The UFO Kill List: Who Paid the Price? (Ft. Richard Dolan)

This episode dives deep into one of the most unsettling and enigmatic figures in American history, James Forrestal, the first U. S. Secretary of Defense, whose descent into paranoia and suspicious death still sparks intense speculation. Was Forrestal silenced over what he knew? Historian and researcher Richard Dolan shares how a single book launched his decades-long investigation into the UFO phenomenon, unraveling hidden threads in our historical narrative. We explore the infamous Majestic Documents, the debated authenticity surrounding them, and post WWII factions between the Air Force & Navy. The conversation moves into the murky waters of military secrecy, disinformation, and how researchers, often ridiculed and dismissed, have paid a steep personal and professional price for chasing the truth. At the heart of it all lies the reality-shattering nature of UFOs, where events like the Pascagoula abduction, backed by police recordings and credible witnesses, pierce through layers of denial and control. | Richard Dolan | YouTube ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@RichardMDolan Website ➤ https://richarddolanmembers.com/ | Sponsors | Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code AMERICANALCHEMY at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/americanalchemy -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Patreon (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://www.patreon.com/c/JesseMichels Discord ➤https://discord.gg/crHc44m3kF Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Website ➤ https://www.jesse-michels.com/ Merchandise ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] #JesseMichels #RichardDolan #UFO #Alien #History Chapters 00:00 The Unraveling of James Forrestal 10:19 The Breakaway Civilization and Financial Discrepancies 18:58 UFOs, Military Encounters, and the Nature of Secrecy 28:41 The Role of the Navy in UFO Investigations 38:43 Historical Accounts of USOs 47:39 Crash Retrievals and Underwater Operations 57:29 The Mysterious Death of James Forrestal 01:13:36 JFK, Assassination, and the UFO Connection 01:19:19 The Dark Legacy of Nazi Science 01:20:52 Unraveling the Kecksburg Incident 01:21:14 The Aztec Crash: A Controversial Case 01:22:50 The Kingman Incident and Its Implications 01:24:04 The Struggle for UFO Disclosure 01:29:28 The Reality of Extraterrestrial Presence 01:34:22 The Media's Role in UFO Disclosure 01:40:22 Science Fiction and UFOs: A Reflection 01:44:25 China's UFO Phenomenon: A Black Box 01:51:19 The Complexity of Global UFO Research 01:53:24 The Influence of Power Structures on UFO Research 01:58:38 The Pascagoula Abduction Case 02:04:17 The Long Island Crash and Its Aftermath 02:18:15 Reflections on UFO Research and Legacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  People were noticing all throughout this time that Forrestal seemed like he was unraveling. He started developing these weird nervous tics. He said, "I'm being followed by strange, foreign-looking men." He started dipping his fingers into glasses of water all the time and just wetting his lips.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  I drink only distilled water, not rainwater.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Oh, great. See what you're getting at?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Couple of big, tough Navy guys grab him and throw him the hell out the window. And I'm absolutely convinced that's what happened.

• 1:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  Oh, it is.

• 1:04Jesse Michels?

  And in the 80s, it felt like maybe the US moved from a strategy of secrecy and denial to flood the zone. And flood the zone doesn't mean put out BS. It means put out partial truths and put out a lot.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  People did see it emerge from the water, circled their transport ship twice, totally silent. He said there were high winds. This thing should have been bouncing around in the wind. It was rock solid. He writes in his diary at 3:30 a.m. on August 12th, 1825. "The night watch reported this orange spherical object rise from the ocean." Let's get down to the fundamental reality here. We are dealing with a phenomenon.

• 1:48Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  It is a reality-shattering phenomenon. I do believe that there's a good reason to think that we have been monitored or observed for a long time. It's not that we're being too crazy and too... We're not being... We're not going out there enough.

• 2:02Jesse Michels?

  I think that's right.

• 2:29Jesse Michels?

  Here with the great Richard Dolan. We just did this amazing, um, kinda live show for a bunch of people.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It was a lot of fun.

• 2:36Jesse Michels?

  It was a lot of fun. I told you afterwards, I think you're the easiest person to interview because, uh, you know, I just have to tee you off and then you, you just go. Uh, and, uh, yeah, it's an honor to be here. It's a long time coming for me and, um, maybe what we should start with here in this kind of, you know, private setting is I'm curious to know how you got into UFO research to begin with and who your inspirations are.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a lot of inspirations in my life, some in, uh, some in this field, some beyond. Um, this is a story I've told a few times. I don't wanna kinda sound like I'm, I'm rehashing it, but I wanna, I'm gonna try and do it fresh. Um, I was always like a very like driven young, young person and, um, I always felt like there was this very intellectualized destiny that I wanted to pursue. I didn't really know what it would be. I've always been drawn to history and politics. Um, discovered a real deep love of literature when I was in my, my early twenties and, uh, that's remained with me. But as a young person trying to make a professional life, I thought, well, I would, I would finish a PhD in history and teach at a university.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Uh, when I was in my youngest portion of that, I had, I was totally unqualified to, to try to do what I ended up doing. I was studying German history. Uh, my German language was minimal at best. And here I was studying the, uh, basically the J. Edgar Hoover of Otto von Bismarck's 19th century Germany, uh, back in the 1850s and 60s, a man named Wilhelm Stieber. And I'm like, oh, this is an interesting guy. And I'm diving into his career and I thought, I'm gonna do a dissertation on him. I wrote a hundred and fifty pages or whatever. And it failed. I just, it was, I was, I was unable to crack Wilhelm Steber. He's an interesting guy. He did blackmail people. He created a brothel in Berlin in 1870.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  He would take pictures, all this stuff.

• 4:28Jesse Michels?

  He literally was the, a J. Edgar Hoover of German unification.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:33Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And it was amazing. But anyway, so I bailed out of that.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  That was when the Berlin Wall came down. I was, I was there. I was in Berlin during that whole period, 1989. I was trying to, trying to wrap this thing up and it just failed. So I go back to the States and, and I left for about two years. I was studying at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. And, and then I went back and I thought, you know what? My, my German sucked, so why don't I just do like American history? Cause I know that language. And I went in and I focused on United States diplomatic history. And I did great. I was really, really into it. I was very deeply, and by this time I was in my early 30s, so I was a bit more mature. And I was studying Harry Truman and his presidency.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  And I was doing a lot of Soviet stuff too, but I ended up studying 1950 national security strategy, just before the outbreak of war in Korea. And, you know, it's like, who cares? But that was what I was doing at the time. And I wrote another 125, 150 pages of a dissertation on that. And, which I did not finish. So I had two unfinished dissertations. And I was in a bookstore, just like a ordinary bookstore one day in Syracuse, New York. And I saw a copy of Timothy Good's very classic work, Above Top Secret.

• 5:54Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  And it was the subtitle of that book that caught my attention. It was The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up. Oh, wow. So here it was, like 1994, so I'm about 32 years old. And I flipped through the book and I'm like, I know that name. I read his diaries. I know that department. Wait, what? UFOs? What, what is this? Like, it was this great cognitive dissonance. And I thought, this is, this looks like a fairly serious book. He's got a variety of documents. It looks like his research is at least halfway decent. And my question wasn't, are UFOs real? My question wasn't like, are there abductions or are there crop circles? I wasn't down that road.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  My question was simply, even if this was a mistake, like if they were mistakenly interested in this UFO thing back in, or the flying saucers back in the 40s, how come I never read about it in any academic history book, like ever? Even if it was a mistake, like, would you not think that's kind of interesting? You go back to 1947, 48, and I'm reading here in Tim Good's book, like, the Air Force and the Navy, like, they were totally into this. And you're in the early Cold War, yeah, that's damned interesting. And so I thought, well, I bought the book and I just went down that rabbit hole. And I thought, I'm gonna just spend like two or three months. And I just wanted to resolve for myself, like, was this a thing or not a thing? And that was it.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  And then I figured like I would just leave and go on to my life. And those are my favorite, famous last words. So I read Tim's book and it was like, this is a very good book. Started going online, back with the baby internet as it existed, all the news groups, you suck, no, you suck, I'm gonna kill you. You know, the bulletin boards as they existed in the 90s. But there were some good UFO bulletin boards and I went down that. And the next thing I knew, I just, I left. I left the University of Rochester. And, and it was a real crisis in my life because I'm in my early 30s. I'm like, I've got all this ambition. I wanted to do something. I wanted to teach at a university, but I just lost the belief.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  I lost the belief in that whole system. I lost the belief in academia. I lost the belief that I wanted to do that anymore. And I was totally obsessed with UFOs. I would, I would remember for an entire year, I'd lie in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking all of these if thens, like, if, if this is real, then was I totally wrong about everything I thought I knew about history? What is the truth then about the Truman administration that I was studying? Or Eisenhower or Kennedy? Like, there had to be- This whole subterranean reality that I was oblivious to. And when you're, when you think you're a smart person and you think you're well educated,

• 8:49Speaker 01

  that's the hardest because you wanna like, you've got your ego there. I had my ego, like absolutely, I wanted to be like, I'm, I'm a smart guy. I think I know everything, but wait, oh wow, I missed this whole thing. It's not easy to admit.

• 9:04Jesse Michels?

  No, it's not when your identity is so tied up in the system. The system's given you positive feedback until that point to just accept, you know, that sort of crumbling and finding something new, I think is really, is really tough. But you do, you read something like Timothy Good's, you know, Above Top Secret and you're like, this is a whole ontology separate from, you know, the reality that I know. And it's so well researched and it, you know, if you associate, you know, psy ops around UFOs with like, you know, American intel, like he's coming up from British Ministry of Defense. He starts with the Battle of Los Angeles, but he goes through like the, really the UK history and.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I'm impressed that you just can roll right through that. I mean, I just tossed Tim Good out there and you're like, yeah, yeah.

• 9:48Jesse Michels?

  Well, he's amazing. I mean, you gotta, you know, like, you gotta pay respects to your stuff, you gotta pay respect, you gotta know that these are canonical, I think, you know, works. Today's episode is sponsored by Incogni. You ever Google yourself and realize how much of your personal info is just out there? Your address, your phone number, old jobs, even your relatives, all online for anyone to see? There are these companies called data brokers and they make a living collecting and selling that information without you ever knowing it. They sell it to marketers, recruiters, even risk assessment firms. Worst case, it ends up in the hands of scammers or identity thieves. That's why I started using Incogni.

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• 11:13Jesse Michels?

  Thank you to Incogni for sponsoring this episode.

• 11:20Jesse Michels?

  In UFOs in the national security state, you bring up this idea of a breakaway civilization. And you have Catherine Austin-Fitz, this former Housing and Urban Development employee, who then went on to be a consultant, who's uncovered trillions of dollars worth of fraud.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Discrepancies in accounting, yeah.

• 11:37Jesse Michels?

  Discrepancies in accounting. Yeah, there you go. It's a nice euphemism. So what is a breakaway civilization? And what is the nature of the contact that we're seeing?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an interesting... I haven't really thought... I haven't talked a lot about the idea of a breakaway civilization in a little while, but I still think it's probably true. And just to give a background, it was a phrase that I coined, I don't know, about almost 20 years ago now. I do a lot of reading of other types of historians and I was reading a story named Arnold Toynbee. Some of you know of him. He writes meta histories of civilizations. And I was kind of in that headspace. And I thought, you know, what is it that actually makes a civilization distinctive and unique? And I thought, well, there's a lot of things. There's like your social structure and your economy and your ideology, your cosmology. And I thought, you know, if you really think about the classified worlds, especially like assuming like the Roswell event or other crash retrievals happened, you have

• 12:32Speaker 01

  this very, very deep classified structure that keeps the technology and the science classified away from you and away from me so that we can't really look at it. And I thought, well, what do they do with those breakthroughs in their technology? Well, they're gonna learn new things and they're gonna privately, maybe, patent them and keep them away from the rest of us and they're just in danger of running more and more away from this. Will they have functional flying saucers one day? Can they go off-world? Can they encounter other beings and all of this? And I thought, well, they're really, actually, kind of like a separate civilization, one that's broken away from our own. And it was a totally theoretical idea, it still is, I guess, but I think there's evidence for it in a lot of different ways. And so, that's what I was talking about.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And I think it's a kind of a breakaway group that has its own legal protections and all of that. So, I've known Catherine Austin Fitz for many years. I absolutely admire her work. She's a brilliant financial expert, you could say. She did, she served with the first George Bush Senior Administration back in the late 80s, early 90s as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. She told a really, a story, it should be funny, but it's actually really tragic. She said, "When I went into HUD, I said, 'I wanna look at, I wanna look at the accounting, I wanna look at all the books.'" And they said, "Well, no, you're not, you're not authorized to see that." She says, "To hell I'm not authorized to see that."

• 13:58Speaker 01

  So, she finally got her way and she said, "What happened when they brought in the financial records?" She said, "You know the old library carts with all the books on them?" She said, "They wheeled in, one after another, filled, stacked with papers, like, organized, disorganized." And she's like, "God could not pull this apart." She said, "You'd need the greatest accountants in the world to undo this god-awful mess." And she concluded, like, "This whole system is designed so that it is impossible to audit." And that was her start. And then she goes through four years of that and she had her own amazing tumultuous journey

• 14:37Speaker 01

  dealing with analyzing the US government and then, and then eventually looking into, she wrote a really great paper called "The Myth of the Rule of Law." I highly recommend it. And then she told a really interesting story about, I think in 1998, she was invited by... A gentleman named John Peterson of the Arlington Institute. John Peterson was on many, many shortlists for DOD, Secretary of Defense position for years. She wrote about this and he said, "We're doing a little get-together of a mini-conference to discuss what it would be like in a world where extraterrestrials are openly acknowledged as living among us." And she said, "The biggest regret in my life was not doing that."

• 15:20Speaker 01

  She was afraid because she, at that time, she was looking at connections of the US government and drug trafficking, intelligence communities and all of this, and she knew that they were after her. And she was afraid that this was like a setup, and so she didn't do it. But I think she came to regret that. But anyway, that's Catherine, and she's come to look at discrepancies in financial doings of the Pentagon and the federal government in general. So back in 01, Donald Remsfeld, famously before the House Armed Services Committee in, I think, July of 01, just before 9/11. Now, the Bush administration were brand-new at this time, so in a sense, what he's about

• 16:04Speaker 01

  to say was no skin off their nose. This is really indicting Clinton years. He said, "Yeah, we've looked at the Pentagon records and there's 2.3..." Well, he kept revising it, but originally it was 2.3 trillion dollars in unaccounted expenditures. He said, "If you can believe that, chuckle, chuckle, laugh, laugh in the House." And that became 2.1 trillion on September 10th, and then came 9/11. And then you never hear about this again. That was kind of like gone. A few months later, there was a guy named Dove Zachheim who took over the accounting of all of that. And he, this is like in 2002, and he's like, "Yeah, no, we got to figure it out. It's all done.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  We've just, you know, had to look at the books a little more carefully, and it's down to zero. We have no more discrepancies." Literally, that is what he said. But anyway, so Catherine's been on top of this all these years, and then the question arises. Does this mean the money's missing? Or is it just you've got accounting discrepancies where you're not getting your books right? I do think a lot of it is that. It doesn't mean that 2.3 trillion dollars got stolen. But it does mean there's a lot of opportunity for money to just go missing. And one thing she has always said is our accounting, our global financial system, she says is like an open window. It's not a closed system, it's an open system. So, in other words, the money goes out somewhere.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  And this is where she and I really connected because she's like, I think that this idea of a breakaway civilization is really right on. And I think some of this money is going, a lot of this money is going to that. To support and fund and, you know, keep that whole thing secure.

• 17:44Jesse Michels?

  And I believe in her Tucker Carlson interview, she mentions your work. And he's like, where is all this money going? And she goes, well, talk to Richard Dolan. And she goes, space, very vaguely, but like, you know, the implication is almost like they're using this in some of these, you know, some of this off the books UFO research. I believe also that Jordan, that, not Jordan, John Peterson story where they're doing a simulation of, you know, extraterrestrial contact at the Arlington Institute. This is from a researcher named Lynda Thompson. She's very active on Twitter, she's great. She-

• 18:18Speaker 01

  We know Lynda, yeah.

• 18:19Jesse Michels?

  She said that John Peterson promised to show Catherine Austin Fitz a UFO if she would stop engaging in her research.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  I don't think I caught that one. That's interesting, yeah.

• 18:32Jesse Michels?

  I don't know.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, interesting.

• 18:34Jesse Michels?

  Do you think-

• 18:36Speaker 01

  By the way, John, I don't know if I should say this or not. John Peterson and his wife, along with James Woolsey, CIA director at the time, and his wife were the people who invited Stephen Greer to a dinner in the early 90s in which Greer has many times talked about this. So I'm not really spilling any beans here. Just kind of interesting connections going on here. And I think you interviewed him.

• 18:59Jesse Michels?

  I did.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't know if that ever came up.

• 19:02Jesse Michels?

  I don't know if it was an interview, but um-

• 19:07Jesse Michels?

  So you have trillions of dollars off the books. She's talking about deep underground military bases and facilities. Do we have documentation that this exists? And how far have we made it? Presumably, some of this might be getting siphoned off. You know, we all probably believe that there's some reality to the UFO story. Is some of this money being spent on reverse-engineering UFOs?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Well, all we can say is, "I think so, we think so." Is there proof? That's a hard thing for me to say. I don't know what I can say in terms of proof. There's a tremendous amount of good research showing that we have these so-called "dumps," deep underground military bases. I don't think there's any question that that's real. We all know that there are such things. I used to work kind of closely with a gentleman named Richard Souter, who's done a lot of work on underground base construction. He went through the documentation. I think he made a very, very strong case that even back in the 40s and 50s, we were looking, the military was looking strong about how to go deep. You know, partially, a lot of it's legit. You know, if they're worried about like nuclear war, nuclear exchange, how do we have secure

• 20:16Speaker 01

  underground facilities that are not, that are impervious to attack? But of course, a lot of other things can happen in those things. Not just underground, but potentially in the oceans. This is, I don't think this is necessarily impossible. If you have the ability to go under the ocean floor, at least in maybe the shelf areas, where they're a little more shallow, there's a lot of possibilities here. In terms of proof, it's difficult, you know? A lot of this stuff is hidden very, very well. Hidden in plain sight, perhaps. But to answer your question, I don't know if I can answer it.

• 20:54Jesse Michels?

  I think all of these are somewhat unanswerable questions, but you're as qualified as anybody.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  What is your opinion of these new sightings of unidentified objects? With all due respect to the Air Force, I believe that some of them will prove to be of interplanetary origin.

• 21:10Jesse Michels?

  My mind just went here, and it's somewhat of a non sequitur, but mid-century UFO stuff. I remember watching a video of you talking about a letter that FDR had written about a very destructive weapon that America had acquired, and that that had come from extraterrestrials. And you thought that that was maybe a valid letter. Am I getting this wrong?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Well, I'm trying to think. There's the so-called majestic documents. You know, one of the people at this conference where we are is Ryan Wood, who is a very good friend of mine. I've known Ryan for years. He and his late father, Dr. Bob Wood, are of course are the curators of the majestic documents, which are kind of related to the MJ-12 documents to some extent. And Ryan and his dad did extensive forensic analyses of those. Those are not just photographic negatives. Those are actual pieces of paper that you can study them. But what you can say with the MJ-12 documents. So they first

• 22:12Speaker 01

  appeared in 1984. They were probably sent from somewhere near Kirtland Air Force Base, and so we know that. That's a connection to the notorious Richard Doty. And they were sent to a filmmaker and friend of Bill Moore, researcher, a guy named Jamie Shandere, who has his own, had his own very interesting intel connections, I believe. So that's how we get them. Now, the thing is, you set the stage for this. So in the late 70s and the early 80s, the UFO field is being rocked by two major developments. So one was the recently strengthened Freedom of Information Act. So in the late 70s and through the 80s,

• 22:55Speaker 01

  early 80s, UFO researchers could petition the government for documents. And they were getting thousands of pages of documents related to UFOs. This is a shocking thing. You know, all through the 50s and 60s and most of the 70s, the government agencies, CIA, FBI, military agencies said, "Look, we don't really, we don't do this. This is not in the interest of ours. We don't really give a damn." And then suddenly, thousands of pages of military failed interceptions and CIA memos and FBI investigations, like it's all there. It's like they were clearly lying. So that's one thing. And so from that perspective alone, if you're on the side of the secrecy, you're thinking... Are they gonna shake the tree just enough and then the right document's gonna come out and now we're screwed?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Like, is that gonna happen? So that was a concern. The other prong, the other threat to secrecy were the researchers who were engaging into looking in crash retrievals. People like the late Leonard Stringfield, who was the true pioneer of crash retrieval research. But also Stanton Friedman, also Kevin Randle and Don Schmidt and the late Don Berliner and then Tom Carey and all these people. So like they're, but in the late 70s, there was, a lot of this was just slowly building. It wasn't, we didn't really know a lot about Roswell at that, we're just starting to talk about Roswell. But that was a threat. So these two things.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And then, in the wake of all of that, we get these MJ12 documents, which are allegedly memos to Harry Truman, or letters signed by Harry Truman describing the formation of this organization to manage the UFO secret, referring to crash retrievals and Roswell and all of this. And so it, you know, you had a lot of skeptics, the late Philip Klaas, a man that I think was deeply, deeply connected to the US intelligence community, in my opinion, not just mine, said, "Well, you know, Truman's signature, that was, that was not his actual signature. It was identical to another one." Well, I think they were using AutoPen then as well, actually, if I'm not mistaken. So I don't really know if that matters.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  But that was supposed to make it like fake. It was a fake. So it was a hoax. New York Times was very happy to support that. But, and there are, you know, legit, strong researchers who do think it's a hoax. Robert Hastings, who you mentioned, very strong, very strong. And he, he and I in the past had some disagreements about that. And I very much respect Robert's research, so don't get me wrong there. But he does not, he does not believe that they're legit. And a lot of people don't. I don't know, I don't feel that way. I think that, I don't know about those MJ12 documents. I don't really know where I stand on that. But I think... When I look at the majestic documents that Ryan and Bob collected, you print them all

• 25:46Speaker 01

  out, it's this thick, it's like an inch and a half thick, and you just try reading them sometime. I did this, you know, 20 years ago. I was afraid of looking at this for the longest time, but I thought, all right, I have to read them. I printed them all off, I put them in my own little combound collection, and I just started reading them, page after page. And they are highly sophisticated, extremely sophisticated, frankly. And so if you're thinking if this is a hoax, you have to ask yourself, who's creating this as a hoax? All right, you have documents that are through the decades, the 40s and in the 50s and the 60s, all in a very, like, seems exactly accurate format. The data that's in them is written in exactly

• 26:31Speaker 01

  the correct way. So it's not some guy in his basement doing it all by himself, that's for sure. Yeah, there's documents in there, and actually, my memory is a little more fuzzy on this maybe than yours at this moment. But FDR did have some statements, or letters, I believe, where he expressed an awareness of this phenomenon. There's another letter, supposedly, from Albert Einstein.

• 26:53Jesse Michels?

  Einstein, yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Very interesting document. Yeah, I mean, those are debated, and I don't spend a lot of my time really fixating on them, but I go back to them every once in a while. And I suspect that there is a lot of truth in them.

• 27:09Jesse Michels?

  I do, too. I wonder if they, you know, you know the name James Jesus Angleton, of course?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 27:14Jesse Michels?

  So, you know, one of the founders of the CIA, kind of an Alan Dulles acolyte, very deceptive and devious.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  He ran US counterintelligence for several decades.

• 27:25Jesse Michels?

  Several decades, and seemed very involved in the UFO issue. And this is really interesting. He was actually stationed in Italy at the time, or his father was, Hugh Angleton, at the time of the Magenta crash in 1933, which is really crazy.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I only recently learned this, maybe they get that with you and Mel Grimms interview. I think maybe that's where I picked it up.

• 27:46Jesse Michels?

  Uh-huh. But there are rumors that the Knights of Malta have something to do with the UFO story as well.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  Well, what I'm saying is, yeah, they did, because, because Angleton was there.

• 27:57Jesse Michels?

  And so it's interesting, you know, I've heard, and I don't know if this is true, that maybe he had something to do with the MJ-12 leaks. And in the 80s, it felt like... Largely, maybe the US moved from a strategy of, you know, secrecy and denial to flood the zone. And flood the zone doesn't mean put out, you know, BS. It means put out partial truths and put out a lot, put out a lot of truths.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  That is the way disinformation works. This is something we, I'm really glad you bring this up because, what is disinformation? It's not the same as lies.

• 28:32Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  You know, like, so say we're on the inside and we've got this secret to protect and we are afraid, like, at some point, this is gonna come out. So how do we deal with this? So maybe you put it out, but you sandwich it between things, or you stick at least one thing in there that can be factually demonstrated to be a hoax or a lie.

• 28:49Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And that's, you know, that's an inoculation. It's like you get inoculated against a disease by getting part of a virus, but it's deadened, and your body recognizes it and can fight it. So it's like you become inoculated against the truth. The truth is put out there, but it's sandwiched in such a way that it's, it's not credible.

• 29:09Jesse Michels?

  I love that. You say you're immune to it. And, you know, it's interesting. I think you have Blue Book where it's just kind of rationalized, explained the whole thing away. The Conde Committee sort of kills it. And then in 74, Heineck seems to flip and they create, you know, UFOs, past, present, and future. And from then on, there seems to be this kind of outward openness on the part of the DOD around, you know, UFOs. And in the 80s, it feels like, you know, you have Rick Doty doing all his stuff, and you have, you have this sort of flood the zone, like, we're actually gonna actively promote and see if, and this was peak Cold War era.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  I would say yes and no. I mean, you know, officially, the Pentagon throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s was like, no, this is nonsense. We're not gonna do this at all. So officially speaking, there was never any, to my knowledge, a genuine promotion of a UFO reality coming from that institution. So I just say that. But there were, let's call them shenanigans going on, and, you know, we've... Learned about Richard Doty, which is a really weird topic for me because I actually met Richard Doty once.

• 30:15Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  He's extremely gracious, genuinely, like, he's a nice guy when you meet him.

• 30:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  And I know.

• 30:23Jesse Michels?

  I'm sure he's extremely likeable.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, he is. So, so you gotta be, but, right, that doesn't mean he's truthful, of course.

• 30:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  But I do know for a fact that he has very high respect from within a lot of his colleagues from the intelligence community and from the, you know, the peripheral, like, scientists and people who've worked with him, they like him. They respect him. His own father was, I don't know all the details, but was deeply involved in Area 51 and with UFOs.

• 30:55Jesse Michels?

  I didn't know that.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, and Richard Doty was kind of brought into that as a young officer, or a young military person. So, he, like, when he says these days, like, he knows it's true, which he says many times, like, I, I think he's telling the truth on that.

• 31:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  He is saying he knows it's true because he does know it's true. You know, in the early 80s, late 70s, early 80s, and I'm not here to defend this, but he was doing his job. Look, he was in the military. His job was to, I assume, protect certain secrets that were wrapped by Kirtland Air Force Base and the like. Paul Benowitz was a very highly intelligent man, looking at some of them, and, and that's what Doty did. So, he, he did kind of lead Benowitz astray there.

• 31:35Jesse Michels?

  Doty also first shows up, this is kind of a little-known thing about Doty, in 1977 Ellsworth Air Force Base, Mario Woods has an experience.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:44Jesse Michels?

  Where he is, according to his hypnotic regression, abducted, at the very least, he ends up 10 miles away from Ellsworth Air Force Base.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:52Jesse Michels?

  With marks on his body and his, his partner, Michael Johnson, in a catatonic state. He then goes through this whole debrief session, and guess who's there? Rick Doty. And so, it is interesting that, I, I think a pretty, at least, if you're into UFO stuff, you know, the Mario Woods case seems pretty legit to me. It's in a line of, you know, all the Robert Hastings, UFOs and nukes.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:13Jesse Michels?

  And then you have Doty show up, you know, a couple of years later, and he's definitely psyopping, you know, Benowitz.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's an, there's a document at Ellsworth there, which has been manipulated, and that's been traced back to Doty.

• 32:25Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  So, at least I'm pretty sure. So, you know, the thing is...

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not, I'm, I'm not going to like condemn, and I, I try not to wag the finger too much at people, like it's easy to do that. Um, everyone's got a job to do.

• 32:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Uh, we have a job to do, which is to get past the BS and to try to understand the truth.

• 32:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And, um.

• 32:49Jesse Michels?

  Well, I always say it's, it's, it's dangerous enough just going for the truth. So don't go ad hominem against like, yeah, there are people who it's like, it's obvious that they're sort of counter intel or whatever.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 33:00Jesse Michels?

  But like, it would be one thing if they were clearly leading you astray on a single thing consistently. And you're like, come on dude, stop doing that or whatever. But I think, you know, some people want you to stop your pursuit of truth in order to just antagonize those counter intel people or whatever. And then you're, you're sort of losing.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 33:22Jesse Michels?

  You're, you're gonna get less close to the truth.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:24Jesse Michels?

  And you're gonna nuke yourself. And it's just like, so it's like, what do you, what do you want? Like.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  We all, we've all grown up. We all know the government does all kinds of stuff. And it lies and lies. I've started saying this probably before many other people. I've been on this for a long time. Of course, I, I, I did a whole study on the history of false flags a few years ago. And, um, so yes, we know there's shenanigans and they never stop. But is every single thing an op? And, and what I'm hearing are like some, some people out there, like they, it's almost like there's, the implication is the government wants us to believe in UFOs now, therefore they want, and they want us to believe in aliens now, therefore it must all be black budget, special ops.

• 34:13Jesse Michels?

  That's right.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And that the whole alien thing is a ruse. And I'm like, that is so wrong.

• 34:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  You are so wrong if you do that and you're going down a very incorrect path.

• 34:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, well, it's this reflexive, if the government says something, I'm gonna put a minus sign against it.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:28Jesse Michels?

  And so you're gonna be totally thought controlled as a result. If you have some, and, and maybe there is some, it is important to have the hermeneutic understanding of where the government stands on a thing.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  But, but there is no the government, there's the whole thing.

• 34:40Jesse Michels?

  That's true, they're factions.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Everyone's talking.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Like, oh, the gov- but what you have is, I mean, look, the Pentagon alone is a trillion dollars a year.

• 34:47Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Is a mountain of labyrinths and fighting bureaucracies. And I can tell you for a fact, you go back to the earliest UFO history, and there's always been factional wars on this subject, within the military, within the intelligence community. They don't all agree on policy. They have never agreed on policy. In the 1940s and early 50s, there were factions that wanted openness on UFOs from within that military. We know that. Read the old books by Donald Keough. He actually lays it out very well. So, that was the case then. It is the case now. And there are people, we'll just mention Lou here again, who, within that system, who support openness.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  And there are other people who absolutely do not, and they will fight to the last, you know, the last battle if they can. So, that's the fact. And so, when you're getting messages coming out of there, it's not, it's not like a unified system. It's like, who's the faction that's speaking there?

• 35:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  It's a war that is going on, and we need to understand this.

• 35:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  They don't understand that there's a war going on inside our establishment right now, which is in real trouble.

• 35:57Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Okay? There's a lot of desperation on a lot of fronts, UFOs and beyond. That's going to breed factional disputes galore, and hard, you know, battle plans from within to disable the other side. Totally understand that.

• 36:14Jesse Michels?

  Totally. I couldn't agree more, and I think there are probably less outright liars in the space than people trying to front-run the truth. So, you see disclosure's gonna happen, you maybe have to get in front of it or something. And so, I think there are all sorts of, you know, factions battling on that front. Speaking of secret science, which I agree with you, I think the second you look at this topic for a week plus, you realize that there probably is secret science going on, and there's a real UFO phenomena going on, and those two are two disparate threads. We spoke on the phone once about Thomas Townsend Brown. I don't know if you remember this.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Oh, a little bit, yeah, yeah.

• 36:49Jesse Michels?

  And you told me an interesting story.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  What the hell did I say?

• 36:54Jesse Michels?

  I talked about how his work might have made it into the B2 stealth bomber, and then you had an interesting anecdote.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I do, yeah. Okay, so I'll tell this. This is true, yeah. So, back in 2008, I was at a conference in, was it in Vegas or in Denver? I think in Las Vegas, so...

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I met with a brilliant, very cool retired Air Force Colonel with a PhD. So he had a very strong knowledge of the UFO topic. He, we had a lot of interesting conversations. I met him and I met his wife too. She's a really nice lady. So we sat down and he's, one of the things he said is he was part of the B2 stealth bomber project. And I said, "Oh." I was so like, young, I was so enthusiastic. And I just read a paper by Paul Lavolette.

• 37:48Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Who is a researcher on electroggravitics. And had things to say about the B2 stealth bomber, having incorporated essentially, basically, principles of electroggravitics to give it a form of lift. An additional kind of lift. So, yeah, so I'm sitting with this Colonel and I'm like here and he's like closer to me than you are right now. And, and also, we were in a pretty crowded area, so there's like people milling about, you know, and I'm not recording anything, I'm just, we're just talking. And I said, "See, have you heard this paper by Paul Lavolette, talking about electroggravitics as part of the B2?"

• 38:27Speaker 01

  And he, he was so nice, but at this moment, he literally put his hand out like this, "Stop." And he looked this way, and he looked this way, and he leaned forward and he just whispered, "That's bullshit." And, and he wouldn't talk anything more about it. And as soon as he said that, I thought, "All right, that's gotta be true."

• 38:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  That's gotta be true.

• 38:52Jesse Michels?

  That's a kind of a telltale sign.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Definitely. Yeah, it was a very interesting moment. I didn't think I would hit a sore spot like that or something that's sensitive, but it was clearly very sensitive.

• 39:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. It's so fascinating. And as a good segue to, you know, your current work on UESSO, submersible objects, Thomas Townsend Brown was actually a Navy guy.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:14Jesse Michels?

  And it seems like, you know, he was in the Navy, I think, from like 1933 to 42. And it's- It seems like the Navy knew a thing or two, maybe about UFOs before the Air Force actually did.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  It's totally possible, yes, absolutely. For example, one USO account, which is actually the account that started me on this book project that I'm in, nearly done. I did the first volume, that's out, two and three are coming out.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Was an account right by the Aleutian Islands, near a little island called Adak Island. In the summer, excuse me, of 1945. So the Pacific War was still happening. The European War was done by then. And there was a US transport ship called the Delleroff, which was coming back from Japan to Seattle. And it was passing by, still in the middle of ocean, but north of it, the closest Aleutian island was this place called Adak. You can look it up on Google Earth.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  And according to the primary witness who was interviewed, a man named Robert Crawford, and he spoke with a number of researchers, including Dr. James McDonald, who's kind of a legend himself. Anyway, Crawford said, yeah, the crews, they saw this. He didn't see the object come from the water. He saw it right after that. But other people did see it emerge from the water. It's a disc-shaped object, about 200 feet in diameter, circled their transport ship twice, totally silent. He said there were high winds. This thing should have been bouncing around in the wind. It was rock solid, totally stable. And then it zipped off to, I think, the east or southeast so fast.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  And he said, you could see this flash of light as it left. So that's US Navy.

• 41:04Jesse Michels?

  You have just documented 670-something unidentified submersible object cases. You've created this whole database and taxonomy around them. Which case shocked you the most and why?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  There's some very excellent ones. One of the early ones did shock me. It was from 1825, and it was in the South Pacific.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  So it was a British vessel called the HMS Blonde. There's a naturalist on board. I liken it to, you know, in the movie Master and Commander, there was that great buddy of Russell Crowe, the doctor. And so I think of him as this type of a guy. So he's the naturalist. He wrote a diary. His name was Andrew Bloxham. And he kept a very detailed account of the travels of this ship during this. They actually went from Hawaii to the UK, back to Hawaii, and then down to the Cook Islands and on their way to South America. And so, on the return trip from Hawaii, they're passing the Cook Islands.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  And he writes in his diary at 3:30 a.m. on August 12th, 1825, this is 200 years ago. He said, "The night watch reported this orange spherical object rise from the ocean at 7 degrees." He said, "It lit the deck of the ship so bright you could pick a pin off the deck. It then descended back into the water and then rose a second time, and then descended into the water." And what's interesting, you could find this, it's a PDF online, you could look it up. And he, you know, before all of that, this is like just really detailed account of the travel, it's very meticulous. And after that, it's very like conventional, very meticulous. Interesting.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  He published this as a diary at the time, so it's been in publication for 200 years. And there's just this one entry of this. He said it was red hot like a cannon shot. It was, I think, about the size of the moon or the sun, although there was no moon out that night. So there's no confusion with that. And that's it. It's just this bizarre thing. I read this and like, holy crap. And what, I like to pair it with another encounter from 150 years later involving a United States aircraft carrier. The USS John F. Kennedy, which was in July 2nd, 1971. It had just finished doing a series of qualification tests, which they do periodically to stay,

• 43:35Speaker 01

  you know, current. And we have this account from the man who ran communications at that time. His name is James Kopf with a K. And he wrote about this several times, around 2000, 2001. He spoke to the Disclosure Project in 2000, so he's on record for that. So anyway, this is what he says. July 2nd, 1971, it's 8:30 at night. He's running the comms, and he said, "All the inbound communications start spouting gibberish." He's like, "Hmm, what's going on?" And then he's on the, and hears on the intercom, some sailor, like, freaking out, screaming, "It's God, it's the end of the world." That's what he hears. Wow. Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  So, that gets his attention. So he goes out, and outside to see, a glowing, orange, like, roiling, orange, yellowish, reddish. I think he's, I'm thinking he said it was the size of a beach ball at arm's length, which would be quite a big. It was just above the ship. Or maybe off to the side, it wasn't totally clear. He said, "I'm standing there, watching this, for about 20 seconds." Lot of other people, he said sailors were, one guy, he said he had to be sedated. This was a really intense moment. And then the ship goes to battle sta, uh, general quarters, battle station. So he had to go back to his comm.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  And he didn't see it after that, but for the next 20 minutes, the ship was on battle, on general quarters. And he stated that the weapon systems went offline. He learned later. And, I'm trying to think what else. That was essentially it. So no communications, no weapons, and, and then that ended. And he doesn't know how this departed, because he didn't get to see it. But that's his story. And then he actually said, "By the time we got into port a few days later, the only, the only..." Discussion about this at all was from the ship's captain. He got on the ship's intercom and said, "Well, as you all know, certain things happen aboard a US naval vessel that have to remain on the vessel and not to be discussed anywhere else.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  I hope I made myself clear," you know, something like that. And that was it. That was it. But what was interesting, made me think of it, is that this was, I mean, it sounded like it could have been the exact same type of thing that Andrew Bloxham, back in 1825, was describing, this spherical object. And I guess I'll just say, you know, we hear a lot of people talking these days about orbs and spheres, and I have to say and noticed a large number of USO encounters do involve these kinds of orb-like spherical objects, which frequently, and certainly, I think, in the case of the JFK, engage in some kind of electromagnetic interference. And there's a lot of that. A lot of that goes on.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  I guess I'll just add, when I finished doing all of these cases and hunting them down in all of these disparate sources and just generally wanting to breathe life into them, most of these were completely forgotten cases. But had a lot of long conversations with my wife, Tracy, about this, and she said, "You know, you should really look at, peel out some relevant categories for each of these cases." And I did that. I pulled out each case like 15 different categories, like special effects from there. Was it at daytime or at nighttime? What was the shape of the object and all of this? And what I noticed, after looking at all of the statistics, and I put a very amateurish spreadsheet together, large, large, but amateurish spreadsheet, but it helped me to see patterns.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  And I noticed about 10% of all the cases involved EM interference, about 1 out of 10. It's quite a lot. But that percentage has doubled when I looked at the military cases. So there was a 2X likelihood that a military encounter would have electromagnetic interference. I'll just add one other thing about that. In the few cases where people reported missing time with a USO encounter... And there are such, or sightings of a being in connection to a USO, and there's a few of those, those instances are four times as likely to report electromagnetic interference. And when I looked at these numbers, I mean, maybe my data sample's small, I don't know,

• 47:58Speaker 01

  but it's as large as, you know, whatever it is. But it makes me think that these EM encounters, they're not accidental. They're kind of a tool, maybe a weapon, like, they're not, it's not a random thing. So, I'm getting a little off track here, but it's just, it was fascinating going into all of these, looking at these trends and these relationships that exist within these sightings. There's an intelligence, and those guys, they know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing.

• 48:32Jesse Michels?

  Do we have a USO crash retrieval program? The thing that comes to mind for me is, I think Howard Hughes had like, it was like a front company for the CIA, it was called like Global Marine Corporation, and out of that came the Glomar Explorer.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 48:48Jesse Michels?

  And, you know, we know that we've retrieved exotic technology from the ocean floor, so have we possibly retrieved USOs?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  I think yes, I believe that's probably a yes. The Glomar Explorer, yeah, this Hughes Corporation, they actually recovered a sunken Soviet submarine in the 1970s. It was an incredible feat, because they went down, something like three miles down to the Pacific floor. They got it, it broke, but they recovered half of it. They actually gave a proper military burial to some of the Soviet sailors that they recovered. So that was an incredible thing. And in terms of recovering discs, I once, I received a communication from a gentleman who was former US Navy. He told me about having attended a conference, not this one, but another excellent one, the International UFO Congress, really great place there.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, I'm hanging outside, and I run into this other Navy guy between lectures, and we're just chatting, and this guy was aboard the USS Nautilus submarine, so that was the first nuclear-powered submarine. And he said, you know, the Nautilus went through a retrofitting, or a refitting, excuse me, in the mid-sixties, which is true, we know about this. And he said, one thing that we did is, we had like this, we created this hatch, this side hatch, to be able to acquire...

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Objects that were just unknown, unknown objects in the ocean. Now, I mean, this guy, the guy like wrote to me and then, and then he, he never really was able to follow up with this Navy guy, so he lost that whole thread. So he wrote to me and we went back and forth on it and I, I reported that, it's in, it's in my first volume here. I don't know if this is true or not, like, because a Navy submarine is not going to be able to go down to the ocean, the bottom of the ocean floor. That's way too deep. But it can, you know, about 10 or 15% of our oceans are basically ocean shelf. And that might be a different thing and you might be able to have a submarine kind of

• 50:52Speaker 01

  work, work that area if, if this is a true thing. Definitely, look, we have a long, long history. Crash retrievals is a really strong interest of mine personally. And there is no question, we've had a number of crash retrievals or recoveries of these UAP. We could do a whole interview on that frankly, there's just a lot to say about that. Now, those are retrievals that we know about from land. You know, the waters of this world are, are much more remote to us and much more mysterious and I don't think a lot of these stories come through. I did, there is one gentleman that I did speak to many years ago, his name is David Noble

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Whitehorse and he was, did you not talk about this?

• 51:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, we did.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I thought we did, yeah. So, and did you interview him?

• 51:43Jesse Michels?

  No, but it made its way into the Malmgren thing that I did. And then I realized it was actually, you know, I think there, yeah, it was a whole can of worms. But this, I think it was a year before Malmgren. I think that was actually a little off. It was one year, because it was, it wasn't Bluegill Triple Prime, I think it was one year before.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:04Jesse Michels?

  And he's a really interesting character.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  He's a great guy, I, you know, I interviewed him, I don't know, 15 years ago and I can't even remember how I found him, but we talked extensively and he was a member of, aboard a US ship called the Finch back in 1962, they were involved in what became Blue Gill, Triple Prime, part of what is called Operation Dominic, you can look this up, and there's a series of high-altitude nuclear detonations. This is at the peak of like, we were just going crazy detonating these massive hydrogen bombs. It was crazy. So, he said it was October, this is like, right around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 25th, 1962, they were off a little

• 52:47Speaker 01

  place called Johnston Island, which is about 500 miles off of Hawaii, out in the Pacific, and he said, "We did a detonation." He said, "We often would have bogies in the atmosphere before we would do a detonation, like, as UFOs, and they would always disappear just before we would detonate the bomb." So, they're hanging out, checking it out, evidently. He said, "On this occasion, so, we had to do the detonation, and we were all ordered below deck, this is protocol, and then, to his surprise, some other officer or some other guy comes down and says, 'You, you, you, and you, and you, I want you out now,' out on the, I think, the port side, one of the sides, he says, 'You are now to face

• 53:32Speaker 01

  forward, you are not to look to the left, you are not to look to the right, just look ahead of you and observe.'" And they're like, "Oh, okay, whatever, orders are orders." And so, what they see is this long cigar-shaped object zooming by horizontally, and that's all he saw. Then, he was doing a cross train with radar, so later that day, or evening, he's talking to the radar guys, and they're all talking about the bogey that was, seemed to be shot out of the sky. And, and this is clearly what he saw, and it landed at some point in the Pacific, and they were sending a series of ships to go and see about trying to recover it.

• 54:12Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating. So, actually, I did a little research. I think the Finch might have been an earlier Operation Dominic test. We can workshop this live, or I don't know, anybody could search, but... There's, I have a lot of reason to believe that there were anomalous objects that came out. Actually, Bob Jacobs, 1964, you know, Vandenberg case. He was stationed at Johnson and Toll a few months before the Vandenberg case where he saw, he was a photo instrumentation specialist, he was on Big Sur and he saw a UFO wrap around an Atlas 8F missile.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 54:48Jesse Michels?

  And

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Only two years apart.

• 54:50Jesse Michels?

  And he said it was, you know, ubiquitous water cooler conversation that a UFO shoot down was being used as a cover for shooting down a Soviet nuke.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  The scuttlebutt at the time by every single person on that island, when I got there, this was engineers, technicians, my airmen who had been down there before me. We were told that what happened is the Soviets had launched a nuke into orbit up above us. And JFK told Khrushchev, "Take that down."

• 55:25Jesse Michels?

  So I found that to be an extremely interesting, another firsthand testimony.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  That's wacky.

• 55:31Jesse Michels?

  And this was around Blue Gill Triple Prime, so this was, that was, you know, what it, this detonation that had happened a year earlier and then you have the whole Mount Mgram testimony, which I think is very important as well. I want to ask you, so this begets all sorts of questions around secrecy. You know, everybody talks about the Air Force. You have in 1947, Twining writing this memo, you know, he's the head of Air Material Command for the Air Force, and he's expressing kind of earnest confusion as to how UFO, how UFOs work, but he says they're, you know, real and not visionary or fictitious. The Office of Naval Intelligence is the oldest intel organization in the US, you know,

• 56:11Jesse Michels?

  1890s, you know, they call it the silent service, the Navy. What does the Navy know and how deeply embedded are they in this issue? Even the reports that came out, I think in 2020 and 2021 were Office of Naval Intelligence led.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, Navy, I think, has been deeply, deeply involved in this from the beginning. It took me a long time, even, you know, researching this for years to Fully appreciate just how deep their involvement was. If you go back and look at some of the original books that were published by people like Donald Keigho, he's one of the people that kind of my springboard, he kind of talks a lot about this. Keigho was a Marine, so associated with the Navy. And so he knew a lot of top Navy brass. He was friends with many admirals. And so he had a real ear to what was going on there and described quite frequently the rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force. This is very well known. I mean, after the Second World War, the Air Force was the new organization. They had a lot of prestige.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  They were the only branch that had nuclear weapons. The Navy wanted their own nukes. They eventually got it. There was something around 1949 or so called the revolt of the admirals. This was a big political fight between the Navy and the Air Force. So there's all, there was all this kind of bureaucratic institutional rivalry that already existed. But it also had to do with this, the flying saucers, as they were being called back then. The Air Force was getting all the attention. But one thing that Keigho wrote about, even back then, was like Navy people were having UFO encounters and the Navy personnel would get really angry because Air Force people would come on the Navy ships and throw their weight around and take over the investigations.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  And the Navy guys were really resentful of this. The Secretary of the Navy in 1950 was a guy named Dan Kimball. He had his own UFO sighting. So he was, he was flying in dual with Admiral Arthur Radford, who's quite famous. They were flying out from California to Hawaii in 1950, I think it was 1950. Yes. And Keigho wrote about this. So what happened was Kimball's plane and Radford's plane were both accosted by an object that circled around their aircraft.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  They're like a number of miles apart, but they both had this happen. And as a result, Kimball decided, "We are going to have our own separate investigation of this. The hell with the Air Force." But at least according to what Kehoe learned, it didn't seem to take off, didn't really go anywhere. But the rivalry was always there.

• 58:49Jesse Michels?

  I think Ross Colthart is somewhere here, and he ended up having a conversation with Nat Kobitz, who was Director of Science and Technology for the Navy. And this is the end of Nat's life, I think he was dying of cancer, and he said that he had seen UFO technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And it was involved these sort of bonded metals that were fabricated at the atomic level and said all sorts of other interesting stuff, so.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've heard about this. I've not actually listened to it yet, and I'm kind of really excited about doing that.

• 59:24Speaker 05

  General Eisenhower is called back to duty, meeting Defense Secretary James Forrestal to discuss many vital questions.

• 59:30Jesse Michels?

  So one other kind of interesting axis around that time Navy, James Forrestal. So James Forrestal was a Secretary of the Navy before becoming Secretary of Defense, meeting a very mysterious, untimely death.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  He was murdered.

• 59:44Jesse Michels?

  Okay, let's hear that.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  He was absolutely murdered.

• 59:47Jesse Michels?

  Did he have anything to do with the UFO issue?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Maybe, yeah, probably.

• 59:50Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Probably. Yeah, so Forrestal, this was one of my real pet projects when I broke into this field. And Forrestal was a fascinating guy, a very brilliant man, of course, kind of a financial wizard. I think he played football at Princeton back in, you know, as an undergraduate. So then he becomes, after he makes his fortune, he becomes one of those so-called dollar-a-year men under FDR for the war, basically to support the war effort. He becomes under Secretary of the Navy, and then Secretary of the Navy at the end of the war. And he was actually one of these guys.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  ...who fought against a strong Secretary of Defense position. When we were going through the reorganization in 1947, National Security Act, kind of a total, let's like, we're done with the republic, we're creating the empire now, people, and we got to reorganize the whole military system. Forrestal fought tenaciously for naval independence under a unified Secretary of Defense. And the real issue was, does the SecDef have budgetary authority over the independent services? That's really where the power is. And Forrestal particularly fought so well that he won that battle, and the Secretary

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  of Defense originally did not have the authority to tell the Army and the Navy and the Air Force what their budget would be. He didn't have that capability. So he was a weak SecDef. And then, irony of ironies, Forrestal ends up in that position as Secretary of Defense. So he, for his entire two and a half year tenure in that role, one of the biggest problems he had with Truman, we tend to forget this, was that Truman wanted to cut the military budget significantly. At the same time, he wanted to expand US military presence globally. So there's kind of a disconnect there.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  And the Joint Chiefs were saying like, $15 billion, are you out of your mind? Which, of course, that's nothing today, but at the time, it was also not very much. They wanted like $30 billion, I think. And Forrestal sided with them, but he was kind of stuck, because Truman's just like, just make it happen. And so they had a very unhappy relationship over that. Then, at the same time, we have the flying saucers making their appearance in the military world and in the American psyche. It's like, we're talking about it. And... This was something that he was definitely very aware of. It was impossible not to be.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  I read Forrestal's published two-volume diaries, which were published after his death. We'll get to his death in a second. And of course, there's not a mention of UFOs or flying saucers in there. But anyway, so what ended up happening? So Forrestal and Truman, their relationship became rocky. Truman's up for reelection in 1948. Everyone's like, sure, he's gonna lose. Thomas Dewey, the Republicans sure win. And Forrestal, bad move, had met with Dewey, and it got out, and Truman was pissed, like, "You betrayed me." But anyway, so Truman wins, shocks the world, tells Forrestal shortly after that, "You're done."

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  I think in January 49, he says, "You're out. You're out." And they give, but publicly, they give Forrestal this nice going-away ceremony, it's like, "You're a great American," and all this stuff. And this is the crazy thing. So this is January 49. Forrestal leaves this ceremony, he gets into a limousine, and in the limousine is the Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington. Now, Symington was like one of Forrestal's major political enemies. Forrestal was convinced, and I bet he was right, that he was being followed. Symington was probably involved. There was a journalist back then named Drew Pearson, who was writing stories about Forrestal.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  And people were noticing, all throughout this time, that Forrestal seemed like he was unraveling. He started developing these weird nervous tics. He said, "I'm being followed by strange, foreign-looking men. He's looking around, he's very paranoid." He started dipping his fingers into glasses of water all the time and just wetting his lips, like there's some weird thing going on with him. So he gets out of this meeting, and he goes in the limo, and there's Stuart Symington, who they hate each other. And all that we know is that Symington said, "I want to talk to you about something." No one, to my knowledge, knows what actually happened on the limo ride back.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  They were going back to Forrestal's office. But what we do know is that when Forrestal got out of that limo, he was, he goes into his office, closes the door.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  And he's shut in there for like hours. Finally, his secretary knocks on the door and she opens the door and he's, he's sitting in his chair, he's just staring at like this blank wall. And he's repeating one sentence.

• 1:05:44Jesse Michels?

  What is it?

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  You are a loyal fellow. So, he's out of it. So they start making the phone calls, you know? And suddenly the team comes and they collect him and they fly him down to Hobie Sound in Florida. And he's there for, I think, six weeks, five, no, maybe less than that, a few weeks. It's been a little while since I've remembered, since I got into all of this. At one point down there, he apparently, we're told, tried to hang himself with his belt. That failed. They bring in a army psychiatrist by the name of Menager, I think William Menager, he was kind of famous. He had a clinic.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  And then one of his friends, Robert Lovett, a future Secretary of Defense himself, goes to visit him. And apparently, Forrestal's first things to Lovett, first words were, "Bob, they're trying to kill me."

• 1:06:42Jesse Michels?

  Uh.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  So then they fly him back up to Maryland, to the Bethesda Naval Hospital there. I think it's 16 floors. Against all the advice of the attending physicians, they take him to the top floor. Because they're like, if this guy's suicidal, that's the last place you should take him. He should be on the ground floor. But no, the national security people said, "Top floor." So he's sequestered there. Now, he's visited by a few interesting people. We all know Truman, yeah. Oh, and one thing they certainly did is they grabbed his diaries. Like, that's not making it out. They expunged the shit out of those diaries before they were ever published.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  But Truman, Forrestal's successor, Louis Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson, young guy named John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

• 1:07:33Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  And who else?

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Forrestal's own brother, William, was not, did see him, finally was able to see him after a long, long time. Forrestal was never allowed to see his spiritual advisor, a chaplain by the name of Shihei, Father Shihei. What guy in a hospital is not allowed to see his priest or rabbi or spiritual minister? Like, that's kinda weird, right? Forrestal wasn't allowed. So, anyway, he's there for, I think that's six weeks, yeah. And he's getting better. He develops a friendship with a, one of his Navy corpsmen guards. Like, they're in eight-hour shifts outside his door, you know? And one of them, they just strike up a really good

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  relationship. And Forrestal says, "You know, when I'm out of here, I want you to be my assistant." So, this is really a good thing. So, he's thinking about the future. And, but his brother William, was it William or Henry? Yeah, Henry. He is, he is angry that the Navy's not letting his brother out. Oh, and meanwhile, over in that whole last week, Forrestal's main attending physician was out on, at a conference. So, the henhouse has no protection here. Really. So, anyway, Henry calls the hotel, the hospital, and he's staying, I think, at the Watergate Hotel?

• 1:09:01Jesse Michels?

  Okay, wow.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Is that where it was?

• 1:09:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Or the main, I think that's where it was. Anyway, he calls them, and he says, "If my brother is not out by tomorrow, goddamn it, I'm going in, and I'm going to raise holy hell, and you're not going to like what I have to say." So, that was the, that was May 21st, 1949. And on the night of May 21st going into the 22nd, that's when James Forrestal did his 16th floor bungee jump out the window. So, what happens? So, what we know is that Forrestal's Navy corpsman, who he was pals with, who had the midnight shift, somehow went AWOL and was gone. No explanation. A new guy comes in. And at 1:30 to 1:45, we are told...

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  He opened the door to check in on the secretary on Forrestal. And he sees Forrestal up in his bed and he's reading a book and he's, looks like he's taking notes, this type of thing. He asked, "Would you like a sedative?" And this is according to his testimony. Forrestal said, "No, I'm good." And according to the replacement corpsman, he said, "The next time I went in there, he was gone." Well, he'd gone out the window. So, what apparently, the official story is that Forrestal is transcribing ancient, an ancient Greek play, The Death of Ajax. It's actually really amazing stuff.

• 1:10:35Jesse Michels?

  Sophocles, right? Or who is it?

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  That's Sophocles, yeah. That's a Sophocles one. And he stops transcribing in the middle of one word, Nightingale, I think. Stops in the middle of it and decides, apparently, that he must kill himself at this very instant.

• 1:10:51Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  So, he, according to the official story, gets up. And I think in the, there's a shower where he could have done this more easily, but he didn't do that. He leaves his room, goes out into the hallway, there's a little, a little window there, behind a radiator, you know, the radiators that were ubiquitous back in those days. And he takes his bathrobe cord, ties it very tightly around his neck, ties the other end, not so tightly, I guess, around the radiator. And think of this, it's a weird way to kill yourself. Tries to hang himself outside the window?

• 1:11:33Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  No suicide, I don't think anyone's ever tried to do that. So, according to the official story, the cord slipped off the radiator and he just plunges to his death.

• 1:11:44Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Now, let's look a little more realistically here. How difficult would it be? I mean, Forrestal had been very athletic as a younger man, but he was small, a lot more frail, he wasn't really doing great. Couple of big tough Navy guys or big tough young guys grab them and throw them the hell out the window.

• 1:12:02Jesse Michels?

  Then tie the bath, the radiator after the fact, yeah.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Jesse Michels?

  That sounds pretty.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  That is, I'm absolutely convinced that's what happened.

• 1:12:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  And then this is 14 years before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. So you have a country that is, they're gonna believe every single thing the military says. They just won World War II.

• 1:12:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  They're national heroes. And what they said, they immediately said it's a suicide. They followed up with a kind of investigation, which I read the transcript, most of it anyway, the Willa Cuts Review, I think it's called. They actually interviewed the Navy corpsman who was on duty.

• 1:12:37Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  You'd think like, this is your main guy, you like, you gotta really grill this guy? I think he was in for like 15 minutes and gone, like.

• 1:12:43Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Like, thank you for your testimony, young man, you can go.

• 1:12:47Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  There was no, no, no, no investigation, no critical examination of this.

• 1:12:53Jesse Michels?

  I believe Forrestal and JFK actually knew each other from the Marshall Plan much earlier, actually. They had had some interactions, which is an interesting thread of history.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm not sure how much I knew about that, so I believe it, though.

• 1:13:07Jesse Michels?

  Uh, it's so fascinating. Another Forrestal thread possibly related to UFOs is I believe one of his direct reports was Admiral Richard Byrd. And so you have Operation High Jump.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. That would be Byrd, yeah.

• 1:13:20Jesse Michels?

  In 46 and, and you have, you know, off the coast or down the coast of Argentina, you have this, this big fleet of American ships.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Jesse Michels?

  Going for, I don't really understand what the story is, like, it's a very weird story.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  It's kinda weird.

• 1:13:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  I don't even know if I believe the high jump thing. I, I think I don't.

• 1:13:38Jesse Michels?

  Do you believe, like, when you say you believe the high jump thing, you believe it was even a mission to begin with?

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  No, no, I think it was, but I, I don't believe they ran into basic leg Nazi flying saucers.

• 1:13:48Jesse Michels?

  Space laser Nazi flying saucers.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  I don't think I do, no.

• 1:13:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  And, and, um, cause I remember I read Byrd's full statement that he gave, and if you really read the whole thing, I don't think he's really talking about flying saucers. There was, was a death or more than one death, a couple, I mean, it's very difficult conditions down in Antarctica, so that's one thing. But my, my thing is like, if they ran, if they were chased away by super advanced technology, well, like a year and, and two years and three years later, like, we went right, we went back to Antarctica. It's not like we didn't go back there.

• 1:14:19Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  So. Maybe there are details that I'm missing and I will fully like, look, if someone is able to show me a really strong case for it, I'll change my mind in a heartbeat. I'm not committed, but I, to like, thinking it's prosaic, but I just don't know that I'm convinced it's, um, that they're in to not.

• 1:14:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's really, it's really spotty. It's like, I think he came back and he gave a speech, but it's unclear.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  He said, "We're, we're living in a new world now where from pole to pole, uh, danger can come."

• 1:14:49Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  I'm paraphrasing probably badly, but he's talking about the fact that we have nuclear weapons and, um, and there will be delivery systems. Everyone knew it was all gonna happen.

• 1:14:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  And that's a smaller, we're living in a smaller world, in a dangerous world.

• 1:15:01Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  I don't know that he was talking about, uh, aliens.

• 1:15:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Or, you know, whatever.

• 1:15:07Jesse Michels?

  We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. You have Danny Sheehan in the audience here, the great Danny Sheehan, who's done incredible research around this. Um, do you think, you just actually did a great show on this on your podcast. Um, do you think there is a connection between JFK's assassination and UFOs?

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:15:32Jesse Michels?

  We just had an 80,000 document drop that was less helpful than, I mean, it's like, well, I'm more confused, you know, afterwards than going out. Like, I'd rather just listen to Danny on it.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  I likened to JFK's murder to, uh, Agatha Christie's murder on the Orient Express, in which, spoiler alert, everyone killed the guy. There was, there were more than one motive, there were many, many motives to, to assassinate President Kennedy. Many. He was, he was a threat on every level you can imagine. You know, my wife and I just re-watched JFK, Oliver Stone's great movie.

• 1:16:05Jesse Michels?

  Great movie.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Just like, less than a month ago.

• 1:16:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  I'm really glad, back into the left, remember that. Uh, but that was, that was a great movie. And see, he brought up the Vietnam connection, which I think is legit. He also brought up Operation Mongoose, that's the whole Cuban operation, that's absolutely part of it. Uh, he didn't bring up some other things, like there's the whole Federal Reserve connection, Pan Kennedy was a threat on that. Uh, and, and the whole nuclear connection, where, I think that, this was brought up in the movie, uh, where Kennedy really was ...interested in a kind of a nuclear reduction and maybe disarmament to some extent. So Kennedy was the guy who made the mistake of thinking just because he's president that he was actually running the show. He goes up against this national security establishment that was like, "No way, we're not gonna let you, you are like a traitor communist." That's how they saw him.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  "And we're gonna, we're gonna have to kill you for, to protect this country." That's their rationalization. But the UFO subject, yes, this is, I think, absolutely must be brought into it. The interview that you're referring to is with a gentleman who's here. His name is Philip Lavelle, and he's a very good friend of ours. He's not a published author on JFK, but he, he knows that assassination as well as any person alive. No lie. And he's a great friend. And so we talked about it, and about the potential UFO connection there. And he's, he's on board with it as well. I think he believes that this is absolutely a part of the picture.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  You know, there was a memo JFK did sign on November 11th, so 11 days before he was assassinated. It was November 11th, wasn't it? Or the 12th? 12th. 12th, yeah, thank you. Where he's directing the Central Intelligence Agency to coordinate UFO data with the Soviet Union. For, for, you know, laudable reasons, I would say. So that was part of his psyche right there. He was going against the system. You look at the majestic documents, which you referred to, and there's something called the so-called "burned memo." Where Lancer, and that was the code name for Kennedy, was described, oh, I wish I could remember the exact wording of this, "But an operation has to be done on him if he's

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  too dangerous and it must be wet." And that refers to wet, wet work, which is assassinations. So, and that was, that was written shortly before the assassination. I can't remember the date of that. So...

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think Kennedy, but I don't think it was only the UFO situation. I mean, John F. Kennedy is complex. There's a lot to see there. And as I mentioned Philip Lavelle, but the reason is Philip said, you know, you talk to JFK researchers and they absolutely will not go there. They will not, even to this day, they will not want to talk about the UFO connection. You see this in all aspects of the alternative community. It's like, "Well, I'm already taking slings and arrows from the establishment for this. I don't want to talk, I don't want to wear this other albatross around my neck." But it is true. And the UFO phenomenon, look, it is, it is the elephant in the room of United States

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  and world history of the 20th century. And, and all the academicians, all the mainstream historians and analysts, they ignore it over and over again. You know, the first director of the CIA, Roscoe Helen Carter, was into UFOs, big time. Why does no one, why did none of the historians talk about this?

• 1:19:31Jesse Michels?

  And he, and he joined the NICAAP.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was a board member. Until he resigned suddenly at the moment where in 1962, Donald Keough, his friend, they were trying to get congressional hearings, it looked like it was going to happen, and a week later Helen Carter says, "Uh, yeah, I'm out of NICAAP. Look, the Air Force is doing everything they could. I think we should lay off."

• 1:19:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  And that was the end of that. So, there's a story here that establishment historians ignored for years and years and years and years. It is the elephant in the room. If we do not understand the impact of, of the UFO or UAP phenomenon on world history, we're not going to understand a whole lot. We're going to miss a big part of the picture.

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  Reports of flying saucers are nothing new. From the beginning of recorded time, men have been seeing unexplainable things in the sky.

• 1:20:26Jesse Michels?

  Can we go rapid fire through some crashes?

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:29Jesse Michels?

  I just want to get a real or hoax?

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. All right, well, I'll see.

• 1:20:35Jesse Michels?

  Okay, Roswell.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Oh, real.

• 1:20:38Jesse Michels?

  Uh, Kingman.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Yes, real.

• 1:20:40Jesse Michels?

  Um, Keksberg.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Yep, um, that's a good one. I don't believe it was the bell that people say is de Glocke.

• 1:20:49Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Just because it looked like it superficially. First of all, the bell was not a flying device. It was...

• 1:20:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it was like some sort of torsion chamber thing.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Jesse Michels?

  High voltage electricity thing it was.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  And it probably did use rotating mercury, um, you know, like pressurized mercury and all of that, which is very important for electroggravitics and you want to get an anti-gravitic lift. Not my specialty, I should stop right there. But it was not a flying device by any means. Um, according to the legend, uh, you know, Cook, I think, wrote about the hunt for zero point.

• 1:21:23Jesse Michels?

  Oh, Nick Cook, yeah, amazing.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  That's a really good book and he, he broke this out a little over 20 years ago. And he, he said, according to, I think this was brought out in a, a post-World War II trial of Nazis in Eastern Europe, in Czechoslovakia, where they talked about this. And the claim was like, you had a bunch of scientists, like 60, a bunch of them died from the effects of this, and then the rest were executed at the end of the war so they wouldn't talk.

• 1:21:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  That, that's the, that's the story.

• 1:21:52Jesse Michels?

  The de Glocke thing is fascinating because you see a rig there now where maybe like a bell-shaped thing. Well, I mean, it looks like that shape. It's, it's really fascinating. And then I think he's also documented through this Polish journalist Igor Witkowski, who, uh, documented that Ernest Graulitz, who, um, was basically that, this SS medical chief who worked with, directly with Joseph Mengele, and, um, another guy named Walter Gerlach, who is a gravitational expert in physics, uh, were working on this project. And so you have a gravity guy and then you have a guy working with like biological, you know, specimens doing, and we know the Nazis did like experimental cell block ni, like they were doing weird stuff.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  They, they were and they were doing a lot of like off, off the, off the mainstream of physics.

• 1:22:38Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, they really were. So there's a, I, I love hearing you talk about this. Uh, back to Keksberg, I just, I guess I'll just say, uh, there's something very bizarre came down there and I don't think it was a Soviet satellite. I do not believe that. I do not believe that at all. You know, there's Stan Gordon, who's still around. I love Stan. He's really dove into this, and I think he's got the goods on it. There were, uh, there was a local radio station guy, I think Frank Murphy was his name. He goes in there, it wrecked his life. It destroyed his life.

• 1:23:09Jesse Michels?

  Ah.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Uh, on many levels. Anyway, so Kecksburg, I don't know what that was. I think it was important. It wasn't just a satellite and maybe it was something more. Maybe it was a craft.

• 1:23:20Jesse Michels?

  I have a, I have a.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:23:22Jesse Michels?

  I have a weird one for you. Aztec.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, I'm, I'm on the Aztec train. I believe that one. Aztec was, you know, was the first case that was, uh, written about.

• 1:23:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  In 1950, and it was viciously, viciously smeared and debunked.

• 1:23:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  A couple of years after that, uh, that guy named Considine. I think that was the one.

• 1:23:43Jesse Michels?

  JP Con.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Oh, JP Con. Thank you, thank you. I'm getting all of my people mixed up. It gets tough to be an older man.

• 1:23:50Jesse Michels?

  Well, you know a lot of stuff, man.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, JP Con and, and, um, but this story, what, there's, I have two very dear, wonderful people, uh, Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, who've really done the work on this. But they revived and resuscitated this case and, and what they showed was that, that Khan's expose was utterly mendacious and just driven by resentment over not being allowed to do the story.

• 1:24:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, he was gonna break it.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  With Scully to begin with.

• 1:24:16Jesse Michels?

  And he lost it to Scully and then it was kind of this pit, pit, yeah. And then the, the other weirder thread is he was family friends with Jared G. Huber as well?

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I heard that.

• 1:24:25Jesse Michels?

  Like JP Con?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  I did hear that.

• 1:24:27Jesse Michels?

  And then you have these FBI files on Silas Newton and Gebauer.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:32Jesse Michels?

  Going way back to the, uh, I think the 30s or something, and they're, they're totally redacted. Like, so it's like, why would you have these crazy FBI files?

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  This whole thing of smearing them as these shysters, you know, sleazy real estate investors, that's not, I don't think that's true at all.

• 1:24:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Um, in fact, I'm just gonna give a shout out to Richard Geldreich, who, uh, I love his research. And, uh, I talked with him and he. He's got stuff on this.

• 1:25:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  He's gonna come out with more information.

• 1:25:03Jesse Michels?

  Amazing. I would love to hear from him. Silas Newton was worth $20 million at the time.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a lot of money.

• 1:25:09Jesse Michels?

  Just for inflation.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  1950.

• 1:25:11Jesse Michels?

  It's like, that guy doesn't need to hustle people on a doodlebug oil thing.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  No, no! No, absolutely not.

• 1:25:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so anyway, I think Aztec was real. I think that actually did happen. You know, unfortunately, with a lot of these crash retrievals, Roswell was the anomaly.

• 1:25:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  In the sense that because Roswell made the newspaper at the time. And so it was harder, like, they buried it right away.

• 1:25:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  But it, but there were always researchers like, "Oh, remember that newspaper headline?"

• 1:25:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Like, so it was always kind of there. And then it wasn't until the late 1970s that a few people, especially like the great late Leonard Stringfield. He's, you asked in the beginning, like, "Who are some of my heroes?"

• 1:25:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  He's one.

• 1:25:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  I never met the guy.

• 1:25:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  Um, he was amazing.

• 1:26:00Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Amazing. But anyway, so Stringfield starts collecting and dredging up these, and he was one of the first people to interview and publish his interview with Jesse Marcel Sr. And, and by the time that happened, you're really looking 20, uh, no, 30 years after Roswell. So those people were, a lot of them were still around. Some were gone. And researchers kind of jumped in. And they found many, many, many people. Like, in the case with Aztec, uh, it just didn't work out that way. Kingman, you've mentioned that before. I just want to say that, that, there's no question in my mind that Kingman was the real thing.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Raymond Fowler, still alive, in his 90s, I think, uh, was involved in, uh, contacting the, uh, the primary witness of that.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  And so I think there's some good information on Kingman, but the problem with all of those other cases is compared to Roswell, we have like a small fraction of the number of people to be able to talk to.

• 1:27:02Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  And that makes it, that makes it tough for them.

• 1:27:05Jesse Michels?

  It shows you how managed this subject could have been in the Cold War secrecy era too, because with Roswell, nobody really knew about Roswell until 1979, 1980.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:27:16Jesse Michels?

  Stant and Friedman helped popularize it, Jesse Marcel came out.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Jesse Michels?

  But between 47 and that time, it was not in any of the UFO books.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Not only that, yes, so the UFO, you know, this applies to us today in our community. And in the early decades of the flying saucers, so it was really not an easy career move to like, you know, write and study flying saucers or UFOs. Bad career move for the most part.

• 1:27:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  So everyone stayed away from it. And so the people who were in it were often like hyper-conservative in a way. Like, it was very surprising. So like, abductions, like, no way, they're not gonna get into abductions. That's like, that's crazy talk. You're talking crazy talk. Crash retrievals of UFOs? Keep that away.

• 1:28:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  They would, and they'd been scared off of it by the JP Kohn hit piece, certainly. Despite the fact that, how is it illogical that with all of these flying discs, the United States military might have gotten one?

• 1:28:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  It's really not that illogical when you think about it. But it was absolutely off, off the limits. And when, when Stanton Friedman and Stringfield and others started looking at these crash retrievals in the late 70s, they got a lot of pushback from established, you know, UFO researchers at that time. This was not an easy sell.

• 1:28:37Jesse Michels?

  It's still not. I mean, if you Google.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:28:40Jesse Michels?

  Aztec crash, it goes Aztec crash hoax. That is the Wikipedia page of this thing.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:28:47Jesse Michels?

  And you have Scott and Suzanne Ramsay.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  That's not UFO researchers managing those pages, of course. Those are hardcore skeptical.

• 1:28:54Jesse Michels?

  Hardcore skeptical organizations, but then you give them first principles points as to why actually maybe something did happen at the time. And there's never anything to say back. It's, they always have a, well, it's been well-established that it's a hoax. And it's like, you're, that is just received wisdom. You're literally just repeating some party line. You've done zero research.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  No, I think Aztec really, that was the real deal.

• 1:29:16Jesse Michels?

  I agree. I've been there and I've been there with Scott and Suzanne and you see the trees have been, you know, where the UFO was dragged out, you see that the trees are like, you know, have been bent over in this awkward shape. You have FBI files of the two guys who reported on it, you know, through Scully or whatever, going back to the 30s. So they were clearly kind of tracking these guys, which is, you know, really strange. They were thrown, Newton was thrown in jail over this. So, yeah, I think there's a lot. And then Scully, people say with Scully, oh, it was like written in this sort of flowery, artful way or whatever, but he was the guy a lot of celebrities would go to, to give, really kind of, you know, to tell stories where, you know,

• 1:29:58Jesse Michels?

  they didn't want everything out necessarily. They wanted it told in a delicate way.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Jesse Michels?

  But he was approached by this possibly consortium of scientists that were kind of, you know, consolidated into Dr. G or whatever.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Jesse Michels?

  And it would make sense that he would have been approached. And you have all these people mysteriously dying around Scully. You have Carl Flock, you know, who's the, probably a three-letter agency guy.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  I knew Carl Flock.

• 1:30:20Jesse Michels?

  So it's like you do a little digging.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Other thing about Scully.

• 1:30:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  You read, read that book. Read just like the introduction.

• 1:30:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  If nothing else. 1950, this is a guy who really knew things really well. He was deeply skeptical.

• 1:30:33Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Of the United States establishment and the military.

• 1:30:37Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Which is an unusual thing for a journalist in 1950.

• 1:30:40Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  Uh, Scully was no one's fool. He knew things really well. It's, I would recommend anyone find the book. Just read that.

• 1:30:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  It, it reads about as fresh today as when he wrote it back.

• 1:30:52Jesse Michels?

  I agree. And you have a recording of Silas Newton speaking at the University of Denver or some, Colorado or something. And, um, so there's so much documentation from the time, but as, as, as soon as you say, this is a hoax, people just kind of, kind of look away and, and, and forget about it.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, because again, the whole thing about being in a fringe field like this.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  It's like the last thing you want to appear is gullible.

• 1:31:19Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  It's like that's the kiss of death. Like you don't look like you're stupid. I'm gonna believe every single thing. And so there's this overcompensation that has always happened in this field.

• 1:31:28Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Which is too bad because let's face it.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Let's get down to the fundamental reality here. We are dealing with a phenomenon.

• 1:31:36Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  That is beyond us. It is a reality shattering phenomenon.

• 1:31:45Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  And it breaks everything.

• 1:31:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  It breaks absolutely everything. And the reality is that we, it's not that we're being too crazy and too fr- we're not being, we're not going out there enough.

• 1:31:56Jesse Michels?

  I think that's right.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  That's the thing. This is a very, um, it's a very powerful subject in reality. What we, UFOs, UAP, whatever we want to call them. This, the, but even more than that. Like UFOs or UAP, that doesn't really even touch.

• 1:32:13Jesse Michels?

  That's right.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  That's nothing.

• 1:32:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  The, the truth is, there is an other.

• 1:32:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  Intelligence, society, civilization, whatever they are, they're here, they are established. They have bases, they have a presence. They are global every, every day. The nationwide sightings of mysterious drones. Weeks of mysterious drone sightings.

• 1:32:39Jesse Michels?

  You're telling me we don't know what the hell these drones are and New Jersey are? Can you make sense of the Jersey drones? I know you've covered these.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Jesse Michels?

  In various contexts. Uh, it's so confusing. You have, you know, Rogan and Sean Ryan being like, they're looking for loose nuclear material on the eastern seaboard. You have other people saying, you know, we found some, uh, uh, Chinese nationals like around there. And then I think there's a lot of reason to believe there was possibly genuine anomalous aerial stuff going on.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone's always like, I've solved it, I've solved it. Like, everyone's like, figured this thing out, but really, the thing that strikes me about the mystery drone phenomenon was it's like every single other UFO wave you ever study. In other words, this thing happens, no one seems to be able to explain it, everyone's got their own theory, thousands of theories are out there, and then it goes away and you have no resolution. No resolution. Well, you know, join the club, this is how, this has been going on for many, many years. There's still a lot of unknown things about this that I'm personally, I would like to get more information about, and I don't know if we ever will. There were reports of these things supposedly coming out of the water and harassing US Coast Guard vessels. That's one.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  It was apparently a swarm that supposedly came from the ocean, out of the ocean. Do we know? I don't know, but it swarmed a Coast Guard vessel.

• 1:34:03Jesse Michels?

  And yet Trump saying, it came from a garage, and, you know, these are, it's a very strange place. Biden knows where they're coming from.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  Our military knows where they took off from. If it's a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. I can't imagine it's the enemy, because it was the enemy that blasted out, even if they were late, that blasted. Something strange is going on, for some reason, they don't want to tell the people, and they should.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  With Trump, it's always hard to know, because he speaks in such an overly simplistic sing-songy way, where it's like, dude, I don't know what you're saying. But, you know, what do you? It's entertaining, but, you know.

• 1:34:42Jesse Michels?

  It is entertaining, but that, there's sorts that seem to imply something kind of anomalous, right?

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't really know if Donald Trump actually knew what these were. I mean, presumably after he became president, he might have figured out. And by the way, notice, you know, the Trump and Biden teams, they hate each other, and yet, when they talk about this phenomenon, they sound exactly the same.

• 1:35:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that's right. It's the only thing.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  There's no difference.

• 1:35:06Jesse Michels?

  It's the only thing that gets, like, AOC and Matt Gaetz to agree, and then simultaneously, like, the power structures that are clamping down to agree.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if, I don't know if we have an answer to that, and I don't have an answer to it. I was very unpersuaded by the argument that they were looking for nuclear material. I didn't find that believable at all. Because, first of all,

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  You had these mystery drones over Ramstein Air Base in Europe. You had them over Lakenheath in the UK. And there were a lot more reports of them having sightings in California. One of the problems with this is it's really hard to know, are we looking at the same phenomenon? When you look at all the massive UFO or UAP reports, it's really hard to know, like, are all of these legit? So how do you actually see the patterns here? Is the European aspect of this related to the New Jersey tri-state area aspect of it? Is that related to the California? I don't know. Because it's, who is doing the actual sure-shot research and nailing these cases down, getting field investigators out there confirming?

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  We have a lot of stories, a lot of people throwing videos out there, and I was in as much confusion as anybody else on that.

• 1:36:16Jesse Michels?

  Where do you think disclosure is going? Because, you know, you've been in this field for decades. I'm sure when you get into the field to begin with, you start to gather data and you start to probably think, like, why is no one earnestly, like, why isn't the mainstream media taking this seriously? And then you probably think, oh, disclosure's maybe right around the bend or something. And so now I hear maybe a slightly more pessimistic Richard Dolan, or where are you?

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Oh, well, yeah, sorry. Like, I have wonderful, brilliant friends who say, Richard, you know, look on the bright side a little more. And I do, I do, I do. Once a week, I actually will look on the bright side of things. So one out of seven days, and I'm there. No, seriously, you mentioned our media. So one thing that I have definitely concluded a long time ago, like, we, you know, we like to think of our media, media's supposed to be the watchdog, they're the press, they inform us, and, you know, we all kind of know a little bit better now. But really, when you look at the media, it's part of a system that must maintain itself. You have a system that is, we have a very complex society with a lot of interlocking

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  parts that really do kind of need each other to make them go. Not just to keep the lights on, but you need that, and you need all the logistical systems in place, and you need all the financial systems to be working properly. And that's how we live, that's how we eat our food, and that's how we make our money. And disclosure to a lot of those interests is a threat. It is a threat.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  It may not be a threat to you or to me in the immediate sense, but think about someone who's sunk trillions of dollars into a military infrastructure, or an energy infrastructure, or a transportation infrastructure. Disclosure could upset a lot of that. It could make some of those investments maybe worthless, or at least lose a lot of money. We don't really think about this enough. And so, it's a danger to that established society. Some people may say, "Well, to hell with it, I don't really care." Okay, well, I get that, but those guys who own it do care. And they're gonna fight every step of the way to protect their financial interests, and also their... everything else, the political stuff. And the media is part of that system.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  Media's part of that system, it always has been. You know, earlier today, I was doing an election, I quoted late Catherine Graham, who was the owner of the New York Washington Post for many years, and she famously said, you know, "Look, this is in the 80s, late 80s." She's like, "Yeah, yeah, we work with the intelligence community all the time to manage information." And it was known, it was not even apologized for. So, that's our media. And that's not even for me to criticize the media, that's just for us to, like, see it for what it is. So, I don't think we're gonna really see a media... I mean, think about since 2017. So, you have Leslie Kane, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper, they write the really breakthrough article for the New York Times, two of them. And we were all like, "Is this disclosure?

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  This was kind of an amazing thing." I was blown away by it, I was really caught off guard, it was amazing. What happened in the aftermath? Really, nothing. Nothing, nothing at all. No deep journalists, like investigations by journalists of the mainstream. You had this very moderate, measured, controlled, often skeptical response to that, where months and months and months would pass before another article would come out. Sometimes it'd be like a skeptical editorial in the New York Times and things like this. That's the nature of their investigation. So, they clearly were not interested in following up. There were no primetime news specials on this, like, none of that stuff.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  So you have to wonder this. We've always said, even the skeptics would say, well, this would be the biggest story of all time. Okay, so now we're we're we've got a glimmer of it. Where are you guys? And I think we know that's not a of actual area that they want to open up because it's too dangerous. So back to disclosure, I don't believe that we are going to ever see an honest voluntary disclosure from the US government. It's not going to be voluntary. It could be if their if their backs are pressed to the wall by, let's say, powerful revelations that become that become too unrealistic to deny.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Let's say a senior level, recent or active US government official, maybe, maybe a Pentagon person. Matt Kovitz was would be an interesting one, but he's now he's.

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

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• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Gone.

• 1:41:28Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  So but something along that level, maybe, but those those people are tough to get.

• 1:41:35Jesse Michels?

  They're very they're very tough to get. Yeah, I'm with you in the frustration. I met with one of the lead op ed people at the Wall Street Journal, maybe a year ago. And I was trying to convince her that she should write about this topic and that this was a very worthwhile, important topic. I was telling her about the nuclear connection. She did express some interest and I think she was, you know, earnest. I don't think she was like dogmatically opposed to the subject. And it's funny, she she said, oh, we have a consultant for this stuff. Said this guy's name is, you know, David Spiegel. And this guy did the, you know, NASA UAP panel in 2023, probably associated. With the whole secrecy.

• 1:42:15Jesse Michels?

  And then he said, he said to her, apparently, you know, he told us that, you know, it was all light reflections and temperature inversions. And I was like, oh, my God, Don Menzel was saying the same thing in the 50s, and it was probably working on the same mainstream media proponents back then, and where it's like, literally snapshot to today.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  So, yeah, think about it. So, The Washington Post, one of the establishment publications, has a deep system, deep state scientist, you could say, who's managing this topic for it. So, she has to defer to him.

• 1:42:47Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Basically, is what it sounds like.

• 1:42:50Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  So, that's how the whole thing's managed.

• 1:42:52Jesse Michels?

  You got your talking points. After having researched this topic for as long as you have, Richard, is there a science fiction book or movie that most accords with your worldview?

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  I'm looking at my wife right now. Well, there's a few, a few movies and shows that I think are really neat. Hey, you know, I co-authored a book with Bryce Zabel. We did After Disclosure about 15 years ago, and he, of course, co-produced the TV show Dark Skies, which was a really great show. They did one long season in the late 90s. It's tough to compete with The X-Files, but they did a, did a good job of the kind of inside machinations of an MJ12 group. I actually really like what they did there. That's almost 30 years ago. Steven Spielberg, 20 years ago, did Taken, which I think was a very, very good, good work on that.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  I'll just put this out now, because I'm a fan of him, and I talked to this man. There's an author named Lou Baldwin, who I love, I love Lou's work. And he's, he's, it's crazy to read him, because he is a self-described contactee. And I don't, I don't usually hang out or work with contactees. That's really not my thing. But Lou's work fascinates me, absolutely, and I have no problem saying this. So, he, in the 90s, mid 90s, he writes a book called In League with the UFO. Weird title. What does that mean? And then he subtitled it The Roswell Incident. It's like, this book has nothing to do with Roswell. But he was trying to, like, market it. 1997, it gets published. Roswell was the 50th anniversary, so, fair enough. But you read this book.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  It's insane. He says, "Well, I got the material for writing this book from a gentleman who gave me some papers, totally cagey about like this." And he writes an insider's story of how the committee studied the flying saucer that came into their possession after Roswell. The scientists, all the crazy stuff about the alien ship, how surreal it was, all the crazy, conscious, genius-level alien gadgets, as he calls them, that baffled these scientists, the political arguments. And I'm thinking, "This is fiction. This is the best damn fiction in UFOs anywhere." And it would be.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  And is it true? And well, to this day, people discuss it. I've communicated with Lou, I've talked with him, and he's still around, and I really like him. And I think I believe him. I think I believe this man. Somehow, he gets this information. He can talk about it. I'm gonna try to interview him one day, you should too. He's worth it. And then 10 years later, he writes this even crazier book. It's insane. It's called "A Day With An Extraterrestrial." Who has a name. The extraterrestrial's name is Milton.

• 1:45:53Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  That's a good name. So Lou writes it, and he's like, "Yeah, I'm doing my daily walk in the park where I live." And this crazy guy accosts me and says, "Hey, I remember me." He's like, "I don't know you at all." "Yeah, yeah, you know me very well." "Well, I don't think I know you at all. Get the hell away from me." Next thing you know, he's been paralyzed, he's floated, levitated into a ship, no one sees it. And he goes for an entire day on this crazy Alice in Wonderland adventure. This is Alice in Wonderland for ufology. This book, "A Day With An Extraterrestrial." If Lewis Carroll were to write about UFOs, this is the book he would write. People do not realize just how wild it is. Is it true? I don't know.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  It's a great read, and I find myself returning to it over and over again. Lou, you're welcome.

• 1:46:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that's what that... I've never heard a better plug.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  It's a great book.

• 1:46:48Jesse Michels?

  I wanna pivot a little bit. You've been on this interesting kick around China. And UFOs. To many of us, I think China is somewhat of a black box when it comes to this topic. You know, people talk about the three-body problem, this famous, you know, science fiction trilogy, or I guess that's the first book of the trilogy. And there are a couple of journals from China that people are aware of, but you've done kind of a deeper dive?

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. I did actually this for the members of my website, so I like to do special projects for that. We've got richarddolanmembers.com, great people there, and I'm always like working on that, those projects, as well as what I do on YouTube and in my books. So I thought, you know, I've always been interested in understanding all international dimensions of this phenomenon, and that includes international research. And China was as much a black box to me as you're just saying now, and I thought, I don't really, what can I learn? I mean, I want to do the same dive on Russian ufology as well, but I started with a better knowledge of that, and with Chinese ufology, I felt like I knew next to nothing. And I thought, why, why is that?

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Why do I know so little about what the Chinese UFO history is? Well, yeah, I just discovered, it's really quite fascinating. So, there's still a lot that I don't know. But what I can definitely say to you, you know, everything revolves around the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. So there's pre-Mao, and up to that point, you could not, absolutely not, no way, ever research UFOs in that country. It was absolutely no way. The whole subject was off limits because, I mean, it seems to me, it was a challenge to the authority of the Communist Party, and a challenge to the fact that the party was in control of everything. And so what are these things flying around? Are they American, are they extraterrestrial, whatever it is, we don't like to acknowledge

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  it, and they did not. Mao then dies, and of course, with many aspects of Chinese society, certain floodgates did open up. One of them was a massive, absolutely massive, almost national interest in UFOs. To this day, I think this is a very, very popular topic in China, but it's managed very differently now than it was in the 70s. So when Mao first died, you had Chinese researchers, a number of different ones, you had a kind of very scientific, materialist, you could almost say Marxist, version of understanding this subject. But what you find is that culturally, among the grassroots...

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Chinese people, they are into like contact cases, big time. Into like metaphysical aspects of this subject in ways that you wouldn't think for a communist country where spiritual beliefs are not particularly encouraged or even tolerated at times. But yet, this became a huge thing. So all through the eighties, you get the development of, on the one hand, very like solid, like MUFON-type, you know, Chinese research where they're researching sometimes military encounters and publishing some of these. So I was able to find some of these. There was a Chinese researcher by the name of Paul Dong who wrote a really great book

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  in the early, early 1980s on this. And I think you can find a PDF of that. It's out there. But anyway, and there's a few other like random Chinese journals that you can get some of the information here in the West. But basically, long story short, through the eighties and 1990s, China had an organization known as the Falun Gong, many of you know of this, that grew so massively. So the Falun Gong was essentially doing kind of like a version of Tai Chi movement with a very, like, almost like yoga, but Tai Chi, it's, you know, you could probably do it outside on your mat. And that's what they would do.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  But it was such a massive national movement, millions and millions and more millions. And the Falun Gong had very explicit UFO extraterrestrial-related beliefs, that's what made them a little different. And this movement became so big, the Chinese government really became afraid of it. This is, you know, Tiananmen Square, remember that, 1989, where all of the openness that had been happening through the eighties became, kind of grew and grew and morphed into a public demonstration wanting.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  You know, open and complete freedom of expression, and that was very, very severely crushed. So all through the 90s and the aftermath, the Falun Gong goes on their rise. And they were ruthlessly shut down in the late 90s, in almost the exact same way. Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party decided, this is way too much of a threat. We absolutely cannot allow this. And we must crush this, and they did crush it absolutely, completely. The whole thing that, my biggest takeaway from all of that was that, we talk about disclosure here in the United States.

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  Disclosure in China is, I really am sure would be perceived as such a major threat to the government, vastly more, vastly more than anyone in Washington DC would perceive to the United States' structure of power. So it had to be suppressed in China, and Chinese ufology to this day is, basically, has its teeth taken out. I mean, it's very, very tame, it's very managed, it's very controlled. And it's also, one thing that you would have to add is the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese Army, Chinese military, they are very sophisticated in tracking UFO reports. Very, very sophisticated.

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  They are integrated, I think, in all of like the Chinese research civilian organizations. They're collecting everything. And they have a multi-tiered system by which they organize these reports. So they, they collect, then they have, they bring them to like a central clearinghouse where they study and analyze them, and then they bring them to a final repository where they keep these. We don't get any of that information. I don't think any of that really comes out, but they're very, very sophisticated. They have got, they are on top of managing their UFO data. And that's really one reason, I think, why we don't really get anything out of it. I tried, you know, looking, you know, we can do Google Translate, you can translate

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  website pages, but you cannot get to the Chinese cases. It's, I don't think it's... Maybe some people can, but I can't.

• 1:53:34Jesse Michels?

  It's so fascinating, and it does beg the question of, you know, why is this Dark Forest trilogy, The Three Body Problem, allowed? You know, they can clamp down on whatever literature they want, and it doesn't exactly paint the Cultural Revolution in the most, you know, the rosiest of ways. It's sort of...

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  Well, I want to respond to that, because I think what we're seeing is, nothing is black and white anymore. We're in a world, and China is part of this too, where things are in change. We're in the midst of an AI revolution, we're in the midst of all of the kinds of tech revolutions going on, and a global communications revolution has been occurring, it continues to happen. So, just because a government, whether it's the US government, the Chinese government, the Russian, just because they say, "We don't want to recognize this," doesn't mean that they're able to prevent it. They can't really prevent it 100%. I think what we're seeing is a series of adjustments being made by all of the governments in all of these ways. I think you see them fighting defense, as it were.

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  That's certainly the US as well. People will say, "You know, this guy says he's taken all these NDAs and all of this, and yet he's talking about crash retrievals, isn't he breaking classified security regulations?" And what I suspect, I mean, I don't know, but I think what happens is you've got factions all over the place. You've got factions in the US, Pentagon, probably multiple factions, not just two, probably many. And some people have supporters who are enabling them to say certain things, other people in that same structure who probably be dead set against it, but they didn't win that battle. And so, certain things get out. And I guarantee, it's probably very similar with China. They have to, they have to play the game.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  They can't just slam down all the time and say, "This is how it is forever." We're in a world that is in flux. We just have to recognize, there are other sides of this, and I'm not advocating for one thing or another, I'm just saying, it's a little complicated. But when you have a system that is designed to support, like media, the media is part of this system. So, it's been captured, we all know, long ago it's been captured. Like, there, you know, you had some watchdog journalists that, maybe some of them are still out there, you're one. But in terms of establishment journalists...

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  They will, everything's captured by the system because it must protect itself. The system must protect itself.

• 1:56:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  So, you know, when you get these skeptics out there, they, they fit right in perfectly. They serve the system as well.

• 1:56:15Jesse Michels?

  It's funny, you, you have, you know, people like Vannevar Bush talked about in UFO lore kind of all the time. You know, Robert Sarbacher said he was, you know, part, part of the program initially. It would make sense if we had a UFO program, it would be adjacent to our atomic program. He was head of, you know, the Office of Strategic Research and Development at the highest level for, for FDR and Truman.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:56:37Jesse Michels?

  And, uh, he wrote a, a paper called The Endless Frontier. And I almost think if you read that, that, that paper, that essay through the lens of UFO technology, maybe it's like, oh, the, the frontier is actually super endless and, um, this thing needs to be, you know, how this tech gets developed needs to be managed by, you know, these central groups like Allah.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  And they are convinced like they're the guys to do it.

• 1:57:03Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  They're smarter than we are. They know better.

• 1:57:06Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:57:08Speaker 01

  We can argue whether they do or don't, but that's their position. And so they're not, they're not ever gonna like voluntarily just say, oh yeah, here, here you go.

• 1:57:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  It's not gonna happen.

• 1:57:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. I have a weird crash for you. I don't know if you're familiar with this one, but, um, uh, South Haven, uh, uh, Long Island.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:57:25Jesse Michels?

  Uh, in the nineties.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:57:27Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, by Brookhaven National Labs.

• 1:57:29Jesse Michels?

  That's right, by Brookhaven National Labs.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  There's a man named John Ford.

• 1:57:33Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Who I'm sure you know this, maybe, maybe some listeners do too.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I actually think that's, that's a real possible one.

• 1:57:43Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a Long Island UFO group, uh, he headed it. And they, actually there, there may be more than one of those that may have happened on Long Island. I grew up on Long Island.

• 1:57:57Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  My backyard there. Uh, I didn't know about it at the time.

• 1:58:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  That was kind of.

• 1:58:01Jesse Michels?

  You think there are more than one?

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Well, I think they believed there were more than one.

• 1:58:05Jesse Michels?

  Well, that's fascinating.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  Thought so.

• 1:58:07Jesse Michels?

  Because that was the first, um, particle accelerator in the U.S., uh, which is the Cosmatron at, at Brookhaven National Labs. And you hear, you know, definitely UFOs are definitely attracted. To nuclear and then I wonder if you could generalize that to tip of the spear science and to high energy physics and particle accelerators.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  To think yes.

• 1:58:28Jesse Michels?

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  The Long Island crash, I think it was supposed to be 1989 by Morish's Bay.

• 1:58:35Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  I think that's when the year and yeah, I believe I'm a little fuzzy on this, but I do know like there was a lot of eyewitnesses who talked about massive security.

• 1:58:47Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  Presence around that area at that time and John Ford looked at it, you know, he was, they really destroyed his life.

• 1:58:55Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  So John Ford, I used to, I used to be on sometimes some good terms with the late Elaine Douglas, who was a very close friend of John Ford. Elaine Douglas, in her own right, was a really cool lady.

• 1:59:08Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Tough, smart, someone you don't screw around with. She could get angry, like I remember that, but toward the end of her life, she and I were, were much closer. But anyway, she knew John Ford very well and I know she was a strong believer in this reality of the Long Island crash. But Ford was, it really does look to me that he was totally set up with this kind of wacky plot to kill a member of one of the, I think the Nassau County or is it Suffolk County City Council, whatever, whatever governing body by poisoning his toothpaste with radioactive material.

• 1:59:49Jesse Michels?

  Jesus.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  Like, are you kidding me, man?

• 1:59:51Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  So he gets accused of this and he's, I don't even know if he's alive anymore.

• 1:59:56Jesse Michels?

  Oh my god.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  But he was incarcerated for decades.

• 1:59:59Jesse Michels?

  Oh, that's nuts.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  He might still be alive.

• 2:00:01Jesse Michels?

  That is so messed up.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  It's, it just seemed, I, I haven't really dived super deep into this, but it really looked like they just went after him and.

• 2:00:12Jesse Michels?

  That's nuts.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  Now, was he, was he just that unstable and he was like getting kind of crazy and I don't know, but I don't, I don't think so. It seems really wrong what they did to him.

• 2:00:24Jesse Michels?

  So wrong. You hear of these historical, you know, Galileo-type case, people who seek truth and then they get persecuted by the establishment. And then you hear stories like that, modern stories and ufology.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Well, we like to think, oh, we're so much better now. Like, we're not any different.

• 2:00:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  The problem with our country, our world, is that we like to tell ourselves we're living in a democracy and we like to tell ourselves, oh, yeah, we've got natural rights and government rights. And so the problem then becomes for those people who've always controlled things, it's like, all right, how do we deal with this? Oh, we do, oh, let's do some good public propaganda, create public relations. You know, Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who creates that whole industry for massive public manipulation. So that's okay, check. And then all these other things to get around the formal restrictions on their untrammeled pursuit of power. And so it's just a game, you know? It's like, all right, we have this pretend democracy. That's really what it is. And both parts

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  are true. Like, we have certain democratic elements to our world, okay. But ultimately, we all kind of see it's very tightly guided and manipulated. And in a naturally hierarchical social organization, and ours is, it always has been, anytime you have concentrations of wealth that are going to be unequal, and it's since we, 12,000 years, since we've both started collecting ourselves into societies, it's always been the case, you're going to have hierarchy, sorry, but this is, it's inevitable. And those people with the money

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  are going to control things. And so they never give up. And they're just, it's like, how do we work our way through this system now? How do we manipulate the system to keep it going? All right, let the people think they've got freedom. Good for them.

• 2:02:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  That's what they do.

• 2:02:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's like the...

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  And we're surprised when we see that there are these injustices happening today. It's like, that shouldn't be.

• 2:02:26Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yeah, it's a...

• 2:02:29Jesse Michels?

  It's a weird, you know, it's like the left is always talking about, you know, government overreach and then the right's talking about, you know, corporate overreach. Uh, and, uh,

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it used to be the opposite.

• 2:02:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it used to be the opposite.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  The, the left used to talk about the government overreach and, or no, the, the corporate overreach and the right used to talk about government.

• 2:02:46Jesse Michels?

  Government overreach, exactly.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  They've like switched around.

• 2:02:48Jesse Michels?

  They have. And then, and, and, and now it's, it's just a sort of seesaw where, you know, the only constant is the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer, but it's a sort of hypnotic, like, you know, they're rearranging the deck chairs in the Titanic or something.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:02Jesse Michels?

  Um, but I was thinking about our conversation yesterday. We talked about, you know, this amazing history of unidentified submersible objects. You have this incredible chronology. One case that you've covered before that, which I think connects to USOs is, uh, the Pascagoula case where you have these two fishermen who are abducted. I didn't realize this until recently. Pascagoula was, uh, uh, right next to the, uh, largest production of nuclear submarines at the time in the US.

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  That's, that's right. I don't know if it still is, but that's right. And, um, actually, well, that's a good case. And, um, in the second volume of my study, which will cover the 1970s and 80s. So there's a,

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  you know, maybe I'll make more of a reference. I might throw a little bit more about Pascagoula in there. It's not, in my opinion, technically USO case necessarily, but a week or two later, there was a genuine USO incident right there.

• 2:03:57Jesse Michels?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Right there. And that is in my book and it's a good, it's a really good case.

• 2:04:02Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  Really, really good. So, um, but I do make a reference to Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker. They were the witnesses for that. They were the abductees for that. And, um, yeah. So basically what you had with that, they are seeing, they're fishing, uh, I think Hickson at the time was in his 40s. Cal Parker was like 19 years old and they're doing a fishing thing early in the morning and they see this, uh, Dome shaped kind of craft, like a, almost like a cone, maybe a cone shaped craft, I guess. And it's hovering above the water. It's off the coast of Mississippi and they are, um, they're abducted. And for the longest time, it was only Charles Hickson who was supposedly abducted, but Cal, Calvin Parker,

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  years later, thing indicated that he was too. The thing about that is a couple of things. So the being that they described is very bizarre looking. It's got like a carrot ears and a, like, it's a weird looking, weird looking creature. Very bizarre. Look, you, I wouldn't think of an alien looking, it looks like, it looks like a 1950s version of an alien, like in one of those bad movies. Which is the one thing about it, like, you just don't want, you look at that and you cringe.

• 2:05:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  Oh, guys, like, is this what you saw?

• 2:05:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  But like, it's what they said they saw. But what's interesting about it is they were, they reported this to the police, the local police.

• 2:05:27Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:27Speaker 01

  Which many people know and the, the guy, the deputy sheriff on duty is like, he's kind of suspicious of them.

• 2:05:34Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  So he leaves a recorder in, in the room where they're alone. They don't know this. They don't know they're being recorded. And they're just talking very honestly with each other, like, like, and Cal Parker's freaking out. They're like, holy crap, how do we do this? How do we process this is? And so they totally convinced the law enforcement there that they were honest and sincere.

• 2:05:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  So it, and you know, and, and for many years, Cal Parker just kind of disappeared for a while. He reappeared toward the end of his life, but Charles Hickson did lots of interviews. And like, you know, I, I've watched the guy, I've listened, read his interview transcripts. He's, I think he was telling the truth, you know?

• 2:06:13Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating.

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:14Jesse Michels?

  Do you ever, um, does naval surface worker crane ever come up for you? Are you familiar with that facility?

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  Not related to the Glomar bit, is it? Or?

• 2:06:24Jesse Michels?

  I don't know. Well, you actually reported on it. You did in, as part of Richard Dolan's intelligent disclosure. Like and subscribe.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  Maybe I use different terminology.

• 2:06:31Jesse Michels?

  You, you talked about, well, I think this guy Randy Anderson, who I, um, interviewed.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:37Jesse Michels?

  Who went deep into an underground military base, which you've, you've covered.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  Yes. Now, he's, he is fascinating guy.

• 2:06:43Jesse Michels?

  He is fascinating and, um,

• 2:06:46Jesse Michels?

  You know, that was not really on a lot of people's radars, that complex at the time. I think it's still, there's very little known about it.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  You talking about the thing down in Puerto Rico in the Caribbean?

• 2:06:54Jesse Michels?

  No, I'm talking about this thing in 2014, 2015. It was taken down underground to this and then taken to a skiff that said off-planet technologies.

• 2:07:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I never took notes on it. I should probably revisit this.

• 2:07:06Jesse Michels?

  Well, yeah, I don't know. Well, it's a complex that's very interesting. I have a couple of Navy friends and they say some spooky stuff goes on there.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  I'm gonna data mine you about this when we're done talking, so.

• 2:07:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do it. Well, Richard, this has been an absolute honor. Yeah, I can't thank you enough for your time and, yeah, I mean, you're just an absolute wealth of knowledge.

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  I love talking to you, man. You're very easy to do this with. And you're a wealth of knowledge in your own right. Like, your knowledge of 1940s, like, World War II era stuff, very impressive.

• 2:07:42Jesse Michels?

  Well.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  I really enjoy hearing you talk about it.

• 2:07:44Jesse Michels?

  Standing on the shoulders of giants and...

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  That's what we all do.

• 2:07:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  We said that before we started, but it's true. Like, that's all we ever do. We stand on... You asked me who some of my inspirations are. I'm gonna tell you right now. So, when I started with... Before, before I got into UFOs, I was into a couple of academic guys that I really loved. Max Weber, great sociologist from a century ago, was very, very important to me, still is.

• 2:08:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  His ideas still resonate with me, his whole idea of rationalization of the world. I think about this a lot.

• 2:08:14Jesse Michels?

  Age of disenchantment.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, yeah, absolutely. In fact, that whole thing, I was 21 years old when I first read Weber and I read him talking about disenchantment of the world. And that's what, that hooked me. So, it's kinda cool that you mention that.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of other kind of important thinkers of the past, I guess, but within UFOs... Uh, I'm, I'm like an admirer of a lot of all the OGs, you know? Donald Keough is probably number one in that.

• 2:08:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  I went through all of his books very carefully.

• 2:08:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Um, James and Coral Lorenzen of APRO, um, very huge admirer of them. And Edward Rupel, his whole story has just been, uh, interesting.

• 2:08:58Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:08:59Speaker 01

  Very early death of a heart attack at age thirty-seven.

• 2:09:02Jesse Michels?

  Are you conspiratorial about that or his death, Rupel?

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 2:09:06Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  Some people are like, nah, no, he died. He had, he did have a previous heart attack before that.

• 2:09:12Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  But the thing about Rupel that's weird.

• 2:09:14Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  He, he absolutely was pressured to basically debunk his own book.

• 2:09:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  And, and, and there's no question about this. So you read nineteen fifty-six, he does the report on unidentified flying object, which was flew in the face in many ways of the official air force position. He, he ran project blue book. He was in a position to talk about this. And he's making it clear throughout the book. It's like, yeah, we were baffled by this. This scared the hell out of us. This was amazing. That blew my mind like again and again and again. Very uncomfortable. So what ends up happening, uh, Keough is the guy who writes all about this. He brings this out because he was in touch with Rupel. And, and Rupel was on board with all of the kind of pro UFO, um, uh, public statements right up until around, I think the middle of, uh, early nineteen fifty-eight.

• 2:10:07Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  So for fifty-six and fifty-seven, he was gung ho. Uh, it starts to become a little cold in fifty-eight and Keough's noticing, what's up with Rupel and other people like, what's up with Rupel? Well, he was working at Northrop at the time.

• 2:10:21Jesse Michels?

  Uh.

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  And he was under pressure.

• 2:10:22Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  And he ends up in nineteen sixty, publishes his second, his revised version of his book, which all he ended up doing was he tacked on three chapters at the end of it.

• 2:10:34Jesse Michels?

  Ah.

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  And the, the chapters are. I mean, written in a completely different manner. They're very like, the original book is very like, it's measured, it's mature. The three chapters tacked on is like, sophomoric and goofy and just, he's, he's, he's smearing people, including Kehoe, and he's, it's just like, very unlike, uh, the writing that preceded it.

• 2:11:00Jesse Michels?

  As if he was coerced or pressured.

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And he publishes that and he trashes UFOs at the end, calls it, I think, the space age religion or myth, myth of the space age, and then he dies. Thirty-seven years old.

• 2:11:15Jesse Michels?

  It's crazy. Well, you, there are other cases like that, you have, you know, Philip J. Corso, you know, he had 24 hours to edit The Day After Roswell, written, co-written by

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  William Burns.

• 2:11:25Jesse Michels?

  J. Burns. And, and he had written another thing, you know, Dawn of a New Age or whatever, and, and so you have this like, managed version, and this more, more pure version, and we talked about Aztec earlier, William Steinman, he was a Scunk Works employee.

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  I spoke with him at one point.

• 2:11:39Jesse Michels?

  He was, he was an employee at, at Lockheed.

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  Scunk Works?

• 2:11:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, and they were, he was pushed out because of his, his UFO research and could never get a job in aerospace after, uh, writing that book, which I would love to vindicate. I think that is a, a great UFO research book.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  Yes, it is, it is.

• 2:11:55Jesse Michels?

  Because Wikipedia says the, the, you know, Aztec thing is a hoax, you know, he, you throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, before the Ramses rehabilitated, Steinman did a, wrote a really big fat book on it.

• 2:12:06Jesse Michels?

  An amazing book, that covers all sorts of interesting stuff around MJ12 and

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  He sure did.

• 2:12:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, yeah, I talked with Simon one time and I really, really, uh, I liked him a lot. He has all kinds of stories, like all kinds of really crazy stories that come out. Other people I've admired and continue to admire.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  One of them's still alive. Her name is Linda Moulton Howe.

• 2:12:31Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  Linda, Linda is a one-off. There's no one else like her. She is one of a kind. And, uh, she's brave. She puts herself out there all the time. She's investigated. She's, uh, I just admire her. And, and by the way, if you ever get to hang out with her, just let the lady talk. She has got the, like, more amazing personal stories.

• 2:12:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  Because the thing about Linda is, all the older guys always like Linda.

• 2:13:03Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  Like, all the military guys.

• 2:13:05Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Well, she's brilliant.

• 2:13:07Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:13:08Speaker 01

  No BS about her. But they, they feel that they can talk to her.

• 2:13:13Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  And she listens. And she's, and she's brave. And so she's collected all of these amazing encounters. Like, some of them are just kinda crazy. And I, I just, like, I sit and I just listen. Just listen. Uh, I've been really lucky that I can get to, to do that with her. She is, uh, one of a kind. Amazing, amazing resource. A gem of a human being in, uh, our field.

• 2:13:41Speaker 01

  I don't know. A lot of other people I've really, uh, truly admired. Tim Good is one.

• 2:13:44Jesse Michels?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I got to know Tim a bit. And, um, he's, he's not, he's not well these days. And I, I, I wish him the best.

• 2:13:52Jesse Michels?

  He must be a little over eighty at this point?

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, about that, yeah. And, um, he's, absolutely just retired. But, but Tim was a real gentleman and a, a really, a gent, a gentleman and a smart guy.

• 2:14:04Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  Um, this is a field of UFOs. Like, I, I look back and I think, what an amazing little ride I got to have just be, just because I, I thought, I got the bug and I thought I would write a book and I get to meet these. Because Stanton Friedman was another one. Although Stanton, I'm just gonna say this. Uh, always liked him, always respected him.

• 2:14:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:26Speaker 01

  Stanton was a little bit of a gatekeeper with me when I first broke into this field.

• 2:14:30Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  I will say that, yes. You know.

• 2:14:32Jesse Michels?

  But he didn't, he didn't sort of just give you.

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  It was all about Bob Lazar.

• 2:14:36Jesse Michels?

  Ah, cuz you were, you expressed genuine interest in Lazar?

• 2:14:39Speaker 01

  Well, in 2001.

• 2:14:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  So, uh, I still had nice black hair, big round glasses, I had all that going on. So I did my first, uh, my, my first public appearance was actually in Laughlin, Nevada, in March of 01.

• 2:14:54Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:14:55Speaker 01

  And my second one was right after 9/11.

• 2:14:58Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:14:59Speaker 01

  And it was in St. Louis and Stanton was there. We had like, honestly, probably like 15 people in attendance at this whole thing. Like I flew out there, Stan was there, a couple of other folks.

• 2:15:09Jesse Michels?

  How old were you at the time?

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Uh, 39, I think.

• 2:15:12Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  I just turned 39.

• 2:15:14Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, uh, and you know, we didn't, there's no social media, so things were slower. You know, I had two appearances in a year. I was like, wow, that's great.

• 2:15:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  Um, so I mean, I'm there and Stan, like I'm sitting alone with him and he's checking me out. He's like, who is this guy? Cuz I'd just written a book, big fat book. And, uh, he's like, so, what's your opinion on Bob Lazar? And the fact was, I didn't really have one. I mean, I didn't know enough. I had spent the last five years just trying to figure out from 1941 to 1973. It was like, Lazar? Are you kidding me, man? I, I didn't really know yet. And I was, and by the way, I was scared out of my mind entering the UFO field back then because I knew.

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  I wrote this, like, it was a good book on the early part of the, the cover up, but like, I, when I published that book, I knew nothing about the 1980s and 1990s. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't have time.

• 2:16:16Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  I didn't have time, so I was afraid, like, people are gonna ask me all these questions and I don't know what I'm going to say. And, and Bob Lazar was one of them. I was aware this was a big thing, but I didn't. I hadn't really spent enough time to know. And so, and I resented though Stan, like I knew where he was coming from. He wanted me to come down against Lazar. And I was like, you know, don't, I, I think I said like, I'll decide to spend my own time.

• 2:16:42Jesse Michels?

  Well, that's right.

• 2:16:43Speaker 01

  And I let him know like, you can't, don't bully me, man.

• 2:16:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:46Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna take to it. Uh, we, we always had a fine and cordial relationship. I wasn't really close with Stan, like others people were. Uh, but, you know, I, I think he learned to respect me over time. It took him a little while.

• 2:17:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  One, one thing was he realized like, cause everyone's attacking him over MJ 12. And, and he realized, oh, Dolan's kind of like, okay with MJ 12. So he, he suspected I was kind of an ally there. The other, the other thing I was just gonna say about Stan though. Uh, and this is a bit of a problem. The fact that he was so hardcore against Lazar, to me signified a larger problem.

• 2:17:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  Which is that, look, you're gonna research Roswell. Good.

• 2:17:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  Great, in fact, and it's really good that you did that. But why in God's name would you think the story stops there?

• 2:17:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  Alright, so you have the craft. It is obviously going to be studied.

• 2:17:40Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  Under great secrecy.

• 2:17:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  That's a given.

• 2:17:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  So let's look for some stories here and, and he just always seemed to like shoot them down.

• 2:17:49Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's kind of intellectually disingenuous to say simultaneously, I believe they're seek covert reverse engineering programs and then also say, the one guy with probably the most coherent story around having worked on a craft is a hundred percent wrong. You have to think probabilistically and so I.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:09Jesse Michels?

  You give it, give it some probability above zero. If you think the first thing is.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And he fixated like on the education.

• 2:18:16Jesse Michels?

  On the education because he was educated at MIT and it was personal, I think. I think he was like, what did I do to get my degree at MIT?

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right.

• 2:18:23Jesse Michels?

  It was a little ego.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, yes.

• 2:18:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  I, I think so. And, and he kept using the word fraud over and over again. And I'm just like, this is not helpful.

• 2:18:32Jesse Michels?

  Right. And it, there is something that happens in, with UFO research too, where by that time. I think Friedman, he had gotten in with, I don't know, probably a lot of, you know, interesting characters in government.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  He was very good friends with Bill Moore, William Moore.

• 2:18:47Jesse Michels?

  He's good friends with Bill Moore, who admitted at MUFON in the late eighties that he, you know, helped with the mess up Paul Benowitz.

• 2:18:54Speaker 01

  Moore, I'm not going to defend or attack him, but Moore always said, and Greg Bishop wrote about this in a really good book called Project Beta.

• 2:19:02Jesse Michels?

  That's amazing.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  Moore said, "I allowed my, I've allowed myself to get involved with those people because I believed I had the ability to separate the shit from the candy," as he put it. So he, he thought, or at least this is his explanation, that he was going to deal with these people because he wanted to get to the holy grail himself.

• 2:19:21Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  And Bill Moore was the, the hotshot UFO researcher of the 1980s.

• 2:19:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:26Speaker 01

  People so often forget.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  And it was Robert Hastings, by the way, who, in my opinion, is probably more than anyone else responsible for the takedown of Bill Moore. Because Hastings, if you go back through the old MUFON journals of the late eighties, I wasn't involved in the field, but, you know, he can read the journals. Hastings was on, he was on, he knew that Moore had intelligence connections. He knew it, and he sniffed it out. And I, and I personally think, I'm sure others know this better than I do, but I think that Moore, by July of 1989, was at the MUFON symposium there, the gig was up, like he couldn't, there was no way he was going to keep this going anymore. So he just kind of came out, that's what I think.

• 2:20:04Jesse Michels?

  Hmm, that's fascinating.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, you also have, you have the guy, Chase Brandon, who wrote Crypto's Mandrum. I think he was working on a script at one point with Stanton Friedman, and so you have these interesting.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, with Stan, right.

• 2:20:16Jesse Michels?

  With these interesting sort of overlaps where, in the beginning, you start off super irreverent and iconoclastic, and then maybe you get softened over time or something.

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for bringing me back to Stan, that was all, I was going a little off there. But yeah, I mean, I, having said all of that, look, I admire and, and always respected and liked Stanton Friedman and his, his contribution to what we, where we now are at is extremely important.

• 2:20:39Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  And, but, you know, like I, I once read Marilyn Monroe couldn't cook, you're going to hold that against her, you know, she's Marilyn Monroe.

• 2:20:47Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  Everyone's got their things where we're not, we're not 100% perfect.

• 2:20:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  And, and, and so, but yeah, Stan was someone that was important to me and.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  Anyway, I'm kind of tailing off here.

• 2:21:02Jesse Michels?

  No, I love it. I could talk to you for hours. Well, Richard, this has truly been an honor and hopefully we can do it again at some point. And thank you for doing everything. Go subscribe to Richard Dolan Intelligent Disclosure on YouTube. This is on Spotify and Apple too.

• 2:21:19Speaker 01

  I think so. You know, I'm not that good at organizing.

• 2:21:22Jesse Michels?

  Wherever it is on social media, but I know it's on YouTube. I check it out on YouTube. Buy his new book on USOs. Volume one is out. Two and three are coming. It's amazing. And buy all his other books too. He's written some incredible, I don't know, UFOs in the National Security State.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all like little babies of mine. They're all, I love them all. And the thing I love most is probably writing the books.

• 2:21:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:47Speaker 01

  I mean, YouTube is fun. Conferences, talking with people is fun, but I actually mostly enjoy just writing.

• 2:21:52Jesse Michels?

  Well, keep going.

• 2:21:53Speaker 01

  And putting that out.

• 2:21:54Jesse Michels?

  Keep doing what you do.

• 2:21:55Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jesse.

• 2:21:56Jesse Michels?

  Thank you, Richard.