like that?

• 47:36Speaker 04

  I hear people saying that, and I don't believe them, because the people who say they know all that stuff, I don't trust. But, you know, I didn't want to end without a plug for this other book that I did with my wife, UFOs.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Because I did the book on John Mack and after that, my wife heard me doing all these interviews and she said, wouldn't it be, she's a children's book author, wouldn't she say, she said, wouldn't there be a children's book in this because kids don't know what to believe. They hear all these things on TV and they, you know, so we wrote a book for children called UFOs, O H S, that is strictly nonfiction. It's sort of what we know at this point, the mystery of UFOs, that librarians, you know, can cite, parents can cite, teachers can cite, that give kids a factual background. It's beautifully illustrated by an artist my wife Debbie knew, who did a book, another book of hers, Adam Gustafson.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  And interestingly enough, he pictured the UFOs from above, looking down on them, as if, you know, there's some higher power looking down on the UFOs. Anyway, we're very proud of that book. And I think it is a good way of, because, you know, the kids are the ones who are going to inherit this mystery. And you might as well give them, you know, some factual basis to start on, because they don't know what to believe. They think it's all, you know, cartoon stuff. But they're going to be growing up in a world where hopefully there'll be some answers. And we want to give them a little factual grounding. So.

• 49:17George Knapp?

  It's hard to focus on UFOs right now, as you said. I mean,

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, it is. There's so much stuff going on on Earth, that, you know, people think, oh, it's a luxury. We don't need to worry about UFOs. But they're going to be with us for a long time.

• 49:34George Knapp?

  Rob Blumenthal, great talking to you. Thanks very much.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Thank you for the opportunity. Real pleasure. Thanks, Rob. Good to see you, man. Okay.