'Immaculate Constellation' Groundbreaking Reveal (ft. Michael Shellenberger)

Join Jesse Michels in an exclusive sit-down with Michael Shellenberger, recorded right after the UAP congressional hearings on November 13, 2024. Shellenberger delves into the hearings' revelations and his newly released Immaculate Constellation report. Support American Alchemy by Becoming a YouTube Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join 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] Original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. #uap #congressionalhearing #congress #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

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• 0:27Speaker 01

  I don't believe that this is being kept secret from us simply to protect methods. I think it's being kept secret from us for deeper reasons. The intelligence community is treating us like children. It's time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Boys, quick photo.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  We are at Rayburn House Office Building where the Oversight Committee hearing is going to happen. The last one happened July 26th, 2023.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  They have let in 15 people from the public.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Some big, big changes in public perception and even public interest. The topic seems to be a lot more in the zeitgeist. It seems to be people just have a general interest into the topic and just I think in the paranormal in general.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  So yeah, let's get this thing out there, man.

• 1:31Jesse Michels?

  You are just taking photos on your iPhone. It's incredible.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  So I'm just going to tweet it or whatever we call it. Immaculate Constellation report on the US government's secret UAP UFO program from Whistlemore.

• 1:42Jesse Michels?

  You say, um, discussed by Congress in today's hearing. Full report here and then.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51Jesse Michels?

  Give it an RT right now.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's roll. From Whistlemore, let's say about, okay. Done. Done.

• 1:58Jesse Michels?

  Well, I just, you better get that first tweet. Feels like the main impetus we all need to read. Michael just tweeted the Immaculate Constellation report. That was bad.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  You happy? Great, thank you. Thank you, sir. Yeah.

• 2:14Jesse Michels?

  I love Bruchette.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  He was coming in hot.

• 2:15Jesse Michels?

  He comes in hot every time.

• 2:17Speaker 05

  And we punished them by giving them multi-million dollars more than they asked for every year.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Thirteenth time.

• 2:23Jesse Michels?

  Thirteenth time.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26Jesse Michels?

  Unbelievable.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27Jesse Michels?

  What are the other times?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Uh, I've done energy, the environment, um, climate change, censorship.

• 2:34Jesse Michels?

  Maybe you'll be in this chair one day.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 2:37Jesse Michels?

  Michael.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I'd be bored to tears.

• 2:41Jesse Michels?

  How did you get into this topic to begin with?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I mean, the first piece I did was on maybe the craziest of all the cases, which is the famous Brazil crass in Varginha. And I did it in part because I lived in Brazil, I speak Portuguese. I thought the movie was incredibly interesting and I ended up doing some original reporting to verify some of the claims that James Fox was making. I interviewed someone that actually had seen the photographs of the alleged creature and I did a two-page spread for New York Post. And then the subject kind of went to sleep for me and then I only came back to it after David Grush's testimony and I just wanted to poke around and see if I could verify some of the claims and I've done about, I guess, four or five stories since then.

• 3:29Jesse Michels?

  And we've both gotten to know David Grush for the last couple of years and he's also a big, for me, source of confidence because you can kind of feel the earnest, I mean, he has mild autism, you know, attention to detail and focus on truth. And then he'll also, he'll say a thing and it just gets corroborated continually in sort of your open source findings. Have you found that as well?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, this is, so this is an issue that I would never use even just two sources for. I feel like when you're in something that is so on the fringe, you know, genuinely on the edge of... You know, of what we understand that you need multiple sources and that you have to really check them out. And so I've been pretty cautious, you know, in my reporting. I also, you know, am careful to be like, this is what people are saying. This is what people in these positions to know are saying. I remain agnostic about the essential nature of the phenomenon. I don't know what it is. You know, I think that the other motivation was that this came during a period of time when we were reporting on other governmental

• 4:35Speaker 01

  abuses of power. The most famous one was censorship, but we've now done stories on entrapment by FBI. We've done stories on disinformation operations. And so I find myself getting certainly fascinated by the phenomenon like everybody else, but I think that my motivation has been like, this is bad, that the government is behaving in these ways and that we need and that really that's sort of if you're going to kind of list top functions of journalism, kind of at the top of it would be governmental abuses of power.

• 5:04Jesse Michels?

  How do we make progress on the nature of the phenomenon itself? Because I thought you did a great job of toeing that line and maintaining kind of epistemic humility around what this thing is.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:15Jesse Michels?

  How do we get closer on that?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it seems like we're getting closer. You know, there's a

• 5:20Jesse Michels?

  Read, by the way, the report that Michael just tweeted because maybe that'll get you a little bit closer. It goes in a lot of detail.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's people are gaining courage. So, you know, certainly cowardice is courageous, but so too is courage. And so you start to see the whistleblowers becoming more comfortable. We've had whistleblowers who are anonymous that are that were now on a different issue. We need to attach their names to it. I think you're seeing more people come forward. As I always stress, I could never encourage whistleblowers to go get information because I can't encourage anybody to, you know, break the law. However, if people have information, I will promise to protect them. And that's ultimately why You know, someone came to me with the Immaculate Constellation stories. They just felt like they'd seen me getting grilled in front of Congress before about revealing my sources, and I think they trusted that I wouldn't betray them.

• 6:10Jesse Michels?

  Well, hopefully you get a deluge of interesting stories after this because I think you're doing amazing work with public and

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 6:18Jesse Michels?

  You did a great job protecting your source in this case. You were questioned pretty intensely.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  Do you know those sources?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I do.

• 6:24Speaker 06

  Are they within the Department of Defense?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I can't say.

• 6:27Speaker 06

  You can't say or you won't say?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I won't say.

• 6:30Speaker 06

  Okay, why not?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Because I protect my sources and I think the

• 6:33Speaker 06

  But you're not naming them. It's a big department, but many of us on my side of the aisle would say it's far too big. So you're talking about the Department of Defense, sources from within the Department of Defense?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I'm not willing to reduce the potential universe of where my sources might be.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I will say that after I published, I was told that this program, that the USAP was actually managed by the Department of Defense but held at the White House.

• 7:07Speaker 06

  Roger that.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  But that's a single source and I don't have multiple sources to verify that.

• 7:11Speaker 06

  Thank you, sir. I did my best to trick an answer out of you, but it was partially successful. Madam Chair, are you?

• 7:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, who was that? The congressman?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Congressman Higgins.

• 7:20Jesse Michels?

  Congressman Higgins was like, "I tried to trick you."

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard. I mean, you have to remember not to reveal anything about them, their gender, their agency. I try to keep the universe pretty big, but also want to sort of say they're in a position to know. You can't be so vague that people don't trust it.

• 7:39Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  But I ultimately think that the report itself, which came out now, it's been, I guess, probably about a month since my article, or maybe a month and a week, and I think that the facts will speak for themselves. I didn't have, I didn't, I'm not going to say I verified every single part of it perfectly, but I did spend some time looking around just to make sure it didn't look like this was compiled from existing lore or existing cases. The accusation, of course, with the UAP issue is that this is a case of circular reporting.

• 8:09Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Circular reporting is a real problem. I mean, it's, you want to avoid, you know, somebody told somebody something and then you thinking that you're getting something from two sources, but it's actually just from one. So there's ways to prevent that, but I, it seems like pretty new information and certainly the revelation that there exists A very large strategic intelligence project to evaluate this information in a way that you would expect someone to evaluate it with a lot of still images, video images, human reports, combining them. You can see there's a very interesting section where the source goes through the different kinds of UAPs and the different psychological effects and biological effects. I think that's a really fascinating part of the report.

• 8:52Jesse Michels?

  That's so fascinating. It's almost like this total information awareness where you have signals intelligence, you have human intelligence, you have these databases that we don't have access to. And presumably, this is, I think, a really important thing when it comes to the topic is people ask, you know, where is this program housed? Is it in NASA? Is it in the DOD? Is it in the DOE? The truth is, right, it's sort of all factions of all of those things. It touches on all of those things. And the departments themselves, in many cases, don't have proper oversight over these kind of factions. It's kind of this cargo cult of what was set up from the 50s.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, I mean, the, my sources said that it was a DOD program. After I published, a source said that it was, it's a USAP, Unacknowledged Special Access Program, controlled by the White House but administered by the DOD. I think there's definitely playing, somebody's playing some games here to keep this stuff hard to track or easier to deny, for example. So, but I think like, you know, for the bottom line, for the public and for members of Congress, is that behind the scenes, the Pentagon and the intelligence community doesn't just have a bunch of blurry, fuzzy videos.

• 10:07Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  I reported, and this is from a single source, but I reported it pretty carefully, a report of a very high-quality video shot from a helicopter of an orb coming out of the ocean about 20 miles off the coast of Kuwait, being joined by another orb. And it, you know, high-definition, full color, you know. And I also point out that it was shot in a helicopter on, you know, I'm assuming high-quality cameras, but this is not some, you know, one of the concerns around maybe why they don't release this information is they don't want to reveal how the military collects this information. Well, I think everybody knows that we have helicopters and high-definition cameras, so that can't be one of the reasons. And I think even in the other, some of the other technologies,

• 10:51Speaker 01

  you can also, you know, you can redact it, you can hide stuff, you can blur stuff. You know, I think it's, I don't believe that this is being kept secret from us simply to protect methods. I think it's being kept secret from us for deeper reasons. And some of them may just be ego, legacy, you know, psychology, politics, or maybe some criminality, there may be some ethics. I don't buy at all the excuse that they're high in all this stuff just because they don't want to reveal how we capture this information.

• 11:27Jesse Michels?

  Lou Elizondo, famous, amazing whistleblower when it comes to this topic, who was involved in ATIP and OSAP, he was asked if he was read into Immaculate Constellation. He had a very interesting answer. He said, "I can neither confirm nor deny." What do you make of that?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, those kinds of statements are always curious because you would think that if it were not true, you could just deny it. At the same time, I think that if you, you know, if people read the denial as revealing some information, then I could see why it would do that. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a very interesting moment. There's always been speculation that Elizondo had more direct involvement in crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs. But again, it's another case of why he needs, we need to have the proper protections so that he can reveal what he knows.

• 12:21Jesse Michels?

  How do we get that? Because we had the Gallagher Amendment, but it doesn't seem like we've had this, you know, what we, you would expect the floodgates to open after that, right? A lot of these people would come out. How do we get the proper protections? Because that seems just so key and essential. I remember, you know, we spoke and, you know, I didn't say anything about the source, but you did say he was very scared. And so, that seems to be like, these people can't be extremely afraid of reprisals, right? They have to be able to come out and be in public, not just on public.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I think, I mean, there's a friend of mine who's a journalist who covers this very skeptically says, you know, if there really was this proof and you really had people that were close to it and they wanted to come out, they would just do so without concern for reprisals. And I understand what he means in the sense that, you know, if you had, you know, photographs and film of alien bodies or craft or whatever, you could potentially get into a hearing like this and release it, and you would have the public protection not to release it. I think that... Most of the cases that I've seen of the whistleblowers is that they don't have that. They have a lot of the photographic evidence. And certainly, there could be reprisals and criminal prosecutions.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, I think progressives in particular forget that Barack Obama prosecuted more government leakers, whistleblowers than any president, I think than all presidents combined before that. So the federal government has certainly shown itself willing to prosecute and persecute and retaliate against whistleblowers. There are protections, but they're obviously inadequate because we're not able to get that. So I mean, I think it's, look, we've got a president-elect, who whatever else you think of him, has committed to a much greater set of transparency around everything from the JFK files, to the Epstein, to the UAPs, to COVID origins, to all sorts of government secrecy. It's accumulated over the last 50 years.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  We had our last big intelligence reform in 1975 with the Church Committee hearings. I think it's pretty clear that we need something like that again, and that it needs to be and should be bipartisan. I don't see any reason why it should become an ideological issue. And you saw, I mean, I think this issue is a beautiful issue to work on because it is so bipartisan, and it's wonderful to see Democrats and Republicans both asking for the same thing.

• 14:40Jesse Michels?

  You're touching on possible Trump disclosure, where it could be broad disclosure. We could have reforms in all of these different areas. Is there the existence of an alternative history where UFOs play a central role in a lot of pivotal events when it comes to American history? You hear rumors about JFK. RFK is in consideration for various posts in the Trump administration. Do you think things come out of that nature where it turns out, you know, you have E. Howard Hunt, for example, former CIA operative who claimed to be involved in some of the JFK stuff, saying, you know, he was killed over UFOs. He said that to his son. Do you think any of that might kind of become transparent?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to, I mean, you would think that the stuff that they're continuing to hide. Would have to be pretty bad if for them not to release it. You know, Mike Pompeo was asked about the JFK files, said that there were people who were still alive who would be affected by it. So, like, it must have been pretty bad if that was the case. You know, obviously, there's tons of, you know, rumors that and suspicions that the US government was involved in some way in JFK's assassination. I personally, I don't know, but I find it extremely suspicious that they won't release the full JFK files. There's even some theories that it might have even involved the UAPs, you know, so...

• 15:59Jesse Michels?

  Pompeo, when he was interviewed by Judge Napolitano, very awkward kind of segue from, you know, was like, "Are you gonna release the JFK files?" He goes, "No, you know, we can't do that, some of the people are still alive." And then he goes, "You know, I've seen the UAP files as well," or something, and so that I found very curious as well.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 07

  These don't hold the dark secrets that everybody wants to just hold up as the bogeyman. I saw the UFO files, too. We've got bigger problems.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that he sort of, that he thought they were sort of connected in some way.

• 16:29Jesse Michels?

  Some sort of conflation, yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard to know, but it's, it is suspicious and, look, I think it's, I think the thing you always have to remember is that, you know, for people that say there's absolutely nothing there and it was just one guy that killed JFK, great, well, then release the files. Like, you know, there's, you know, there's, UAPs are nothing, it's just, it's great, so then, then why not the transparency? I mean, that's the ultimate problem for the skeptics. If you're a skeptic, you should be the greatest advocate of transparency and disclosure because it would make, it would make all of your enemies look like fools.

• 17:02Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And yet, it's kind of suspicious that we don't see that. It's almost like what we're hearing is, there's nothing there and therefore the government shouldn't release the files.

• 17:10Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Not exactly a consistent position to hold.

• 17:13Jesse Michels?

  You mentioned John Greenwald in your testimony, who runs blackvault.com. He's constantly using the Freedom of Information Act to retrieve all sorts of, you know, formerly sensitive documents in the government. He's doing a great job with that, and I think he toes the line because certain people he's sort of skeptical of in UFO whistleblower world, but he's also, it's very clear that he's just been stonewalled in all these cases. Like he tried to FOIA fast walkers and NORAD said this is, you know, actually just very sensitive material.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:44Jesse Michels?

  And that was actually mentioned, fast walkers was mentioned in WikiLeaks email between an aerospace contractor named Bob Fish and John Podesta. Podesta is mentioning fast walkers as these vehicles moving through our outer layer of defense, the defense support network run by the Air Force.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:03Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating stuff.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Well, I think Greenwald is underappreciated and in part because I think he's a little bit like neither fish nor fowl. He doesn't, he's not someone that endorses the NHI hypothesis. The same time he says it is a possibility. For me, I thought that his work needed to be highlighted a little bit here because he has established that the secrecy has been growing, not declining. There's a, there's a, there's one story in the UAP community that sort of says that we are in the midst of disclosure. He says, no, that's not the case at all, that we're actually having less disclosure than we have in the past. I think that is important because I think it undermines the idea that this is all, I mean, either hopeful or not hopeful,

• 18:49Speaker 01

  but it undermines the idea that we're sort of on our way. I think that Greenwald is also important for pointing out the inconsistencies in the, in the claims made by the Pentagon and the military. As I have, there's a great quote from him, which is they'll say one thing on Monday and they say something else on Friday. So, you know, on the issue of the videos, there's some complexity to it, but basically after some of these videos were released, the Pentagon said, yeah, there's no more videos, just those three videos. And then he was like, well, you know, really? And then a different branch then said, well, there's other videos, but we're not going to release them. So he also has established that there's other videos that they won't release for national security reasons.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  I mean, the final thing that's important about Greenwald is he noticed that they are justifying secrecy under a law enforcement provision rather than just national security. And that is very suspicious because if it's true, then we should know what the law enforcement investigations are, or at least the members of Congress should. But if it's possible that they're also just abusing that, then we're just seeing, I mean, I held up, you know, one moment, the redactions because it's just so absurd that they're redacting how long they've been collecting reports, how many reports they have, and what UAPs could be, as though like, there's not already a lot of speculation about what UAPs could be. It's really as though they don't want to admit for some reason that they are considering the more freaky hypotheses.

• 20:13Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Because they don't want to give it legitimacy, but that's just not how it works. People don't become less suspicious when there's censorship, they become more suspicious. So if you don't want conspiracy theorizing, then you should release more information.

• 20:27Speaker 00

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• 20:57Jesse Michels?

  Congressman Eric Burleson, speaking of, you know, people conspiratizing, he was looking into the issue of biologics. He also said, "Who can I talk to when it comes to the gatekeepers of this program?" Chris Sharp just wrote an amazing article at the Liberation Times about the whole history of UFO craft retrieval programs, and he said that guy at the CIA, Glenn Gaffney, was the gatekeeper for this program, and he actually blocked the transfer of this craft that Lockheed had collected in the 50s and was trying to transfer to OSAP, to Bigelow Aerospace, to study.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:33Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that any of this is true? Does it comport with any of the conversations you've had with some of your sources?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  I haven't verified it, but I mean, it sounds completely reasonable.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  These reports of crash retrievals and reverse engineering are decades old. It's not new. I mean, there's a guy named Stringfeld who did a huge, you know, a number of investigations into it. When you really get into the crash stuff, you also get these really conflicting accounts. It makes it like a hall of mirrors. And you get them from people that are really credible, saying really different things. This is really dramatic on Roswell. There's a lot of interviews that have been done. So it's a tricky one. I very rarely find people, these witnesses, I really, I don't think that any of them are, very many of them, I should say, are deliberately trying to hoax anybody, which just makes the phenomenon more and more fascinating. Like, I mean, one of the things around the Roswell, the alleged Roswell crash is that it was,

• 22:29Speaker 01

  was it one UFO or two UFOs and taken down by radar? But how could it possibly be taken down by a primitive radar if it's an advanced craft? I mean, the whole thing is mysterious. I mean, the thing that everybody raises is if you've got advanced craft, how are they possibly crashing so much? Other people say, well, that's, you know, no, it makes sense. And, you know, if we had ships going into other planets, they could crash. But, yeah, it's just...

• 22:55Jesse Michels?

  Or it's a donation.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Or a donation, yeah.

• 22:57Jesse Michels?

  You've read Jacques Vallée and, yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, after a while, I mean, I think part of my interest in the secrecy stuff is like the, I just, I sort of go, you can spend so much time on the speculation. At the end of the day, it's like, just give us the freaking five. Just let us in and show it to us. And even if you don't know it or understand it, or it's not pleasant, just, I think, maybe that's part of our own evolution is that we're, I mean, look, I, for, I mean, you look back now and you go, like, that's weird that anybody was upset that they discovered that the sun was revolving around the Earth. Like, why would that bother you? And maybe that's how we'll look back on this. It's like, why was anybody upset that, you know, there was some, you know, something else going on than what we thought?

• 23:42Jesse Michels?

  Do you have any sense of what these biologics might be?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I don't. I mean, that's also another, you know, mystery is, um, you know, I mean, you had this really strong testimony last year from Grush. Um, you know, I think that, uh, I thought Elizondo basically supported it today.

• 24:01Jesse Michels?

  Backed him up, yeah, absolutely.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  There's a fair number of people that do that and, you know, and there's a way in which I kind of go, I mean, I think Chairwoman Mace was like, you know, like, we got to this, you know, we have to, you know, show some movement here. I mean, I kind of go, I'm not sure how much, you know, society and the Congress can do. It's really up to the executive branch. I mean, I, I worry, like, if Trump doesn't do it, then I don't know what the mechanism to get it done is. Um, so, you know, um, you know, I think I'm glad to see some advocacy organizations on this. You know, one possibility is just that there needs to be, I mean, I looked at it and I thought, maybe we need a much

• 24:44Speaker 01

  broader movement, not just on UAP transparency, but also on all forms of government transparency. I mean, the Church Committee wasn't just on CIA, it was also on FBI.

• 24:53Jesse Michels?

  And that was 50 years ago, so.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  50 years ago, I mean, it's definitely, you know, overdue. I mean, I sort of felt the same way about whistleblower protections. Like, there's a, you know, Burchett has a piece of legislation for UAP whistleblower protections. Obviously, I support that, but it's like FBI needs whistleblower protections for, you know, when they expose entrapment, which they do quite a bit, and CIA needs it. So it does, it does feel like something has shifted seismically. But, uh, yeah, I mean, I think if it doesn't happen in the next couple of years, I would start to be very pessimistic. My optimism would shift into pessimism if it doesn't happen in the next couple of years.

• 25:29Jesse Michels?

  Well, you were a huge part in breaking the Twitter files, this idea that there's kind of this revolving door bureaucracy between three-letter agencies and places like Twitter that are just involved in, were involved pre Elon purchase, in systematic censorship of users, shadow banning, all sorts of things like that. Does something like that happen with the Trump administration? Can we get you in there and can you be the official, you know, disseminator of some of this stuff?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously, as a competitive journalist, like, I would love to be able to get in there to those files. You know, the truth is, they should be released to everybody, and I'll cover them with everybody else. I do think, you know, I think it's, uh, you know, I think it's salutary. I mean, I, one of the lessons for me from the Twitter files is that it is possible to keep conspiracies a secret, and that I think there's... This is a funny issue because people say, well, if they were really, you know, if the government were really covering up, there'd be whistleblowers. And then you get the whistleblowers and people go, well, how come the whistleblowers don't have more evidence?

• 26:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  It's, you know, I mean-

• 26:25Jesse Michels?

  They're all counter intel.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:26Jesse Michels?

  All of them are.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:28Jesse Michels?

  They don't count.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So, you know, I think what we saw with the Twitter files, in particular, I covered the FBI and CIA information operation on Hunter Biden's laptop. That was kept perfectly secret.

• 26:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  You know, until the Twitter files showed that it involved Aspen Institute. You know, no one knew that it involved the media.

• 26:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Was being kind of programmed or, you know, pre-bunking, but brainwashing beforehand. Nobody talked about that. And so these operations, I don't have, I have no, I do not have a hard time believing that the US government is capable of carrying out and keeping secret covert operations.

• 27:00Jesse Michels?

  And you brought up a couple of very interesting names on Joe Rogan that were involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story that are also involved in the UFO story.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:11Jesse Michels?

  Care to talk about that?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, one of the, I mean, the big name is, is a gentleman named Garrett Graff. He's a, he was involved in, in, you know, pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop in the summer of 2020 with the Aspen Institute, along with his supervisor, Vivian Schiller, who was the head of NPR, the head of media at Twitter, New York Times executive. Um, credible career as a high-level media executive. Now they're at Aspen. And Garrett Graff comes out with a book on UFOs earlier this year called UFO. And it's basically just a debunking of all these cases. You know, I mean, I haven't gone through it. I mean, you really need to go through each and every one of them. But one of the things you discover is when you get into some of these alleged debunkings is that they haven't actually debunked it.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  They'll often come up with something. Well, I think one really salient one is there's, there's been this argument between, um, Mark Von, um, I don't know if I remember his last name, Remen, Remensdorf?

• 28:08Jesse Michels?

  Remensdorf, yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 28:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, sorry, Mark.

• 28:13Jesse Michels?

  Mark's awesome.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mark has been having this argument around the gimbal UFO video with a gentleman named Mick Was.

• 28:21Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I think Mark has-

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Has kind of won the argument that it's not lens glare or some sort of optical illusion. It's really, and I think X, formerly Twitter, has been important to being able to do that kind of, to be able to see, you can kind of like, you don't have to follow the whole thing, but you kind of see that Mick West runs out of responses and Mark is very persistent. So, I mean, each of these cases, you know, the first thing you do, people do, I mean, they just went 100 by laptop. They go, oh no, it's been debunked. Or they did it with COVID origins, that's been debunked. And, you know, 90, 95% of journalists and others go, oh, it's been debunked, I'm gonna move on. They don't even look at it to kind of go, wait a second, it really wasn't debunked. You just, you just said some words.

• 29:03Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  You know, and you didn't actually prove it. I think there's a lot of that going on when it comes to UAPs. And it just requires, you know, it's part of the problem with the issue being marginalized, but you would normally have academics or others that had budgets and there were staff time and PhDs and whatever's in peer reviewed journals that would kind of go through this in some way. I mean, it's not to say that peer reviewed journals don't have a lot of misinformation or corrected information, but you at least have that sort of debate. But as it is now, it's sort of left to, to non-professionals. I mean, there's really, everybody's non-professional. But yeah, I found it, I guess the bottom line is, isn't that a funny coincidence? The guy that was involved in the Hunter Biden disinformation

• 29:44Speaker 01

  operation is, was also involved in the UAP information operation, whether it's all disinformation, I haven't evaluated, but I find him a suspicious character.

• 29:53Jesse Michels?

  No, and that book makes UFOs out to be some like novel curiosity that, you know, if you're a member of the real intelligentsia, you should laugh at or whatever. It's like not serious.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  It's a little bit more subtle in a sense that, I mean, with, you have these kind of gradations of debunkers. You have this gentleman named Stephen Greenstreet of the New York Post who's just, with Sean Kirkpatrick who are just dismissive and ridiculing, just old fashioned, UFO ridiculing, angry, this is terrible, we shouldn't even be talking about this. You have slightly more sophisticated with Mick West. And then you have Garrett Graff, which is a bit more sophisticated. I mean, he does acknowledge that there are UAPs and there are things that we can't explain. I think he even does the orbs, you know, the orbs are kind of the UFO. of the moment, you know, like if in the 70s it was discs or 50s and 60s it was like disc orbs seemed to be, you know, gaining a lot of attention. And so he kind of acknowledges

• 30:44Speaker 01

  that they exist, but then says, I mean, one of the things he says that I think is very disingenuous is he says that the military and the intelligence community and the government just doesn't know what they are. I mean, I don't think he knows that. Like, I don't think he, I mean, how could, I mean, if he does know that.

• 31:03Jesse Michels?

  That's another issue.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Then that's a problem, because the members of Congress don't know that. We don't know that. The only established position is agnosticism.

• 31:11Jesse Michels?

  One of the themes that keeps recurring with these hearings when it comes to UFOs is the inability to get firsthand sources of information in a SCIF.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:19Jesse Michels?

  You had the unique ability to speak to somebody in a, you know, some compartmentalized setting. How can we allow them to speak to a firsthand witness? Is that possible?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Well, my understanding is that the members of Congress and their staffers have spoken to witnesses. I don't know the exact status of it, but, you know, they don't have the authorization or they don't have the permission to declassify, you know, it's just, I mean, obviously, members of Congress are frustrated about that. I mean, it's the same problem with the documents and with the rest of it. They're just clearly not being given the authorization to declassify or make these things public yet.

• 31:59Jesse Michels?

  Where do you think we go from here? What do you think? What comes next in this in this topic? Do you think we make progress?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the, there's been a huge emphasis, understandably, from the UAP movement, since there is a movement to try to persuade people that UAPs are real, and then I think another part of it to persuade people that they're NHI. I think that the right focus is to persuade people, is to persuade the public and the government to have transparency and disclosure. And I think it helps to sort of, at least for people that are genuinely agnostic, to acknowledge that we're agnostic. I think that it's

• 32:39Speaker 01

  You know, I think it actually makes the case stronger when you point out that, you know, look, if it's some peculiar form of mass psychosis, or social contagion, or Chinese balloons, or whatever it is, we still need the disclosure and the transparency.

• 32:53Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I think you inspire a little bit more trust from the public on that issue, and I think it focuses on the government's secrecy rather than on the nature of UAPs. I think there's a separate sort of cultural movement phenomenon that really is exploring what UAPs are, it involves taking really detailed cases and testimony, and that's all to the good, and of course, that's great. But I do think at a kind of policy and political level, this sharp focus at going after the government secrecy, the cover-ups, the disinformation is absolutely essential. I think it's a chance to go from strength to strength. I mean, here you've got like, one of the only bipartisan, nonpartisan movements I see. You saw every single member of Congress today on the committee.

• 33:36Jesse Michels?

  Both sides.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Recognizing that there's something real there. This is the 13th time I've testified before Congress. It's actually heartwarming, like literally heartwarming, because it's so awkward when you testify normally, and the Republicans and Democrats are just attacking each other in the nastiest ways, it's like shocking. To see them being kumbaya and one love up there, it gives me a lot of hope for this movement, and it's actually part of what inspires me to want to work on it. It's nice to work on something that actually brings people together. It's also a reminder, because there's so much hostility, you know, in other parts of the society, whether it's in the media, or from the debunkers on social media, or from friends and family that don't like it. It's nice to see that when you have a group of lawmakers that have actually dug into this, that they're actually, they're clear there's something real here.

• 34:22Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  And that this is not, it's clearly no longer a fringe thing. There was no uncomfortable giggling, there's no uncomfortable ridiculing, there was no character assassination, and, I mean, so I kind of go, strength to strength, this could be one of the most important social movements of the 21st century.

• 34:37Jesse Michels?

  You're a traditional nuts and bolts journalist, who's done amazing job on all sorts of things. You talk about the decline of San Francisco, you talk about nuclear energy, you talk about big tech overreach. With this issue, it's very interesting because you can try to maintain some sort of impartiality, but if you say that there probably is some sort of non-human intelligence, then I think it's tough to say that it's a bridge too far, that maybe they're actually somewhat involved in the disclosure process. You get into biologics, somebody, you know, a congresswoman asked about hybrids.

• 35:12Speaker 07

  There are rumors that have come up to the Hill of a secretive project within the Department of Defense involving the manipulation of human genetics with what is described as non-human genetic material, potentially for the enhancement of human capabilities, hybrids. Are any of you familiar with that, yes or no?

• 35:34Jesse Michels?

  So, how do you deal with that? How do you draw the line? And in the world where there is non-human intelligence, do you think that they are sort of, you know, involved in the process of disclosure?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's very interesting. I don't know. I mean, Jacques Vallée, who I think we, you know, you and I talk about a lot, we both respect him. I mean, I've read a lot of his books, maybe most of them or all of them. He believes there are NHI. He also thinks that there is three levels of deceptions. One is from the government, the second is by the people that have the experiences, and he doesn't mean it as a criticism, he just thinks people don't completely, often represent exactly what happened, often leaving out the freakier, high weirdness elements of it, high strangeness parts of it. And then there's, he says the NHI themselves are being deceptive. It's a very interesting argument because, you know, there's these really funny cases

• 36:28Speaker 01

  like, for example, there's this great case in France where, you know, a very trusted, respected farmer discovers a spaceship on his land, and then he goes up to it, and then there's supposedly an NHI there, holding a tray full of soil samples and other vegetables, and he was like, "Oh, I didn't see you there, and I was just coming by with this." It seems absurd, like, if you have some advanced civilization, like, why would they be caught off-guard by a farmer with soil samples? It almost feels as though something's, I think he He would sort of say it is creating, I think he kind of describes it as a control mechanism, that's sort of creating a particular perception, something that wants us to think that these are extraterrestrials and that they're investigating who we are and expressing concern about nuclear weapons and the environment.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  I always point out that you didn't need any non-human intelligence to point out that nuclear weapons were very scary or that we need to protect the environment. We didn't need anybody to tell us that. We knew that starting right away after World War II. So that's a very interesting hypothesis. I mean, I think it's hard. I mean, I know for a close colleague of mine, who is uncomfortable with the subject, doesn't like it, that it's certainly, I'm in a stronger place with that person to talk about the need for disclosure and government openness and whatnot. It's also the case a lot of people that are involved in this, the journalists, the people reporting it, they're involved in a lot of anomalous phenomena. There, you know, there's Skywalker, Skywalker Ranch is a very freaky place

• 37:57Speaker 01

  and there's a lot of freaky stories that comes out of it. It's used by the debunkers to sort of discredit, you know, the broader sense of it. Part of me goes, you know, I think we should be a little softer with each other, a little bit more tolerant of each other. There's so much mystery. I came back to my faith about six years ago. Really? Yeah, and it's, I'm a Christian and I believe in God and I think we have souls and I think there's some part of us that's immortal and it's a faith. Like, I didn't come to it because, you know, I discovered some secret thing and I'm open about that and that's my faith.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  And I think it's natural that people that have a faith or that they believe in, that see paranormal things, would be more attracted to this. I don't think it means that there's nothing there. And there's also people that are genuine atheists that are also interested in the phenomenon. So, you know, I kind of go, I think it needs to be okay for people to ask the seemingly ridiculous question and to have those conversations and allow them. They shouldn't be censored. They shouldn't be stigmatized or demonized. They shouldn't be used to attack people's credibility. I think it is good to always, you know, as a journalist, or as an attorney, or whoever, or some investigator, it's always good to say, here's what we can prove, and here's the evidence.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Here's what we suspect but can't prove.

• 39:22Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And here's some various possibilities.

• 39:24Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  We get into a lot of trouble when people start to confuse their own theories with the things that they know. So that's a completely legitimate thing to be policing. But allowing some amount of conversation, speculation, imagination, and spirituality. I think humans need

• 39:41Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  A sense, a transcendent moral purpose, a sense of transcendence. I think that when people think they don't need that, they end up creating, they often turn their politics into a religion, and that's taking them to some dangerous places. So, much better to be, I think, transparent about what it is that we're talking about. And, you know, like, if you were asking me for proof of God, I wouldn't be able to provide it for you. But if you're gonna ask me for proof that the Pentagon is hiding UAP programs, I think I have much better proof of that.

• 40:11Jesse Michels?

  Well, you've provided amazing evidence. You're an American hero, after what you did today, but also a lot of your other work. And just grateful to be able to discuss this with you. And on the note you ended on, absolutely. And on the note you ended on, I was just with Colonel Carl Nowell, former head of Army Features Command, and Diana Pasulka is a Catholic scholar. And they were both talking about how the angel hierarchies of the past, St. Thomas Aquinas, Jambochus, all that stuff, you know, lines up with a lot of the non-human intelligence experiences that witnesses seem to have today. And so, I wonder how that lines up with Immaculate Constellation.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what a name, right? I mean, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, science came out of Christianity. It came out of the idea that we needed to understand God's creation. And it was never, you know, and you get to a point where then it starts to kind of problematize some older ideas. But I think if one of the If one of the reasons that the government is not revealing what it knows is because it worries about the impact on faith, I think that's overstated and, you know, and that we just need to be treated like grownups. I mean, I think if you're a person with real faith, you're, you know, and some non-human intelligence is telling us that we're wrong, I'm not sure why we would believe them any more than we would anybody else.

• 41:33Jesse Michels?

  Well, this was an honor. Thank you, Michael.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jesse. It's a pleasure for me.

• 41:36Jesse Michels?

  How can people find you?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Schellenberger@X, or the name of our Substack is public.

• 41:42Jesse Michels?

  And if you have anything interesting to come out with, contact Michael.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Thank you, yeah.

• 41:46Jesse Michels?

  Or me.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  I will protect all sources, for sure.

• 41:49Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely, and did an amazing job today.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Thanks, I appreciate you.