Navy Fighter Pilots Witness UFO Mid Flight (Ft. Ryan Graves)

In today's episode of American Alchemy, Jesse Michels sits down with Ryan Graves, a former F-18 pilot, to discusses Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Graves shares his eyewitness accounts of UAP, notably a close encounter with a cube inside a sphere. The conversation explores the routine nature of UAP sightings among military pilots, radar detection challenges, and the psychological pressures faced in high-stress flight scenarios. UNCUT EXCLUSIVE VIDEOS & MONTHLY Q&As! ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichelspremium/ SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify DISCORD ➤ https://discord.gg/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Personal) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Show) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [email protected] TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Introduction 00:59 - Flow State of a Fighter Pilot 03:28 - Insights from Dr. Ea Whiteley 07:09 - Emergencies in the Skies 16:16 - First Sightings of UAP 17:56 - Descriptions of the Unknown 19:00 - Theories About UAP Origins 21:55 - The Role of Fighter Pilots 25:07 - Public Perception of UAP 26:20 - Fighter Pilot Experiences 34:58 - Testifying Before Congress 36:11 - Reflections on the Hearing 39:14 - Government Reverse Engineering 55:08 - Future of UAP Research 59:44 - Speculations on Advanced Technology 01:01:55 - Acknowledging the Reality 01:05:21 - Evaluating Arrow's Role 01:11:34 - The Pervasiveness of UAP Encounters 01:14:12 - The Go Fast Video #uap #navy #interview #aliens 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

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Jesse Michels?

  You're sitting there and you're sitting with David Fravor and with David Grush. And you and David Fravor have these amazing eyewitness accounts.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace. These sightings are not rare or isolated. They are routine.

• 0:41Jesse Michels?

  There's a long history of fighter pilots like yourself having seen these things. What happened when you were there?

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Our assumption at first was that these were just great air. But they weren't behaving like false traps. They were steady, they were solid, they were consistent. And some of these objects were even going over the speed of sound. As soon as they cross that threshold, boom, object shoots down. Came within about 50 feet of the cockpit. And he describes it as a dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere. Half the room raised their hand like, oh yeah, the cubes and spheres. You know, we saw those. Yeah, about five to 15 feet in diameter. Oh, by the way, they're out there all day.

• 1:16Jesse Michels?

  Do you believe that? Do you think that the US government is reverse engineering UFOs?

• 1:23Jesse Michels?

  Different parts of the rain have different activity. But you know that, don't you?

• 1:32Jesse Michels?

  Maybe you should interview me.

• 1:41Jesse Michels?

  Flow state is a popular word in, you know, pop psychology, that sort of thing. I have to think, you know, it's described as like, you know, you're purely present and you're just focused on the... You have to think that that experience, flying a fighter jet like that, has to be peak flow state, right? A hundred percent. And, you know, honestly, it really even starts before we get in, you know? Well, we have a brief, we have to prepare and, you know, joshing around. But once that brief starts, it's very serious.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  You finish a brief, maybe have time for a coffee and then you're you're walking to the jet, you're walking to maintenance, signing it out, signing out the maintenance forms, reviewing the aircraft, strapping in all the gear, you know, 60 pounds of gear or so and hopping in the jet, you know, we do what we call building our nest, you know, for unloading contents from our new board, we're strapping in, we're placing things on our legs that we need for information.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  But then, once you get airborne, it is, it's just like, it's like being constantly in the moment, but you are planning ahead. You're always thinking about your fuel state, where you're going, what you need to do, what the contingencies are. And I would say the greatest example of that, the penultimate presence moment, if you will, is landing on the aircraft carrier, especially at night. It's a very trippy experience. It can be almost meditative when you're out at range and you're just flying towards this singular little light that's in a sea of blackness and literally a sea as well.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  And, you know, you kind of have this very like slow and gradual perspective change. And then all of a sudden, you start to notice it's getting faster and faster, this perspective change, the light getting brighter and bigger. And all of a sudden, you almost have to kind of snap out of this state and remind yourself that you're about to go through this very intense evolution.

• 3:26Jesse Michels?

  It almost feels like, does the jet become like an appendage of your body at some point?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  100%, yeah, 100%. You're strapped in there. I mean, there's, it's not the jet and you. It's just, you know, you think and the aircraft moves, you know, I mean, becomes so synchronized and part of, part of kind of your subconscious, you know, because you trained so much on it. You're constantly making corrections, you're constantly doing things. And just all those mechanisms are just so well rehearsed that it just feels like you're, you're just part of the jet and you're just moving it around.

• 3:59Jesse Michels?

  You did an amazing podcast, actually, with Dr. Ia Whiteley, who deals with the psychology of both fighter pilots and astronauts. What did you learn from her? I mean, I imagine she was sort of putting words and analysis and names to things that you've experienced firsthand, but what was that conversation like?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we get a lot of what we call ground training, where they bring in folks not unlike herself and teach it to us at a certain level. And we go through different reviews, you know, like every six months or a year, where we re-discuss these different issues. But I think what was like most impactful to me, like as, as the operator, as a guy on the leading edge, we don't always... You know, get to see behind the curtain to like the countless people that like it takes to get us there and make this mission successful. So to really talk and engage with someone who's devoted her career to this or life to this. It was just really rewarding to kind of have that perspective from someone that is ultimately always on the outside of like actual operation, but is so critical to what we do.

• 4:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And I imagine you learn so much kind of in the abstract before you get into the cockpit. And then everything probably goes away at some point. Like there's a great book called The Art of Learning by a guy named Josh Waitzkin. He was actually the inspiration for Searching for Bobby Fischer. So he's this prodigious, amazing chess player as a kid. And then he became, I think, a champion in like Tai Chi, push hands or whatever martial arts. So he's one of the few people who've like been at the top of two different disciplines. And he writes this book about how to best learn. And it's called, it's a great book. It's called The Art of Learning.

• 5:35Jesse Michels?

  And he says that you have, you can learn a bunch of mental models, but ultimately when you're like doing the thing, all of the mental models just go away.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:43Jesse Michels?

  And you have to kind of integrate. It's like a dog catching a frisbee is not doing vector calculus when he's catching it. He might be using it, but you know.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, those models too are based on assumptions, right? And building that model so that you can have some type of, you know, pre-knowledge of what you're getting yourself into. So you can hopefully meet the expectations. But, you know, I was on flight instructor for three and a half years. And it was called a advanced strike fighter instructor. And so I was working with students who were flying their first tactical jet for the first time. I told them all the time, you know, there's guys that and girls that are incredibly, incredibly studious. You know, memorizing the book, know the procedures inside and out, know exactly what to do. And they get up in the air and it all falls apart, you know, because they're trying to almost kind of reach back to what they learned on the ground.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Instead of just kind of being in the moment and like physically learning it, you know, which is a totally different mechanism than just memorizing something. And, you know, you have to go in with, with the right knowledge into those brief, into those missions. But the people that succeeded the best, you know, weren't trying to necessarily prove themselves in the jet. They were there to like actually take it in as a learning experience.

• 6:55Jesse Michels?

  You know, James McDonnell of McDonnell Douglas, you know, famous American aerospace corporation. He got really interested in this idea because a lot of his early planes, he would have fighter pilots fly them and they would kind of freeze up at times. And he had a word for this. He would call them gremlins. And so he spent a lot of his research career looking for ghosts in the machine. And when I imagine when you're working with F-18s, you know, these incredibly complex instruments, you know, maybe your mind leaps to the conclusion that like, there's something at play here that's almost like magical or mystical or something. Did you experience anything like that when you were, when you were flying?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Gosh, that's an interesting question. I'd say, you know, I'd say the instances where that was, you know, maybe part of my, my assessment of the situation, if you will, was during the abnormal times, during emergencies where there was uncertainty about how things were going to go, go down, right? You know, one example is I was about 80 miles west of the boat, 30,000 feet or so, nighttime, and all of a sudden, my canopy starts leaking. And I don't know if it's cracked, I don't know if a seal blew.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  But, you know, we essentially just inverted the jet and pulled down as fast as we could so that we didn't have a hypoxic situation if it did burst. And, you know, those are the times when you kind of start maybe fitting the pieces together a bit as far as, you know, am I going to get through this? Am I going to get back to the boat in time? Is this going to get worse? I've had multiple issues like that. And, you know, in fact, maybe even a better story is a time we were going to drop a training round in Saudi Arabia. And I was flying on the way out and I just, it was very hard to describe the stick just didn't feel right. And I had been on this boat, I just got to the squadron, my first fleet squadron, operational squadron, and...

• 9:03Speaker 02

  You know, as a new guy, it's like, last thing you want to do is be like, my stick feels funny. You know, like, this is not, that's not a diagnosis. It's just, maybe it's in my head, right?

• 9:12Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And, you know, we're getting out there and I'm noticing it more and more. And then we get to the point where we're going to drop the bomb. We roll in, you know, 40 degrees nose down. And I'm in the dive for about two out of the six seconds I pull up and I abort. And my commanding officer, who was leading the flight was like, you know, what happened? And I'm like, Sarah, I don't know what to tell you, but my, my stick is just not performing the way I would expect. Like it feels tough to move in certain directions and I have no warnings, no cautions, no advisories. And so there's not a whole lot we can do other than just kind of hang on. And we're progressing back to the boat. It's probably about a hundred miles or so. And it's getting worse and it's getting worse and it's getting to the point as I'm like 10 miles from the ship,

• 9:56Speaker 02

  where if I want to move the jet to the right, I have to take both hands and force the stick to the right. And if I tap it lightly to the left, the aircraft would essentially overbank 120 degrees immediately. Still no warnings, no cautions. And, you know, there's a lot of lessons learned from that, from that situation. But came back boarded uneventfully on the carrier. And it turns out there's one of our bleed lines, we call it, they take air in the intake and they siphon some of it off to power generators and do other things. One of those had broken and it was essentially like a plasma beam just cutting things inside the jet.

• 10:32Jesse Michels?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  And it was cutting through the control feedback lines that attached to the stick. And they ended up having to like crane the jet off of it. But, you know, that was certainly a moment where it was, you know, and it wasn't a doubt of the aircraft at first. You doubt yourself first before you kind of jumped to, to the aircraft and you don't have any indications. But that was certainly a time where, you know, you're really questioning what's going on, you know, where does this go? And, you know, is there a ghost in this machine that I'm battling?

• 11:02Jesse Michels?

  And what did you experience per a lot of the listeners of this show that care about the UFO and UAP phenomena, which you've played a massive role in both public advocacy wise? But also just in relaying this experience, what happened when you were there?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when we came back from that deployment, we began, entered what we call a maintenance phase where we just were not flying as much, we're upgrading some systems, we're even sending some jets to forward deploy squadrons. And One of the, we were slated for a major upgrade of our radar system, which is our primary detection tool and what we use for all the weapon systems. And we were going from something called the APG 73. It's considered a mechanically scanned array radar. So basically a big dish in front that's moving around, sending trons downrange, receiving them back and giving us a picture of what's out there. And we were upgrading to like a very new technology, very capable technology called actively electronically scanned array radar. The APG 79.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  And so this system, it's fixed and it's much, much more precise and a lot more energy in it and smaller packets wherever it wants. And it took about eight months for this process to occur, you know, maybe like a month per jet. And so you might be flying one mission in the morning with the older radar and you might be flying later in the evening with the newer radar system. And immediately we noticed that when we were flying, we're flying in this big cube off the coast of Virginia Beach.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  That there were objects in a working area that we were detecting with the newer radars.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  And the older radars could have errors, not software errors per se, but they might pick up reflections of radar energy from say a moving car or a thick cloud or something of that nature. So, you know, these kinds of false tracks, as we would call them, weren't, were something we were used to. This system wasn't supposed to have those errors. It was supposed to essentially filter them out, but our assumption at first were that these were just simply radar errors, non-existent objects, just kind of a bug, a bug, a ghost in the machine, if you will.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  But they weren't behaving like false tracks, right? They were steady, they were solid, they were consistent and they were behaving ways that didn't really make sense for a false track. They're sometimes completely stationary, 0.0 Mach, over a piece of the ground, very high winds, category three hurricane type winds. And even in an F-18, you're working in winds like that, you have to like maybe plan your turn, you know, like three miles earlier because you're going to get blown three, five miles as you're making that turn. And these things would just be perfectly stationary, not even like vibrating, right? Not like kind of like being moved around and propelled back into a position, but perfectly stationary.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  We'd see them at point six or point eight Mach, which are on 250 to 350 knots. And that's, those are speeds that we typically operate at. And they would be doing that in a, in a holding pattern and a circular pattern and racetrack. And this is not consistent with what we would expect to see from radar errors, but it's what we were seeing. We'd see them meandering sometimes, so non-consistent heading and non-consistent altitudes, kind of just moving in a general direction, but doing it very sloppy way, which is not, again, not how we operate, just wasting fuel. There's no real reason to do that.

• 14:27Jesse Michels?

  And this is you and roughly how many other people in your squadron are kind of noticing?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, at this time, we didn't really know.

• 14:33Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  We, we weren't really discussing it. And I think a lot of guys that were seeing it just, you know, either maybe I didn't hear them talk about it, or they just weren't talking about it.

• 14:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  But even some of these objects were even going over the speed of sound.

• 14:47Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  1.1, 1.2.

• 14:49Jesse Michels?

  So you're kind of at this point personally noticing this and like kind of keeping it to yourself?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Pretty much, yeah. We're talking a little bit because there's a guy in my backseat.

• 14:56Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  So there's a little bit of chatter, but it's not something we're like debriefing.

• 15:00Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  It's not something we're, we're going to the commanding officer with, but you know, when we're out there, you know, with this radar system, whatnot, and we see targets or tracks, we're not just like looking at them, we're, we're basically fly with the track pad on our throttle. And we're moving it around like a computer mouse and we're selecting these targets. We're categorizing them and organizing them and switching between them. And it just so happened that some folks started flying with the AT FLIR. It's a infrared and electro-optical targeting system. And as they happen to be within a relatively close range of these radar errors, Yeah. They noticed that the FLIR, which is looking where the radar is looking, is seeing something at these locations. There's higher energy coming back from it.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  And typically, it almost just looked like someone was shining a flashlight into the sensor. It wasn't, you know, the skid of an aircraft and we're seeing propulsion come out the back. And at that same range, our AIM 9X missile systems that we're carrying are also detecting and locking on to these objects. And so now we're having correlation across three different sensors telling us that there's a physical object here. And that was kind of the moment we, you know, at least those that were like, okay, this is like, these are probably physical objects. Like, you can't assume that there are just errors in the radar. It's, you know, it'd be irresponsible, could lead to a safety risk because we are essentially just flying through these, ignoring them.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  And so that really kind of started, at least for me and a few others, the process of trying to fly up and visually seeing one of these objects. And so we'd get on our radar, we'd get on our FLIR, detect one that's slow. And, um, you know, we'd step down about 800 feet outside of our 500-foot safety bubble, getting a look up so we can see it against the blue sky.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  All our sensor data would get pumped into our helmet like an augmented reality system. So it's telling us exactly where to look. And we'd come by this very manageable merge, I'll say, we're not doing it 1200 knots like we usually do. And we couldn't see anything.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Nothing there. We would turn back around and our sensors would reacquire it. There it is again, and yet it seemed to be displaced a bit, but it was generally in the same location. And that, you know, just led to more confusion because we had to trust our sensors. And we didn't know really what else to do at that point. And that was kind of the status quo for a few weeks.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  But eventually. A few of my buddies in the squadron, they're flying out, two aircraft taking off together.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  They're probably about 150 feet apart as they approach this kind of entry point at a fixed GPS location altitude. Where they enter that working area. As soon as they cross that threshold, boom, object shoots down the left or the right wing of the lead aircraft. Came within about 50 feet of the cockpit, which is extremely close. And anything splitting a section is a problem. They canceled the flight, turned back around. And I saw him in the ready room, he still had all his gear on. Had his, you know, mouth gaped open a bit, you know, kind of just looking like, you know, what the heck? He's like, I almost hit one of those fucking things. And, you know, we didn't know, I mean, we knew what he was talking about, we didn't have a name for it, but.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Well, you know, what it looked like. Cause this was the first time we had really ever seen one, as far as we knew at this point, at least I did. And he described it as a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  About five to 15 feet in diameter was the best estimate he could give it. And that really triggered a pretty big reaction to squadron. Cause now we had to file paperwork, a safety report, a hazrep, a hazard report. And, and so we did that and the safety officer took the time to kind of survey the rest of the squadron to see, you know, okay, what other experiences have you had around this?

• 18:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  And as it turned out, there were like four other near mid aires that our squadron had had over the past, you know, few months with this issue that went unreported.

• 19:04Jesse Michels?

  What was, so you're taking all this in. What was your first instinct as to what this thing might have been?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  You know, at the time, I really, I didn't speculate what it could be. UAP wasn't a term I was familiar with. You know, there were some jokes about UFOs.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  But, you know, I think the general assumption was that this must've been something that blew in, it must've been some kind of civilian attack, it must've been maybe even worst case an adversarial capability, but. You know, the more that we kind of talked about the various experiences, what people had and what they were seeing, it just, it didn't fit any of those categories, even though like we didn't really have anything, any other label to give it, you know? Or any other category to put it in, you know, there's no propellers, there's no propulsion. It seems to be masking its IR signature, so it can't even break out to see what it looks like.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And they're traveling at speeds and, oh, by the way, they're out there all day.

• 20:31Jesse Michels?

  What were the, what were the top speeds?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  1.2 Mach was the fastest I detected one of them. Yeah. Which, as I told you, my top speed of 1.32. So I mean, that's fast even for a super hornet.

• 20:41Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Especially for something with no exhaust blower.

• 20:45Jesse Michels?

  Totally. So the main anomalies you'd say would be, yeah, low observability and masking signatures. It would be being able to withstand extreme amounts of wind and stay stationary. That's not obviously normal. The shape, the geometric shape.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:00Jesse Michels?

  Anything else? I imagine speed combined with those factors is anomalous, but maybe speed alone would not be considered anomalous. Anything else that you'd consider anomalous?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Well, there would, there would typically be like a handful of them out in the areas. It wasn't just like one that we might see. It was like three, five, seven of them. They're only over water. They're only going fast when they're hitting like due east essentially.

• 21:24Jesse Michels?

  Did any of them go? Cause obviously your friend, Commander David Fravor, who testified with you in front of Congress, and I want to talk about that. He had an experience at Nimitz in 2004 with their carrier strike group. And he mentions that the craft that he saw was hovering right above the water and then it almost seemed to, you know, go in and out of the water like this, be this kind of transmedium object, which is another observable when it comes to UAPs. Did you experience anything like that or?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  So I haven't heard of us in that timeframe experiencing that. You know, we can see down to the ocean, you know, the ocean with our radar system, although it gets a little worse as we get really close. We really don't have the system to tell us that something's entering the water unless we're like up on it and we can visually see it.

• 22:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  But these things would be climbing and descending various altitudes. We kind of cap our radar at around, you know, 30,000 feet or so. So if they were coming from higher than that, we weren't really observing it, but very likely that they were operating even higher than that. And they weren't respecting the boundaries of our area at all, which was a big clue, right? I mean, if it was some test, they would not be flying through the international commercial channel that's to the north of our area, but these weren't.

• 22:34Jesse Michels?

  They wouldn't be almost hitting one of the pilots.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:36Jesse Michels?

  Like, that seems pretty unsafe, even if you're... It's funny, because we did this great talk last night, it was a lot of fun. And I was telling you, one of the guys in the audience was NRO and NASA, and he came up to me afterwards and was like, I do think some of these things might be red teaming our systems, our detection capabilities in our airspace, which may be true in certain cases, but he wouldn't try to hit a pilot, you know, if that were the case. I don't know what your take is on that.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's hard for me to imagine that they would unwittingly expose us to what would very likely be what's considered like Special Access Program-type tech, SAP. That in itself would be a massive security flaw, almost equivalent of telling someone that doesn't even have security clearance in the data. And by the way, we have, you know, very secure ranges that are in the middle of the country to test these types of things. They have engineers, they have pilots, they have whole squadrons that can do that type of work. And so to take that type of tech, basically doing illegal activity to expose us to something we're not read into, and oh, by the way, doing it over international waters, where it's very well documented that there are, you know, adversaries that are hanging out down there,

• 23:49Speaker 02

  that are trying to see what we're doing, it just doesn't make sense to me.

• 23:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I think that's, uh, that's right. And then also just the shape as well, because the final sensor is the human eye, right? And so you guys saw these things, and that's incredibly important as well. How many eyewitnesses were there to the actual physical object?

• 24:12Speaker 02

  God, that's a good question. There was probably, I mean, I would say probably, let's see, there was five safety reports, there was two people in each air, or each jet, I mean, so at least 10 out of the 25 pilots or so that we had, but I imagine it's much higher than that.

• 24:26Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  And then it wasn't just our squadron. I later learned and talked to, uh, other squadrons that were operating out of the same area and even other areas later, but...

• 24:38Speaker 02

  You know, when the New York Times article came out and I saw that, I started asking people back on the East Coast, because I was in a different area, I was asking people in my ready room and, you know, about half the room raised their hand like, oh yeah, the cubes and spheres, you know, we saw those, yeah. And I know, no prompting, you know, like, and I didn't even realize these people had had their experience. I'd known them for a few years.

• 24:57Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  And that's just not something they talked about.

• 25:00Jesse Michels?

  Have you met fighter pilots stationed elsewhere who've experienced that shape? Because that shape, when I first heard about your testimony, I was like, that's so not even what you hear kind of in the history of UFO lore. It's like, you know, discs and saucers and that sort of thing. Have you heard of other fighter pilots seeing that shape?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'll, I've heard that one and spheres are very common as well, ones that are like outpacing jets. But, you know, I mean, basically every base that we have in the US, I mean, Norfolk, Virginia Beach area, of course, out in California on the West Coast, yes. Further inland, Lemoore, Fallon, these are other, you know, big Navy training ranges, they're seeing them there. Pax River, where we do our test pilot training, they're having incidents up there. So, you know, I think where these sensors are, guys are seeing them.

• 25:53Jesse Michels?

  It's so fascinating. And we're on the heels of very interesting reports that last year at Langley Hampton Air Force Base, for 17 days, you had quote unquote drones swarming the base.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:07Jesse Michels?

  And there was nothing that the US could do about this.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's incredible, right? I mean, Langley provides air response to DC. I mean, that's a major, major, you know, piece of the puzzle here.

• 26:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Houses F-22s, they had to move the F-22s to a new base because they were afraid of potentially losing those assets. They had similar incursions at Norfolk, the Norfolk Naval Base, which is the largest naval base on the East Coast, if not the country. Basically where our carriers were stationed. And there's other reports of similar objects that have been further in, like actually over DC itself. So, I mean, these are all adjacent to the areas that we were having our experiences and now we're having this influx of other issues that are occurring, you know, further north and further north and. If only someone told them that this could potentially be an issue, right?

• 26:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. If you were to poll, you know, people on the street at this point, we're in pretty interesting times. I think probably 50%, maybe over 50% of the American population now believes in the reality of UFOs. You know, this is obviously going to be sort of a guesstimate on your part, but you speak, I'm sure with a lot of other fighter pilots, you advocate for, you know, all these safety initiatives around the UAP topic. What percentage of fighter pilots in and around, you know, military circles do you think are bought in to UAP's existence?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a tough question. Um, I'll tell you what, 100% of people that have had their own experiences are bought in.

• 27:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  You know, I've, I've heard from some of the staunchest critics on this topic. They think I'm embarrassing the community by having this conversation. Uh, and then they have their own experience and they're just, you know, like, holy shit, you know, I guess I was the guy that was wrong here. So, you know, it's tough to say, I don't know if I can quantify it with any precision, but, um, you know, in my experience, guys that are flying that radar, they are seeing these objects and whether they've had the agency to go check it out and gain a visual. I couldn't put a number on that, but it's definitely a topic, at least within the Navy, maybe not the Air Force, that, uh, guys are, are smart on. They're briefing it in their flights, they're, um, they're debriefing it afterwards, they're submitting reports in some cases. Uh, I've talked to guys who are still not comfortable

• 28:23Speaker 02

  reporting it either because they just don't want to put the time in, or they don't think anything's going to happen, or they don't want it to affect their career in some way. Um, and so I still think it's underreported regardless.

• 28:33Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating. I, I think the Navy angle to all of this is extremely underrated. I think the Navy has experienced a lot of this stuff for a very long time. And one anecdote is, you know, I did this show on this, you know, mid-century inventor named Thomas Townsend Brown, who I'm fascinated with because I think maybe he made some interesting updates in topological physics and the world of gravity that have not met the eye. And there's this story actually, um, you know, he's being written about by this historian Paul LaViolette. And Townsend Brown goes to Hyman Rickover, who is the head of the Nuclear Navy. Basically started the American Nuclear Navy. And Hyman Rickover says, Townsend, you know, stop wasting your time. Like, we've already figured this stuff out.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, back then, too, huh?

• 29:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. So, and then there's another guy named Robert Sarbacher, who David Grush mentions as having set up UFO secrecy, along with Robert J. Oppenheimer, at, you know, the Atomic Energy Commission of 1954. And Sarbacher actually worked at the Harvard Undersea Observatory.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Oh, did he?

• 29:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 29:38Jesse Michels?

  And so I think there's a lot going on underwater. And I think that the Navy's gotta be, you know, have experienced this stuff for a very long time, would be my guess.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, that's interesting. You know, underwater world is interesting. You know, they call them USOs, or unidentified submerged objects, I believe. And, you know, I'll just say from my experience talking to the guys on subs and whatnot, always very cagey.

• 30:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Very secretive. But think about it, you know, you don't have the type of like air traffic that you have. You know, on our radar, we're always seeing all these different contacts, a lot of civilian air. But underwater, there's much less of that. And so if you're seeing something bizarre, it's probably a very high likelihood that it truly is bizarre versus some type of misinterpretation. And I know going back to, gosh, even, you know, Columbus and even before that, most likely, that they were, you know, seeing things under the water, that they didn't understand what they were. And I know Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who used to run NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, is highly interested in these underwater anomalies. I know he's, he's working on pursuing that as a research topic.

• 30:49Jesse Michels?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's the little brother to the NRO, which is now public, so I can talk about it. But there's not much known about it as NRO. And it's the underwater version of the NRO. And one gets the sense that, yeah, we've probably detected a lot of these things underwater. And do you, do you think, you know, per what you described as the kind of the observables of what you saw at Oceana, do you think these things have their own almost like inertial reference frames? Because one of the observables is they seem to be able to break conservation of momentum, right? Like, you're flying Mach, you know, one or two or whatever, and then you stop on a dime. And it's like, that's just impossible, like with a, you know, a gas propulsion fighter jet.

• 31:32Jesse Michels?

  And so, and then plasma is also coming off the craft, which can reduce, I guess, G-force, you know, inertial drag. And so, do you think they've figured something out in that realm? Obviously, we're in extremely speculative territory here.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a natural question, though, because based off of the flight mechanics, I mean, if you have something that's going supersonic, or even, you know, even 0.8 Mach or so, and you immediately stop it, I mean, it's no different than just slamming into the ground, right? I mean, in fact, it's probably a faster stop than if you were to crush an aircraft into the ground. So you have to ask yourself, you know, how is it doing that? And I don't understand a physical mechanism that would allow it to do it without having to speculate about some type of ability to, you know, control or manipulate inertia.

• 32:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. FLIR, which, you know, you guys picked it up with FLIR, also seems to be this important kind of sensor modality. FLIR had just been installed in 2004 in the Nimitz case with David Fravor. And so it was like this new Raytheon FLIR system, and Raytheon's like, we're not in charge of what you detect. What you detect is, you know, it's on you guys, or whatever. And so I find that very interesting as well, especially given, you know, Hal Puthoff, who actually lives in Austin out here, he's one of the deepest, you know, on some of the scientific theories around this stuff. And I think one of the questions, you know, average people will ask, which is a fair question, is like, why aren't we drowning in high resolution photo of this

• 32:58Jesse Michels?

  stuff? And I think it's because of these blue shifts and red shifts. And so if you were actually manipulating spacetime in these ways, that would comport with all these observables that you're mentioning, you'd experience probably, you know, it would be, it would be things at the ends of the electromagnetic wave spectrum, not in the RBG spectrum that we sort of see. And so it makes sense that FLIR would pick this stuff up.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  You know, well, our systems too, you know, they're designed for very specific purposes. And the way our systems work is that, you know, we have two giant, or one giant, you know, propulsion system in aircraft, and they expel a lot of heat, and the rest of the aircraft kind of absorbs energy from the friction of the air and things of that nature. And so the system is calibrated because that's the expectation where you're going to see. And so you can break out rivers on a jet, you can see the cockpit.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  And you can very clearly see, you know, the flames in the exhaust, if you will. But if you had something that was propulsing itself, an entirely different mechanism that was putting energy out equally across the skin of its body, it might just look like a blur of a yeah, just a blur essentially because it's, you know, we're kind of getting the worst part of the image and it's, that's what's being, that's the type of energy that's putting out across the entire surface of the object. And so the FLIR, although it might be effective for detecting that there's energy coming from there, it's essentially masking itself so that we can't see. And it might not be doing that potentially. It could be a byproduct propulsion, or it could just be a clever masking system.

• 34:33Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating. One of the things that always stood out to me about the Fravor testimony was he would say, it almost felt like the craft detected him, like knew that, you know, he was sort of looking at it. And is that something that comports with any of what your squadron saw?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't. Not in my experience. Well, I've heard some stories after the fact, but you know, they would be doing their own thing. They'd be in the area. So it seemed like they were focused there, but they weren't like, if we showed up, they weren't like coming over to us or going away. They just continued to do their own thing. So we certainly didn't have that type of experience. But, you know, I have heard, you know, multiple cases of these maneuvering around aircraft up in Pax Rivers. Fascinating case with one of my good friends who had basically a sphere pull up about 15 feet from his cockpit while he's, you know, maneuvering pretty quickly and hang out there for about 20 seconds and then dart off in front of him. There was another incidence down in New Orleans where

• 35:32Speaker 02

  an object with the same description is shot past the cockpit, initially thought it was a balloon until his wingman noticed how to turn and chase the jet and basically shot up in front of it and overtook it. So they, I think they definitely have the capability to maneuver around us, detect us, know we're there, but.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  My personal experience at the time wasn't to expect these to be reacting to us in the way that they were with Fravor's case.

• 35:58Jesse Michels?

  So you testified before Congress?

• 36:01Speaker 02

  My name is Ryan Fobbs Graves and I'm a former F-18 pilot with a decade of service in the US Navy. I have experience advanced UAP firsthand and I'm here to voice the concerns of more than 30 commercial aircrew and military veterans who have confided their similar encounters with me.

• 36:14Jesse Michels?

  It was a historic day. It was incredible. I mean, I couldn't believe it. I was lucky enough to be in the room and we talked to each other for a bit afterwards and it was just like, I never thought this topic would ever get that sort of airtime on that level. And so how did you feel about that?

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Man, I mean, just what an incredible experience and day, you know? It was really powerful for me when I went there. I mean, I didn't know where I was going to like show up, right? So it's like, I gotta find the room and it just happened to be walking in the same direction as everyone else. And, um, you know, we see the line of people. Right? Oh, okay. Well, this must be a spot. Interesting. You know, it's cool. There's a line. And we kind of get to the front line, realize it was a corner. You take the corner and there's, you know, another 500 people lined up on that side. And it was just, I mean, it was really powerful to just see all the support and the interest, you know, in person instead of just kind of the random comments on Twitter or X, excuse me. But, you know, in a sense, it's almost like, almost like landing on the boat, at least it was for

• 37:17Speaker 02

  me, where you're just kind of locked in and trying to push away all the, you know, all the doubts and other thoughts that you might have. It was kind of getting to the zone, be very present, like, you know, we mentioned earlier. Um, I met Dave for the first time there, got to speak to his lawyer and some of the other folks out back. Um, it was kind of, you know, funny anecdote. We were kind of getting ready to line up to walk out and, It was like Dave was, well, Dave Grush was standing there and then Fravor, they both just kind of like grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to the front. You first, this is your show.

• 37:53Jesse Michels?

  That's pretty wild.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it was like, here we go, you know?

• 37:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  And cameras clicking, you could, you almost feel them. It's almost like you can't even hear them in some sense.

• 38:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just really powerful, but you know, what was so fascinating, you know, what are so rewarding, I think for me was that, you know, you see hearings on the news and it's usually like, you know, members are maybe attacking the witness or whomever's testifying, or maybe it's a partisan issue and there's just a lot of back and forth on, on the sides of the aisle, but I've never seen a hearing that was quite like that where it just seemed like everyone was working together, right? We were all trying to figure this out. It wasn't partisan, it wasn't adversarial. And I think, you know, strange that this is an issue that's starting to bring out, at least politically, like some of the best of us, where we can have like a normal adult conversation and maybe move the ball forward.

• 38:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it was wild to see AOC and Matt Gaetz just completely simpatico, you know, just in total agreement over this issue.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:54Jesse Michels?

  It's, I think that this might be the only issue in which they agree on everything.

• 39:00Jesse Michels?

  So you're, you're sitting there and you're sitting with, you know, David Fravor and with David Grush and you and David Fravor have these amazing kind of eyewitness accounts. And then you have David Grush sitting next to you saying that there's been a covert reverse engineering program. We've actually had a crash retrieval program for, you know, 70 plus years around this stuff. Do you believe that? Do you think that the US government is reverse engineering UFOs?

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a tough one, you know? I, you know, in my job as Navy pilot, I was not exposed to any type of technology like that or any type of programs like that. And so the only information that I have to go off of is the same information that basically everyone else has that's in the public sphere. You know, I respect David Grush.

• 39:47Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  I, he was tasked to do a job with the UAP Task Force and that was the job to understand and uncover this information and he did it to the best of his ability and he reported his findings. And so there's, there's nothing, you know, in his background or in his professional experience that would lead me to believe that he's lying or making it up or being facetious in any sense.

• 40:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Now, how do I integrate that into like a wider belief system? It's tough. I think it's tough for everyone.

• 40:15Jesse Michels?

  For everybody.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  It's one of those things, I think that, you know, the only satisfying resolution is to have it essentially be admitted and pulled out to some degree by the government itself.

• 40:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  And although I think people are, you know, they have their scales of probability and I think, you know, he moved the needle quite a bit closer to certainty than

• 40:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  than before. And, you know, it's, you know, I listened to a little bit of his story before the hearing, but, you know, a lot of that was new information for me as well. And it was a very surreal experience, me sitting next to someone testifying to that type of information.

• 40:57Speaker 00

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• 41:27Speaker 02

  So yeah, I mean, I, I believe what he said. I believe he did it in earnest and unless he was being manipulated, you know, I think that the, the statements that he made are, you know, the first line of attack for a representative to further understand this and hopefully uncover what's going on.

• 41:44Jesse Michels?

  Totally. And he gave over a thousand pages to the inspector general, to the ICIG, Thomas Monheim, who the, the quote from Monheim was, "This is urgent and credible." And so I, I don't know, unless it's like something where the tip of the iceberg doesn't resemble the rest of the iceberg or something. And so we're jumping to conclusions around exotic material falling from the sky, but it like has to do with something that we're not even thinking of. There are things you can fathom like that, but on the surface, you have a guy, I've gotten to know him personally. I think he's in extremely high integrity, really, really smart, has literally an autistic attention to detail.

• 42:26Jesse Michels?

  And yeah, I think it's it's hard to argue with and it's so near term falsifiable where it's like he brought 40 people who claimed to have worked on this stuff firsthand to the IC inspector general. If something doesn't pop in the next 20 years, I think you, you know, it's it's kind of falsifiable, right? So it's like kind of inflect one way or the other where people will be like that was a psyop or they'll be like, like this was real. And just incentive or motivation wise, it doesn't make sense for him to, you know, do that if he doesn't actually believe it.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he was being very specific. He wasn't just kind of saying, oh, you know, we've heard rumors of this, that and the other thing. I mean, you know, I mean, I heard him say, he's like, I can tell you the location. Let's get in a skip. So I mean, you don't say that unless you're highly confident about what you're saying, because I mean, you're just setting yourself up for failure.

• 43:14Jesse Michels?

  Yep. And more and more of has come out around like possible past gatekeepers in politics. You hear Dick Cheney's name, you know, around, you hear George W. Bush might have contemplated UFO disclosure. And a part of me, and then you, you know, we talked about it last night, John Podesta, who's, you know, you could say Clinton's chief political operative, you know, is the White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, basically ran Hillary's campaign extremely into this topic. I I sort of want to question some of these public figures and be like, what do you know about this stuff? I mean, it's fascinating.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  I mean, a lot of these people are alive, you know, let's have the conversation. And I certainly understand why they would be hesitant to do that. But, you know, I agree with it. I think more attention should be put on these folks and have them at least provide a statement about what they know. And, you know, there's always a fear, not fear, but, you know, the expectation that they're just simply going to deny it. Because I mean, if they are read into these details, they would be breaking the law and would very likely face consequences.

• 44:15Jesse Michels?

  Totally. Yeah, no, it's a it's understandable that it would move in this sort of step function way where it's like a little more comes out and then, you know, you you get regulatory action and then a little more can come out and that you wouldn't get this kind of catastrophic blow up.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Is that, do you think that's part of an intentional strategy? Or is that just kind of what's happening?

• 44:36Jesse Michels?

  Outside group. I think it's, I think it's probably somewhat both. So like, I don't think, we talked about this last night. Think about the psychology of a whistleblower, right? Like you're this like patriotic guy with a military or intel background. Maybe you bump into this stuff. There was, you know, this new AP task force that was created that Rush kind of came out of. This guy David Grush, he testified with Ryan and there are other kind of, you know, high level officials who came out of that, you know, task force. If you bump into any of these programs, maybe these people have intersected with your career in the past, as David Grush has said in himself. You're probably going to want to coordinate somewhat with people on the inside to do this in a safe way.

• 45:19Jesse Michels?

  That makes sense for American national security. So yeah, I don't think, uh, any of the people at the forefront of disclosure. By the way, myself included, want everything all out, all at once. Having said that, as an academic feel. I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like the nuclear thing is a great example, right? So you have like nuclear trade secrets that like should never get out, but like nuclear science, like nuclear physics is a program at every elite university. And the idea that, you know, I, I think we're kind of stuck in these physics cul-de-sacs, you know, string theory and some other stuff. That, that's really travesty because it's just like, we have this like massive brain drain going on, uh, on this like really, really big level where not to insult any string theorists out there.

• 46:04Jesse Michels?

  I think they're very smart string theorists, but, um, if, if we don't have access to kind of greater ontological truth, like your, your physics theories are going to be like way off. But yeah, I don't, I don't think there is, there are very many proponents of quote unquote catastrophic disclosure on the inside. But I don't think most people on the inside want everything out. I don't think they want trade secrets that will give China or Russia an advantage over the US. You know, they don't want those things out. Um, but I do think, and then I also think there's probably something around softening the blow for the ontological shock or whatever. Where it's like, if you have some top of the pyramid view of this, it's probably pretty expansive and deviates a lot from the average person's worldview.

• 46:47Jesse Michels?

  And so maybe some sort of conditioning thing is happening. I, I think, uh, More likely, though, it's emergent. And so like, it's like, one person makes a move here. There are these like game theory dynamics around disclosure. Like this person wants this stuff to come out. And then this person over here is like, wait, I've been sitting on this stuff. And they're getting the glory here. And there's like, stuff like that happening. That's like, doesn't seem that coordinated. It seems like human.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:14Jesse Michels?

  And then in the world in which there are NHI, which I, I am pretty sympathetic to. I think, you know, we're not apex, you know, consciousness. Uh, I think more likely than not, if it's coordinated, it's not being coordinated by us. In the world in which they exist, right?

• 47:30Speaker 02

  We always talk about what's happening, uh, within our community, if you could say. But yeah, I mean, if, if that's true, then, you know, there is other calculus that we're totally not taking into account.

• 47:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, I, I, I'm really curious to see where it goes. Do you feel like you have a, any sort of prognosis or yeah, prediction for the next few years?

• 47:52Speaker 02

  I'm not playing that game.

• 47:55Jesse Michels?

  That's good on you.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  I mean, I see, I see the change that's happening right now. I don't know necessarily where it comes to culmination. I don't know when it ends, but there certainly is an acceleration of the process. You know, there seems to be more cases. There seems to be more people that want to talk about it. And, you know, I, I think there's this kind of interplay between this disclosure process, where the government's willing to share information and release stuff, whether, you know, the government or whether factions within the government are doing that. And the process of people out in the civilian world and the commercial world that are saying, hey, you know, like, well, I guess I'll investigate this. I could put resources here. I might be able to detect these objects. I might be able to understand this. And the more the disclosure process moves forward and information comes out, it motivates the outside.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  And the more work that happens on the outside, the more pressure that's exerted to release information on the government. And I think we've been seeing this kind of interplay and, and buildup between those two groups.

• 48:49Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  And, you know, what's gonna, what's gonna be the end result? Where's the, where's the big reveal gonna come from? I guess is to be seen.

• 48:57Jesse Michels?

  Totally. I, it's this beautiful crowdsourced effort. And I think there can sometimes be ego in this space of like, I want to be the one or whatever. But it's, it's this amazing thing where if you, if you push it, you know, a little farther. You often get something back.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  It's a social movement in a lot of ways, right? I mean, the more information that comes out, the more people understand it's okay to talk about. And they stop dismissing the things that they maybe have as far as information, or maybe that they've experienced. And, you know, I've been privileged to talk to a ton of people on this topic. And, you know, the amount of people that have had their own personal experiences are, I mean, pretty close to 50%.

• 49:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's wild, yeah.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  And maybe that's even higher once people feel more comfortable. I mean, even last night, you know, the question was asked and, you know, maybe like 30% of the crowd raised their hands. And so, yeah, I mean, the more, you know, even if you do an action in this, in this space, and it doesn't lead to the government releasing a new video or something, you're, you're educating the populace on why this matters, why it's important. And, you know, once, I've met a lot of naysayers as well. And it's easy to tell that they haven't done any research into this because they would see the connections and at least have some interest in it instead of being completely dismissive. And so, more information that gets out there, you know, we're changing minds, making people understand it's a serious issue. And all that's going to just lead to greater understanding.

• 50:22Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  You're doing work with that. I mean, you're doing, you're doing that job, you know, with this podcast. So, thank you.

• 50:30Jesse Michels?

  Oh, man. Well, doing my small part, but I appreciate that. Something we, we share is an interest in the private sector applications of this stuff. And despite conspiracy theories about, you know, I work with Peter Thiel. People think he's reverse engineering a UFO.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  That's not.

• 50:48Jesse Michels?

  It's not happening. It's not happening. I wish he were more interested in, in, in doing things like that. But I think the, um, the trouble with some of this stuff in the private sector world is it's just a long time horizon. It's, they're moonshots. They're really like, you know, low probability, but extremely important, you know, work. And so. We were talking about this last night. There's a part of me that thinks like the Bell Labs model of like quasi-public-private funding just needs to come back. If we are in, you know, some sort of arms race vis a vis the Russians and the Chinese, and you know what Carl Nell says is right, he's a, you know, has set up Army Futures Command and he was

• 51:30Jesse Michels?

  on the UAP Task Force with David Grush. If we're in this arms race, I think we'd need sort of more nationalized support towards some of these technology efforts. And I don't know what your experience is, but mine is that a lot of our best and brightest talent aren't working at the big primes anymore, or in government positions, they're working at, you know, private sector companies. And so, what do you see? Do you think there's opportunity here? I know you're doing some interesting work in this area.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, you know, I think I consider this part of the kind of discovery process. How can we motivate the government to release information because there's a pressure coming from the outside to move the conversation forward? And I think it takes, you know, it takes place in kind of two categories. There are, there are companies and people that are working on tech that is inspired by this topic. Some very interesting technologies by some very, you know, intelligent people and mainstream people. Advanced propulsion, advanced materials, energy production, and integrating that into unique ways that would be consistent with some of the things that we're observing. And, you know, I think some of these capabilities are capabilities that can come online, say like in a normal five

• 52:41Speaker 02

  to six-year timeline, without having to be a 10 or 15-year type project. I think they could be broken down. And I think really the key to doing that is finding opportunities that have wide applicability, right? So of course, if you can, say, generate energy in the skin of an aircraft, that would be highly applicable to many different industries, but it also might validate or invalidate something that we're seeing in the UAP topic. On the other side of that coin, it's not just about trying to put forward these different technologies, it's about, you know, how do we better understand what we're seeing? How do we sense these better? And that's an area I've spent a lot of time thinking on. What technologies can we put forward that will provide us, you know, the ability to detect these objects, to characterize them, and then further evaluate, you know, exactly

• 53:26Speaker 02

  what they are, what their intent are, and, you know, where they came from? I've started a small company that is building what we believe to be the next generation of space situational awareness cameras that will be able to provide highly detailed information around non-traditional orbital trajectories. These can go on satellites and it has a great use case where, you know, it can provide awareness to the satellite operator so they can choose or not choose to maneuver their space vehicle and extend the lifespan. But this would also be a source of UAP detection that could be commercialized and sold as potentially intelligence product, or whether within DoD or within the commercial markets.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  And so I think, you know, the way that commercial space is evolving and being deregulated, or at least not deregulated, but it's loosening up quite a bit. I think the time is now for companies and other folks to look to how they can contribute to this project through open source technology, through commercial projects. And, you know, that's an area that I've talked to a number of people that are interested in funding. If anyone's interested in learning more about that, be happy to share that information and help them on their, on their journey. Because that's, I think, the path that's going to move us into understanding this and not having to just simply sit back and wait for the government to share with us.

• 54:48Jesse Michels?

  And I think also unconstraining or opening up some of these like prior biases that we have, especially in physics. Carl Nell just did a great interview for Danny Sheehan's New Paradigm Institute. And he was talking about not only the preponderance of life in the universe and how, you know, it's probably much older than we think it is. And, you know, all sorts of things there, but also when it comes to physics, faster than Light travel, you know, Miguel Alcubierre figured out this sort of theoretical model. And NASA has been studying this for years. You have Sonny White at NASA, you know, doing interesting work in this area.

• 55:27Jesse Michels?

  And it involves, I guess, negative mass or negative energy, but we actually detected negative energy, you know, with the Casimir effect. And so there are all these ways in which if you talk to an average scientist at, you know, any sort of university, they'll say these things are just impossible. And then you'll talk to like, somebody doing interesting work at, at the frontier of R and D at aerospace. Like I just met this former head of revolutionary tech at Skunk Works. And it's like, he agrees with all this kind of ostensibly wacky stuff that I believe way more than, you know, any of these like prestigious professors. And it's this weird thing where it feels like aerospace has the real science and academia just doesn't. What do you think?

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It seems kind of like a zero sum game in academia where everyone's competing for the same grants. The standards are extremely high and no one wants to screw with their career path. So they can get tenure and then kind of settle into whatever they actually really want to do.

• 56:23Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  But, you know, that's different than how the startup world works in the technology world, you know, guys are, they're pushing the edge of the boundaries. And they, the only limitations they have are their resources and, um, and what's capable. So I, yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent. I think a lot of the real interesting work is happening out there. And that's why, again, I think it's such an interesting time now where that, that type of environment, this, you know, this startup community that we have could be leveraged to be able to push this conversation forward. I don't think we can rely on academia to do that.

• 56:53Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely. It would be awesome if young, talented STEM students watch content like this and they are, get opened up to these frameworks and they can work on things. And we were talking about it last night.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  As important is the process of discovery, right? What can we do in the private sector? What can we do in the commercial world in order to bring forward capabilities, technology, and understanding that's going to allow us to decipher this without waiting for the government to throw us scraps essentially? And so there's multiple organizations out there. Some of them are attacking it from a technology side. Can we potentially create technology that replicates some of the kinematics that we're seeing? If we can imagine perhaps they have capabilities in the skin of their vehicle to generate power versus having an engine in the back. So there are companies working on some very interesting energy and materials, propulsion technologies. On the other side, there's how do we better understand this scientifically?

• 57:50Jesse Michels?

  It's like SpaceX is an amazing company, but it's an Earth-based space company. And it'll take a human on a chemical combustion rocket 80,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri B, which is not viable, obviously. And so we need some sort of spacetime metric engineering.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  You know, just to kind of speculate a little bit, one of the things that fascinates me about the UAP topic is if, you know, if we can make the assumption that these are from somewhere else, they're observable, they're studyable, you know, are we one or two like breakthroughs away from having the same capabilities, you know? That would, you know, immediately lock potentially even close to our lifetimes access to the rest of the galaxy in a lot of ways. And I can't think of a grander vision for focusing our energy on something.

• 58:34Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah, it'd be amazing. And that was actually probably when I interviewed David Grush, right after your guys' amazing testimony, that was probably the most thing, the thing he said that was seared the most in my mind, which is he said, if I were a betting man, I think that this represents tech that is not a stepwise leap ahead of humanity, but it's almost an alternative timeline in which they went some civil propulsion route and we went this destructive catastrophic nuclear route. And I just, I was like, holy shit, that's amazing.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought of similar things, right? Like, I mean, again, making the assumption they're from elsewhere. I mean, what if they evolved on a highly, a large planet that had very high gravity, right? And perhaps the economics didn't work out such that, you know, chemical rockets were a solution that was ever viable.

• 59:24Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  And so they, maybe it took them longer to get to space, but then when they did, they did it by developing a technology that either we have And got to or never considered because there was more economic option on the table.

• 59:33Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. Yeah. So like mass ejection wouldn't even work because the gravity was so intense. So you'd need some sort of space time warping. Wow. That's cool. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, there's so many, there's a plethora of options when it comes to this stuff. And I, yeah, I think per our conversation on, you know, kind of academia aerospace in the 40s and 50s. You were telling me earlier that you live in New Hampshire and you live pretty close to this pub. That is dedicated to the Gravity Research Foundation, I believe. You know, this work of Roger Babson, they're doing all sorts of gravity research. And this is a time when military and academia were extremely entangled. And then you had these things called the Mansfield Amendments, which disentangled them.

• 1:00:17Jesse Michels?

  And you have the Invention Secrecy Act of 1952 as well, where it felt like, you know, physics became dangerous. You had, you know, atom bomb up until thermonuclear bomb. And you have to think, you know, that like physics itself needs to be treated in this sort of more careful way. And so, yeah, I think we're in this weird time now where a lot of people feel very kind of duped by a lot of the frameworks that are public, string theory, quantum gravity, that sort of thing. And yeah, they want tech to re-accelerate because we live in this, we live in this horrible multipolar world that's on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Like if there's ever time to get better, exciting civil side use cases

• 1:01:01Jesse Michels?

  and explore the stars, it would be now.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And you know, when I think about that, I kind of go back to your, your comment earlier about, you know, we can't release things that are going to damage our national security, right? We're not suicidal. It doesn't make sense to do that. We certainly can't rely on something else that may be out there to stop us from wronging ourselves.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  But you know, nuclear physics is a known quantity. It exists and people share that. We don't share the secrets to our nuclear weapons. And I think, you know, I think that's a fair model for how this can be understood, right? We don't have to maybe give away the secrets of the material science of the repulsion system of how it's integrated in other tech, but the base reality that exists, I think. That's my hope for, you know, people talk about disclosure. What does that really mean? But I think ultimately that's what it needs to be, just an acknowledgement of the reality of the situation and allowing them to share, hopefully, you know, an assessment of maybe not the star system they're from, but you know, to understand that they're not from here. It's not an adversary system. It's not trickery. And yeah, and I think the public would be very accepting and understanding of the fact

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  that of course, not everything is going to be shared, but I think it's really just basically a crime against humanity to just withhold such important information about the reality of it from the world populace.

• 1:02:19Jesse Michels?

  Couldn't agree more. So right now in government, you have the all domain anomaly resolution office, right?

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:27Jesse Michels?

  Arrow. And there's kind of a split in our world of people who are advocating for UFO disclosure. Some people support Arrow. Others say that, you know, they are somehow co-opted or they're not doing their job in good faith in collecting this data. They've recently had a change of the guard. So from this guy Kirkpatrick to, I think you told me who the new leader is.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  John Koloski.

• 1:02:53Jesse Michels?

  John Koloski. What do you think of Arrow as an organization?

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, as an organization, I think that, um, you know, one, they've been given a very challenging task and it's something that requires them to interface with essentially the whole of the government to be able to resolve. So just right off the bat, understanding that they have a very colossal task on their hands. But you know, I've, you know, I've know they've received a lot of criticism as well from people online that have suggested they're not doing their job earnestly. And you know, I think the individuals within the office themselves are, you know, doing the best work that they can do with the resources they have. But ultimately, you know, they need to be properly funded, which I believe has occurred,

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  and they need to have access to the right information. And ultimately, it's a DoD organization, right? They're not there to succumb to the needs and desires of the American people necessarily that are looking for particular answers to questions they have. And so, you know, I think we need to understand that, you know, they're doing it within the confines of answering to a customer that isn't necessarily the American people. And I think that's why the legislation such as the UAP Disclosure Act is so important, right? Because it created that mechanism that does answer the mail for the American people, specifically with the suggestion of a review panel, which essentially would receive the

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  output from Arrow and others and be able to do a security assessment or risk assessment of the threat to national security of the information and have the authority to declassify information for public consumption. I think that was my biggest disappointment, that that was removed from the first version of the UAP Disclosure Act. We're dwindling on our options for this year's version, but I think that is really going to be the key piece, key piece that, you know, Arrow just simply can't, can't fulfill, right? They're not designed to do that. They don't have the authorities to be able to share and declassify information for the most part. And so, yeah, I think, you know, I think there was other components that are needed outside of just Arrow.

• 1:05:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it would be amazing if we got that executive panel of interdisciplinary experts to sort of, you know, help with this process. You have worked a lot on kind of aviation safety initiatives around this. I guess I'm somewhat of a split mind where I'm like, my take is going to be very armchair compared to somebody like yours when it comes to aviation safety. So I'll sort of like be deferential to like you and other fighter pilots. And then at the same time, I'm like, this stuff has probably been going on for a long time if it's the UAP phenomena. And so... I don't know of too many incidents. There's, I think, one from like 1979 that James Fox covers,

• 1:05:47Jesse Michels?

  where this Iranian pilot like shoots at the UAP and then there's, you know, this sort of dogfight and then he starts going down. And so there clearly are safety implications, but how kind of near term important is the safety component of this?

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, so, you know, it's a sliding scale, right? So people that don't fly, you know, think safety issues, you hit something in the air and you lose your aircraft. And, you know, that's obviously the worst case scenario. And I think for a military pilot that is not treating this seriously, that's a much higher probability than say a commercial airliner that they're just sitting in the chair, you know, they're looking outside, they get all the time in the world, their cognitive loading, as we call it, is pretty low. They don't have the agency to maneuver, so they're on a very strict path. And, you know, I think the risk is lessened in that particular scenario. As a military pilot, we are often operating at the edge of your cognitive ability, you know, and starting to maybe shed things. That's when you have a much higher risk

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  of having an incident. When you're, you work as hard as you can, you're doing, you know, mental math, you're targeting into all these different groups, you're getting blown with the wind, you're flying next to your lead, all these things compound and that's when you have an issue. There's, there's a gentleman that sends me several times a month, stories that he's pulled up about aircraft that have mysteriously gone missing.

• 1:07:18Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  And so there, you know, some of them are, hey, he, he saw an object and he chased it. And then, you know, five minutes later, he flamed out or he crashed. There's a number of cases where it's just, you know, an aircraft hits an airborne object.

• 1:07:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  And it crashes and there's no knowledge or understanding of what the object was they hit. And I'm not necessarily attributing to UAP specifically, but I think there's a lot more research that can be done to validate some, some issues that have occurred in the past that may or may not be related to that.

• 1:07:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, it was considered. A national security issue in the context of foo fighters nineteen forty two nineteen forty five and specifically in Bavaria, southern Germany. You had these like what looked like controlled controlled balls of lightning kind of showing up and but messing with allied fighter flight paths.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Jesse Michels?

  And fighter pilot flight pass and it was it seemed like, you know, there was some sort of intentionality on the part of these objects and the pilots were definitely kind of they felt like they're they were being kind of obstructed in their abilities to fly.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  Safety is one thing. National security, however, I think it's a very clear and present danger. Right? So when we're flying around in our jet, we're being very cautious about what aircraft are out there. And if this was a tactical scenario, I mean, we have to know one hundred percent what each one of those aircraft are. Are they a threat? Are they a commercial airliner? And we're going to, you know, start World War Three by shooting down, you know, a hundred people in an aircraft. And so we have so much technology and so much training into that. And so when you just you take this very complex scenario and then you just kind of sprinkle in all these unknowns.

• 1:08:58Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  It becomes a massive issue.

• 1:09:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, even if the conclusion is we know the signatures of these things, there's not much you can do. But like when you detect it, you know what's going on, you know, maybe don't be aggressive and kind of do your thing or something, even if that's the takeaway. Like, it's good to have that, right?

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  And look what's happening, you know, in Ukraine, of course. I mean, having unidentified, non-responsive, unknown origin type vehicles that are operating near our military bases. I mean, you can see the devastating effects that that could potentially lead to. And, you know, I think one of the big things we see is that guys say, oh, you know, someone that might be a bit incredulous on this topic is saying, oh, yeah, I don't believe in UFOs. That's nothing. Or I don't even want to report this. And what if it is an adversary that is observing our bases and doing something? You know, it's just this massive flaw. And we've learned these lessons in the past, but it seems like we're repeating this error by just the force of the stigma that is surrounding this topic.

• 1:09:56Jesse Michels?

  What do you think of, you know, Lou Elizondo has been out for a while now, you know, since. 2017, he was kind of one of the first whistleblowers. And he in the past has said, maybe UFOs are sort of prepping the battle space. Maybe they're doing recon or sort of a scouting job. And maybe they're, they are somewhat adversarial.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Jesse Michels?

  And they haven't stopped nuclear wars in the past. Do you think that that's a possibility?

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Well, that was one of my first assumptions when I, we were seeing these on the Eastern Sea Board. We weren't assuming they were UFOs doing that, but we're like, hey, this could be an adversary that is soaking up our waveforms, that is trying to decrypt our radios, that is observing our tactics. And if we just ignore them, let that happen, you know, the next time we go into a major conflict, all of a sudden they know everything we're doing, they can jam us, they can break our radios. And so we were setting ourselves up for failure in that point. So I do get the sense that even just having them out there in the passive, kind of nondescript way they were, could very well just be a recon type mission.

• 1:10:58Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. There's a long history of fighter pilots like yourself having seen these things. So you have Gordon Cooper, who, you know, was one of the first American astronauts who spent more time in space. I think he spent 36 hours in space or something for the Mercury mission. Ted Stevens, who was a senator from Alaska, who actually helped start OSAP with Harry Reid, actually saw, saw UFO, I think in World War II as well. And then recently I interviewed our mutual friend, James Fox. He talked about Buzz Aldrin's sister telling him that Buzz Aldrin, as a fighter pilot in World War II, saw UFO, I think in Japan.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  I don't know where.

• 1:11:39Jesse Michels?

  So I think this is a very, it's probably a much more common occurrence and I'm just very grateful for you to be the tip of the spear as far as coming out and de-stigmatizing it, because a lot of this stuff is going on, water cooler conversations, hallway conversations, and you're really making it public.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, before, before I spoke out, I mean, you'd hear the talks, right? Even just, not just the historical ones, but guys, you know, kind of older guys have been flying for a while, like they all just seem to have that cool story they tell you, you know, once they had a few drinks in them.

• 1:12:09Jesse Michels?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, I think this is, I think this is much more pervasive. I think it's been happening for a while and, and it's still happening, you know? I mean, I've spoke to current astronauts that have had their own instances. So it's, you know, it's strange how we, we tend to discount the past, even the recent past on this topic, but it does seem to be very pervasive and.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  You know, when I, when I spoke out about this, I did it simply because I was hearing that my colleagues were having no resolution to this issue. It was still a safety issue. It wasn't getting run up the chain. It wasn't getting resolved. And, you know, my motivation was simply to be able to provide some additional information so that this would hopefully get the attention it needed to get resolved. And of course, since then, I've learned it's not easily resolvable, as Arrow has learned.

• 1:12:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Despite the name.

• 1:13:01Jesse Michels?

  Hey.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  And but, and then, you know, I kind of became a beacon for people to call and report their incidents for me, primarily aviators, but all sorts of people. And that, you know, that's what led me to believe that, you know, wow, this is, this isn't just military pilots, it's commercial pilots. And, you know, that was my goal going back to the hearing, was just simply to be able to do the same thing I was trying to do for the military guys, is to be able to share just how prevalent this was and how this was something that was just going unmitigated.

• 1:13:30Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Was, you know, a real issue. And I'm, I'm eager to see where this conversation is in five years, whether there's full disclosure or not. I think that this topic and conversation is going to continue to grow in the public sphere. People are gonna be more willing to share their experiences and stories. And I think we're gonna learn a lot from that.

• 1:13:49Jesse Michels?

  I'm equally eager. I think you're gonna play a big part in it. And before we wrap up, you mentioned something fascinating to me, which is you know, one of the central characters whose voice we all know from one of the three videos that the New York Times released in 2017 that the Pentagon admitted was real in 2020.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  That's not a L S though, is it? It's not even a L S, dude. But if there's something, it's okay.

• 1:14:42Jesse Michels?

  You want to talk about that?

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I'll talk about it a little bit, you know? So, I mean, when I first saw the New York Times pop, uh, massive deja vu. I'm seeing this, what the heck, you know? And, um, my gosh, that's the video I saw on the classified space. My very good buddy, I'm not going to say his name, um, who recorded that video. And, uh, of course, the pilot in the front seat as well. But this particular gentleman, he was at my wedding party. Wow, we went through training in Virginia when we first got on the F-18 together. Went to the boat for the first time at night together. We got sent to the same squadron after that together. Uh, and then as I was leaving that squadron, he actually put in a package to, um, transfer from a weapons system officer, the backseat guy, to become a pilot. Then he got assigned to the same place I was instructing.

• 1:15:27Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  We spent most of those 11 years or so hanging out together. We were very good friends. Um, and, you know, we got to talk just recently and he actually shared something with me. I, I, um...

• 1:15:39Jesse Michels?

  Which, we should specify which video.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 1:15:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Um, but he, he, he shared something, uh, new on one of the, uh, now famous videos, in particular, the Go Fast video.

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Are you box reading target? Yeah, dude. No, I'm looking on a track. Oh, okay. Oh, my gosh, dude. Wow. Look at the try.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  And what this was, was that it wasn't just a singular object when they detected that. There were actually four objects that were in what we call line abreast, or basically a straight line about a mile apart, which, you know, in flying formation that way, which, you know, makes you think they have to be connected to each other in some sense digitally, right? They have to know where they are in relation to each other, be able to fly that precise of a formation. But, you know, he's still very interested in this topic, at least in the context of his experiences. It's still something that he thinks about, and I think we'll be hearing some more from him.

• 1:16:57Jesse Michels?

  Can't wait and excited to see what you do too. And yeah, hopefully we can keep collabing and thanks for coming out to Austin, Ryan, and coming on the show.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 1:17:07Jesse Michels?

  Awesome, man.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

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