Hello, and welcome to the Rojas Report. My name is Alejandro Rojas.
That's the name Roja and I have with me Steve McDaniel and Steve. I'm
going to actually read your bio that we had put together. And this is
the first time I've had Steve on on the show. Actually Steve is viewing
the roe hoarts and I'm very full for that, Thank you very much.
But let me tell you something Steve, so you can understand why I'm so
excited for this interview and how Steve can contribute to the conversation, which he's
already had talked about that as well, even though he's kind of new to
at least in the limelight in this field. But Steve McDaniel is a founder
and lead software developer of sky Hub if you've heard about that. That's an
organization that the Scientific Coalition for UFO or UAP Research just partnered with. But
sky Hub is a community of volunteers that's dedicated to developing UAP UFO tracking software
that enables users to deploy Skyhub trackers to help research the UFO UAP phenomenon.
Steve has over twenty years of technical experience over a wide range of industries.
Seventeen plus years of experience includes software development, reverse engineering, Windows Linux kernel
development, and developing highly distributive systems. Several years of experience using a variety
of tools, profiling tools and software assurance tools. And this next part I
have found, especially with our friend Tim McMillan, it's extremely valuable experience.
Which is Steve spent five years in naval intelligence in a total sixteen years in
the intelligence community. Steve was also the one to discover the UAP report request
for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the Intelligence Authorization Actor for twenty twenty
one. In fact, this has made big news, but nobody might have
even noticed it if it wasn't for Steve. Discuss how Steve found this information
and how it relates to his software driven search for you AP information. We'll
also get his observations and perspectives on recent news. Welcome to the show,
Steve, Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here, and
thank you. Fantastic intro. Yeah, thank you for coming on. So
I say, new to the field. I'm guessing that you've been into this
topic for quite some time, though so somewhat so typically normally I would catch
the occasional UFO documentary. Years ago, I watched a season or two of
Ancient Aliens. Haven't watched it since, but you know, i'd catch occasional
documentaries and I've always wondered if there was something to it. Late last year,
actually over the Christmas holiday, I ended up writing a UFO tool that
actually indexed thousands and thousands of UFO documents that had been released by world governments
or through four year requests. And that's kind of what got me into the
UFO Twitter community, and since then it's progressed into larger projects such as sky
Hub. But I've I've really been participating in the community less than a year,
so I'm somewhat of a newcomer. M So you know what, I
guess drove you to do this then, So it's interesting years ago I saw
a UFO so about it was about twenty years ago, in nineteen ninety six
I actually saw UFO and still to this day, I have no idea what
I saw, so I'm not exactly sure what I saw, but it was
something I still can't explain. So that's that's kind of why I have an
interest in a drive to to figure out what's going on. So kind of
my perspective is is I think this is something that's worthy of scientific research,
and kind of when I decided to get into the community, I wanted to
have a very narrow focus and a very specific purpose. And I've tried to
focus on that one thing and contribute what I can. And then once I
do that, you know, we'll see that where that leads me. Mm
hmm. As far as you're sighting, are you willing to like share any
the days? Sure? Sure. So I was actually sleeping outside looking up
at the stars with two other people, and as we were sitting there,
a very bright red and orange object was moving across the sky and it was
kind of floating across the sky, and all three of us saw it,
and we're just like, what in the world is that thing? So,
as it slowly was gliding across the sky, at its stopped and appeared to
stay stationary for roughly ten seconds. Then it shot off in the opposite direction
and was gone in one or two seconds, and it cleared the entire sky
and horizon and was out of you. It was one of the strangest things
I've ever seen. But you know, who knows the other thing is this
is fourth of July weekend. It didn't look like a firework. But there's
really like like witness testimony, like personal experience really isn't scientific, so it's
hard to really base anything on a personal experience, something that you saw in
the sky without data to back it up. So that's why that's why we're
making sky hubs, so people have data to back up things that they see.
M hm. It's interesting because my signings are somewhat i would say boring
like yours, but like you, they still boggle me. And it's kind
of funny because of the different reactions people have. So I've talked to a
lot of people who are like, I've never seen a UFO. But then
I explain, you know, a couple of my sightings which are similar to
yours, point of light doing something it shouldn't be doing, and they often
say, oh, I've seen something like that, but that's not a UFO.
That's like a satellite or something, right, and they don't realize,
well, no, that's not how satellites. They don't stop and turn around,
you know, they go one direction. So it's kind of funny because
the couple of sightings I've had are similar, but like you, they're very
impactful although understated. Yeah, definitely, it's and it's interesting to see something
and not be able to come up with a plausible explanation. So, like
you said, it could be a satellite or an iridium flair a drone and
you know over twenty years ago that wasn't really really drones around, so it's
it's kind of hard to find an explanation and there definitely could be like a
natural or prosaic explanation for it. And if sky Helb can help determine natural
explanations, that's also a win. Mm let's get into Skyhub. So sky
Hub, and I think you have a part of sky Hub behind you in
the background there it looks like an idea with a dome. Yeah, it's
one of my test cameras and my test set up back there for development.
So in fact, I'm going to bring up the website, but go ahead.
So yeah, so kind of the idea with sky Hub was we wanted
to remove the human element from UAP observation. So people often talk about how
difficult it is to study the phenomenon because it's not reproducible. Well that's perfect
because that's what observational science is so we basically have made a platform that is
free. The software is free, you'll have to purchase the hardware, but
we use commodity off the shelf hardware to put together a platform to collect different
data points about UFOs and UAPs. So we're collecting video data, Sensor data
includes magnetic readings, atmospheric ratings, temperature barometer and things like that. And
we're also tracking airplanes using ADSB, so we'll actually track airplanes flying within range
of views so we can help roll out known aircraft from the sky, which
is really helpful when you're trying to find things that shouldn't be there and that
aren't explainable. So really what it is is it's a citizen science platform that
anyone can get involved and deploy their own tracker and create a global data set
that we plan on giving away for free. So the idea is we can
accumulate this massive data set from trackers all over the globe and try to get
academics and scientists involved to actually analyze and research this data. And to date
it's been great, so we've gotten individuals. Actually, specifically we brought Chris
Cogswell in he agreed to be our director of the science at sky Hub,
so he's the director of the advisory board. So he's managed to reach out
to watch of lots of scientists and academics, and we're getting individuals such as
meteorologists and physicists involved. We've got astronomers involved, and now excuse me,
astronomers involved that have basically more expertise in certain areas that really helped the project
grow and develop. And that's what we want. We want academics to look
at what we've done and realize that we've actually followed the scientific method and produced
a data set that they don't have to worry about the stigma or or the
fringe aspect of eufology. They get to focus on just pure data mm hmm,
which is kind of a burgeoning area right now, although when I say
that, you know, it's a slow growth, but it's there than it
was in the past, and I do want to So it looks like your
project is you provide the software, You create the software people, it's open
source, anybody can use it, and then you give people directions on how
to build their own device, like the one that we see in the picture
here, which is it looks really cool and at least but the bottom part
actually looks fairly simple. It looks a lot like the storage unit I have
outside, like one of those outside storage type things. So it's actually pretty
fantastic. So we had a member of the community that was involved early on.
His name's Richard. He's from Austria and he actually designed this case.
So he actually has one of these that he built and is sitting on his
roof in Austria pointed up at the sky. So it's really great to see
members of the community be major contributors to this project. So he's really solved
a lot of the hardware and enclosure problems that we have. He's gone through
like done weather testing, he's deployed it out in the rain for weeks at
a time, and it's really really run well. And we're looking at building
more of these enclosures and deploying more boxes that look just like this. So
is it a combination of people can take the initiative to build their own,
but also you're trying to raise funds to get them built and to distribute them.
So ultimately right now it's very DIY. So there's actually a lot of
these parts are three D printable, so you can actually print them in a
three D printer and all those files are available. Over time, we would
like to transition into buying the entire unit in one piece, because not everybody
wants to do wiring or assembling or three D printing. So we have discussed
doing something like a Kickstarter campaign or Indiegogo where we can go to a manufacturer
and say, okay, here's the complete system, make us a thousand of
them, or however many we get funded and actually be able to mass produce
so people can just buy a box and plug it in. So that is
a long term goal of ours because we would really like to see thousands of
these deployed across the globe. And so you've got working units like right now,
you have units that are working, and the ability like you've got it
all worked out where this can actually be done created right now. Yes,
so we have a bunch of tenes, so we hope to make a final
release this month. But we have quick test notes across the United States and
Austria that are currently processing live video data and basically collecting metadata and environmental data
and shipping it to a central location in the cloud. So we're really close
to having a public release that will be generally available to the public. That's
cool. And the reason I state that is because, as you probably are
aware, there have been several other projects to do this one. Let's see
what is it, UFO photog or UFO TG you know which is backed.
And I probably had this guy on the most marked' antonio because he's a friend
of mine who works with the special effects guru of shows like Close Encounters,
Douglas Trumbull, and they've tried to develop their own. Of course, they're
just a two man team. Essentially. There's Chris he's in the San Luis
Valley of Colorado. Chris O'Brien, who's created when he's actually deployed a few
and then there's also, maybe even more important for what's going on right now,
Chris Mellen, who's in the news so much in part of to the
Stars and some of the other more serious researchers put together a group called UFO
Data a few years ago and that kind of made headline. Ley Caine wrote
about that for the Hufstington Post. Leslie Cane being one of the authors of
the string of New York Times articles on UFOs, but nothing really came of
that, really, not much, as Chris O'Brien's the only one to actually
get one deployed out in the field. So it's kind of exciting that you
guys, you know, came into this not at the beginning with something you
hope to do, kind of like UFO Data did, but you actually are
ready to deploy right So. And it's interesting because over a year ago I
actually sent UFO Data a message because I wanted to join their team and work
on it, but I never actually heard back, and I believe I reached
out two times, and it's it's something I've kept my eye on, and
they do occasional status updates, but I don't know how involved their project is
or how much activity they have going on. But there are some great projects
out there that appeared to have made some really good progress. UFODAP, I
think it's done a very good job with their platform, but I wanted to
take a different approach. I wanted this to be an open community, and
I wanted the data to be open to the public. I mean, it's
really not about the tracker, right It's about a public database of of UFO
data that people own. So there's no cost. We've licensed everything under a
Creative Commons license. All of our source code is licensed under an MIT license.
Anybody can take anything we've done and use it for any purpose. There's
only one stipulation on the data. It's free for public use and academic use.
But we do have a stipulation and it is for you cannot use it
for commercial use. So we want to make sure that that data it makes
it to the public into academia without any cost at all. That's cool,
that's great. So getting into some of the software side, like you mentioned
on the site, AI a lot, so maybe you could share the role
artificial intelligence takes in the project. So yeah, So one of the things
that's very expensive when you do basically any type of cloud infrastructure is storage costs
a lot. So one of the things that takes a lot of storage is
video. So we want to keep video in its raw form and it takes
a lot of space, so we can't just store every second of video from
every tracker. We really want to do is have some sort of filtering mechanism
that runs at the edge and that would be on the tracker. So the
best way to filter is to use machine learning. So machine learning has progressed
leaps and bounds over the years, and basically we're using machine learning models such
as tiny, yolow and object tracking to identify and label objects. Now,
often when we bring this up, people point out, well, how do
you identify something that's unidentified? So it's a good question, right, So
we start with the things that we know, so we can go through and
classify birds and bugs, flies, planes, and things that we know should
be in the sky, and we basically assign them a label. Unfortunately,
there's lots of publicly available free machine learning models that we get to start with,
so we start with all the known things, and over time, as
we collect more and more data, we'll be able to tune and tweak our
machine learning models to find truly abnormal things in the sky. So at some
point there will be a human in the loop to analyze some of the anomalist
stuff that we see. That that's exactly what we want. The machine learning
is going to help us filter out all the video that we can't go through
because if we have hundreds or thousands of trackers, there's just not enough time
to analyze all that video. So we were taking advantage of AI to help
save us time and be more efficient at finding anomalists activity is are you finding?
Is that machine learning? I mean does it accidentally? Does it screw
up? I guess yeah, it does absolutely So depending on what machine learning
model you use, you might hit like seventy percent accuracy on labeling an object
correctly with some of those machine learning models, up to a ninety percent accuracy.
And training machine learning models isn't one of my expertises. I have done
it in the past, but it really is based on your network topology and
your training data set. So the quality of the training data set really dictates
how accurate you're going to be. So it's kind of a balancing game between
the size of your model, the performance, and the accuracy. So it's
going to be something well, you know, if you're a machine learning expert,
jump into the project, come help us train models. You know,
we're definitely looking for expertise around the community to help improve the accuracy of our
system. Now, uh, I guess one of the things is there like
a threshold when it gives you does it have like a confidence level when it
labels things? You know that it's pretty certain that this is a plane or
you know it, there's a thirty percent chances is a plane. Does it
give that sort of thing, Yes, it does. So generally it'll give
you four or five probabilities on what object it is. So I might say
there's an eighty two percent chance this is an airplane, in a seventeen percent
chance this is a bird. Generally it's correct in the Let you take the
highest probability and use that to actually tag and label the image. But the
benefit of that is so one thing I love about sky hub because it's not
all about UFOs we're collecting data on you could potentially use it for bird migration
or tracking aircraft or planes. Because if you can identify all these known objects
such as comets or helicopters or drones, you could really make a valuable data
set for lots of different things and lots of different research that people would be
interested in. Right. That's what uh go ahead. That's what's gotten me
excited about other projects and why I'm so excited for these projects to launch.
Of course, it's very interesting to capture unidentified objects, but that's far and
few between. But other rare natural occurrences, there's a lot of potential.
There also and there's a lot of learning that can happen. It seems like
from the deployment of objects of equipment like this in that, you know,
we can learn so much more about our natural environment. Oh, definitely,
definitely. And one of the there's a project called pressure net. I don't
know if you're familiar with it. I might be mistaken. I think it
was run by Stanford University. Someone will probably correct me after this, but
essentially they made a mobile app that ran on phones and it read the air
pressure from your phone, so it just grabbed the barometric pressure and return that
data back to a central server in California. So they have thousands of people
returning barometric readings to a central database, which helps with weather prediction and understanding
how pressure truly is changing across the globe. And we'll be able to do
things like that. We'll be able to measure all these different atmospheric readings and
provide a central database where people can do analysis and research and potentially, you
know, get better at detecting earthquakes or you know, weather events or pressure
temperature. So you know, if you ask a scientist or researcher what he
wants, he wants money and he wants data and we can at least help
with one of those things. M right, potentially the most important part because
usually the money, well, it funds the capturing of data, which can
be really expensive, which has been kind of the gatekeeper for the most part,
I think in this community and why we've had to rely on such poor
data because getting good data on projects such as yours historically has been very expensive,
and even now it's relatively expensive, Like the average person would probably hurt
their pocket book a bit to dive in and try to build one of these
themselves, right, and you know, we've really tried to focus on that.
So for about three hundred dollars, you can launch a bare minimum tracker
that will watch the sky's twenty four to seven. And you know, it's
not super cheap, but it's affordable for a lot of people, especially people
that are interested in the topic. You know, three hundred dollars isn't too
bad, and we really wanted to try to make this as accessible as possible.
But on the higher end, you can literally go spy spend thousands of
dollars on a single camera. So you know, if if someone has the
funds and access to the equipment. They can set up a very sophisticated sky
Hub tracker and we'll support that. So we so cool. Yeah, we've
really tried to captivate a large audience. We really like to get as many
people deploying these as possible, and cost is a big deal. Unfortunately,
computers keep getting cheaper and cheaper, and Nvidio has released a Jetson platform that
is designed for AI and machine learning, and that's what we're basing the skyhubtracker
on is an Nvidia platform that's used for UAVs and self driving cars and things
like that. When it comes to the thresholds we talked about earlier on you
know, tagging unidentified, I guess what are those kind of malleable? Are
those things that you're working on constantly? And like if I was to have
my own unit, what I kind of set those parameters myself, So for
instance, you know, I want to identify anything that has under a fifty
percent confidence level and identification as something I want to review. So we kind
of set a baseline for the whole network. So the plan is to deploy
the same configuration to all the trackers. You really want to collect data in
the same way you kind of have a control if you want, like a
valid, consistent data set, So those those features and vectors that we're tracking
will be controlled as a community. So basically we'll push out that configuration configuration
to everyone. But long term, as we start getting more data, we
actually want people to volunteer and help identify and label objects. So what we'll
plan on doing, and this is probably something that will happen hopefully in the
next year or so, we'll have a database of images and videos that people
can go through and help us label and identify. So that's how Google and
Facebook and Amazon have done it. They've used humans to train these data sets,
because I mean, that's what you have to do. You have to
use humans to go generate a data set to at least get started with the
automatic detection. So in time, we'll have a platform where users can come
in and help identify objects that we can't classify, and hopefully we'll get to
the point where we can identify most known things and some anomaloust things. And
I think it just makes the data that much better, especially to get people
involved to help you build that data set in that knowledge base that you need
for machine learning. Yeah, that's exciting now with the Scientific Coalition of Eupology.
Some of them aren't have been in UFO Data or I should say Scientific
Coalition for UAP Research, the name changed an organization now that you all have
partnered with the group that I was there with beginning, and I work with
quite a bit and one of the few groups of people trying to gather data
and new science to investigate this field. One of those people is Robert Powell,
who I also work with that mofin he was a functional director who was
in charge of the scientific Advisory Board there and so in looking at the data,
which Robert and I both have kind of a passion for, one of
the struggles has always been Moffon collects a lot of reports and there are a
lot of especially media and some others who try to distill something from those reports.
But one of the problems that we have we found early on Robert and
I and I always identify is that it's really poor data. I mean,
really you have untrained observers looking at things. I think that you know,
for instance, in Arizona that who has They've got a really really great chief
investigator there and they come up with about three perns so the vast ninety percent
of sightings are something that are misidentified, and that's so the data is really
really dirty essentially, whereas something like this is much more clean and you have
a lot more information that comes along with that data. It seems to me,
even though we have these thousands of reports that organizations like move On collects,
there's limited value to that data scientifically, And so the data you're collecting,
although it may appear and some people feel like, oh, we have
so much data, we can tell so much about UFOs, the reality is
we have very little good, clean data as of this moment in time.
Would you agree with that? Yeah, it's really tough. I mean it's
hard to get. Like if you're an investigator and you're going out to see
someone that has the UFO siding and you fill out a report, you know,
the report itself could bias the person based on the questions that you ask
them. Maybe they remember details different than how they actually happened. So it's
really a difficult problem. And also the person feel out the report for them,
Like, you have all these different factors that make it difficult to study.
It's I'm not saying it's not studiable, but kind of removing the human
element is useful because your perception might is much different than than a piece of
equipment. So so why we use very specific, fine tuned pieces of equipment
for studying, you know, quantum particles, that's what you use. Why
we use them in physics. They're very specific for you know, a very
narrow focus. That's kind of what what our aim is. We're going to
collect very specific things in a very consistent manner and and do that on a
global scale. MD. It's just gonna say that's why these projects are so
exacting, because I mean, I think there's been at least for the folks
in SEU and and those of us looking for better in our data to figure
things out on it's exciting to have these projects. That's why so many of
us have been so excited about UFO data or some of these other organizations and
so let down that really none of them have got off the ground unfortunately.
Although on the same note, at least acide there. I shouldn't say there's
no value to that data that an organization like MOFON is gathering, because what
is interesting is I think you can which does help trend how humans react.
I mean that's really what you're you're looking at is what prompts humans to report
sidings? What are they reporting? And it's kind of that social factor which
can help with scientific data. For instance, you know how many UFO sidings
are there? You know increases there when the latest season of Unidentified is out
because I found you know, certainly these TV shows that are very impactful for
like that even chan aliens they drive a lot or UFO reports. The interesting
thing about the personal sightings to get reported. So I would love to see
when sky Hub starts getting deployed in more areas, if someone has a sighting,
if you can actually correlate that siding with an event in the sky Hub
network. So I think when you're able to do that kind of correlation on
reporting where you take witness testimony and correlate that with what is collected on a
sky Hub tracker, I think it gets even more interesting. Right, so
you have something saw something and a tracker caught it with a sensor array,
I think the data set gets that much more interesting. Truly, you can
start, you know, studying different aspects of the phenomenon. M So I
want to kind of transition also over in to some of the latest news and
some of the Navy and all of this sort of thing. One of the
things that I've been finding and the kind of thinking of quite a bit lately
is, and I'd love your input on this, is intelligence work is fairly
similar to journalism, and in that, for instance, the reports I write
for Open Minds, if I were to be doing this for an intelligence agency,
essentially writing a report of a summary of a situation, it'd be fairly
similar, especially if you're doing a good job as a journalist where you're citing
your sources and your you know, not filling it with opinion or bias.
So you have good intelligence, right, I mean, does that ring true?
I think so. I mean, when you're researching anything, you follow
the data. I mean, you basically have leads that you try to verify
and that and you have to establish a good foundation for making claims in an
anything you do, whether it be intelligence work or science or journalism. I
think generally you have to have a strong foundation of data in facts to support
anything. Mm hmm. So when it comes to then the videos that we've
gotten out of the Navy, of course, to the Stars is released,
there's a bit of limited value to that data, but part of it is
due to it seems like there's probably a lot of telemetry that was gathered that
we aren't privy too besides just the video. You know, it's possible.
I really don't know. So the tough thing about this is we're working off
limited evidence. So I've talked to a bunch of the guys from the Knimts.
It's a very compelling story and it's actually one of the stories that piqued
my interest to start getting more into UFOs. But if you actually look at
it from a scientific perspective, what is publicly available, it's it's not that
useful, So we need more data. So I think it's very unlikely.
I don't know this. I think it's very unlikely we'll ever see that data
for it to become declassified. I think it's really unlikely. I think ultimately,
if we want to see data on UFOs, the public has to go
get it themselves unless there's more transparency. But I just don't see collection systems
or intelligence systems being made available to the public. And beyond that, I
mean in your estimation, and of course your guess, but it's an educated
guess. I mean with your background. The Navy says they take this stuff
seriously, but how seriously do you think they take it? So do you
think that they would dedicate resources? It seems like it would be worthwhile.
So, for instance, in the in situation, perhaps a wiser protocol would
be, if you're witnessing unidentified objects, you know it's on radar, that
you record that, and that you have some sort of protocol to record that
information so that it can be analyzed later to figure out whether it's an error
into STEM or some other because it certainly affects the safety of you know,
your guys out there doing training in the area and your ability to identify pottles.
I mean if that was that was a training situation, but if it
was a live, you know, battlefield type of situation, then those unidentified
could cause a lot of Oh definitely purely from like a defense perspective, to
have an aircraft of any kind get close to a battle group or any navy
vessel is a big deal. So I mean, consider if something got within
firing range to a naval carrier, that's a really big deal. You don't
want that to happen. So even ignoring that they're unidentified, you can't let
that happen. So you can't have some sophisticated aircraft get close to any any
military asset. It's a big risk. It's it's really I mean, if
you want to maintain a national security mission, you have to stay on top
of this kind of stuff and be able to identify and mitigate potential risks.
So yeah, I think there's a lot of risk to having and that's what
it's really about, mitigating risk. So if you want to mitigate that risk,
you need to understand what you're dealing with. And I'm not sure we
fully understand what we're dealing with. And I think that they videos is a
perfect example. So you have a lot of very compelling witness testimony from a
number of people, and then a couple of videos that shows something like completely
unknown. We have not done well to explain it. So yeah, I
think it poses a big problem, especially when you you know, hear things
that David Fraber said in his initial thoughts were the things from out of this
world and interacting with a sophisticated aircraft. So it does seem problematic that we
haven't quite at least publicly figured out what it is. And I think people
should push very hard to to make the government accountable and to be about this.
And it seems like perhaps there was some analysis done in that allegedly you
know, RDAR data, video data was acquired and taken away by some some
and then potentially examined, but it was reactionary. It was after the fact,
and so whatever they were able to obtain, you know, was not
intentional. It was happenstance that you know, someone like Kevin Day paid attention.
If he would have just really blown it off, then they wouldn't have
had anything to gather and jets wouldn't have been scrambled. So it doesn't seem
as as big of an issue or something they're paying it to as much at
that time and potentially not now. It was more like, well, if
something happens, we'll take a look at it, but we're not going to
actively try investigating these things or gather data, at least at the NIM even
in Roosevelt, I think it. I think we heard similar sort of things
and that kind of alludes to that, although well, the idea that they
haven't been really taking it that seriously and perhaps because of that boo and it
sounds counterintuitive. I think that people, especially the more conspiracy minded that you
know, of course they're doing everything. There's there's all this you know,
research and secret stuff going on. Well we didn't really see that. We
haven't seen that in military cases. What we've seen is more of a reactionary
type of stant where sure, maybe after the fact they'll take it seriously,
but before the fact, it's not really something people are thinking about and even
avoiding. So it's kind of interesting. So I'm not real up to date
on UFO history, but I have a Project Blue Books, so there are
times where we have taken UFO seriously. And I was shocked that when Louel
Azando came out publicly that there was actually a program studying unidentified aircrafts. So,
I mean there has been programs running. Who knows, Like the the
classified world is is very stovepiped, so for all we know, there could
be programs we know of at least a tip and asapp and potentially more might
be known in the future. So it's really hard to know how long this
has actually gone on inside the government and classified programs, But unfortunately we have
to stick with the facts. We at least know that a tip and asap
OSAP existed, so there seems to be interest. Internally, it doesn't seem
to be a lot of interest. I know some of the numbers were thrown
out, like twenty two million dollars were spent. I'm not sure they spent
more than that, but from a defense budget perspective, that's super low.
That's that's now much so, and we may find out in the future that
there is more more ongoing. I do believe that the intelligence community and the
d OD is actually taking this more serious now, and I think the Senate
Intelligence Committee report is evidence of that. So there's politicians and legislators that are
they they might have been baffled, you know, over the last two years
finding out there are truly unidentified objects flying around m HM. And that brings
us to that Senate Intelligence Committee, which is really interesting because another part of
your use of AI, and you mentioned this in your introduction, is the
use of you know, scrubbing the net to look for information and for documents,
And so maybe you could share how did you come across this mention of
this UAP report request that the Senate Intelligence Committee was making. So this is
actually kind of funny. It was a total accident. This was not intentional
at all. So I rarely, very rarely look for documents. I happen
to be on youv info dot com and I searched for UFO and a couple
of documents popped up, nothing related to UFO, So I was like,
well, I'll search you AP. Nothing showed up, so I was like,
well, I'll type out the full phrase. I searched Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon
and I was like, they published a new document four days ago. So
I opened it up and I read the whole thing. And I have a
private chat with a couple guys from sky Hub and shared it in there and
I was like, have you guys seen this? Like they actually proposed UAP
task Force. So I read the document, I went to work, so
like eight or nine hours later, I ended up posting it to Twitter because
you know, I was wondering, like why am I not hearing about this?
Yeah, so I went and posted it and it kind of exploded from
there, and yeah, that's sort of how it happened. It was a
complete accident. I just happened to search the right phrase on the right day.
So and it's sort of interesting, and I really I think I dropped
the ball in asking this, and hopefully I'll be able to get this answer
soon. I would assume that Chris Mellen knew Chris Mellen with a tip or
with to the Stars Academy, and he's the guy who you know, used
to work for the Senate Intelligence Committee, has done a lot of work in
the government. He's on unidentified He essentially was lobbying that to Senate Intelligence Committee
do this, and it happened the only person really actively lobbying for this as
far as I know of, even coming up with verbiage and obviously had quite
an effect my opinion. They knew it was coming, So when I posted
on Twitter, I think Chris Mellan missed my original tweet of that article.
Later that day, he made a tweet that I responded with something along the
lines, is that why we're seeing you know a you know, basically UAP
task Force verbiage in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, and then he responded with
more to coom dot dot dot. Within hours, TTSA was pumping out press
releases and blog articles covering that document. I think they knew it was coming,
they just didn't know when. And I think it just went unnoticed by
everybody. Yeah, I mean the other possibility is they knew, they just
wanted to keep it under wraps, which would probably be wise too until it
passed, because certainly the circus has come to town and it's your fault actually
partially, And maybe the New York Times might have been wanting to reveal this
themselves. They maybe had going to get the scoop but just didn't get the
scoop actually because of you. Brian Bender with Politico got the scoop as far
as mainstream media. But it's interesting that it was kept so secretive and so
quiet until you ran across it and really blew things up. Yeah. I
was sort of amazed about it, because you know, I'm not a journalist.
I read the article and I was like, wow, this is pretty
groundbreaking. But I didn't really think to say, hey, I should probably
send this to a journalist, Like it just didn't cross my mind. I
was just fascinated by the article after I read it. But you know,
one of the reasons I shared it is because I wanted to get other people's
analysis, and there was a lot of really great articles about it, and
MJ and Tim and others put out great great coverage of that article of the
report, and even Adam Kehoe has put out some really great interpretations of some
of the verbiage in there. Mm hm. So I guess I was a
little selfish and sharing it with everybody. I just wanted to see what they
had to say about it. No, I think it's great. I think
everybody is really appreciative that you did that, and I think it's great.
I mean, really, it's yours to share. You're the one who found
it so funny that you had just run across it in that manner, not
using AI, using bi brain intelligence. You know, it's funny because I'd
never been to gov info dot com before and I just happened to happen to
navigate there, and I was like, oh great, here's a place where
they actually digitize documents from the Federal Register and from Congress. So I started
searching for documents there and I just got lucky, Yeah, well done,
Because I mean it's a huge it really is a huge game changer. And
I think that the impacts of the significance of the Senate asking for this information
and then the manner in which they did, and even Chris Mellen's influence and
participation is a much bigger story than what we've seen thus far. And you
know, I guess that brings us too. I think Brian Bender did a
pretty good job and just sticking with the facts and he puts them. He
got a hold of Chris Mellon and got some responses from him on all of
this, but like maybe even very quickly, like the day after you posted
or something like that, very soon after. But it brings us to the
New York Times story on this, which was really weird. I mean,
I have been one of the hugest fans of Leslie Kane for many years.
She's a good friend. I like her a lot, and I've had some
conversation with her in the last couple of weeks. But the article was so
strange, especially in that a lot of paraphrasing without quotes or sourcing, and
then not only that, kind of mudding the waters or at least mixing the
messages, and that, hey, there's this intelligence committee. They're asking for
more information, so we're going to get more information from this task force that
was likely, you know, an a tip, but in a new form.
However, then they throw in this weird stuff about these guys convinced that
there's UFO crashes, and it really kind of muddled muddied things up, and
it was kind of strange. Did you find it odd? Yes? So,
I mean there's a lot of history, as you know, that led
up to the New York Times article. It almost sounds like potentially the article
tipped off a number of people that there was going to be a UFO crash
retiever or were coming out at some point. And it had to do a
lot with the Wilson leaks. So I read those when they initially came out.
I didn't think much of them. There's really no evidence, well,
there's really no good evidence inside those documents. There's lots of claims, a
lot of lots of anecdotal stuff, but not much actionable evidence. Sure you
can vent the sources that are mentioned in the document, but leading up to
the article, it's interesting to see more articles, but you know, through
the retractions and corrections, and I guess it didn't do much for me.
I really want to see more evidence in transparency and hopefully this article will produce
something more. But it was just such a weird chain of events, especially
watching the Twitter community talk about the Wilson Lenks and the UFO Crash Retriever article
that was coming in the article than what I expected. I actually expected no
article. I didn't think anything related was going to happen. But you know,
an article did come out that had a slightly different narrative. M your
thoughts. I thought an article was coming out, but I didn't think it
would contain the Wilson documents and just just quick a nutshell for those who are
not familiar. The Wilson documents are these documents that came out allegedly, and
I think this has been fairly well established from Edgar Mitchell's since he passed away
some of the files that he had. And these allegedly notes from Eric Davis,
a physicist who worked with a tip who is in this New York Times
article saying that he believes and he has briefed the Pentagon on off world,
you know, devices vehicles being captured. But these notes allegedly from Eric Davis
or him meeting with his admiral, and the admiral says, yeah, I
found out about the UFO crash retrieval program. I tried to go in there
and get information. I tried to walk in and say I'm an admiral let
me in and they said, no, I mean, and I'm sorry for
making fun of the notes, but they are silly like that. I mean,
you read the notes and even the interactions really weird and certainly not the
type of thing, maybe the type of thing you'd see even the TV show.
John Greenwald even speculated they read more like a TV show script than they
do real life. And I think that's true. And a lot of people
have talked about how really this is breaking so many protocols and Admiral would be
familiar with. So Eric Davis will not comment on the notes. Admiral Wilson,
who is supposedly the guy who tried to figure this stuff out, says
this never happened. I was never even in Vegas. I haven't been in
Vegas for years, so that they're not true. So that's kind of what
the Wilson documents were. They weren't mentioned in the article, which makes sense
because nobody's fessing up to it. It would have been really weird to mention
it. But even though they did, what they did mention was essentially Eric
Davis's opinions. And I just wrote an article yesterday a follow up to another
one which was essentially based off of Chris Mellen's response, which seems to be
more along the lines of you know, responsible response, which was Eric Davis
gave the Pentagon people at the Pentagon leads so they could potentially confirm this information,
but essentially saying that's all they are is leads, and that's been my
argument, whereas a lot in the UFO community have ran with this is confirmation,
there's UFO crashes. Roswell's real blah blah blah will know you know,
as he told me an Open Mind GFO Radio, which I think is his
longest interview on all of this, he heard from colleagues who knew he was
interested in UFOs, who shared classified information with him, at least information they
felt was classified. That certainly, I would imagine if you're sharing classified information
with someone else who has a clearance, I don't think you're expecting that person
to share that information publicly with the New York Times and so forth, so
or with Open Mind GUFO Radio, which he did, you know, and
essentially so the information is kind of sketchy as hearsay to begin with, But
you know, I did mention this, and I would like your thoughts on
this. I did mention there is a purpose that is served in that at
least Alessando says he's convinced of this. Davis, of course, is convinced
of this. It is signaling I guess from them that we believe there are
UFO crashes or UFO debris that you all have, so we want to hear
about that and these reports that are upcoming, right, So I'm a little
curious. So Alessando has publicly stated I believe that. I think he believes
that we have UFO debris. He told Fox News yes to UFO material Then
Tucker Carlson kind of mentioned UFO debris, but Alexander was talking at the time,
so essentially he says, yes, UFO materials. However, I did
ask. I said, the New York Times is now saying you're convinced there's
UFO crashes and materials, and he said he felt that was He was fine
with that framing. He didn't really tell me, well, where is this
source? Did they interview? Do you directly? He just said he's fine
with that framing, and he didn't really he doesn't like talking about this stuff
that much. So it's so interesting because it's such a huge claim. It
is exactly. It's like a lot of people seem to accept that potentially,
And when we're talking about UFO in this context, we were talking about ET,
right, No, So now Davis believes that and he says he's believed,
but Elesander has been very clear UFO does not equal necessarily equal alien to
him. So I don't think that he's using that term in that context.
I would be he doesn't believe it's Russian or Chinese, but he doesn't know
what it is, right, And I think that's the correct definition. I
can't. I don't think we can assume that UFO equals ET. But if
it's not ET, something else. So it seems like what would that body
of evidence even look like to establish that it's not man made? So there
has to be so much research done, And I've read the papers about arts
parts in some of the material that tts EV TTSA eventually got a hold of,
and I'm just not convinced. I don't think there's enough evidence there to
actually establish that anything that they have is not natural or not man made.
So it's really difficult to really establish that someone has an anomalist like truly unknown
material or piece of equipment. I guess it's possible. But I take the
perspective and that we have to deal with the things that we know. We
have to deal We have to basically progress on data and evidence. Trying to
trying to do search and investigation and scientific analysis on claims is really not useful,
right And yeah, and I mean I've relied on throughout the years.
Chris Cogswell, Now your lead scientists, you know, part of your scientific
advisory board who's been extremely critical of to the Stars and their discussions about these
meta materials or anomalist materials. Although kind of rightfully so, I believe because
he brings up, you know, the challenges that this is not a cake
walk. You can't just walk into the scientific community and say, look what
we found, guys. I mean, if you look at the Mars Rock,
the evidence for you know, life on this Mars rock that even President
Clinton said it looks like we found life, and it's still debated. It's
not a foregone conclusion among all the scientific community that that was not evidence of
life, just not enough proof. And that's the hard part is the the
bar for the evidence that you need is like Chris Mellen says is unidentified.
He says, you know, you need extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence.
Of course, he follows that up on the show and says, now we
have that, but as far as UFO crashes or even materials, we don't
have that, and it is something that will have to be scrutinized in the
scientific community before those kind of claims can be made. And I think that's
fair to ask for that, and I think that's really important. So I
guess my question now, if you're an intelligence person, of course, I'm
looking at this from a media perspective, so you know, I'm thinking,
whoa guys, these are you know, unverifiable or unsubstantiated claims that you're making
regarding UFO crashes based on apparently hearsay. However, if you have this opportunity
and it could have been you know, maybe it's not really going to hurt
us so much if we take this opportunity to signal than it that we believe
these materials are or this evidence is out there, so that if it is,
you better include it or you're going to hear from us. That might
be sort of their thinking as to why they would talk to The New York
Times and say these kind of things. That's my gas. Does that seem
like a potentially the case or I mean potentially I mean if you really So,
if you really want to find out and collect intelligence on something, I
mean you basically you're going to perform a huge signals intelligence mission. And that's
what we're doing with sky Hub. We're collecting signals intelligence and collecting data about
it. And that's that's ultimately what you want, right, So data is
the answer, and that's what's going to get people involved. So kind of
the whole premise of this. There's a lot of people involved in ufology that
is doing a lot of research, right, but it seems that a lot
of people aren't using good processes for data. There's some people using science,
and there's some people that think that science can't observe the phenomenon. I reject
that for now. So I think we want scientists involved in the community,
But it seems like sometimes a community makes it so difficult for academics and scientists
to actually do research. There's a lot of fringe ideas in pseudoscience that's involved,
and we need to get over that. So one thing I like to
think is we don't need scientists involved to use the scientific method now. We
are all capable of applying the scientific method and critical thinking to what we're doing
in eufology right now. And I think as a community, we can actually
use better processes and you know, basically methods for acquisitioning knowledge and testing and
using science to build the body of evidence that large researchers and academics will want.
So I think, really we can make it easier for academics to get
involved. And the ANSWER's data, and the answer is applying the scientific method.
And you know, maybe some people are right the scientific method won't work
in this case, but I don't think we've exhausted that. I totally agree,
because I agree with you that scientific method has not been It's rare that
it's been applied fully and rigorously in this field. So I think that still
needs to happen. Some of that happened apps in blue Book, but not
much that I can think of. Some of that happened in the Condon Report,
some of which was revelatory in that it showed some of those things were
true on identified at their best efforts. So I totally agree with you,
and you know it also makes me think scientists want data, but they don't
care where it comes from as long as it's good data, whether that comes
from the Navy or whether it comes from sky Hub, what it's The crux
of the issue is going to be how good is that data? And that's
going to be the key. So and everything's going to be questioned, whether
it comes from the Navy or otherwise. Everything's going to be questioned by the
scientific community. Yep. And I think that's why it's so important to have
people like Chris Cogswell involved. You know, we want to be transparent on
how we collect data with We're going to be transparent about what hardware is used
to collect it, so when a researcher comes along, he knows exactly what
we did to produce that data. So we want to be completely transparent about
every way we're handling the data. So it's important especially when they want to
study it. They need to know air rates, they need to know how
it is collected. So, you know, we want to be able to
provide the best data we possibly can. Mm hmm. It seems like secrecy.
And of course there's the Federation of the FAS. I can't remember their
federation. I don't think it's American scientists. Maybe it is actually, but
essentially it's kind of this battle between when it comes to the military and government
science that's done in secrecy. Science requires transparency, like you're talking about,
so that everything can be verified. And I think it seems like there's these
kind of dangerous echo chambers that can happen in the classified world in that Eric
Davis even told us about the difficulty of getting help. If you have a
classified program, you can't go to a scientist or a mathematician who you need
help from directly. They've got to be read into the program, they need
to be classified. There's this whole procedure before you can even have this person
help you with your project. So it's a very difficult thing. And without
you know, I'm sure when it comes to bureaucracy, there's a tendency then
not to seek outside help or your ability to get outside help is hampered,
So then you probably have and they could be the case. And when we're
talking about these UFO crashes, this echo chamber where these rumors get started or
there's this or that that's going on, these rumors about you know, hey,
project X is created anti gravity or they think they're there onto anti gravity.
But when you have you know, le a small amount of scientists looking
at this who can't have their colleagues verify their data, then it's going to
hamper their ability to actually work on these projects. So it's a hard problem.
So, I mean some of the things I observed over the years,
so things were very stove piped and they basically ran on a need to know
policy, so you knew about the program that you worked in with. After
nine to eleven, they kind of transition to a need to share policy on
intelligence sharing, so you basically share the more openly with the intelligence community to
avoid things like nine to eleven. Well, after Snowden that that definitely shifted
back to a need to know and it actually changed how information is shared significantly
inside the intelligence community. But when you talk about programs like SAPs, it's
a it's a whole different it's a totally different ballgame like they're they're I mean
it's called a special access program. I mean it's very controlled, it's very
limited on who gets to work in those So yeah, I can see how
these things happen where you have a limited number of people and you don't seek
you possibly don't seek the right expertise all the time, and when it comes
to you SAPs, you can't even talk about the program's existence, so you
can't even acknowledge that it exists. So yeah, and I think there's even
more problems with that. So I can see how you know, these stove
pipes and classified programs can kind of get stuck and have very little oversight.
So I it's it's how do you solve that problem? Though you're and they're
not doing nefarius things. These are These are people just like you and I
go into work every day and they're trying to solve national security problems and creating
new technology that they don't want any anyone to know about. What that's the
real goal, right, It's there. They are people that are working diligently
in their jobs trying to solve a problem. Right, no one can know,
right, And which is kind of interesting. On the other flip side
too, is that, Okay, let's say these UFO crash programs are real
and they are highly classified. If that's the case, then there is some
delicacy needed in that. You know, we can't just go bushwhack and charging
into this that there are national security concerns, especially around technologies. If it's
true any have been gleaned from back engineering something you're used to, I guess
you said you did that. I would guess you did that on the tech
side of things. Yeah, but hardware and software, mostly software, So
you've been there, and so those are very sensitive projects. I'd imagine,
Oh, yeah, they're they're very sensitive, and we're just I mean,
I don't I'm not big on speculating. It can be fun, but it's
I guess it's for me, it's not too useful. But if to speculate
on if we have crashed UFOs is I just don't feel like we have evidence
enough evidence to to really pursue that to its end. And people will disagree
with me. I'm I'm I'm a I'm a big skeptic, even when it
comes to UFOs. I'm pretty much skeptical about everything, and I think that's
important. And like you know, people will knock mcwest, but we need
people like mcwest. If if you have an idea or an opinion that can't
stand up to scrutiny, well then potentially it's not an idea in our opinion,
that's that's work holding, right, So, if you talk about crash
retrievals, I guess it's possible. We've we honestly really haven't seen a strong
indication that there are There seem to be a number of people that are convinced
that we have retrieved crash UFOs. But what they're really saying is they have
something that they recovered that they don't know what it is. That's it,
right, So right, So I'm not really sure what I can derive from
that. There's something that they have that they don't understand. So there's a
lot of things we don't understand, right, I don't know what to make
of that. So I think, what we need more data, and we
need more evidence. And I think it's great the work that tts tt s
A is doing and the work that skyhub is doing, and the folks over
at uap X are looking to hands on research. So I think as these
groups start pushing for further and further, hopefully we'll be able to get more
clarity on some of these claims. M Yeah, I've posted on Open Minds
articles on I think what are probably the most convincing crashes in the US and
international cases some of them are very interesting. But of course some of them
have turned out to be space debris, which would make sense. That's the
whole point. If it's unidentified, it could be foreign technology, and foreign
technology of course typically meaning Chinese or Russian or some other government, which has
turned out to be the case in many cases. So I think you're right,
you know, none of those cases, even Roswell. I wrote a
piece on that recently, just kind of I'm just trying to educate people on
UFO crashes and what's out there historically regarding UFO crashes, so they can have
all the information and you know, determined for themselves. But I would say
you're right, they all pretty much rely on anecdotal information, which is sort
of difficult. And I would say none often non. Well, yeah,
the anecdotal information. So it's really difficult especially if and I keep saying this,
if you want the scientific community involved, we we have to we have
to get better data. And as you collect that data and be more rigorous
on how you build your body of information about UFOs, people will take that
seriously. You know, people will knock Neil de grass Tyson or recently,
you know, I commented on Seth Shostak's article about UFO, and a lot
of people criticize me for, you know, saying, great article. But
these are the types of people, maybe not specifically Tyson or Shawstak, but
these are the types of people where we really do want involved. We want
these people that have devoted their careers to physics and searching for life in the
galaxy. So we want these types of people involved in the discussion. But
the only way you're going to get them involved is credible data. They want
data. Yeah, I agree with you one thousand percent, and I think
one of the problems is and that's what is kind of difficult. Maybe Skyhub
will finally be that person nobody has been willing to kind of stand up and
counter or at least debate Shostak and others kind of a in a peer to
peer type of way. And I'm hopeful that will happen because we do need
a setti of UAPs essentially, and to the Stars has kind of been had
their own focus. They have limited resources, despite what many people think,
and they've also made I think an astronomical amount of headway in this field right
now. Just I never could have imagined, you know, I mean,
they've gotten the Senate intelligence community to ask these questions. That's you know,
amazing. So they've definitely been doing their part. But yeah, hopefully in
the not too distant future, we'll have you know, people challenging them with
more than just you know, we'll go look at the internet. You'll see
this and that, or you know, with more challenging points and facts and
data, because certainly, I think there's room there. Certainly, I don't
know if you'd agree with this. Shostack is an intelligent thinker, but he
doesn't seem to have all the information when he is espousing his opinions. Potentially,
I mean, so consider this. So, if you're interested in astrophysics,
it doesn't necessarily make you interested in UFOs. So I assume that Seth
has pursued SETI because he's passionate about it, and maybe he's not passionate about
UFOs. You really don't go researching UFOs and ufology unless you have a deep
interest or a curiosity about it. And also, you know, I'm sure
his job's fairly demanding and he would actually have to like prioritize researching UFOs,
which I wouldn't expect anyone anyone just to go out and start researching UFOs.
But if you go to someone and like say, oh, there's unidentified like
and of course there's ets flying around our atmosphere, someone that has devoted their
life to searching for extraterrestrial intelligence and the galaxy is going to be like,
yeah, I'm not convinced, and they're they're probably not going to look at
it unless you give them really compelling information. Can't be anecdotal, can't be
cleaned stories. So my only argument is Stan Friedman has did debate him before
he passed away quite a few times and did give him materials. And for
instance, I've written an article and I do a lecture about astronomers and UFOs,
And I guess that's my main contention with him is that he always claims
astronomers don't see UFOs, they're not interested in UFOs, when I think I
can show in my article and in my lectures that astronomers are the ones who
started in neufology, beginning with like doctor j Allen Heinek, he was an
astronomer and he wrote a paper. And there's another guy, Peter Sturk,
who wrote a paper, a book about astronomers and UFOs demonstrating including doing inventories
with large astronomy associations. And I know Friedman in particular has shared this information
with Shatstack, these books and information, and to this date, even though
it's been decades, to this date, it doesn't appear that he's read or
reviewed any of that material. So it is my opinion he is actively staying
away from trying to educate himself in this area, and possibly for the reason
that you mentioned is that you know it would be a lot to tackle.
But at the very least he could read those reports. The Heinech wrote a
report on astronomers and UFOs, there's a book. If he read those things,
at least he would be able to correct that inaccurate statement. I mean
we could ask him, I mean, I know, ask him. Yeah,
I'm confident he'd give us an answer. Yeah, well he has been
asked, and essentially just as I'm not aware of that material, and that's
all he'll say. So unfortunately, but I think things will change as more
people and people who are at a higher level begin to to get involved with
the conversation and I and it always comes back to data. I think we
were to present Shawstak or any other scientists with credible data that showed something truly
interesting, they would probably, I mean the scientific community, let's be honest,
they would jump all over that. Yeah, if you could actually too
give them evidence, they would like they would be all over UFOs. And
I can't blame them in that. Typically, you know, this has not
been the most disciplined or scientific kind of area of study. So I think
the vast majority happens to us, happened to you right now. Vast majority
of information that is shared with you is less than credible or usually very dubious,
and you, for my case, I'll spend days or hours researching it
just to find out it isn't something credible. So it's interesting. I've actually
become more skeptical of UFOs after getting involved with the subject. So, like
you know, as I dig in and like learn more about some of the
different aspects in eupology, I'm even more skeptical about most of the things.
And one of the primary reasons I'm actually even involved is because of Chris Mellen
and lluell'esde. When they got out was it twenty seventeen, they came out
on stage and showed the Like got the videos out in the New York Times
and they announced TTSA was That's what kind of dragged me in is seeing two
really credible people from the intelligence community jump into the UFO topic, which I
found very interesting. So I probably wouldn't be doing this today if it wasn't
for those two. Yeah, that's awesome, and I think that's true for
a lot of people. And I think whether you like it or not,
your work is going to get a lot more people involved and that that's going
to be exciting. One last question before we it's a bad time we end
this. That's okay, you got time, yep, I okay. My
last question here is there was kind of a debate that I thought was really
interesting and I'm not sure if you had seen that, you might have been
involved with this Twitter debate between Like and the people we're mentioning, Adam Kehoe,
Tim McMillan, Chris mellan, and Tyler Rogaway. And it was kind
of not that Chris mellon was definitely involved with the conversation, but he certainly
prompted it by statements he had made and essentially someone asked, you know,
how comprehensive was their review of information to determine these objects weren't from another country,
especially China or Russia, and he said it was very comprehensive. And
he argues that you know, they do have oversight. He did when he
worked with the Senate, have oversight of all of the SAPs and USAPS,
and so he's very confident when he says these aren't ours, and we don't
have programs with these sort of things, and he would be in a position
to know. Some people argued, surprisingly, even Tyler Rogaway, defense writer
journalist, that it could be possible that there could be projects or programs that
are outside of you know, normal oversight. Do you think that's possible.
I think Mellon seemed skeptical of that. So did most Brian Bender, I
think even commented at another defense policy you know journalist, skeptical of that.
What are your thoughts? So I never really worked at that level, right,
So I worked cleared programs, of course, But as far as a
program existing without oversight would be, it would seem difficult. It would seem
to be difficult. I'm not exactly sure. I guess in theory it's possible.
I never witnessed anything that was done in the shadows. It's just sensitive,
right, They're just trying to protect information. I guess it's conceivable there
might be a program somewhere, but there's got to be somewhere someone wondering where
all this money is going. So they're accountable to someone because they need money
and they're getting it somehow, So there's always some trail of paperwork or money.
So I'm not really sure. I'm probably not the best person to ask
that. It would seem no, just your experience is interesting. It would
seem difficult to do because a lot of people have like kind of an interesting
perspective of the government, like this well oiled machine, hiding secrets from the
people and conspiring against the people. But really it's just people like you and
I. It's your neighbors, it's your friends, it's your family that are
going to work every day getting a job done. And it's really not a
well oiled machine. It's just a bunch of random people showing up every day
trying to get a job done. And you know, people should be surprised
the government runs as well as it does. But uh, yeah, it's
I just don't see like working inside the government and being a part of it.
Nobody's conspiring. People are just trying to get jobs done, and you
know, things are sensitive you can't share with the public right So skyhub dot
org is where people can go see more about sky Hub. Also, when
you said to you you found all these government documents are tho shared online somewhere,
so they were so I used to have everything hosted at fluxufo, but
since I got involved in sky Hub, that has kind of been pushed to
the wayside. So my collection of documents is not currently accessible. It is
possible they will be back on line in the future. But there is another
project that's popping up called Sightings that will incorporate witness testimony and potentially other data
sources of documents and things like that. So I would keep keep your ears
peak for that one. That might be an interesting project to keep your eye
on. Yeah. Well, I'm super excited about what you're doing. If
Open Minds dot tv can help in any way, please do let us know
and keep up the great work. Your involvement thus far has been very helpful
and definitely appreciated by people like me, and I know the guys at SCU
who do appreciate you know, the scientific method and better, more credible ways
of collecting and sharing data. So keep up the and I have a feeling
this is going to be the first of many, cos I think so well.
I really appreciate you having me on. It's been great my pleasure.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do it. And I guess
we'll see you, hopefully in the audience again next time we do a show.
Oh definitely, and don't forget catch us at skyhub dot org and come
check out the project. Yep, I hope. I'll definitely be pushing that
quite a bit. It's really exciting and the finished product is really good looking
too. Oh, thank you all right, thanks man, talk to you
later. Thank you.