NASA Whistleblower: “We Systematically Suppress UFO Data!”

Go to https://buyraycon.com/jessemichelsopen to get 20% off sitewide. Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring! Our American Alchemist this week is Kevin Knuth. Kevin Knuth (University at Albany physicist, former NASA) lays out the most concrete physics-first framework I’ve heard for what these objects are and what they can do. This episode centers on three hard points: repeated UAP interaction with nuclear assets, flight performance that breaks conventional engineering by orders of magnitude, and a growing civilian pipeline analyzing debris and isotopes outside black programs. -------------------------- Support Our Other Projects Below: Grab Your American Alchemy Merch Here ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Join The American Alchemy Magazine Here ➤ https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com/ Subscribe To Our Clips Channel (10 Minute Highlights!) ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8ZKTXN9trt5dhixz6b6l6w -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Discord ➤https://discord.gg/crHc44m3kF Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Apply For Jobs ➤ [email protected] Sponsor Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:42 The Role of Technology in Perception 04:56 The Cattle Mutilation Incident 08:02 The Shift in Perspective 10:45 The Nuclear Connection 12:53 UFOs and Global Phenomena 16:20 Encounters with the Unknown 17:47 Working in Secrecy 19:21 The Anti-Gravity Debate 22:42 Exploring UFO Technology 24:59 The Physics of UFO Movement 28:31 Investigating UFO Materials 29:35 The Legacy of Roswell 33:20 Secrets Within NASA 36:28 Unraveling the UFO Subculture 42:34 The Water World Hypothesis 47:24 The Case for Underwater Bases 50:31 Documenting the Catalina Mission 54:57 Challenges in UFO Research 56:27 FLIR Camera Insights 56:45 Convincing UFO Sighting 57:49 JAL 1628 Incident 1:01:17 Reagan's Scientific Team 1:05:34 Kecksburg Crash Connection 1:08:34 Military and UFO Secrets 1:09:16 Nuclear Site Encounters 1:14:45 Beatrice Villareal's Discoveries 1:20:21 NASA and UFO Encounters 1:24:40 NASA's UFO Obstruction 1:25:56 Comparing International Reports 1:41:08 The Mystery of 3i Atlas 1:49:53 Academic Perspectives on UFOs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  They're not coming in from another star system every other Tuesday. They're, they're present here. There are handfuls of people doing weird things here and there. Those people are all over the place. Some of them I knew when I was at NASA have come to talk to me and said, oh yeah, I was interested or I know something about this or that.

• 0:49Jesse Michels?

  Have you met anybody working on the crafts themselves?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I've met people who've claimed to have worked on them or seen them.

• 0:55Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  So, yeah. So the question I've had is why, when we had the NASA commission, why was there no section on what astronauts have seen in space?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  I talked to Alan Bean. He was from Apollo 12. He said that when he went up to Skylab, they actually photographed a red flashing light. Nobody puts lights on satellites. First, you don't need them. And second, it's more weight.

• 1:21Jesse Michels?

  Also, satellites back then weren't doing proximity operations. They were just falling predictable orbits.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  And they weren't changing orbits.

• 1:27Jesse Michels?

  They weren't changing orbits.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  They weren't moving around either.

• 1:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  They actually had a craft pull up alongside of them.

• 1:33Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Half their orbit. And the cosmonaut drew a picture of the object. Story Musgrave, a shuttle pilot, also talked about seeing things like snakes.

• 1:43Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Things writhing around in space.

• 1:45Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  This is a phenomenon that people have seen for centuries. This case is going back to the 1800s.

• 1:56Jesse Michels?

  Back to Columbus.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Balls of light coming out of the water, hovering next to the ship, following the ship and then taking off into the clouds. And that's why I think there's probably bases underwater is your best bet.

• 2:13Jesse Michels?

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• 2:57Jesse Michels?

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• 3:41Jesse Michels?

  Thanks so much to Raycon for sponsoring this episode. Now, back to the show. Kevin Knuth, this is an absolute honor, and it's been a long time coming. You're a physicist at the University of Albany, and to me, you are one of the few people who speaks about UFOs in a really concrete, hard-headed way. I think you're one of the few people I know who are studying how these crafts actually fly, how to detect them. And so I'm really excited to have you. Thank you.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Well, and then thank you so much for having me. It's very exciting.

• 4:11Jesse Michels?

  Oh, no, it's an absolute honor. And you have a NASA background as well. I want to know how you got into UFOs to begin with, because a lot of people with your sort of credentials and background think UFOs are a joke.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, I mean, I've I've always been interested in in UFOs. I was 12 when Star Wars came out in 1977. And during and during that time, I mean, that was the same year Close Encounters, The Third Kind came out. It was, you know, another movie studios' response to Star Wars that came out in December. And I didn't, I didn't like it as much because there weren't spaceships shooting each other's with lasers, right? So, so as a 12 year old, that wasn't that exciting. But um, but at the same time, you know, there were TV shows like In Search of with Leonard Leonard Nimoy, and they would cover UFO topics. And that was on every night, like at 6:30 when we're eating dinner. So, so I watched that all the

• 5:07Speaker 01

  time. So I've always been interested in them. And um, and I think I wasn't so so this, so I went to graduate school in 1988. I grew up in Wisconsin, and I moved out to Montana to go to graduate school at Montana State University in Bozeman. And our first week or two there, I had just moved there, and there was a cattle mutilation, where two cows were killed and surgically manipulated. I don't have a good word for what happened to them.

• 5:43Jesse Michels?

  The blood was drained.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  The blood was drained, the the the sensory organs removed, the genitals removed. One of them had like a core sample. It had a cylindrical hole punched through it. Just bizarre. I mean, really bizarre. And the stand and the people on the news were crazed about this, right? Oh, my God, there's, you know, these two cows on this ranch were killed. And there were UFO reports in the county that night, hundreds of reports. And so the two stories were that it was either aliens or Satanists. And and and everybody's all got their undies in a bundle over this, right? And so, so we're at the physics department, and some of us grad students are talking about this. And especially the new graduate students, we've all just moved there into a PhD program. So you're looking down the

• 6:28Speaker 01

  barrel of spending five or six years of your life at this place. And we want, what where do, what kind of place did we just move to where cows are murdered this way, right? This is really bizarre. So we're discussing this in the hallway. And it was this heated discussion and I remember, I remember shouting at one point, I don't know why aliens would do it and I don't know how Satanists would do it. It was that, that level of stupid discussion, right? That students would have and we were quite loud and disturbed one of the professors down the hall. And he came out from his office to find out what we're talking about. He comes down the hall and we tell him and I don't know if he was trying to make us feel better

• 7:10Speaker 01

  because it was the opposite, but he said, oh yeah, yeah, this happens from time to time and they'll investigate it and they won't figure anything out. And then everybody will just forget about it until it happens again. And we're just like, what? That's even crazier than, than what we're already talking about. And then he adds, he goes, but you know what's really strange? There are, he goes, I have friends who work up at Malmstrom Air Force Base and they have problems with UFOs flying over the nuclear missile sites and shutting down nuclear missiles. And, you know, we listened politely and when he walked away, we laughed our asses off. Because this was the, at the time, it was the silliest thing I thought I'd ever heard.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  I mean, UFOs are shutting down nuclear missiles and this isn't, everybody's not on red alert. I mean, they, our, our entire military should be mobilized for something like that, right? So we just didn't believe it. We thought this was just silly and it became kind of a running joke. Anytime something weird would happen at, you know, at school or somebody's telling a story, oh, this weird thing happening, someone would invariably interject. But you know what's really strange? UFOs are shutting down nuclear missiles up in Malmstrom Air Force Base. And we would all laugh, right? This one, and so that was a running joke for a whole year. And so now time passes and that was September of 1988. And he had said that it was ongoing.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  He said, they are doing this presently, right? And so now fast forward to.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  It was about 2015. So it's a couple of years before the New York Times article. And I was teaching an astronomy class and we got to the point where we're talking about the possibility of life elsewhere. And some of the students wanted me to comment on UFOs. I'm like, well, I don't know anything about UFOs and it's not certainly not science. This is an astronomy class. So, so I was just poking around on the internet. Is there, is there anything reasonable I can actually say other than the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox, right? The two typical things that scientists might talk about. And I was just poking around at like 2am and I stumbled on Robert Hastings news conference from like 2010 where he had

• 9:26Speaker 01

  six people on from the air force who various air force positions. The first one was Robert Solis, talking about UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles at Momstrom Air Force Base. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I heard about this in grad school. That was a joke, right? And then I'm listening to this. I'm like, that's not a joke.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Between September of 66 and March of 67, we lost 30 missiles to UFO activity.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  It's wild. Yeah.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  30.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  30. That's pretty, pretty insane. Now, now what do you do? And he's talking about events from 1966. And I heard about it in 1988. And the professor that told me in 1988 about this was said that it is happening. So this has been going on for 20 years. And no one's paying any attention to this. I mean, the army is still not, the military is still not mobilized and worrying about this. And I thought, there is something really wrong here. And, and I, and I spent some time thinking about it. I was up late that night, teaching class early, right? I didn't barely slept. But I'm

• 10:43Speaker 01

  thinking about it and I thought, I mean, it's either nonsense and the people who are in charge of our nuclear missiles are people we shouldn't be trusting with anything, or this is actually real.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Which makes more sense considering the amount of time that's involved, 20 year time span. And, um, and nobody's reacting to it, maybe because they all think it's nonsense. And I thought, this is extremely dangerous. We're going to get blindsided by something if we're not careful. And I thought, somebody ought to look into this. And I thought, I'm going to start looking into this UFO business. What's all, what, what is here? How real is this? How possible is this? And I saw, so that's when I started looking into it. And I was, and I had actually given a talk in our department, like a year later, after I had looked into it somewhat, I thought, this is actually really interesting. So I gave a talk in our physics department about it, just an informal talk. And, um, and the room

• 11:43Speaker 01

  was packed. I mean, we, I don't know how many people can actually sit in that room, but it was well over the fire limit, right? I mean, we had people sitting cross legged right up to the front screen. And, um, and I, the talk went on, there were so many questions, a talk for it for almost three hours. And, and most people just stayed for it because everybody was really interested. And I thought, yeah, see, this is interesting. I mean, this is an interesting problem here. And it's not that simple. And then of course, a year after that, the New York Times article comes out. And, um, and I thought, well, somebody has to be, somebody ought to study this. And I thought, well, shoot, you just do it.

• 12:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  I should do it.

• 12:23Jesse Michels?

  And the nuclear link, I could see that being the perfect gateway for rigorous scientists like yourself, because I think science in the conventional sense has to be repeatable. You need, you know, every time you drop this pen, it needs to fall in sort of the same way for it to be science.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:39Jesse Michels?

  And so I think the nuclear link is a version of that with UFOs, where UFOs seem to show up across nuclear bases, not only in the US, but all over the world. And

• 12:50Speaker 01

  And that's, that's one thing that worried me. Once I looked into it, I thought, wow, this is happening in the Soviet Union? This is happening in France? This is happening in England?

• 12:58Jesse Michels?

  We were talking before the show, I'm wearing my American Alchemy Japan shirt, which is paying homage to Lino, which is a town next to their Fukushima pre-fracture, where they have, they're famous for their nuclear spill in 2011. They have their civilian energy grid. And UFOs were reported to show up there. They have a whole museum dedicated to UFOs.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:17Jesse Michels?

  Veist did a documentary on them in 2022, and it's the town in Japan that's obsessed with UFOs. And it's right next to this nuclear grid.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  There was a Netflix encounter episode, I think episode four focused on that as well.

• 13:28Jesse Michels?

  And Malmstrom, where you mentioned, that is the site of tons and tons of activity. You have Bob Salas, obviously, in 67, but before that you had this Echo Flight Incident. You know, I think it was like very, it was 10 days before or something. One was March 16th, one was March 24th. Then you have John Mills, this retired missile technician in the early 90s, seeing a bunch of UFOs there. You even have an interview with this guy, Chris Langen, which say what you will about the guy. He says he has the highest IQ in the world. He seems a little cocky to me. But he's just offhand, he's saying he's seen UFOs and he's seen them around Malmstrom Air Force Base.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  On the UFO thing, I was working for the Forest Service, not too far from Malmstrom Air Force Base. One day I was up there in a Forest Service pickup truck at a certain campground. And I was there and suddenly I look up and I say suddenly, it was just in the sky. It's, I became aware that it was up there and I looked up. It was this huge, spherical, you know, but elliptical, not, not a perfect sphere. Like a saucer that was turned partially on its side.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:36Jesse Michels?

  And so it's this recurring trope from all these uncorrelated sources. Robert Hastings, who wrote the book UFOs and Nukes, got into this whole subject because his father was actually working at Malmstrom Base. And he was learning radar theory from one of the radar operators there, Bob Hastings was, while he was a janitor, he was in high school. And the radar operator was like, we're tracking some of these unknowns. You should take a look. And then that was it for him. He was hooked and he dedicated his life to studying this stuff.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:07Jesse Michels?

  So, yeah.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cool. It was maybe three years ago, we were down in Louisiana, visiting my in-laws for Mardi Gras. And so we're, it was February and we're outside grilling, right? And I was grilling with my wife's uncle, Matt. And he had his air force cap on and I spotted Malmstrom Air Force Base on his air force cap. And I was like,

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Uncle Matt, you were there, you were in the air force and you were at Malmstrom, you were at Malmstrom? And he goes, yeah, I was stationed in Malmstrom. I went, when were you there? And he goes, oh, like 1971 through 74, or something like that, and early 70s. And I said, did you ever hear anything about UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites? He goes, oh, that happened all the time. These things would come in and shut down the nuclear weapons. And he was going on and on about this. And I like, like, it's common knowledge.

• 16:00Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Right? And how, how is it Congress is just finding out about this, right? And my wife's Uncle Matt has known this since 1971. This is something to worry about, right? And I was so excited. I, I told him, okay, can you tell my wife this because I'm tired of being the only crazy person in there?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  But, but it was, his response was amazing. Oh yeah, this happened all the time. And like, like it's nothing, right?

• 16:28Jesse Michels?

  So on the one hand, you have UFOs showing up around our most important assets or nuclear assets with people who are on the PRP program, who literally like they have to report if they're on Ibuprofen. These are people who work at the nuclear bases. They're the picture of mental health and of sound mind. And they all see Tic Tacs, saucers, orbs, you know, shutting down nukes.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:50Jesse Michels?

  There's that. And then there's the idea that the US government might have saucers and hangars.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:56Jesse Michels?

  Do you think, it's clear that this is happening, the nuclear thing?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's absolutely clear.

• 17:01Jesse Michels?

  Do you think the US government has saucers and hangars and we have an active reverse engineering program for nuts and bolts, physical craft?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I think that's probably true. I've heard this from enough people who've done that kind of work for years now. That, that's probably the case. Yeah.

• 17:18Jesse Michels?

  Have you met anybody working on the crafts themselves?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I've met people who've claimed to have worked on them or seen them.

• 17:24Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 17:25Jesse Michels?

  Anybody that you can mention or?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  No, I should do that.

• 17:28Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  These are, these are whispers that you get every now and again.

• 17:32Jesse Michels?

  Did you find them believable though?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, entirely believable. Yeah.

• 17:35Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:36Jesse Michels?

  No, you didn't sense any sort of deception?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  No, no. One of the most believable things I've heard is, well, have you been able to figure anything out? No, we don't know. We don't know what anything is or how anything works.

• 17:46Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  That was my most, and I was like, all right, that makes sense.

• 17:49Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:50Jesse Michels?

  So it's like, um, you know, giving an iPhone to a, a, a caveman or something.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Something like that. Yeah.

• 17:57Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  I mean, it seems, it seems like the, the tech, any technologies they've got from it are just. You know, surface level type stuff. Oh, this is some interesting material. What's it made of?

• 18:06Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  That that level.

• 18:08Jesse Michels?

  If if I were on the inside, I would probably want somebody like you working on this sort of thing.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  I would love to be working on this, but I'm not not black work. I'd love to work on this in the open.

• 18:17Jesse Michels?

  Okay. Have you ever been contacted to do black work?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Uh, I had the opportunity to to have clearance when I worked at NASA.

• 18:25Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  But but I turned it down.

• 18:27Jesse Michels?

  Because you've always wanted to do things in an open transparent way.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  I'm a scientist and I want to and this and one of the benefits of being a scientist is we share information. We work together, we cooperate.

• 18:39Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And and yeah, there's some competition, but there's a lot of collaboration as well. So and that's very healthy.

• 18:44Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that's part of what's held back the legacy UFO program?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  If if it's held back at all, it's because you've got 10 people closeted working on one thing and they don't get extra information that you might need to get interesting ideas, you know? The more people you have working on a problem, the more diversity of ideas you're going to get and.

• 19:07Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that there are certain scientific things that you can't work on in the kind of civil side? You know, open world of of science without receiving backlash?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Uh, UFOs is one of them.

• 19:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we there was some backlash. Some backlash when we started working on UFOs is.

• 19:26Jesse Michels?

  You mentioned on Danny Jones that you've had various friends work on anti-gravity and receive sort of backlash.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Threatened threats and things like that. Yeah, too.

• 19:35Jesse Michels?

  That's scary.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  That's very strange. Yeah.

• 19:38Jesse Michels?

  What do you think that is with the anti-gravity stuff?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I really have no idea. I mean, I, you know, you can jump to conclusions and say, well, because somebody doesn't want other people discovering things that they know about and have control over. I mean, you could jump to that conclusion, but I don't. I don't actually know what the situation is. It's hard to tell.

• 19:57Jesse Michels?

  Doesn't that feel like the base case conclusion? Like if you're, if somebody's getting threatened over discovering a thing? It would seem like there'd be some group on the inside that would be tracking people trying to discover a thing that they're already aware of.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:12Jesse Michels?

  Like, that seems like the Occam's razor easy explanation.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  It leads to a whole sets of conspiracy theories, right? And it's difficult.

• 20:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah. I've done deep dives on this guy like Townsend Brown, who I'm really fascinated with. And I talk about him probably too much for the audience always laughs when I talk, but, but, you know, I find him to be really interesting because I do think he made breakthroughs in the world of gravity. This sort of Bifield Brown effect, which is, I think, a very simple experiment. But I, have you looked into that at all or?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  I haven't looked into that much at all. Um, you have limited time. That's the problem. I've got stacks of books I want to read and things I want to look at.

• 20:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  It's just, you have to pick and choose. And I think that's when, that's one reason why you don't have academics in the past, looking into UFOs. Because why spend time on something that's probably nonsensical when you can be spending time on something that is probably going to pay off? And I think that's the calculation most people are doing. And

• 21:09Jesse Michels?

  How do you?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Except at this point, I don't think it's nonsensical. So the payoff's huge, right?

• 21:14Jesse Michels?

  How do you think UFOs fly?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  I have no idea. They're, they're, they're very strange in a lot of ways. First, the, um, how many ways are they strange, right? And

• 21:30Speaker 01

  the, the speeds and accelerations are crazy, right? The accelerations, nobody's going to survive that. So, so the equipment isn't going to survive it. So, you know, in the Nimitz case, we estimated the acceleration of the Tic Tac dropping from 28,000 feet to sea level in point seven, five seconds or so, point seven, eight seconds.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  It's about 5,000 Gs of acceleration minimum, right? 5,000 Gs is insane. The new F-35 fighters, jets, their wings rip off at 13 Gs. You know, most missile frames can't handle more than a missile can't maneuver at more than about 35 Gs. And the frame isn't going to survive more than 60 Gs. And now you've got this Tic Tac thing accelerating at 5,000 Gs. That's not possible. I mean, equipment won't survive. So now this leads you to think the only solution there is you've got to be playing with inertia somehow. You've got to be playing with gravity somehow. And, um,

• 22:35Speaker 01

  and so that leads you down the path of general relativity and warp drive and that way of thinking. Right?

• 22:40Jesse Michels?

  Do you have like a propulsion modality that you like best when it comes to UFOs?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  No, I don't exactly. So then, but then the other problem is power. If you look at energies and power involved, the, the amount of power for that Tic Tac dropping is something like, um, what was it was 1,100 gigawatts of power. You know, I remember Back to the Future with Doc, Doc Brown, 2.1 gigawatts. Like that's crazy or something. This thing was 1,100 gigawatts, right? I mean, this is-

• 23:11Jesse Michels?

  And he had, he had Mr. Fusion, which was a nuclear fusion machine.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. So this is more power. The Tic Tac maneuver took more power than the total nuclear power output of the United States.

• 23:24Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And that's in, in that Tic Tac, in the size of an F-18. I mean, that's crazy.

• 23:30Speaker 00

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• 23:59Speaker 01

  And so now, how do you, how do you get your head around that? If you, so if you, so let's say there, they can deal with that kind of power. For some reason, they have access to that much energy.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Equipment is never 100% efficient. So 1% inefficiency. So in most of the things we make are like 20% efficient at best, right? So let's say they're really good at this. They can get to 99% efficiency. That means you've got a 1% inefficiency. 1% of 1,000 gigawatts is like 11 gigawatts of power. That means 11 gigawatts of power is going into waste heat. The thing would melt. So now what's happening? Are they really more efficient than 99%? Or is, or do we have something wrong? Are we looking at this the wrong way?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe they're not actually moving in such a way that takes that much power.

• 24:59Jesse Michels?

  Do you have any theories?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I don't exactly. Um, warp drive is certainly on the table.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  But that too is messy because we don't know enough about

• 25:14Speaker 01

  how, you know, since there has been theoretical work on, on warp bubbles.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  We don't really know how these would interact with matter. So what does a warp bubble do in an atmosphere? We don't, nobody's, I don't think has looked into that. So, so these things are strange because they don't appear to be interacting with the atmosphere at all. There's no sonic boom, there's no fireball. There's no sound in many cases. The underwater UFOs, you've even got more in, you should, should be have much more friction there. These things are moving the, the one with the H, the, the New Zealand frigate in 1980s. The HM and ZS Southwind

• 25:55Speaker 01

  had an 800 foot long USO.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Following it and it was about two kilometers behind the ship and actually closed that distance in 25 seconds and went under the ship and drained all the batteries, drained all the power from the ship. And you've got to clear, the, the width of this thing was about 150 feet in diameter. This cylindrical shaped object, 800 feet long. So it's, so it's what is that? That's 30% longer than the largest Russian sub to be the Typhoon class subs, right? So it's 30% bigger than a Typhoon class sub. The thing closes two kilometers in 25 seconds. This gives you an excel, a crazy acceleration, right? Underwater, the top speed is something like 3,500 miles an hour.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  And you've got to clear a, a 150 foot diameter cylinder, two kilometer long cylinder of water out of the way to move this thing into, in 25 seconds. That water had to go somewhere. Water is not compressible. So you would have had waves coming up. That did not happen. So the thing is acting like it's not even interacting with the water. Yet we have sonar records from this, which means sonar works by water molecules banging on things, right? And bouncing off. So the water molecules are bouncing off this thing, but it's not interacting with the water all at the same time. How, how this works?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I, I have no explanation for this, but that's the data. Now, now what do you do?

• 27:32Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Interesting.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  It's really perplexing. These things are really not simple.

• 27:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Do you think you've ever studied UFO parts?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Um, my colleague, Matthew Shadagas, has been working on studying debris from purported crashes.

• 27:51Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. He has a new technique for detecting isotopes using neutron activation. So he's developed this technique and he's been working on this furiously for the last couple of months.

• 28:04Jesse Michels?

  Neutron activation. How is that different than mass spec?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Um, mass spec, you basically, you.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Typically, you dissolve the material in nitric acid and then you spray it into a into a some electric plates that basically electrify it, ionize it. And then you shoot it into a magnetic field that constant magnetic field, the thing will move in a circle. So and the radius of the circle depends on the mass. So then it hits a screen depending on where the masses changes where it hits the screen. So you can measure the mass of the isotopes inside that spray.

• 28:39Jesse Michels?

  And to back up for the audience, isotope differences are neutron differences in various elements.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:46Jesse Michels?

  And if you were to find some, you know, isotope ratios in a material that don't occur naturally on Earth and don't pattern match to asteroids, that would be this really exciting, you know, possible smoking gun that the thing is actually a UFO.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Well said. You summarized that very nicely. Yeah, that's exactly it. And so Matthew's technique is different. He basically irradiates the material with neutrons with a neutron source and basically creates heavier isotopes with these extra neutrons. And then he watches them decay back into the states that they were in before. So he can tell what the isotopes he created were. And then he can infer what they were originally from that. And it's non destructive because they they decay back to where they were and pretty quickly. And

• 29:44Speaker 01

  you're not doing it to most of the material. You're only, you know, rating thousands of these atoms rather than as compared to Avogadro's number for the whole symbol, right?

• 29:55Jesse Michels?

  So amazing. I mean, Gary Nolan is also doing this at Stanford. He's using mass spec.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  He uses mass spec, right?

• 30:01Jesse Michels?

  So it's cool to see that there's, you know, there are updates even on his work as far as this material analysis. The UFO legacy program has to be keeping tabs on what you guys are doing. That would be my guess, right?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 30:13Jesse Michels?

  Like they you'd want some sort of like civilian, like the smartest like.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I know there's, there's, there's interest in Matthew's work. He's had contact with government people.

• 30:22Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  I can't really talk about those details, but.

• 30:25Jesse Michels?

  Okay. Are the parts like arts parts, the parts that?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Some of them were arts parts, but he's, he's had other ones too. He's had material from Ukraine and Israel and.

• 30:34Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  All over. Yeah.

• 30:35Jesse Michels?

  Interesting. Yeah, art parts, it's this rumor that Art Bell, right, eventually ended up in possession of this material that I think was from the, was it from the Roswell?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Some of it's from Roswell, yeah, yeah.

• 30:49Jesse Michels?

  And, and the, the material in Art Bell, obviously famous coast to coast, you know, amazing, you know, um, radio show host that reached, you know, 10 to 15 million people every night, super into UFOs. And it's so interesting that he received these pieces because he, you know, he's so passionate about, about this stuff. I believe one of the pieces is magnesium bismuth, is that right?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:10Jesse Michels?

  Cause that's what Nolan has as well. I find this really interesting because in the Bifield Brown effect with Townsend Brown, the anti-gravity stuff, uh, and I don't have any, I have a little bit of evidence that Townsend Brown might've been involved in one UFO crash retrieval, but I don't have a, I mostly have evidence that he figured out an anti-gravity modality, but magnesium, uh, or bismuth, rather, is constantly talked about, bismuth, because bismuth is a high K dielectric. So it stores and discharges easily a lot of electromagnetism. And that in the Bifield Brown effect, if you use that as the insulator between the two, you know, negative and positive electrodes, that creates greater thrust. So I find it fascinating that you have UFO parts that in the only anti-gra,

• 31:55Jesse Michels?

  or in one of the few anti-gravity experiments that we know of, it creates more thrust in that experiment. That seems really significant to me.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Right. And the other interesting thing is that it has nano layers of the bismuth and magnesium and the, and one of, one of the two is paramagnetic and the other's diamagnetic.

• 32:12Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  So they're, they have two very different magnetic properties, which is interesting. So a lot of the, a lot of the modern work that we do in material science on like spintronics and this sort of thing, basically is dealing with magnetic spins with diamagnetic and paramagnetic materials. So, so a lot of the new.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Breakthroughs in material sciences related to these types of materials as well. So this is interesting stuff.

• 32:38Jesse Michels?

  Super interesting. Yeah. Gary was also, when I was at his lab, he showed me some of the pieces and he mentioned that some of these materials might be able to microsize wave guides for terahertz power. And do you think that that's true? Do you think these these pieces are able to do that?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's possible. That we haven't looked into.

• 33:01Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And I know, I know what Matthew's done, but I don't think that he's looked into that at all.

• 33:07Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. What is, what is one scientific truth that you adamantly believe that conventional science disagrees with you vehemently on?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  I don't know if I have an answer immediately.

• 33:27Jesse Michels?

  You could dwell on it if you want for the movie if it comes up.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Think about that. What do I, what, hmm, interesting. Yeah. I don't know if, I don't know if there is one exactly.

• 33:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. At NASA, you mentioned the people there weren't really into UFOs. How does, how do you square that with all this allure of them being interested in UFOs? And I don't know, you have like Diana Pasulka, have you ever read her book, American Cosmic? So she has this NASA mission controller who I guess now is public, but his name is Tim Taylor. And, you know, he's going around taking them to crash UFO crash sites, seems extremely read into any sort of UFO program that exists.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  There are individuals at NASA who are interested in that. And since I've gotten interested and been vocal about it, I've had some of the, some of them I knew when I was at NASA have come to talk to me and said, oh yeah, I was interested. I knew, I know some, something about this or that.

• 34:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:24Jesse Michels?

  It's so strange because it, yeah, you have Hal Povinmeyer, who was a, I think he was both CIA and NASA, showing up at Chris Bledsoe's door when he starts to attract UFOs. Very, it's like.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, people come kind of come out of the woodwork. You find that, you know, I've now had a couple people from NASA, I find out were interested in remote viewing.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Like I wouldn't have thought that when I was back, you know, when I worked there, but

• 34:52Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:54Jesse Michels?

  Is there a, when were, are they doing remote viewing in a professional capacity at NASA?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  No, well, yeah, so, um, I don't know. I don't want to tell on anybody, but some of this is actually public, but nobody's noticed. Um, so one of the people at NASA has actually written a CIA training manual for remote viewing.

• 35:12Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:14Jesse Michels?

  But this is, this is public?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:16Jesse Michels?

  Okay. Well then, well, we can, uh, people are gonna look it up.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  You can figure out who it is.

• 35:20Jesse Michels?

  Okay. All right.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I actually, I was, yeah, there was a, yeah, so, but.

• 35:26Jesse Michels?

  Well, if it's public, it's, you know, interesting.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:29Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  And, and that person did it before they came to NASA, but, um, but are currently or were NASA, they may be retired now at this point.

• 35:39Jesse Michels?

  You know, they also have a patent, I believe in 2003 on a barrel shaped asymmetric capacitor. And they put, they say this is, we're talking about Thomas Townsend Brown.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that, that works interesting too. Yeah.

• 35:51Jesse Michels?

  It's very interesting.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are the, these, there are handfuls of people doing weird things here and there, right? And it's

• 36:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And they've been, I mean, you, and once I've gotten involved with this, I find that those people are all over the place and they're all studying things they're not supposed to be studying, which is

• 36:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 36:12Jesse Michels?

  On that patent, that NASA patent, I believe Larry Smalley, it has his name there. He's a University of Alabama Huntsville. He was the physics chair and under him was a woman named Ning Li. And she was studying, I think, like, um, uh, superconductor based, you know, uh, uh, kind of weight reduction, uh, via kind of anti-gravity. I think she, she called it gravitons, gravity particles, um, would, would cause this sort of effect. And, um, you know, it's obviously, you know, groundbreaking sort of controversial claim. And she speaks about this at some sort of MITRE Corporation event. And, um, then she kind of, you know, goes dark, I think, gets a security clearance. But, um, her physics, she leaves and starts a, a company. I think it's

• 36:56Jesse Michels?

  called Anti-Gravity LLC or something. And then her physics chair, Larry Smalley, goes and joins her, which I think is lends credence to the actual findings, right? Your physics chair leaves. I mean, you, you know, academia, like, it's kind of, okay, like, everybody's got to be high conviction at that point.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You don't leave a tenured position.

• 37:12Jesse Michels?

  And then his name shows up on a patent around a barrel shaped asymmetric capacitor, which is Town and it's talking about Townsend Brown. And I'm like, okay, what's going on?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah. Wow.

• 37:22Jesse Michels?

  I find it fascinating. Yeah. But I mean, one question I have is you have all these names pop up, right? And you have, you know, Hal Puthoff is obviously like, seems so at the center of so much UFO physics. But a lot of, a lot of the names that pop up in UFO science, quote unquote, it's almost like there's some sort of like, substructure of a lot of these like mega structure. So like NASA, I don't like, it almost seems like what you're saying is there is no official knowledge of UFOs. But it's like, these people within NASA that are extremely interested in this stuff. How do you square that with like, you watch the age of disclosure? And it's like,

• 38:02Jesse Michels?

  we have a legacy program, which you would, that implies some sort of like, you know, it's like, super well coordinated.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Program's a different thing. Yeah.

• 38:11Jesse Michels?

  So like, what I always try to ask, I try to press on people here. Is it like, is there a program? Or is it like, this hermetic substructure where people come together via synchronicities?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Just people doing things. I mean, that's one thing. I mean, scientists tinker as well, right? And, and NASA isn't like that now. But when I worked there, which was the early 2000s, you still were able to do like, blue sky research. As long as, I mean, the requirement was you had to convince your area lead that this was in line with NASA's missions, basically, in some way. And so, so and that's all you had to do. And so then you could go off and work on this project. You know, now, and, and while I worked there, near the end of the time I worked there during the Bush administration, they started what they called full cost accounting, where they have to

• 39:04Speaker 01

  account for all their costs. So now, now you have to, you have to account for the time you spend on things. And, and if you're doing that, then you can't do this blue sky research on this, you can't do this little thing on the side. So for example, one of the things that we tried to do on the side. So this was a, yeah, why not? We, we had, I was interested in the, the Roswell story. And I

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Was struck by the fact that the picture, you know, Jesse Marcel says one thing about the, the material and, and sounds entirely believable. And then they get the picture that in the newspaper with General Ramey with what clearly is aluminum foil and balsa wood.

• 39:50Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  In the picture, right? And, and you look at that picture, you think there's no way anybody is going to mistake that for any kind of craft debris. So what was Jesse Marcel thinking? Or did, was it as they claimed that they switched the debris? Right? And I think it's more likely they switched the debris.

• 40:12Jesse Michels?

  Well, Marcel claimed that the, the real UFO debris was off to the side, right outside of the frame of that photo.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Did he say that?

• 40:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, he did. Yeah. He also said he brought it home and that his son played with it.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  He showed it with his son.

• 40:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:25Jesse Michels?

  So I think he would know the difference.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  He would know the difference. Right. So, so then there, there's the picture of General Ramey and he's holding a memo that you can see in the photographs and it's a clearly it's marked stamped top secret. And I thought, what does that memo say? And so me and one of my colleagues at NASA, because we were, I was in the intelligence systems division. So our job was to develop machine learning systems to analyze data. And so we were doing a lot of work with imagery. I worked with Hubble imagery. And I thought, why don't we try to clean, why don't we try cleaning up this memo and see what the memo says? So we actually wrote the algorithms to actually read this, this memo and, um, and wrote them,

• 41:11Speaker 01

  got them running and we're testing them. And, um, and we just didn't have the computer power at the time. It was a 300 megahertz machines we were working on. And, you know, we couldn't use the supercomputer for this. So we couldn't get away with that, right? We could get away with using the 300 megahertz computer on this. And, um, it just didn't have the computing power and computing time to do it. So, so we abandoned the project. But, but we had thought that we were going to, we were going, you know, our little dream was, all right, we're going to. Figure out what this memo says and then we're going to publish it as a NASA publication, but it's going to be buried as an example. We're going to, the publication will be on our methodology and our algorithm. And then we'll have several examples and one of them will be the Roswell memo.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And then we'll make it public and make it an official NASA publication. Right. That was, that was our little plan. I love it. Our sneaky plan. I love it. And it just didn't work out because we couldn't analyze that imagery. Right. But this is, but this is what's going on behind the scenes and all, I probably a lot of government labs, people are doing stuff like this. Hmm. You know, maybe not trying to publish it, but, um, but trying to figure out if they can get something to work or try something interesting.

• 42:22Jesse Michels?

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• 43:07Jesse Michels?

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• 43:24Speaker 00

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• 43:53Jesse Michels?

  So it's like, there is this UFO truth. You have, you know, various crashes. You have various maybe scientific frameworks that are not public. And then you just have a bunch of vigilante efforts in little pockets and compartments.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  You've got people trying things. You've got people, smart people trying things. And it's, you know, I think what, you know, John, I think it was John Stewart said, isn't it amazing what scientists can do when no one makes them stop? And I think that's all it is. It's no one's making them stop and they're discovering things. And some of them are useful, some aren't, and some are really interesting and some they feel they probably shouldn't talk about.

• 44:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  And I think that it's that simple.

• 44:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  In a lot of cases.

• 44:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's so fascinating. You have an interesting theory around water worlds. And, you know, water being this really important kind of variable for UFO transport. Do you want to explain that?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's a few. Yeah, so it has two aspects. The first one is,

• 44:58Speaker 01

  is why, you know, I was at one point wondering why are there so many USOs submerged, unidentified submerged craft? Why is that such a big thing? And, um,

• 45:11Speaker 01

  and when you think about living on a planet, um, living under an atmosphere is horrible. It's difficult. The weather is, the, the, the conditions change every day. They change daily, you know, hourly even. And I'm coming down here from Albany, I'm down here to Austin. You know, we had a snowstorm this weekend in Albany, or north of Albany. I drove through from Montreal to Albany through a snowstorm. And now we're down here and it's what 60 degrees and sunny and I hope to go to the Botanical Garden before I leave or something, right? So atmospheres are very, are quite variable. And now, now you go from Earth to Venus. Venus's atmosphere has 100 times the air pressure on Earth, which would crush you.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And it's about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And actually I was at NASA Ames when the Magellan probe was doing radar mapping of Venus. And we were perplexed because the mountain tops.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Would become radar reflective at times and then it would fade and then they would become reflective again and fade and we're like, what's going on with this, these mountain tops and realize they would become reflective when the temperature would drop. So the temperature would drop, the mountain tops would become radar reflective and they realized what was happening is vaporized lead and bismuth was making, was actually making snowflakes. And so it was actually snowing lead and bismuth snow on the mountain tops. I mean, imagine what that, I can't imagine what that would look like to have metal snow. I want to go there and actually see that. But that's what they, that's a cold day in hell, by the way.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  When you've got metal snow raining on the mountain tops. So that's what Venus's atmosphere is like, right? And then you go to Mars and Mars has one one hundredth the atmospheric pressure of Earth. So you need a spacesuit and it's cold, you know, 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, something like that, colder than Antarctica temperatures. So now, so now comparing Venus to Mars, the temperature difference is, is a factor of 10,000 different. It's huge. Now you consider a water world, water, water is only liquid from zero degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, right? So you've got, as long as you have liquid water, you, you are in that temperature range. You're not going out of it. And so it's much more

• 47:39Speaker 01

  stable, temperature wise. The pressure varies with depth dramatically. I mean, atmospheric pressure varies with atmospheric height as well, but, but because water is so much more dense, it's much more dramatic. So you can control what pressure you like by controlling the depth and, and water has such a high heat capacity, the temperature doesn't change that much. You don't have the temperature fluctuations of water temperature that you do in an air temperature. So it's a much more stable environment. You're protected from solar radiation. You're protected from ultraviolet rays. You're protected from cosmic rays. You're protected from, you know, small meteorites at least.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  It's, and it's a great place to hide electromagnetism. Electromagnetic waves don't travel far in water. So you can't see far. You can't detect things with electromagnetism very well. And which is why we use sonar, right? And um, so it's a great place to hide.

• 48:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  It's so there's every reason to go to the water.

• 48:42Jesse Michels?

  Um, it's fascinating. So if you were like a Kardashev three or four scale civilization, and you wanted to colonize a bunch of other planets, water is the perfect hideout spot. It's evidence.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Water. Yeah, well, that's the other thing. So you, you only have, you only have a couple of choices, right? So if you're going to go to colonize another star system, you've got to carry everything you need to do it with you. Right? So getting already the traveling is hard. It's going to be hard for anybody. Um, but, but bringing everything you need to, to build up a base or some kind of settlement is, is going to be extra difficult. So you, so you really have, have a few options. And water worlds we now know are relatively common. You know, we have several water worlds in our, in our solar system. Mostly, most of them are frozen moons or icy surfaces, but there's oceans underneath, right? So you can either, you can either plan to colonize,

• 49:38Speaker 01

  you can either just plan to stay near spaceships. Right? We're just going to live in our spaceships. That's probably the easiest thing to do, right?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Or to colonize airless worlds like the moon, which is no different than staying in your spaceship. Um, but then the other option is to live on a planet. And if you want to live on a planet to access its resources, you're either going to go with an airless world and stay in your spaceship. Or the next most reasonable choice for could be to go to water.

• 50:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And so it's also evidence, as you said, of this kind of Goldilocks temperature zone. I think water is specifically unique as well because the way that hydrogen and oxygen bond in an H2O molecule is a perfect crystal lattice structure. And so it's unique in that the solid form of it is actually less dense than the liquid form of it. So you end up with, you know, these worlds that don't flood because you end up with a lot of, lot of ice. And so, you know, that's fascinating as well. And then I think that the final thing on the UFO front is you're talking about tons and tons of power. If you were to theoretically break hydrogen and oxygen bonds and H2O, you would get a ton of power.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can use water for, as for storing energy that way.

• 50:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, or for fuel.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  And then seas and, you know, seas have dissolved minerals in them. So you could, I mean, it's not a fast process, but you can, you could extract any kind of mineral you want. You need any atom, any atom you want, you can probably pull out of seawater. You know, whether you can do it fast enough to get a substantial amount is really the question, but so, but that would be easier than mining, right?

• 51:15Jesse Michels?

  Do you think there are UFO bases in our oceans? Tim Burchett recently said there are five oceanic hotspots across the world.

• 51:25Speaker 05

  We have a higher propensity of sightings around these five or six, I believe, deep area, deep water areas. And so to me, it just, um, it creates a, um, a question there.

• 51:39Jesse Michels?

  Do you think there are UFO bases?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  I think that's probably, that's probably the best bet.

• 51:44Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:45Jesse Michels?

  And you went to Catalina, right?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  To Catalina, yeah.

• 51:48Jesse Michels?

  Which is one of the, it's off the coast of Southern California and a lot of people think it's this UFO hotspot. There's a great, um, book, I think it's called Under, Underwater or Undersea UFO Base by Preston Dennett.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:59Jesse Michels?

  And there's a ton of history in the region. And so what did you find when you went out there?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we, we spent, we spent five days on a rooftop in Laguna Beach and watching the skies and,

• 52:14Speaker 01

  and it's all documented in the, the movie A Tear in the Sky. So, um, and the movie best documents what.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  The basically how the mission progressed, right? And so it's one of the first, you know, universities supported UFO data collection missions that that we know of has happened, right? So, um, so there's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of excitement in that movie and that's real excitement, right? Yeah. And, um, and we did see, we did see some interesting things that, um, and so here comes some spoilers. So, and so I'm going to spoil things twice. So, so there's at one point, there's a bright light that's seen from the team in Catalina Island, which was across the Catalina Channel. We had two, two teams. They spotted this bright

• 53:07Speaker 01

  light that was moving. Um, and they said it's too bright to be a satellite. It's, it's, you know, going in this direction. So we're, we're looking for it as well. So we recorded this object and then it just abruptly disappears and which is very strange. And, um, and the problem with documentaries is that, yes, it takes a long time to make a film, maybe a year to two years in some cases. Um, science takes a lot longer. We're a lot slower. And, um, so the scientific study of what the data we collected took a lot longer and that got published just last year. So our mission was what in 2021, tear in the sky, I think came out in 2023, something like that.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  And our scientific paper on the mission came out just this summer. Um, Matthew Shadagas was the first author of that paper. And so we found that that bright light was the space station. Um, why didn't we figure that out earlier? The app we were using to track satellites didn't take into account daylight savings time. A stupid mistake, right? That we shouldn't have made, but this is your first time doing this sort of thing and you make, and I remember telling Matthew on our way out.

• 54:23Jesse Michels?

  Space station looks weird, by the way.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And it looks really weird.

• 54:25Jesse Michels?

  Looks like UFO, yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  And I remember telling Matthew on the airplane, you know, we were both excited. Oh, this is gonna be so much fun. Think, imagine what we can see. And I said, yeah, but the problem is we're just up what we're probably gonna learn is what not to do. And that's really what happened that first mission. We learned how not to do it. But Matthew is the one who figured out it was the space station. He put it all together and he actually took the pixel size on the camera and then

• 54:55Speaker 01

  knowing the altitude of the space station figured out how big the space station should be and he was within one foot of the side of the space, size of the space station. It's really a nice analysis he does. He put it in the appendix and

• 55:09Speaker 01

  and yeah, it was something to be proud of. The fact that, yeah, we identified it to be the space station and actually proved it right. So that's cool. Another, another event that happened was these,

• 55:23Speaker 01

  one of the FLIR cameras was showing these objects dropping to the sea and and I was actually at the time looking through night vision goggles. This didn't end up in the movie and people were too excited about the FLIR camera to hear me shouting about the night. I was telling people, put on your night vision goggles and look over here. But I saw something actually drop and hit the water in infrared.

• 55:46Jesse Michels?

  Whoa, you got that on video?

• 55:48Speaker 01

  No, no, I was just looking through the goggles, watching for things and

• 55:52Jesse Michels?

  But it was through infrared?

• 55:54Speaker 01

  It was in infrared, yeah. And then, then, and I think they tried to simulate this in the film, but it's not simulated properly. They showed this thing hovering and wasn't it just dropped?

• 56:03Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  But, but the FLIR cameras recorded things dropping into the sea and we

• 56:09Jesse Michels?

  So you think you saw a UFO?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I don't know what I saw actually, but because, but I was excited because it happened about the same time the FLIR camera was showing things dropping. But then we figured out later that the FLIR camera was actually malfunctioning. And that's, and that's a failure mode of the FLIR cameras. We actually talked to the engineers who

• 56:25Jesse Michels?

  Is seeing something drop?

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, these things falling down is actually a failure.

• 56:29Jesse Michels?

  Oh, so maybe it was an issue with the camera?

• 56:32Speaker 01

  So, so the FLIR camera recording we had was not something dropping into the sea. I don't know what I saw and probably will never know because you can't, it has to be reproducible, right? You have to be able to see it again and try different things.

• 56:45Jesse Michels?

  Is there a best sensor modality if you're trying to spot UFOs?

• 56:49Speaker 01

  I think as many sensors as you can.

• 56:51Jesse Michels?

  Is there one, say, say you had to pick one and you had to, you know, what, what, what would you pick?

• 56:57Speaker 01

  If I picked one, I would try, that's tough.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  I think I would go with a FLIR camera is a good choice for a few reasons. One, you get a visual record of the object. It's not a very good visual record because it's going to be blurry because it's infrared. I've heard people complain, oh, the Navy produces all these blurry photos of UFOs. Well, they're infrared images. What do you expect? I've heard scientists say this and you want to slap them upside the head and say, what did you think was going to happen? And so, you know, but the other benefit of is for with the FLIR cameras, you can measure the temperature of the object. Because you're picking up infrared emissions, right? So those, that black body infrared spectrum actually gives you the temperature of the object.

• 57:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's where, where white hot comes from.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so now, so, so not only do you get a visual record of the object, but you get its temperature too, which is, which is in, you get extra pieces of information for that. So for that reason, I probably would choose a FLIR camera.

• 57:57Jesse Michels?

  Is there a sighting or a crash that you rank as highest conviction? As far as your analysis of it, that like you, you are convinced that this happened?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 58:13Speaker 00

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• 58:47Speaker 01

  I would have to say the most convincing one is one of the most hard to believe ones. It's JAL Airlines 1628.

• 58:59Speaker 06

  It was a Japan Airlines cargo flight piloted by Captain Kenji Taruuchi. This is the sketch Taruuchi drew of what he says he saw in his window that night. And this Japanese television graphic is based on his description.

• 59:12Speaker 07

  This is just a small space. We can see a big plane. This one is size is a carrier, so mothership.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  And I, and I remember, I remember that being on the nightly news. I remember watching, it was on NBC. Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung, I remember that being on the news and being, holy shit, there's giant aircraft carrier sized walnut shaped UFO followed that Japanese Airlines for 45 minutes across Alaska.

• 59:44Jesse Michels?

  Wild, give us the whole sequence.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so these guys, so the Japanese Airlines, they, it's a, it's not a passenger jet, it's a 747, they are transporting Bouchou Le Nouveau, yep, they got wine in the back, let the skeptics rejoice, no, the pilots were not drunk on Bouchou Le Nouveau, it's just a silly thing.

• 1:00:06Jesse Michels?

  They're just transporting it.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're just transporting it and they're flying across Alaska and, and first, I don't remember all the events, several things happened, they actually saw several UFOs, first these rectangular things show up in front of the ship and have these lights that go up and down, shining light into the cockpit and the pilots could feel the heat from the light of these objects and they're like scanning, there's, you know, like that kind of behavior and they follow in front of the plane for some time and then, and then this giant walnut shaped object shows up, that's something like four 747s in length,

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  right, so this things, the thing's the size of an aircraft carrier and the pilot said that when it was in front of the plane, he couldn't see anything but the craft, it's that big, so it's unmistakable, I mean, and he's screaming at air traffic control, you know, what do I do about this, and they're not picking it up on radar and so it was later found that military height finding radar was picking it up and so that radar actually, that, those radar records actually got collected and, and so this walnut shaped craft basically follow the 747 for about 45 minutes, stayed about seven kilometers away, but it would

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  go from one side of the plane to the other, it was bouncing around from one side to the other and, and we analyzed its.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Speed and acceleration, just crudely based on the description of what it was doing. So it would go, so at one point it would be at like one o'clock. And then the next sweep of the radar, which is about 12 seconds or so, would be, would be at six o'clock. And so we were using those, that information to estimate speeds and accelerations. Daniel Kumbay, another physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute, actually took the radar. I didn't, I didn't know that we could get our hands on the radar measurements when we published that paper. But he actually got the radar data and he analyzed that. He was analyzing the jumps and he found that the object was accelerating at, took several dumps, jumps, different accelerations at different times.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  But there were three, three of them were, the accelerations were greater than 9,000 Gs. One of them was like 11,000 Gs and the top speed he estimated to be 250,000 miles an hour. And at 250,000 miles an hour, you can get to the moon in 54 minutes.

• 1:02:50Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  That's, that's not a joke. So you've got something the size of an aircraft carrier that could get to the moon in less than an hour. Right. That's basically what you've, you're dealing with here. So as, and we have, and we have the radar data from that.

• 1:03:06Jesse Michels?

  You have the radar data.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  You have the radar data.

• 1:03:07Jesse Michels?

  That's amazing. I didn't know that.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  That's amazing. Yeah. John Callahan, who was the FAA Chief of Accidents and Investigations, actually reviewed the case and then Reagan, President Reagan's scientific team and the CIA showed up and they wanted all the data.

• 1:03:25Jesse Michels?

  No way.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  And so they came to collect the data, Callahan copied it and put it in a box that he just put under his desk.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  And so he had a copy of it and he didn't turn that over. So they got

• 1:03:40Jesse Michels?

  And that's public now?

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  And now that's public.

• 1:03:42Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  He held on to it for like 20 years and then when he retired, he made it public.

• 1:03:46Jesse Michels?

  Good for him.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a hero, right?

• 1:03:48Jesse Michels?

  Kinda, yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he said, so when he was in the meeting with Reagan's scientific team, they were all excited. They said, we've never had 45 minutes of radar data from one of these things before.

• 1:03:58Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  And so, um, so that exists, but, but from that radar data, it's accelerating at 10,000 Gs, 250,000 miles an hour. And, and you can actually see the position of the plane on the radar.

• 1:04:12Jesse Michels?

  That is remarkable.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  The one point where the plane actually does a 360 to try to shake this thing, you can actually see that on the radar. So the radar is working.

• 1:04:20Jesse Michels?

  Is, are the pilots still alive?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:04:23Jesse Michels?

  I want to get in touch with them.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure. The one pilot was actually fired.

• 1:04:27Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  For going public with it. He was fired and had his license taken away. And then several years later was reinstated.

• 1:04:34Jesse Michels?

  That's horrible that he was fired for that. I mean, what are you supposed to? You experienced something that kind of traumatic and worldview shattering and

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  What, what would lying about it be a better thing to do for flight safety?

• 1:04:46Jesse Michels?

  You're right.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  That's really the question.

• 1:04:48Jesse Michels?

  Just ignore it? Yeah, that's crazy. Um, fascinating. You know, there's that audio recording of Steven Spielberg, I believe, talking about his trip to the White House and, um, they do a viewing of ET.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Oh, right. I've heard this. Yes.

• 1:05:03Jesse Michels?

  And Reagan says, uh, you know, a lot of you in this room know that everything on that screen there that you just watched is true.

• 1:05:11Speaker 08

  And he just stood up and he looked around the room, almost like he was doing a head count. And he said, I want to thank you for bringing ET to the White House. We really enjoyed your movie. And then he looked around the room and he said, and there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true. And he said it without smiling. Um, but he, but, but he, he said that and everybody laughed. By the way, the whole room laughed because he presented it like a joke, but he wasn't smiling as he said it.

• 1:05:39Jesse Michels?

  And so, yeah, it's pretty interesting, right?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Interesting, right?

• 1:05:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, that's fascinating that people from his scientific team, I mean, it sounds like they were pretty aware of this to, to say, oh, we've, we've never had 45 minutes, but it's like, that implies, okay, you're sitting on maybe, you know, shorter clips of UFOs.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've got something.

• 1:06:00Jesse Michels?

  They've got something, yeah. I mean, Alaska is a hotspot historically as well. I believe Nathan Twining, who was head of air material command, responsible for all aircraft development of the air force, wrote the famous Twining memo in 1947, saying UFOs are not visionary nor fictitious.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:19Jesse Michels?

  He, he, I believe they had like an observation program going on in Alaska. And then just recently you had, it was this weird sequence of events, but in 2020, early 2023, you had the Chinese spy balloon. And then right after that, you had this bizarre, you know, these things seem to show up and like, jam, you know, the radars of these F-22s. And one of them specifically was in Alaska and crashed. And I've heard some very strange things around this specific craft. I've heard things like it reassembled itself and was seen in the air over Canada.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Bizarre.

• 1:06:56Jesse Michels?

  I've heard something, I've heard something about deleted emails involving this specific craft, uh, in the National Military Command Center servers. So I, I don't know. It seems like there's something strange about this craft and this, this was also in Alaska. So.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Right. Wow. That's amazing.

• 1:07:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing to know that, you know, his scientific, Reagan's scientific team had gotten that data. What did they do with it? What is, you know, what are, what are their reports? I would like to see that, you know, the.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Disclose those. That would be interesting alone. Um, the

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Kecksburg, Pennsylvania UFO crash.

• 1:07:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, nineteen sixty-five.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and my, my dad's cousin, Donald Hornig, he was later the president of Brown University was, was on. He was the scientific advisor to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.

• 1:07:56Jesse Michels?

  What?

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my dad's, my dad's cousin did that. In fact, he, he's the person who he designed the, the electronic triggers for the, the plutonium bomb.

• 1:08:07Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  In the Manhattan Project.

• 1:08:10Jesse Michels?

  What was his name?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Donald Hornig.

• 1:08:12Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  And, and the night before the first test in Trinity, that he was, Oppenheimer gave him a sidearm and had him babysit the bomb up in the tower during a thunderstorm.

• 1:08:24Jesse Michels?

  What?

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  And I was surprised that they didn't put that in the movie Oppenheimer, because it's an awesome story, but the movie is about Oppenheimer, not about the Manhattan Project. But, but he was, um, yeah, so that was, and his wife was, but his wife was in the movie, Lily Hornig was in the movie. She was the woman who came from Harvard. And, um, some of the things she actually said, she told us this at dinner, once we visited her in Rhode Island, when she was still alive, but she said when she got to, um,

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Los Alamos and was being interviewed for a position, they asked her how fast she typed, and she goes, they don't teach typing at Harvard, and they used that line in the movie, which was great.

• 1:09:06Jesse Michels?

  Whoa, that is fascinating.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  So, but I, but so I mentioned that because, um, because Donald Hornig was, was the chief scientific advisor to President Johnson, who was president during the Kecksburg crash, and I found, I had actually found a document about. The Kecksburg UFO and Donald Horning was listed as being present.

• 1:09:27Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  I thought, oh, my God. And I didn't never got to meet him. Um, and, and I did, I did ask his wife Lily about it, but she didn't know.

• 1:09:35Jesse Michels?

  What document?

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't know. I maybe I have to look for it. There was some kind of summary about the Kecksburg crash and something. It was some kind of government summary.

• 1:09:45Jesse Michels?

  Official, official government.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Official, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:47Jesse Michels?

  And, and.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  But he was listed as being present, which he should have been. So I was like, well, this is all pretty.

• 1:09:52Jesse Michels?

  But that's, that's even absent the fact that he's your dad's cousin, which is a remarkable synchronicity. The fact that a presidential science advisor is on site at a UFO crash.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:05Jesse Michels?

  Is amazing unto itself.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Oh, that's true. Yeah. That's a good point.

• 1:10:09Jesse Michels?

  That's a really big deal. I think Eric Walker was supposed supposedly present as well at the Kecksburg crash. He was the, um, I believe president of Penn State and he was kind of a material science guy. I don't know if you know anything about him, but he's an interesting guy.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:10:23Jesse Michels?

  Who like seems to imply to many researchers, UFO researchers, that he's very aware of the majestic 12 and what they do and you know, who knows?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:34Jesse Michels?

  I don't know. Do you, do you lend credence to any of those sorts of stories? The idea that there's sort of an elite military scientific.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  I can't, I, I wouldn't be surprised if they were true.

• 1:10:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know if I would just jump on believing they're true without any evidence, but.

• 1:10:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  But, you know, if I was, if I found out they were true, I wouldn't, it wouldn't shock me at all.

• 1:10:56Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's like if the UFO issue is real and understood at the highest levels of government, of course they would have some sort of elite body.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Kind of group of, and if it's not a formal group, there's probably informal groups and.

• 1:11:09Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  All, all that sort of thing. Yeah.

• 1:11:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Do you think, you know, we've mentioned nuclear connection a bunch in this conversation. Do you think that, uh, not only UFOs are showing up around nuclear sites, but that the secrecy, uh, involved in the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy, uh, overlays UFO secrecy and that the program is somehow bound up in, you know, atomic stuff?

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  That's a good question, too. Yeah. It's not clear how.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  I mean, what it what it looks like the the an SCU did a study of this of UFOs monitoring nuclear sites. And so it looks like whoever's behind the whole UFO business, whoever these guys are, have been performing, you know, surveillance this whole time. They're surveilling us and it and it's intelligent surveillance. They know what they're doing. And in fact, the SCU study showed that not only do you so you when you they compared UFO sightings at nuclear sites compared to nearby military bases and nearby population centers and the nuclear sites have more, you know, in the early 40s had more UFO sightings than any of the other places.

• 1:12:29Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Nearby. So it shows that it's statistically significant that they're hanging out at nuclear sites.

• 1:12:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Now, what's weird about it is that they are present at the nuclear sites before we before they were totally constructed.

• 1:12:44Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  And before they had nuclear material there, radioactive material there. So while some of these sites were being built, UFOs were present.

• 1:12:53Jesse Michels?

  That's definitely right.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Now you're like, wait a minute, how did they know that something important is going to be there, right? How do they know what they know?

• 1:13:02Jesse Michels?

  There's something about nuclear that they're really concerned with or interested in. There's, I think in 1945, there's a pilot named Bud Clem, and he's flying over Hanford plutonium base. And it was like, yeah, before the thing was fully up.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:16Jesse Michels?

  And he's seeing UFOs and the Robert Hastings has an interview with him.

• 1:13:20Speaker 09

  On the goddamn, they told us that this bogey was out there right over the Hanford ordnance works and directed Lieutenant Commander Brown to take off and challenge him.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I mentioned him in our paper. I've got the.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  We published a paper this year on the scientific study of UAP. Basically goes through the history of how people have tried to study this. And I, and I mentioned Bud Clem's sightings at Hanford there.

• 1:13:48Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Yeah. It's so, it's so fascinating that that connection is, and there are all these theories you can, one can have. One is that they're sort of doing some sort of intelligence recon or something. And then another is that they're just protecting their resources somehow. The earth maintaining itself in its current form is, is important, or maybe we're a resource, you know, humans are a resource to them. And so they need to intervene and ensure, you know, things don't, we don't blow ourselves up or something. But it's, it's really hard to say. I mean, I know like the age of disclosure, Lou Elzondo, you know, kind of crew, like they talk about it as far as like, uh, they're monitoring our ability to

• 1:14:29Jesse Michels?

  achieve energy breakthroughs. So that would be the tip of the spear of energy breakthroughs, like high energy physics occurs in the national labs and your, you know, atomic sites and that sort of thing. And, you know, we could, we could break out of our, our cage or something if we, if we achieve some unlock and so there are various theories.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Humans are a hot mess, right? And so if they, if they're present in the universe and in our neighborhood and then right now they don't have to deal with us directly, but if we go out there, they might have to deal with us. I think Stanton Friedman put it this way. It's kind of like, you've got a neighborhood where you've got this one house on the block with crazy neighbors. There's always, the police are always there. They're screaming and yelling and things breaking. And you can hear that going on in the house and the block. And then one day the neighbors come out of the, out of the house and they're in the yard and now you have to deal with them. Right? And so he was, he was describing human, the humanity this way. And I thought that's pretty good, pretty good description.

• 1:15:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, that, that feels pretty, pretty apt to me. I want to talk, cause you're in a, I think very unique vantage point as somebody who is at the intersection of kind of credible physics and then kind of very speculative UFO, you know, interest. There are a couple of interesting. Objects of interest of late that kind of hit that intersection. The first I want to talk about is actually this discovery of Beatrice Villareal at Stockholm University, who I had the pleasure of interviewing her. And she was looking at the Palomar Observatory, which was the most in-use observatory in the mid-century in the US. It's in San Diego.

• 1:16:05Jesse Michels?

  And she found over 100,000 in an eight-year period, what appeared to be UFOs, mirror-like objects, little transients, light flashes. And they seem to actually be correlated with nuclear sites, too. There's like a follow-up study that they're 68% more likely to show up a day before or after a nuclear detonation. So this is just fascinating study. And nobody in the credentialed conventional physics world has debunked it. It's been peer-reviewed. And you have people like Sabina Haasenfelder and Brian Keating, people you don't think of as UFO nuts, like going on YouTube and saying like, "This actually seems kind of intriguing."

• 1:16:50Jesse Michels?

  So what do you make of it?

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  No, it's, I mean, that's the Vasco Project. I mean, it's an excellent idea for a project. You've got all of these photographic plates from the 1940s that if you have something in orbit, you might be able to detect it in a photograph, right? So that's the premise. And she published a few early papers, which I found really interesting, the ones where you have several of them like in a line or something like this. And I thought, I think that's fascinating. It's tough. The most recent papers with 100,000, that's hard to believe. That's a little shocking. That makes me worry that...

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  You really have to double your efforts to look to make sure there's not an artifact issue that you haven't considered.

• 1:17:43Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's a hundred thousand between 1949 and 1957. The reason you'd ended in 1957 is because Sputnik goes up.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:51Jesse Michels?

  So it's pre-satellites, which is that's remarkable. And it's they're all in geostationary orbit, GEO. So it's like the, you know, outer Earth's orbit. So I think it's, it's pretty remarkable that does seem really high as well. I think she says there could be an error rate of up to 30% or something. So that's, you know, it's a big margin.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Jesse Michels?

  But what's remarkable is like, when she put this out, the main detraction, the main way people tried to kind of straw man or, or, you know, beat, beat this thing was they said, uh, you know, uh, these have to be plate defects. These have to be sort of, you know, the, the astronomical plates, you know, uh, have all sorts of weird, you know, chemical issues over long periods of time. And you end up with these sort of stains and issues. And then, you know, those could look like transients or UFOs. But then she followed up on the study and she said, is there a, so obviously you have the sun, it's hitting the earth and then you have the shadow of the earth, right? You have like kind of a dark side of the earth.

• 1:18:50Jesse Michels?

  She said, is, um, you know, are these objects dropping off on the dark side of the earth?

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  When, when they shouldn't be being illuminated by the sun. And I think that's the idea.

• 1:19:00Jesse Michels?

  That's right. Are they physical objects? Are they reflecting off the sun? A and B, if they're plate defects, plate defects would not play favorites between the earth's shadow and, you know, the, the sun side of the earth, right?

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  They should have the plate defect, right? It should be constant.

• 1:19:15Jesse Michels?

  It would be completely proportional and constant.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:18Jesse Michels?

  And so, uh, she found a, uh, you know, a serious drop off. And so that seems like pretty significant.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  It's interesting. Yeah, certainly it's interesting. I think it's, um, it's one of the, the.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  I mean, the hallmark of science is reproducibility, right? So what you need to have is you need to have other, other labs look at those plates and actually do the study, try to replicate the study. And I think that's what needs to happen.

• 1:19:44Jesse Michels?

  And that's what she's beautiful about her kind of orientation towards this whole thing is she's now saying you can go look at the data for yourself. So the, the raw data I think is online now for people to, oh, it's not online. Okay, it will be, it will be.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  We've tried to get it.

• 1:19:58Jesse Michels?

  Okay, you've tried to get it. Okay, okay. Okay, then she says she's putting it online.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  She's working on that.

• 1:20:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I think that the, the next holy grail would be you'd want it from another observatory and you'd want the actual transients to line up one to one ideally.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:20:12Jesse Michels?

  At least with some correlation. That would be really important.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  If you have multiple observatories, that would be ideal.

• 1:20:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, so yeah, totally agree. There's work to be done there, but I'm pretty intriguing, I think.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is intriguing. It is, yeah.

• 1:20:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it's a nice idea for a project. I mean, it's a, you've got all of these photographic records and to go through them, I mean, just to look for transients in the first place. I mean, transients would be anything that you don't have a good explanation for. So there's a potential for lots of discoveries there, not just things opening the earth.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

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• 1:21:14Jesse Michels?

  Do you think UFOs come from space? Or do you think they're sort of, you know, going through wormholes, you know, or, or time travelers?

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely no idea. They're, they are, I think that many of them that we see that are observed by people are Actually coming from Earth presently. You know, Carl Sagan once quipped, I think it's extremely doubtful that somebody is arriving from international, from interstellar space every other Tuesday. You know, he made something like this, you know, basically saying that I don't think that. He didn't say interstellar travel is impossible. It wasn't going to happen every other Tuesday is basically what he was saying. It's not going to be common. And I think he's right. They're not, they're not coming in from another star system every other Tuesday, they're, they're present here.

• 1:22:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  And that's why I think there's probably bases underwater is your best bet. Or maybe somewhere else in the solar system. But we know that they can't be more than, in many cases, they can't be more than a light day away. Because they showed up the next, so when you had the Fukushima disaster, they showed up the next day.

• 1:22:20Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  So if they're coming from another star system, it would take years for the, for the, any signal, any information about Fukushima to get out to that star system. And then years for them to come, for them to come.

• 1:22:32Jesse Michels?

  Unless faster than light communications and travel is possible.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:22:36Jesse Michels?

  But yes, in general relativity, it would need to be.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  But they're probably coming from Earth in that case.

• 1:22:42Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Interesting. Do you know of any interesting space-based encounters of UFOs like NASA encounters?

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  That's also a good question. So, um, I know a few of them, there's, well, there's several cosmonauts have reported seeing things in space and that's important to them. Oh, I can't, I'm blanking on his name right now. Of course, it's a long Russian name that I'm not familiar with, starts with an A. But they actually had a craft pull up alongside of them.

• 1:23:14Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  After orbit. And they took pictures on the cosmonaut drew a picture of the object.

• 1:23:20Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Because the pictures all got confiscated by the Soviet.

• 1:23:23Jesse Michels?

  Nakragarin? The Nakragarin?

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  No, it's not Gagarin.

• 1:23:27Jesse Michels?

  Oh, check this out.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Akhenyev?

• 1:23:30Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  Akhenyev.

• 1:23:32Jesse Michels?

  And he drew a UFO?

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  He drew a picture of what they took photographs of.

• 1:23:36Jesse Michels?

  Whoa, what, what mission was this, do you know?

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  I don't know, I think it was one when they were going to, um, one of the beginning, early space stations.

• 1:23:44Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. This thing pulled up, it had, it had windows. It had windows and pulled up and followed them for part of the orbit and then left.

• 1:23:51Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is awesome.

• 1:23:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  I talked to Alan Bean. I met him and talked to him, he was from Apollo. 12 and he said that when he went up to Skylab, they were on Skylab, I think it's 1977 ish.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  They actually photographed a red flashing light.

• 1:24:14Jesse Michels?

  What is Skylab?

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Skylab was one of our early space stations.

• 1:24:18Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  And, um, and they actually saw a red flashing light that followed them for part of their orbit and then disappeared.

• 1:24:25Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yes. And they had photographs of that.

• 1:24:27Jesse Michels?

  What did he say happened to the photographs?

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Oh, they're actually public.

• 1:24:31Jesse Michels?

  Oh, they are. Okay. Wow.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  The big problem, you're photographing a light in the sky and it's a handheld camera.

• 1:24:38Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  On a spaceship through a window. And yeah, it's a bouncy and blurry and.

• 1:24:42Jesse Michels?

  But it's a red light that seems to be falling.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Red flashing light in space. Nobody, nobody puts lights on satellites. First you don't need them. And second, it's more weight, you know, every, every ounce is going to cost you a crazy.

• 1:24:55Jesse Michels?

  Also satellites back then weren't doing proximity operations. They were just falling predictable orbits.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Orbit.

• 1:25:01Jesse Michels?

  They weren't changing orbits. Yeah. Okay. So that's a big deal.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Thing is very strange.

• 1:25:06Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so you, and then you have the, um, the Gemini 11 mission where the, and from the transcripts, the, um,

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  the astronauts are working on, were, were working and something flew over their Houston asset that just something just fly over you. And they say affirmative, weird, weird, weird. And then there's something like six minutes of no transcript, right? And, um, but when the thing flew over the object flew over them, they, it drained, um, their, it drained one of their batteries that's, um, stack Charlie stack got drained. So stack C got drained. So it's almost a classic UFO sighting and they see an object in space. It flies over their ship and then drains their batteries. Right. And so that's in the transcripts of Gemini 11.

• 1:25:58Jesse Michels?

  Wow. And that's public, that audio.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Public as well. Yeah. And now, so, so the question I've had is why, when we had the NASA commission, why was there no section on what astronauts have seen in space? I mean, story Musgrave, a shuttle pilot also talked about seeing things like snakes.

• 1:26:17Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Things writhing around in space.

• 1:26:19Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. None of that mentioned in the NASA commissions report.

• 1:26:24Jesse Michels?

  So bizarre.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  You've got, and then you have, what is there's the, the mission, the Soviet mission to Phobos. Where their craft got disabled. The last picture shows an object like a fin in the, like a tail fin of a plane looks like in the picture.

• 1:26:40Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  That's the last picture it took. And then the whole thing was disabled.

• 1:26:44Jesse Michels?

  The whole thing was disabled and Gemini 11 also looks like the audio, like, like there was some sort of power interference or something as well, right?

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:51Jesse Michels?

  Like electromagnetic interference.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Multiple events in space that weren't even talked, weren't even mentioned in the NASA commission report. Why shouldn't that be of interest?

• 1:27:01Jesse Michels?

  They all sign NDAs, right? Astronauts.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know what they do.

• 1:27:06Jesse Michels?

  I believe, I believe they do.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Jesse Michels?

  So do you, do you think, I mean, you were, you were at NASA. Do you think NASA is sort of systematically covering this stuff up?

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  I would have no idea.

• 1:27:16Jesse Michels?

  Because the other interesting thing from Beatrice Villareal is she said she was in touch with the current NASA person. Who said that NASA tracks what they call uncorrelated targets all the time. So these are, these are, you know, sort of, you know, noise.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Well, they're, they're not necessarily alien spaceships, right? But it's, but.

• 1:27:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  These are things that should be reported.

• 1:27:35Jesse Michels?

  Figure out what they are.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  If you don't know what they are, and you've got a, if you've, if you're running a commission on unidentified aerial phenomenon, and you've got a bunch of unidentified things, you should talk about them.

• 1:27:48Jesse Michels?

  Totally, but also apparently the uncorrelated targets are systematically tracked by Space Force.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:55Jesse Michels?

  And not by, like, according to this insider, again, I don't, I don't know if this is true, but that's really interesting.

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  All, all of our government documents on these things, even the recent ones, barely have any information in them. Meanwhile, the French in 1999 put out the Cometa report, which was 100 pages or something, right?

• 1:28:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that's just crazy.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  10 pages.

• 1:28:16Jesse Michels?

  The French have a UFO research group officially called GIPAN, which unlike Aero, doesn't gaslight the population. They, you know, admit that this stuff is real and are open about it.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:28:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cometa reports, final analysis from 1999 was that, was that.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, these things could be alien spacecraft. There might be a base somewhere in our solar system and the US is probably hiding information.

• 1:28:41Jesse Michels?

  So fascinating.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  And that's what they actually said in the United States is probably covering up information.

• 1:28:45Jesse Michels?

  That's, that's. That was their official report.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Official report.

• 1:28:49Jesse Michels?

  That's amazing. So, and then, and I believe the head of their CIA, former head of their CIA, Elaine Juliette was extremely interested in UFOs and publicly to this day is like this big, you know, UFO proponent. So.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:03Jesse Michels?

  They have a long history. So Gemini 11, that was Pete Conrad was the astronaut.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Conrad and Gordon.

• 1:29:11Jesse Michels?

  And Gordon.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Jesse Michels?

  And did they come back and say, we saw UFO? Did they say anything?

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 1:29:17Jesse Michels?

  Okay. I mean, cause that's the other, look, I, I've looked into all the moon landing stuff and I just actually had Joe Rogan on the podcast, which was a big honor. He, he kind of was the, the first person to be in our spaceship set, which was just built, which is really cool. Yeah. And I just couldn't, couldn't think of anybody better for that. And we, we talked about a lot of the moon, moon landing weirdness, you know, and the presentation of the moon landing. And I, I think neither of us are suggesting that definitively like the US didn't go to the moon. I think you can, to, you know, the, the inverse of that, you, you can say definitively, the presentation of whatever happened is weird and it was sanitized

• 1:30:02Jesse Michels?

  and manicured and presented in a bizarre way. And there was definitely some, you know, managing of that, that was, that was going on. That, that's obvious. And so I wonder if, you know, maybe, maybe we did actually attempt or go, and maybe we just saw UFOs along the way, or maybe there's something very ontologically weird about the trip to space that's hard to come back with as far as a revelation to the public or some, I don't know, but.

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  I mean Edgar Mitchell came back talking about having an epiphany of how we're all connected in the, you know, thinking about, different way of thinking about the university of humanity. But then after that, he was very. Very much involved with UFOs.

• 1:30:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  But he grew up in Roswell.

• 1:30:47Jesse Michels?

  Grew up in Roswell, Apollo 14 astronaut.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  And he had gotten, and so because he was an Apollo astronaut, he got to hear all sorts of things about Roswell from people from at all levels.

• 1:30:56Jesse Michels?

  He's very close with Werner von Braun, who seemed really interested in UFOs as well. He's the father of our, of our space program essentially.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Werner von Braun's mentor was Herman Oberth, who, who gave a lecture in 1954 on UFOs.

• 1:31:12Speaker 10

  Of the so many witnesses have seen the so-called flying saucers. Their existence cannot longer be denied. I believe that these flying objects come from another solar system.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  I have his notes and his lecture notes. And in there, he mentions that he has, they, he has seen numerous radar measurements of their speeds up to 19 kilometers a second, which is about 40,000 miles an hour.

• 1:31:43Jesse Michels?

  He also says that the rocket program was helped and, and he was, he was basically the, the father of German rocketry. And he said that it was aided by these, these non-human beings. So.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:31:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. But that, so that's, that's going back to 19, so 1954, we knew that these things traveled at spacecraft speeds.

• 1:32:02Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  We already knew that in 1954.

• 1:32:05Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  And, and why are we playing catch up just now?

• 1:32:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Why did this, why did this take a half a century to unfold is really crazy.

• 1:32:16Jesse Michels?

  Well, proof that NASA, you know, probably knows something, a thing or two internally about the UFO stuff. And I know this is something you've looked into. And I think my buddy, Chris Ramsey, might be doing an interesting follow-up with you on, on all this stuff.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  But. Oh yeah, Chris, right.

• 1:32:31Jesse Michels?

  There's, um, there's a, the Simpkinsen photo around Gemini 11, that play. And there's maybe the best UFO photo you could ever ask for. It's like a perfect UFO photo. In fact, I have the book, uh, right here. I'm, I'm, I'm going to take it.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  I'll go grab it. Sure.

• 1:32:48Jesse Michels?

  So we have, we have this, um, this Simpkinsen NASA UFO archive and this photo, which is like maybe the best UFO photo of all time. If it's real and it comes from Gemini 11 and you, you figured out that this was a Gemini 11 photo, right?

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Um, well, Ed Wilson knew that.

• 1:33:09Jesse Michels?

  Oh, okay. Ed Wilson did. Okay.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it actually says on, it says strange object as seen by the astronauts of Gemini 11. I think that's what it says underneath on the lithograph. So it's a, so what he found was a lithograph, which is a printing, a printed photograph. They printed them, um, kind of like a, a lithograph is kind of like a, um, comic book is printed with all the dots, right? Which makes it horrible to analyze. If you're trying to find stars in that picture, you're, you were so out of luck. I mean, several of us were trying to identify stars and things like this in that picture. And you just can't do it.

• 1:33:49Jesse Michels?

  Is that a UFO?

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  Um, I actually, I, I, so what I, my best assessment of what that image shows is that it is probably a mock-up of what the astronauts claimed to have seen.

• 1:34:03Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  And, um,

• 1:34:06Jesse Michels?

  Why is that your assessment?

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Because, um,

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Ed actually found the original photograph in the University of Arizona archives that shows Earth with that cloud pattern in the background. And there's no UFO there. Now, of course, it's easy to claim, well, NASA erased the UFO from that picture.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  And it doesn't, now, of course, doing an image analysis like that on, on a scanned

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  negative, right? Where you don't know what kind of process, and it's JPG, which is, which is, um, a lossy encoding and all this, these types of image analysis problems. So it's not great, it's not great for doing an image analysis on, but I found no evidence that anything was erased from that picture.

• 1:34:58Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  And, um, and, and that picture actually is showing the end of the tether experiment. So, so NASA, the Gemini project, Gemini meaning twins, was all about docking. Can we actually dock with another spacecraft in space? And so Gemini 11 was the last one of the series, and a unique one in that their goal was to go up, literally launch and dock within one orbit.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  So but they were doing previously, they'd go and they'd get up into orbit and then they'd maneuver to dock. But the trick was, can we just go up and dock? And that's what they tried to do with Gemini 11, and they were successful. And after they docked, they then were tethered to the other craft. And they did a tether experiment where they actually got the two crafts spinning like this. I'm going to knock things over, got the two crafts spinning on a tether. And then, um, and did experiments to see how stable that is and what goes wrong. And, um, so they had just finished that experiment and they had just released the other craft, the unmanned craft. And that's in the picture that the background of that lithograph is from.

• 1:36:10Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  And there's no indication that the astronauts saw any UFO at that time in the transcripts. They were busy with the, you know, yeah, they're busy with the tether experiment.

• 1:36:22Jesse Michels?

  So when was the, because you just said earlier that

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Then the UFO sighting, the weird thing that happened, happened an hour later.

• 1:36:29Jesse Michels?

  Ah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Put it in another orbit, right? Two thirds of an orbit.

• 1:36:32Jesse Michels?

  So you did some forensic investigating and realized that the timing was off.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  The timing's off.

• 1:36:37Jesse Michels?

  For, for when they actually did see the UFO.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  So the big problems with that being a real picture are, are first, the, um, first, we don't have a picture of the UFO. We don't have an actual photograph of the UFO.

• 1:36:50Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  We don't just have the lithograph. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of tam, those, that photograph being tampered with. Um, there was no indication that they saw a UFO at that time. And the UFO they did see happened an hour later.

• 1:37:06Jesse Michels?

  Yep. So, so, so what's your best explanation as to how that photo surfaced at all with the UFO?

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  What I suspect happened is, is it's, I, I think that what that photo is, is exactly what it says under the photo, what's printed there. Strange object as seen by Gemini 11 astronauts. I think it's a mock up to show what the astronauts saw.

• 1:37:31Jesse Michels?

  And but

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  But didn't photograph.

• 1:37:32Jesse Michels?

  Was that officially published in some NASA thing?

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't officially published anywhere, which was it made it interesting. It was found in Scott Simpkinson was a NASA engineer.

• 1:37:42Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Um, he was, he was actually the first engineer hired by NASA.

• 1:37:48Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  I think. And his nickname was Scotty. Everybody called him Scotty. And I can't, and I can't help but think, is there any connection between Scott Simpkins and Scotty? And Scotty and the Enterprise? I don't know.

• 1:38:00Jesse Michels?

  Oh.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  He was very well known.

• 1:38:02Jesse Michels?

  Oh.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  In the 50s and 60s. So there might be a connection.

• 1:38:05Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Jesse Michels?

  Well, it sounds like he's kind of as insider-y as it gets.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Jesse Michels?

  And the fact that he, you know, you find in his, in his records.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  Designed some of the spacecraft.

• 1:38:15Jesse Michels?

  Designed some of the spacecraft. So if there's some sort of, even if it's an artist's rendition where they're.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  So he had, he, he had, and he had a collection of his NASA files. He and his secretary Emily Erdel had a collection of, of their NASA files. And, um, and then when he died and she died, they were made public and they were put to auction and Ed Wilson bought them.

• 1:38:36Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  That's how he got them. And he discovered the lithograph amongst them.

• 1:38:41Jesse Michels?

  Well, if there's a painting of a UFO in that photo and it's found in his records, that implies that there's almost institutional NASA knowledge of the fact that the Gemini 11 astronauts did see a UFO.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Something. I think, well, and, and they, that's what's said in the transcript. So.

• 1:39:00Jesse Michels?

  Even if it's painted on, it's like this inside joke or way to commemorate this very real event. It's not this.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  Record, way to record what happened as best they can. Yeah.

• 1:39:09Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. That's so interesting.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  And why none of this is mentioned in the NASA commissions report? I have no idea. Did they not? Maybe they didn't know. I mean, that's possible. They didn't know.

• 1:39:19Jesse Michels?

  I don't know.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 1:39:22Jesse Michels?

  I mean, speaking of NASA obstruction, 3I Atlas, uh, you know, we have this Manhattan sized object that is now, uh, uh, come around, back around the sun. And it is headed towards Jupiter. It's going to pass the earth, uh, December 19th. So this might be out by the time, um, you know, it's, it's, it's already sort of passed. Um, so, so what do you, what do you think's going on with this object? You have like, most of the astronomical community. Basically like ignoring it or saying it's so, you know, it doesn't matter or whatever. Then you have Avi Loeb going crazy, going on literally every single podcast that exists, saying, you know, 40% chance that this is an alien craft and, you know, it could be,

• 1:40:04Jesse Michels?

  it could be a harbinger of, you know, either the Messiah or, you know, it could be an invader or something. So what, what's going on?

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, I mean.

• 1:40:13Jesse Michels?

  And then NASA is, is, did a, this stupid gaslighting press conference where I was honestly a little skeptical of some of Avi's statements. I felt like he was like extrapolating and, you know, jumping to conclusions, but I ended up, I wanted to side with Avi after watching this gaslighting NASA.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  First, NASA press conferences are the absolute worst. You want to geek out a little bit, Tom?

• 1:40:34Speaker 09

  You were geeking out so expertly, Nikki, to begin with. So that was, that was fabulous.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  I mean, that were every, every, even when I was at NASA, you wait for this press conference. Oh, there's going to be some exciting news about something and it's not very exciting.

• 1:40:47Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  And, and you're always, and, and the part of the problem is that your expectation for excitement from NASA is, is way too high, right? And unreasonably high. So that's part of the problem. So, so I can't, not all the blame should go to NASA for that. But, but the press conferences are, are always quite, I mean, part of it also is science is kind of boring. And if you're, yeah. So if you're giving a press conference about science, that might be kind, that's often kind of boring.

• 1:41:17Jesse Michels?

  But you should expect a photo that's better resolution than what amateur astronomers are taking of 3I Atlas. It's like this fuzzy.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  It's hard if you've got, you've got a, you've got a spacecraft in orbit around Mars designed to image the surface of Mars and you're trying to use it to image something much further away. That's tough.

• 1:41:34Jesse Michels?

  Right. But then crowds, if you're the official government body and you get billions in funding every year, then find the amateur astronomer that can do it and do it, do work with them. Contrary, you have the money.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  That would be nice.

• 1:41:46Jesse Michels?

  That'd be nice.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I mean, I'm not surprised that we can't get a good image of it. That's, that's hard to do. Um.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  I mean, three, three I Atlas is, is weird. And I don't know, I mean, why the astronomical, astronomical society won't, or community won't recognize that is kind of strange. I mean, maybe it is, are they kind of quieted by Avi being so loud about it being possibly an alien craft? That could be part of it. They don't want to get into this mess. But, but it's a weird thing. I mean, I,

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  yeah, great, easy to say comet, but when it came back around from around the sun, if I'm remembering right, I mean, these are numbers that I not horribly invested in remembering, but it was only like 4% water vapor as it came back around. That's hardly any, the things, comets are dirty snowballs. They're made of water. 4% water? Well, now, now what is this thing?

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  It's got iron? Or it's got nickel, but no iron. Iron and nickel come together. I mean, they're, they're next to each other on the periodic table. To separate iron and nickel, you're going to need some weird process, some difficult processes to separate these two. And meteorites, metal meteorites are always iron, nickel meteorites. Iron and nickel come together. So now you've got something that's nickel and not iron? This is a weird thing. And it suggests some weird processes that went into its formation.

• 1:43:19Jesse Michels?

  Has an ante tail, not just a tail?

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  It's got a tail and an ante tail. It's, yeah, there's, there's a lot to worry about here. And

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  and I suspect, I mean, if from, from a practical standpoint, clearly this is something that we don't know much about.

• 1:43:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  And so just claiming it's a comet and throwing up your hands and walking away is stupid. Just, just flat out stupid and ignorant.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  To say it's an inter- to say it's an alien spacecraft. Well, I mean, yeah, that's, you don't have a lot of evidence for that either. So that's tough, too. But it is something we ought to study. And I remember there were several people who were saying, well, it's not worth studying. I think, no, this is an interstellar object that tells us what the conditions are like around another star system. Yeah, this is something you should study. If you're going to spend money to study another one of our asteroids over something from another star system, what's- there's nothing reasonable about that.

• 1:44:18Jesse Michels?

  That's the problem with this whole conversation around UFOs is you have, on the one hand, most conventional astronomers not even looking at the data set often. Like, I see these guys, I think this Piers Morgan just had on this guy, I think David Kipping or something. He seems like a really good-

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Oh, I know David-

• 1:44:33Jesse Michels?

  You know David. Seems like a really, actually, I loved his episode on Rogan-

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Exoplanet guy.

• 1:44:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, exoplanet guy, really smart on that dimension. But like, this data set that we're talking about with UFOs showing up around nuclear weapons, just like, totally ignorant of it. And like, he's talking about UFOs, but it's like, as if they have to be things that are traveling from, from space. And I don't even think he's probably familiar with a lot of the NASA cases, you know? Because these seem like anecdotal, small sample size, you know, conspiratorial things. I would argue that the nuclear thing is a ubiquitous global pattern-

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  It's a huge deal.

• 1:45:07Jesse Michels?

  That you have to contend with as a scientist.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:10Jesse Michels?

  So you end up with these people who like, again, don't want to like, knock him, like, super smart, conventional guy, but like, is mired in kind of current astronomical data around UFOs and just won't, won't really look at it. And it's all relying on, you know, it's all like, well, if the government has something, they should release it or something, but can't look at the open source stuff. And then on the other side, it's people who are sure that it's extraterrestrial, they're here, they're star seeds probably, you know, and we have all the, it's like, you're jumping super to conclusions, you're not just following the evidence.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:43Jesse Michels?

  So it's those two, it's, there's no like, middle path of like, this is the evidence.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  It's like dealing with a scientific, it's like a scientific community with bipolar disorder.

• 1:45:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  It's like, it's crazy. Yeah, it's, it's really difficult. The-

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  I mean, the best, the, the, the quote that comes to mind is from Stanton Freeman, who said, "If you're a scientist and a professional, you need to do your homework before you open your mouth."

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  Period. That's it. If you haven't done your homework, if you haven't researched it, then you, you have nothing to say. You have nothing to share. And, and you can't go with the excuse that I hear time and time again, "Well, I don't, that's mostly nonsense and I don't have time to read nonsense." Well, then why are you finding the time to talk about, to argue against nonsense? You can find the time to argue against nonsense without looking into the nonsense. I mean, that's, but you can't find the time to research it. And then, and first, my first response to that, first, it's not nonsense. This is something that, this is a phenomenon that people have seen for centuries, centuries. I mean, you had Richard Dolan on and he just put out a book on, on, um,

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  UFOs in water, underwater UFOs, and his case is going back to the 1800s. These are the same things. They, they're coming,

• 1:47:05Jesse Michels?

  Back to Columbus.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  Balls of light coming out of the water, hovering next to the ship, following the ship, and then taking off into the clouds. Same things.

• 1:47:12Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  And for, since the 1800s, and this, nobody in the 1800s is making this up to sound like what somebody reported last week.

• 1:47:21Jesse Michels?

  No, totally. And you have, you have third world places now, like in third world countries, where it's like, these people, like Virginia, James Fox just got back, you know, from Brazil, he keeps going back and like, this whole town, uncorrelated disparate sources, they all report this cigar shaped tic tac like object crashing, and, and three beings coming out, you know, two, one of which was captured and, and, and taken to a hospital. And everybody working at the hospital says that they saw the being. And one neuroscientist who's still alive to this day, goes on record, says he's staring the being in the face for four minutes.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Jesse Michels?

  And this guy's alive. And you have this whole town, there's a saucer in the town dedicated to UFOs. What, they, none of these people are making a penny. Some of them were offered briefcases of cash to shut up about this thing. So like, why, like, explain to me why they would lie. Like, it's ridiculous. It's actually absurd.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  I wish I could see a UFO so somebody could offer me shit to shut up.

• 1:48:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, I'll take it.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  That's a good deal. Maybe that's what's happening with some of the scientists.

• 1:48:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, well, maybe, maybe because I want like, somebody like a Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, like, why he goes on these podcast tours and he's just, he'll just, it's the same thing over and over again, which is like no high resolution imagery. And, you know, it's like, you know, why don't we have, and we were, you know, why aren't we drowning in imagery because we have all of cell phones or whatever. And you have

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Are there any high resolution pictures of quasars?

• 1:48:46Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 1:48:48Jesse Michels?

  But they exist.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  But they exist. I mean, we don't have high resolution pictures of exoplanets either, yet David Kipping and I study them.

• 1:48:55Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  I mean, come on.

• 1:48:57Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Let's, I mean, why?

• 1:48:59Jesse Michels?

  Or ask the average person to

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Why is it a scientist through, when they come to this topic, they throw their brains out the window and then open their mouths? It's, it's, it's maddening.

• 1:49:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I think there's some sort of, well, I, I think unorthodox and independent thinking don't scale with IQ. And so there are a lot of people that can be shepherded into bad frameworks and to not even looking at certain stigmatized topics because ideas are fashion statements and those are bad fashion or whatever. Even though they can like do well on an SAT or something. And so that, I think that's a really, you know, not well understood thing. And so you think of this priestly citadel as like infallible when it comes to thinking about these things. But in fact, they can be shepherded into, you know, in some ways, they can be shepherded even more easily because they think they're so smart. They think they can't be tricked or something.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:52Jesse Michels?

  And it's just, I don't know. I think it's sad because you, there are all these first principles argument. So you can, you can, you can go at, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson with around, you know, red shifts and blue shifts and, you know, gravitational perturbations that will like, you know, uh, cause issues with general optical photography, you know, and, you know, it's like, he wouldn't have anything to say after that. He would just say, well, it can't be, it can't be so. Like there's, there's, that's, that ends of the conversation with a person like that, you know? So it's like extremely frustrating.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:22Jesse Michels?

  I'm sure you deal with it because you have to straddle academia and this sort of more, you know, crazy world of UFOs.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  I've been in numerous discussions where the academic person I've been talking to just throws their brain out the window and stops thinking, you know, if you talk, if I talk about something else, another scientific topic, they're fine, but this, they just seem to stop thinking. It's very, it's very odd.

• 1:50:45Jesse Michels?

  You're in upstate New York. Do you think you're in the general vicinity of Stony Brook University? Do you think they have anything to do with UFOs?

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  I don't know of anything going on at Stony Brook.

• 1:50:58Jesse Michels?

  Stony Brook, okay. Because they, yeah, they have, I don't know, a bunch of interesting, they have like differential geometry stuff going on and, you know, they have Jim Simons, it's like a big guy there.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, Stony Brook has a great physics department, but I don't think they do anything with UFOs.

• 1:51:12Jesse Michels?

  With UFO stuff, okay. Because David Spiegel, who's Jim Simons, you know, foundation guy, so Jim Simons is like runs, he just passed away, ran the best performing hedge fund in the US over, you know, a 30-year period, you know, Renaissance Technologies, the Medallion Fund. And before that, he was an NSA codebreaker and also like a brilliant physicist who's contributed a lot to fundamental physics and like Yang Mills and, you know, interesting stuff. So my former colleague, Eric Weinstein, has suspected that maybe he has something to do with the UFO question or something and that there may be the Renaissance Technology

• 1:51:54Jesse Michels?

  is sort of printing money and then they're putting it towards, you know, the UFO, the UFO question. And I honestly, I thought all of that was kind of conspiratorial and ridiculous. Until 2022 happened, there's a NASA UAP panel and then David Spiegel, who's, you know, Jim Simons' top science advisor, runs the Science Foundation.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wrote, he was the main author on the report.

• 1:52:16Jesse Michels?

  On the NASA UAP review panel.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:52:19Jesse Michels?

  So I'm like, what's going on? Is there some sort of connection there?

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I don't know.

• 1:52:23Jesse Michels?

  Because we were just talking about all the weird NASA data and that seems to be, like, you know, it seems like it might be suppressed or something, so.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Jesse Michels?

  Who knows? Well, this has been a pleasure, Kevin. I really love talking to you. And yeah, I wish you the best of luck with all of your interesting work at University of Albany.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:52:41Jesse Michels?

  And is there anything you'd like to plug or anything the audience can help kind of promote or support that that helps you out?

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Well, our work at U Albany would be great to support. We just got a generous donation from Tony Gorman, who's a local businessman, and that has really given us a big boost. And we can always use a little more boost. So if anybody wants to donate tax-free to to U Albany for our work on UAPX, that'd be awesome.

• 1:53:16Jesse Michels?

  That's awesome. And yeah, one of the few academic institutions that is actually systematically looking into this question. So.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  So we're basically, Matthew Shadagas and I, and you know, we were original members with UAPX, and now UAPX has been disbanded and moved to U Albany, and it's now U Albany Project X. And Matthew Shadagas and I, and Professor Cecilia Levy has joined us as well.

• 1:53:44Jesse Michels?

  So awesome.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  And we're, and the grant, the grant, the gift we got has created an endowment, which will fund us in perpetuity to some degree. So we have, we are here to stay.

• 1:53:56Jesse Michels?

  Wow. Love it. It's exciting. Well, excited to see, you know, as you make breakthroughs on a go-forward basis, and would love to have you back and really appreciate you coming out here.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:54:12Jesse Michels?

  Alchemists, did you enjoy that? If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video, with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten, and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video.

• 1:55:01Speaker 11

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