All right, welcome to the Rojas Reports Live. It looks like we've got
some people in here already joining us. Thank you all so much for being
here. And uh, we've got a great guest again. We've got Adam
Keyhoe. He's not related to Donald Keyhoe. If you're aware of who Donald
is is, all of us UFO nerds know Donald Keyhoe well worked with not
nicap too early. My brain is not taking him. But anyway, one
of the early military UFO organizations that was very, very influential when the Condon
Report and when the Air Force stopped doing everything. But you're not related to
Donald Keyjo anyway. I almost wish I was, you know, it would
be so much fun. But yeah, unfortunately, no different spelling of the
name. That's the biggest question I get when they're like, I saw you
at Adam. Is he related to Donald? So? But Adam have a
PhD and information science and I know you have a big interest in policy when
it comes to defense, and that's something you write quite a bit about,
right, Yeah, absolutely, So for the last couple of months, really
I've been writing intensively about kind of policy issues around UAP. So you know,
I came into this field kind of interested to try to think through all
of the different possible implications. Right, So there's a number of possibilities.
You know, some of these things could be foreign adversaries and there's a whole
set of policy issues there. There could be mistaken observations and that's important as
well. And there's a few of these cases that are really truly strange,
and it doesn't seem like there's much of an organized policy response. So it's
kind of fascinating to look at as a problem kind of at the intersection of
technology and intelligence and government, kind of all of these things all at once,
and it's sort of a new puzzle. I mean, it's it's we're
getting insight into an area of research that the military has been into secretively and
have successfully really kept the public and apparently Congress in the dark. And so,
you know, which kind of for the conspiracy theorists, you know,
there was something there and we don't know we don't know the extent of the
research that has been done by the military in this area. Uh, and
we're just beginning to learn that sort of thing, and that'll probably be a
lot of what we talk about, is that there seems to be even though
we know that they've taken up seriously now, there's still a lot of secrecy
around what they've done, and they don't seem to want to change that level
of transparency at all. I mean, what we've been getting lately is that
things will remain classified in their research in these areas. It seems like,
does that seem accurate? Yeah, I think it does. I mean,
I think this is an incredibly difficult intelligence problem because in order to really look
at this, you have to look at the very edge of your knowledge and
capabilities. So you've got to simultaneously assess, what are the you know,
the best capabilities of our rivals and adversaries and even our peers. What are
our own, you know, best capabilities. Is it a possibility that we've
someone has an experimental platform that is in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And then even if you're looking at the most prosaic thing, which is
that it's a case of mistaken observation or whatever, that very quickly gets into
vulnerabilities and the sensor layers you know, of the military, of where there
might be problems with radar, where there might be problems in training, et
cetera. So all of that is really sensitive stuff, and if you have
to look at it all together, your your decompartmenting information, you're bringing information
that normally would just be in separate parts of the government together, and that's
always a cause for you know, extreme concern, because if that program,
you know, is has penetrated in any meaningful way, then that's essentially a
treasure trove for a foreign intelligence service. So before we even get into any
of the sort of stranger implications of some of these cases, you know,
the kind of more conspiratorial stuff, there's actually like good reason, even if
you were only thinking about drones and planes and you know, radar glitches,
to be really really concerned about this stuff and to keep it fairly secretive.
But as you say, the remarkable thing is that in the last year,
amazingly, you know, we're seeing this public discourse about it. We're seeing
the Senate Intelligence Committee writing this really amazing request to basically say, you know,
we demand more or less a report on this. A public report I'm
classified in a relatively short period of time as sort of stunning given all of
the different you know, intelligence equities involved. But you know, nonetheless,
here we are m so two things a little bit of business person and then
we'll get back into this conversation. I do want to let people know that
I have made this change where now the Rojas Reports live the live interviews like
this one, anybody can join and then after the interview, after a couple
hours, I will make it so just the subscribers can join, and you
could see there's a joint button here on open minds where you can join and
subscribe to the archives. Just do that one. I have the Rojas Reports
live option there. But like I said, you know, I'm gonna not
charge for joining for live anymore. So just so you know, so welcome
and hopefully you can keep joining me. And part of the reason I'm doing
this is because Rojas Reports is a moving target and that I never know when
I'm going to get my guests, and so it's kind of short noticed when
I'm going to have people pop in here. But some of you, like
Mark and Rodrigo and Renee and Dirk, you seem to be able to be
available practically anytime and pop into any of these live streams that I pop up,
and you're very welcome, thank you for being here. The other thing
I do want to mention is just getting back to our conversation here, is
that I was able to watch The Phenomenon, which is a great documentary.
I highly highly recommend it. I know you'll really love it, Adam,
if you haven't gotten a screener yet, I have not. And what's great
about it is that it reviews the history, which will bore maybe some of
the you know, older UFO nerds, but they do it in a great
way, a very credible way, and then come into you know, then
bring it into the current affairs through the presidents, into Clinton and Podesta,
and then we have you know, interviews with Chris Mellan, Harry Reid,
great interviews, by the way, and it really demonstrates this truth which is
and it doesn't include Jimmy Carter. And I do want to mention that as
I did post an article from Open Minds magazine written by my buddy Antonio Juneez
about Jimmy Carter. When Jimmy Carter tried to get NASA to do UFO research,
and we'll talk about that. That was excluded from Phenomena, but all
this other was and it does show that this is not necessarily an issue,
that is not something that the military has always been struggling with but instead kind
of more of a pr issue, at least from the surface. The things
that we know about is, you know, how do they deal with this
and how do they deal with the public on this matter? And that's what's
great is that it really combines things to show that what is going on now
is really a continuation of what went on in the forties and fifties, in
the sixties. It's just a new way of dealing with it. And kind
of this new openness that was mirrors what we had in the beginning. And
I don't think that's a problem. And I think that that maybe all we
were left with in the end, in that back then we knew there was
an issue. There were UAPs, there were things being seen by the public,
by law enforcement, by the military, and it was okay, and
the military is trying to figure out what it was. It seems like that
was where we've returned to, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but of
course it does post some problems for the military. Yeah, I mean,
I think one of the key differences is just that the strategic environment has really
changed. So, you know, twenty or thirty years ago, we were,
you know, largely in this bipolar world where bipolar in terms of the
power dynamic between the United States and the Soviet Union, and I think there
was higher comments in the kind of technological supremacy of the United States, and
today we're in a much more multipolar world where you know, countries like China,
russ are increasingly capable in different ways. And I think also with the
proliferation of drone technology too, there's a certain anxiety that you know, the
skies are becoming a little stranger, a little bit more accessible. You know,
it's not just the B fifty two that you're concerned about, right,
it's it's it's drones and all of these sort of strange new technologies and so
on. So I think that it is it is a slightly different environment.
And then I think the other new thing in the equation is something like TTSA,
which has a few people with you know, really significant government backgrounds kind
of coming in and adding their weight and experience to it, which seems to
be a new aspect of the dynamic. But you're right, I mean,
there's a long history and not just of people being interested in the subject,
but also the government having varying levels of response to it, and and varying
levels of congressional interest and even executive branch interest in the case of Jimmy Carter.
So yeah, there's a sick there's a cyclical aspect many of these things.
I think that Jimmy Carter story is a very interesting one and important one
also in that it shows, you know, Jimmy Carter wanted openness, much
like Harry Reid into this topic, so he approached NASA, and I think
that's where the similarities are. This politician kind of inspired or you know,
started program, and how the military and NASA reacted what they told Jimmy Carter
obviously. You know, what Antonio was able to demonstrate in the article is
that the Air Force behind the scenes was pushing for NASA to not do it.
They're like, you know, this isn't work. That just don't do
it, go away and get out of it. And they did, and
they did highlight the issue, which is a legitimate issue, is that,
you know, if we don't do it, the UFO conspiracy people are going
to be mad at us and claim that we're just covering things up. If
we do do it, then we're going to start to run into problems with
the scientists that we work with in the scientific community, and that's the problem.
So why do it at all, because that just creates just so much
problems We're already I think an organization NASA has always had resource issues. You
know, they've always been, you know, tasked with doing things that are
just they they don't have the budget or demand power to do. And that's
kind of politics. Yeah, if I could have just add a little bit
of context to that, I mean to zoom out from that story a little
bit. So there's the moment where Carter talks about UFOs on the trail and
then commits to looking at them. But if you go back just a couple
of years, there's something called the Church Committee in the Senate, and that
was actually the precursor of the moment of the modern It's essentially the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the permanent sort of select intelligence committee. So what the Church Committee
was doing really was looking at intelligence abuses. So this is a period when
things like mk Ultra were coming to light and all of these other sorts of
the really dark corners of the intelligence world. And you know, it's been
a little while since I've looked at this, but I want to say that
was maybe around seventy six or so, so just just before kind of the
Carter era. So that was a moment in American life where I think people
were looking at the intelligence services in a slightly different way and had a slightly
different sort of perspective on government and maybe a lack of trust in government as
a whole. The other interesting thing that was happening at the time was that,
you know, the defense contractor giant Lockheed Martin and its earlier form,
was in some financial trouble and at one point was sort of quasi nationalized almost,
So that was a moment for the whole security apparatus to be pretty uncertain,
and there were a lot of people, i think professionals in the national
security world that were concerned about what Carter would do. You know that he
would overturn basically the way the way that things were done. And it's fascinating
to go back and take a look at Carter's speech to the CI eight when
he was shortly after he was inaugurated, because he's he does it in this
sort of gentle Carter way, but it's it's a really challenging speech basically saying
that, you know, there has to be reformed, so you know,
it's it's fascinating that there was a whole moment of questioning and reform, a
sort of spirit of reform, and yeah, this issue just kind of ran
into the brick wall, you know. Nonetheless, mm hmm. And I'd
recommend people read that article. I think it's a really important part of everything
going on. But I think it's probably some insight into what's been happening in
the background that we haven't seen. Also that in other words, there are
probably strong forces in the background completely opposed to transparency in this arena and pushing
there using their weight in ways that we don't see. One of the big
mysteries you've brought up that we, I think a lot of us has talked
about is the absence of Air Force at involvement with any of what's been going
on. There's been very little. They've spoken to one issue where they said
they thought something that was in the drone, you know, in other words,
saying there one case was Detroit unidentified. They also investigated the F eighteen
Flair videos to make sure that they were not you know, released unlawfully or
in a manner that they shouldn't have been. That's it, though, that's
all we've heard. They really haven't gotten involved at all on the surface,
but you know, who knows what sort of movement's been going on in the
background. Yeah, and the interesting thing is if you look at the kinds
of if you look at Christopher mellins a wish list, so to speak.
He's written a few pieces now and he's got one where he really just kind
of enumerates a bunch of different platforms and capabilities, and many of them are
Air Force capabilities explicitly. So you know, it seems as if on the
inside there's a desire to tap into data sets and expertise that might be in
the Air Force. And what we don't know is how cooperative the Air Force
has been with that interest, if they're outright blocking it, or if maybe
at this point they're cooperative. It's so quiet, there's kind of no way
to go, no way to know. But yeah, as you point out
in that silence, it's sort of a strange silence because clearly this is the
domain that they're tasked with, is protecting our airspace, So you would expect
to see some leadership. To me, just as someone who kind of watches
the inter branch rivalries and those sorts of issues from a policy perspective. It's
surprising because they risk ceding leadership to the Navy, which has always been one
of their chief rivals. So it's sort of not a good look for them
in a way that the go to place for all of these things is always
OW and I. You know, why is that the case? And you
know, I think down the road there might be some budgetary considerations with that
if O and I proves itself to be the most innovative, But it's also
recruiting because you know the young person that's interest and STEM and you know,
programming and all, you know, all these sort of technological things. You
know, it might be Oh and I has the more exciting story to tell
right now in terms of the work that they do than the Air Force does.
So that bright kid is maybe going to think about a career in the
Navy instead of the Air Force. So yeah, So one of the pieces
I wrote was sort of pointing that out and saying, hey, this is
an opportunity actually to take some take the leadership rings and really contribute. Yeah,
that is one aspect of this whole thing. That is supposedly what got
tommed Along's foot in the door in that he approached the military. He says,
you know, to tell them, hey, you're not looking good to
the kids. You know, if you really want to attract the younger people,
I think you really got to tackle some of these areas they're interested in,
like UFOs. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be have been picked up.
I think that's a great opportunity for TTSA, the entertainment side, to
maybe work with the military to kind of, you know, sex up how
they're seen. That hasn't happened. But I agree with you that is a
good angle, and maybe the Navy thought that was a good angle. I
know in my experience, even some of the NASA PR or some of the
other science publicists people I've worked with, like that angle. You know,
they're not afraid to go to the UFO route and use that as something to
get people interested in. The scientists, of course, are much more hesitant
to do so. But it's a good angle. The issue is, it
seems as though the Navy has now started to change its tune a bit as
far as transparency, because the last couple of you know, at least one
of the messages I think by glass El, the Swedish researcher got was from
the Navy, and the Navy even was speaking to how a lot of their
findings will be classified, and they even you know, put in this mention
of questioning whether Aleisonder was part of a hip again, which is so weird
because that's an established, i think, a pretty well established fact with first
hand you know, witnesses, people who would know, like Harry Reid who
started for the people who worked on the program. So it's almost like they're
they're in their tune now and that I'm a little that the trend part of
this thing is is maybe getting in the mix. Yeah, it's certainly possible.
I mean, I think an important thing to remember always with government in
the military is that it's never monolithic. You know, people have different ideas
attitudes, and there often are kind of wrestling matches in the background, if
you will, about whose ideas are going to prevail. And so you know,
we may be seeing some shift in that where people who maybe prefer a
quieter approach are are getting a little bit more of their way. It's very
very difficult to say, I think overall though, I mean, you know,
in the last few weeks and months, yes, it does seem like
there may be a bit of a shift, but I think overall it's still
in a fairly unprecedented place in terms of you know, they have this request
to from the Senate Intelligence Committee, you know, the D and I,
it seems, is going to have to the Director of National Intelligence is going
to have to speak on this issue. Another thing that I pointed out in
that Air Force piece that does apply here too. There is a curious thing
if you compared Christopher Mellon's blueprint with what ended up actually in the official language.
So Melan I think had a like an eighteen month timeline. It was
considerably longer than the short timeline in the Senate Intelligence Committee. And a lot
of people have asked you, is that enough time actually to do this job?
And it makes me wonder that if there's a hearing someday, there's going
to be a D and I that's you know, sitting in front of them,
and if he or she doesn't have an adequate answer, the next question
is going to be why who's holding things up right? Why aren't we able
to solve this problem? That we know has been around at least sixteen years
if we just look at limits, and that puts some pressure because you don't
want to be the person left holding the bag of holding things up, so
because you're going to get some uncomfortable questions from the Senate, and that has
massive ramifications in terms of the budget and so on. So you're right in
that, like publicly and we as researchers and journalists and and interested citizens,
we may be getting less, but there's still an overall kind of chessboard that
points to there being increased pressure that I think there's going to have to be
some sort of a response to, right, And I think that at least
the public side of things. Rodrigo brings up a great point here. He
says, I'm very impressed with the fact that the UFO issue hasn't become more
politicized, actually, and I think that's at the crux, and that's what
I'm trying to argue right now, is that I think that politician nobody really
knows the strength of the UFO lobby and the effect that it may or may
not have. And I think that's kind of the biggest issue in that do
they have to play politics to this or not. And do they see the
needle move at all when they do make comments or not. I'm guessing not.
So. For instance, with Marco Rubio answered that question about you know,
the way he did about all of this, saying that, you know,
I kind of hope they are aliens because it's scary if it's Russian or
Chinese. You know. Did he get a big response to that answer or
not. I'm guessing no. But that's the sort of thing that are you
know, people who feel like they're UFO activists, which I feel like a
lot of the UFO community does, needs to make their voices heard because I
think that there's a lot of people that you know, a lot of UFO
articles do really well in mainstream media. That shows there's people interested in reading
this story doesn't, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're interested in, you
know, petitioning more transparency in this arena. We could get to a point
where the military says, okay, we take UAP seriously. We're now telling
you this is a real phenomena. So there's something happening here, but we've
got it covered. We can't share with you everything we've discovered, but we've
got it covered, end the story. I mean, that's the scenario I'm
guessing that we're headed towards, and without the public a strong public response,
it's probably where we're going to go. Yeah, I think I think that's
a distinct possibility. I think you're right that there's While these things are popular,
you know, the stories get a lot of clicks and views and so
on, that doesn't mean there's a UFO vote out there. You know that
a politicians really got to wrangle with. And the other thing to consider too
is we may be in just about the noisiest and most chaotic political environment in
modern memory. I mean, twenty twenty is as a heck of a year.
So if you're trying to register whether UFOs make a dent in the twenty
other things, it's hard to know that. So yeah, I mean I'm
also a bit skeptical, you know, of the idea that there's going to
be a meaningful grassroots movement that's able to really pressure individual politicians. I think
that can happen. I think a better strategy is to point out the obvious
seriousness of the issue. So, for example, in past statements, you
know, the Pentagon spokesperson has said they're trying to avoid a strategic surprise.
So to me, when I hear a phrase like strategic surprise, that's a
that's a primal scream in national security terms, because what that means is,
all of a sudden, one day, we wake up and we find out
someone has a game changing technology and we missed it. And that means that
you know, billions of dollars of intelligence funding alone just to catch our rivals
when they're developing new things didn't work. And then also we don't have that
capability that someone else does. So again, before you even get into the
kind of stranger aspect aspects of some of these cases, you know, we
should be really concerned that we've got a potential strategic surprise scenario that's been left
open for sixteen years. That's a very long time to be surprised. So
I think that, you know, the better argument to make is, you
know, not so much that there's a there's a huge vote out there that
you know, demands to get the truth, but rather like this is an
incredibly serious issue. It appears there's been no discernible policy, We have no
real idea what the heck is going on. So you know, it's it's
incumbent to to get some kind of a response at least just to kind of
to know that that that strategic surprise is off the table. So yeah,
I mean, I think there's going to have to be a multiplicity of angles.
But yes, I agree with you that the THEUFO vote, it's it's
always important. I don't want to discount it because I mean, it can
make an impact, but I think that that alone is not necessarily going to
get the job done. And yeah, I mean I think it's essentially,
you know, what we've got as an admission of what we already knew,
but at least it is public and out there, and you know, we
all know, and it makes sense that there would be these weird desks,
you know, people and intelligence agencies that are working on cases that are strange,
that are anomalists, you know, which are the kind of the cross
section of science where science comes into research these sort of things. And I
think that, you know, it's just we're moving to a world hopefully where
it's at least okay to admit that. Yeah, but it's what we need
to force. I think that it's a harder sell and you know what we
all want, and I think even I'm guessing what Chris Mellan was driving was
also to have a portion where they're also sharing with the public at least somewhat
findings and giving an update. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I wrote a
piece a while back about understanding that that UFO or UAP are not one thing.
There are at least four different things, right, So you know,
UFO or UAP, as it's often said, is just means it's something you
can't identify in the sky. It's unidentified, right, So it's it's categorically
not a thing in of itself, it's something else. So it could be
a natural phenomenon that's just you know, a mistaken observation. It could be
an experimental aircraft, for example, one of ours. It could be a
foreign adversary, or there's that fourth category that everyone gets excited about, that
it could be something truly strange and exotic. And so to me, the
question is, well, what's the distribution, right, So how we know
that at least some percentage of sightings are just people not understanding what they're seeing.
No one's going to claim that's everything necessarily, but it's certainly not nothing.
So you kind of go down the list, and I think you have
to have some comfort in being able to examine these different possibilities and really see
what they are, especially because of the kind of drone proliferation and everything else
that we discussed previously. We just don't have the luxury of living in a
world where it's just planes. You know, we have new satellite technologies,
all these new things. So yeah, I think it's it's incumbent on us
to be able to have a mature conversation when we see something in the sky
we can't identify, to figure it out, as opposed to lapsing into the
you know, into the uncomfortable jokes and you know, all the rest of
it. M So somebody asking, we'll ask why are they called UAP and
not UFOs anymore, which is a great question. I think what a lot
of people don't realize UFOs, who a lot of the public unfortunately, means
aliens or alien spacecraft, and that's not what it means. I mean unidentified
flying objects. It was actually a term coined by the military because they were
using flying saucer, which obviously has some other connotations with it and assumptions.
But now even though we moved to UFO for that reason. With all the
baggage that the term UFO has, scientists and serious researchers have migrated to this
term UAP. I know that Nick Pope says they've been using it in the
UK for quite a while, but I think it was actually started by night
not NIGHTCAP, another group, NARCAP, another organization led by doctor Richard Haynes,
who was investigating pilot UFO cases. But anyways, it was kind of
a more acceptable term for the scientific community. I think it. To me,
it was always kind of silly when you have to explain what's the UAP,
You're gonna have to say a UFO. But I've learned from experience that
the scientific community, if you use the term UFO, a lot of people
will just turn off. So you've got to use this term UAP, and
so that's kind of where we've evolved to. Yeah, I mean, I
think I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think the problem is
that over time, whatever the new acronym is, it becomes just as laden
with the baggage as the old acronym. There's just a little bit of a
momentary pause as someone figures out what it actually means, where you've got an
opportunity, you know, to get through some of that accumulated stigma and everything
else. But I mean, I certainly can't speak for the scientific community,
but like I'm scientifically trained, to me, it is silly too. I
look at it, as you know, clearly these are acronyms for essentially the
same thing, something in the sky we can't identify, you know. So
so let's let's move on beyond that. But I think there's always these kind
of pr repackaging and reimagining of the thing to try to get around the taboo.
M So, in this new world where UAPs are acceptable, where it's
you know, it's it's out there, that the US is looking into the
matter and takes the matter seriously, I think what interesting as far as a
result, is that at least now we have another country, another Secretary of
Defence in Japan, you know, a strong, strong ally and a strong
world power now also saying Okay, the US takes it seriously, We're going
to take it seriously to and I've instructed you know, our military, our
security defense forces on how to deal with UAP. However, and this is
a weird however, and I really doubt it to be honest, however,
we've never had a UAP experience, but we'll definitely keep an eye out and
we'll let you know if we do. So it's great that they're taking it
seriously in this manner. It's very peculiar because I don't think I've ever heard
a government military say they've never had a UAP situation. Many many governments have
said they've had many, if not, you know, they've had some,
if not many. What do you make of that? Boy, It is
a really really complicated context. So the first thing to to kind of take
a bigger picture view right of Japan. So unknown things in the sky are
a really big deal in Japan for a lot of reasons. So in the
nineties, for example, there were a series of North Korean missile tests that
were just completely shocked the country. It ended up instigating a huge number of
intelligence and military reforms. It was this kind of wake up call that they're
in a somewhat vulnerable position and can be potentially attacked. And today the issue
is mostly aerial incursions from China. So I think last year there was somewhere
in the order of about a thousand aerial incursions a little bit less than that
in twenty nineteen. I would say twenty twenty is about on track for that.
So this issue of like really knowing what's in the sky and what's going
on is not just a fun kind of like UFO thing, it's a survival
imperative and the issue has come up several times at very high level. So
interestingly, in two thousand and seven and twenty fifteen, the parliament in Japan,
the Diet, actually formally raised this question of what is the UFO policy,
you know, as Japan ever encountered UFOs, and both times someone at
a ministerial level, so for us, like a cabinet level official actually had
to answer this question. And yes, the answer was sort of strange.
It was, no, we haven't experienced any. But in the two thousand
and seven case they also said there were no grounds to dismiss it either,
so the door was kind of left open. And then I think in subsequent
years it's become a little bit more of no, there hasn't been, you
know, any particular UAP or UFO encounter, but you know, but the
government is looking at it. And then recently what changed was the Minister of
Defense Kono in twenty twenty essentially pointed to the Pentagon video releases and said,
you know, he actually even said, I personally don't believe in UFOs,
but the DD has released this video, so I'm paraphrasing now, but I'd
like to talk to them and understand what they make of it, what the
analysis is. And from there the question turned to just what the heck do
you do if you encounter UFO because the normal protocols would be, you know,
if there's something coming into your airspace, which literally this is almost a
daily occurrence that an aircraft aggressively flies into their airspace, you know, you
you call it on radio, and then there's an escalation of things. You
know, you may shoot tracer rounds at it or whatever and try to force
it to land. Well should you do that with the UFO? And it
sounds like a sort of silly question, but that that has become precisely you
know, the issue, and so yeah, a few weeks ago, I
mean rather famously now it got to the point where Minister Kono actually spoke to
Secretary of Defense esper In Guam on this question. And we don't quite know
exactly what the nature of that conversation was. But it seems that the outcome
in Japan is a new policy to you know, sort of photograph take as
many records as possible, sort of similar in similarly mirroring the UAPTF in some
respects. So, yeah, it's an incredibly strange story in terms of trying
to understand where does this interest come from, you know, where where is
it all going. But it's been really really fascinating to watch MM and it
makes sense that they would want to partner with the United States, at least
in the conversation on the military side, which we've talked quite a bit about,
which is to identify technologies and you know that are emerging technologies that are
being used like drones for these incursions, and no doubt they would want some
help with that as much help that as they can get, especially like you
said here in their prequarious situation where they're having these you know, rather heated
kind of encounters with China. Yeah, I mean, Japan in general is
in a sort of at a strategic crossroads of trying to figure out, you
know, do they try to keep to the alliance with the United States,
which has been fankly shaky in the last few years, just with a general
kind of retrenchment of just international interests. I guess in the United States,
there's really no polite way to put it. Do they try to go it
on their own? There are massive problems. It's important to remember too,
that the Constitution of Japan is kind of unique. In that Article nine says
that Japan pretty much forever renounces war as a means to settle international disputes,
and that it can't constitutionally cannot develop a military that's capable of conducting wars.
It's intentionally supposed to be a self defense only kind of construct. Now over
the years that has changed, and it's become murky as to whether or not
there's really an adherence to that. That's always a live, really serious domestic
conversation in Japan about whether Japan should maybe even someday change that and actually have
a military again. So, you know, did get back to the strategic
question. If they're not going to be with the United States and they're going
to try to stand on their own, they need to like change the constitution,
triple the defense budget. They need to develop all these capabilities that frankly
they really don't have. The third option, which is alarming to consider,
but stranger things have happened, would be realigning with China, and in fact,
there was actually some concern about that. After the United States withdrew from
TPP the Transpacific Trade Agreement, Prime Minister Abe at the time actually okayed participation
in a large Chinese logistics program, sort of signaling it was sort of a
warning shot basically to say that, you know, if the United States isn't
serious about the alliance, well maybe Japan will will shift the equation. So
and all of that is going to be in the mind of Esper and Cono
in a conversation like that in Guam. They're going to be thinking primarily about
the balance of power in East Asia, you know, not about UFOs.
UFOs are going to be sort of a side issue. And what I and
I think many other people have been trying to figure out is, well,
why exactly is it that Kno knows that you know, twice in recent history
someone in his position has been asked about UFOs in parliament, and so he
ought to have an answer that could be a reason why another answer might be
as we talked about before, you know, a good UFO program has to
look at foreign capabilities. Maybe it's a way to try to better understand China's
capabilities. You know, we don't know, but but there's some sort of
a strategic calculus there. And I'm just waiting for a good reporter out there
to find out a little more about what happened in that conversation. Mm hmm.
Mcwest has come a people in the chatter saying they noticed that you've gotten
to some Twitter debates with him. Mickwest is a I guess a former or
maybe even current game He makes games, video games so successful there, and
he's also kind of a skeptic and that he's been doing his and I don't
mean this to put him down, but it's amateur, you know, kind
of investigation into the Flear videos, of which she's not convinced that they're that
strange. I guess people are wondering, what do you make of your conversations
with him? Well, it's a great question, so believe it or not.
Mick was probably one of the first people I actually talked to, you
know, on Skype when I was investigating all of this stuff starting out,
and we had a great conversation. I personally like Mick. At times it
may seem like our conversations are pretty sharp elbowed, but I think the reason
for that is we both kind of come from an intellectual tradition that when you're
debating, you need to be really clear, and you're maybe less concerned about
hurting the other person's feelings as you are about kind of laying out what the
logic is. So I think that you know, mixed general approach of trying
to take independent pieces of evidence and to ask questions of them is fine.
It's actually it's a useful way of trying to interrogate, you know, the
data that we have available to us. There are some places where I kind
of depart from him in terms of his general approach. So I think for
my case, mixed analysis gets a little bit shaky when he is trying to
kind of say, well, what if the object was smaller than it seemed
to be, how would that impact the perception of the pilots. Well,
unless there's a particular reason to think that was the case, some evidence that
tells you that, then well what if it was? You know, what
if? Right? You can you can sort of drown in what if questions
and I have the same response to the questions about you know, radar glitches
and so on. I think we can actually look into that question. You
know, if there were glitches, is there any evidence that there was,
and there's you could build a theory of the case of what the bug would
look like, and kind of, you know, try try to see if
you can find anything to corroborate that. I think instead, what's happening is
is Mick is he often describes it this way. He's constructing a list of
possible explanations, and he's trying and he's evaluating how likely each one is,
and clearly, in his mind, something that's physics defying, you know,
really unknown is at the absolute bottom of the list. No debate with that.
The problem though, is that when you use that to kind of say,
well, it couldn't possibly have been this, and so therefore, you
know, an incredibly unlikely series of events is more likely than this infinitesimally likely
exotic craft thing. So there's some some issues in the logic there where I
think you have to be a little bit more attentive to the record itself.
But anyway, I hope that answers it. They're they're long discussions. I
know they're exhausting sometimes to watch, but but I will say this, they
help it. I am sure you do. I sometimes do too. But
as as migraine inducing as they can sometimes be, they help you to understand
the record better. They help you to understand exactly what the live questions are.
I wrote my first FOYA based on a conversation with Mick because it became
very clear there was a, you know, particular piece of evidence that if
we had it, it would really be important. So, you know,
I think that I would recommend the UFO community look at Mick as an ally
in disguise, because he is going to fight your arguments as hard as he
possibly can, and it's it's going to help you get to know the case
better. So yeah, I agree with that aspect of it. And in
that sense that's where debate can become helpful. But it also can waste your
time, I think, and that's one of the biggest problems that I think
that unfortunately, And you know, I think it's great that he gets the
attention that I'm sure he's loving, but I think it's completely wasting so many
people's times. I mean, I think he needs to create a list of
questions for the experts. The problem with when you're examining something that you have
very low expertise on, you don't know what you don't know, and it's
especially frustrating when then you argue with the experts against what their expert opinion when
you don't have that expertise. That's gets me really frustrating. Yeah, yeah,
I can. I can definitely understand that. I think those issues come
up, you know, frankly, epistemic humility. You know, admitting what
we don't know is a big issue. I think for many researchers from different
traditions. I can say that as someone you know, coming from an academic
discipline, you find that among you know, researchers is not just journalists and
people like Mick who are just really passionately interested in this. So you do
have to check that. Yeah, I mean, my, my, my
only real complaint with Mick is that sometimes when I've asked him about the implications
of his beliefs of well, what does it tell us about our defense readiness
for example, or the state of you know, the military. If this
very easily resolved thing has not been resolved for sixteen years and it has turned
into multimillion dollar programs, and that's something that you know, typically when I
bring that up, people will say something like, well, you know,
the defense world spends so much money. What's a few million dollars. Well,
if you do the math, it's many many school lunches. You know,
money is money, right, So just because it's a small percentage of
the budget doesn't mean that those resources. If Mick is right, and this
is all, you know, a fool's errand that could have been used elsewhere.
Because what Mick tends to do is to say, no, I think
the military is very smart and they sort of understand all of these issues,
and they in fact agree with me, and it's just kind of silly civilians.
I think he said at one point that are interjecting themselves. I just
don't think there's any factual basis for that. I think I think that you
have to really kind of reconcile with the implications of your views. So but
I think what he's trying to do is he's more interested in the debate,
right, I mean, he wants to, you know, to kind of
get into the fray. Intellectually, I think he's a little less concerned about
the policy side of that, and frankly that's fine. I mean, he
doesn't need to be worried about that in order to make, you know,
some kind of a contribution. The last thing maybe i'll say about Mick West
and about kind of the exhausting aspect of it is, you know, I
started writing about this subject this year in the late spring, so for me,
a lot of this is new. So you know, the benefit I
get from the debate is it's a way for me to learn the case.
Really for some others who have gone through countless iterations of this, particularly the
military witnesses, I don't blame them. It is a waste of their time.
But you know, from time to time, you know, Mick and
I do like to have our conversation so speaking, Yeah, definitely, and
you don't want to infer into a debate with someone like without knowing your stuff
or like you said, I agree, that's definitely a good way to get
catch up to speed on definitely the minutiae regarding yeah, all of this which
is important to understand. Yeah, it's an opportunity to learn. It really
sincerely mean that it's an opportunity to learn. And if you take it from
that perspective, I think I think it actually can be a useful thing.
The key is just not, you know, in any kind of debate,
is getting really emotionally involved can be you know, can be destructive as frustrating
as all this stuff is. H So, uh, the next I mean,
where we move on, I think is which interesting and which interesting is?
You know, you're talking about how he talked about the silly civilians that
are kind of coming in, But that's really not the focus of what's so
interesting about what's going on because it is a government military, uh sort of
interaction that we are observing that we're we're watching here with the Navy coming out
and saying this is a real thing, that we're paying attention to, the
Air Force saying essentially no comment, the Senate getting involved in saying, hey,
this is a real thing. Then let us in on what the heck's
going on here and create a central, you know, location for this information
to be examined. All of which and and it kind of that last point
being a pretty uh, you know, important evolution of and to you know,
just that feed alone in being able to move past the stigma and to
at least established an organization to look at unknowns, even if you're looking at
it from the perspective of kind of what we've heard the Press Office kind of
spin it as is that we're looking at drones and other technologies. That's an
important step. I mean, that's a good thing to have happen. But
the next step is the Knimmets cases. So you know, Nimets is a
case where they're admitting that this is an unidentified despite all of their best efforts
and their analysis which we haven't seen by their experts as to why they think
those videos demonstrate, you know, there's unidentified And I'm sure they take into
account radar data and witness testimony and other things like in that executive summary that
we've seen, and we'll get to that. But so where do we go
from here? Is what happens? I think to those unidentified those cases like
the Knimts, where does that data go? What's going to happen with that
data? Really? I think the only mention of what may happen. Roger
Glassel essentially asked that of Susan Goff. I guess that's how you say it.
But the DoD p IO and she says it'll remain classifying essentially, and
I think that's kind of the crux of the issue really what it comes down
to. And even in Phenomenon, which I got to see a screener,
great film by James Fox. I can't wait for everybody to see. It's
coming out October sixth, Chris Mellen makes the point that you know, these
are the interesting things, These are what we want to look at. This
is what really the message should be. Which is interesting to hear this from
him is that he feels the most important thing in all of this is that
these unidentified are happening. We have a true, genuine mystery here and that's
the point. But that mystery, where does it go? In other words,
Okay, we've got this UAP group, they're going to look for potential
threats, and but what happened to the Nimitz cases? Yeah, that's a
well boy, there's so many aspects of that to look at, right of
So what happens to a case like nimics in terms of public awareness of it
is always going to be problematic because I mean, even today there are many
people that assert that you know, there's there's data sets produced by radar and
other kinds of instruments, that would back up, you know, witnesses,
but we don't have access to them. We're basically it's almost impossible to get
access to those data sets because they reveal, you know, key things about
our collections capabilities, even though this event happened a long time ago. So
those kinds of limits are always going to be there, right, So we
shouldn't expect that we're going to get the you know, the radar data or
something of that nature. But at the same time, I think that there
are ways to make productions of data that are responsible but that are also helpful.
So, for example, at the moment, I don't think any of
us know how many incidents have there been, how many of these cases have
even been examined. We don't have a kind of a statistical account that you
very easily could do. You could write up a report that would have tables
that would tell you absolutely nothing about our radar capabilities or anything else, or
even where these things happened, but it would least give us a sense of
the order of magnitude. You know, are we talking about something that happens
once a year, once every five years, or once a month. It'd
be really helpful to know that are we seeing an increase in the number of
these things or a decrease or is it flat? We don't know any of
that right now, so I think from a policy perspective, I mean,
we don't have that basic information that would tell us how significant of an issue
is this really? Just how much is it happening? And I think that
those sorts of things could actually very easily be addressed in a way that's completely
respectful of security concerns. So to me, that would be the first step,
and then I think from there we just have to see what the data
actually is. And you know, if we are seeing a lot of incidents
and they're increasing and you know, the military is struggling to make sense of
them. While that might be an argument that the scientific community, the wider
scientific community needs to be more involved in this issue than they have been.
So we'll have to proceed carefully bit by bit, But I don't think anyone
should be looking for you know, we're gonna get the high resolution videos in
the radar anytime soon. I think we've got to to start a little bit
more slowly. But the good news is is that I think it's very possible
to make those steps. MM hmm. Now you know, this document that
we you know, we're kind of tweeting about recently and we've been talking about
that was leaked by George Knapp doesn't seem to get a whole lot of attention.
When it came out, I immediately jumped on it and wrote a couple
of articles about it because I thought it was extremely important and weird, and
that we have this alleged summary, you know, of the Knimit situation that
was leaked by George Knapp. He didn't give us much except to say that
it was written by the military for the military. Essentially, everyone assumed it
was created by Bass and I could understand that because I did too. When
you read it, it reads more like a non military person wrote it,
and some of the speculation in it is pretty astounding. It we should probably
explain that aside from the content of the document, it's the formatting of it
too. So the formatting doesn't it doesn't match any kind of of a formal
US government product. And yes, there's there's use of particular acronyms that don't
appear, you know, in the Pentagon Dictionary and so on, which normally
you know in a formal product. They are quite careful to make sure that
the vocabulary, you know, matches and all that. So before you even
get into the rather incredible account that you're reading, just the way the document
looks tells you this isn't a regular, you know, military document. Mm
hmm. But Loui Alessandro at least is confirmed to me that it was military,
written by the military for the military. Uh. And he gave me
the perception that it definitely it was not Bass, you know, I asked
Leslie Kane. She told me, I'm not sure who wrote it, but
she saw it was part of the information she saw when she helped write the
New York Times article. And then later she made a comment that it was
part of the Bass files, so it was something they had just not necessarily
something they wrote. And then Tim McMillan, another investigator who's got some incredible
sources, says he's been told it wasn't It wasn't an OENI document, So
it was written by intelligence, which it does read to me more like an
intelligence document than the military document. But what it gives us is some interesting
insight into I guess the thought process of whoever wrote it, whether that be
intelligence, that you know, they were speculating along the lines of that,
you know, perhaps this object came out of a larger object that was out
of the water or under the water. I mean, some really strange,
kind of really out there kind of of possibilities that they were considering. I
mean, it's an interesting document, it is, and as one I mean,
not to bring mack up again, but one that I'm very familiar with
because when you start to talk about the details of what happened, it's one
of the few documents that we have where you can actually go through it and
kind of understand blow by blow and see a more kind of raw account from
the pilots. You know, exactly what they saw and when and so on.
And also it does a nice job of describing some of the different technological
platforms that were involved, so the different radar systems and things like that.
So that's how I'm familiar with. It is just one of the better accounts
that we have. So I think two other things maybe to mention about it
is that it seemed it was written about five years after the event as far
as we know, I think around two thousand and nine. And yes,
as Tim Tim McMillan said, in his best understanding is that it was written
by an o NI analyst, but an unofficial capacity, so that kind of
explains why it is not an official looking document. However, it was apparently
some sort of a preliminary attempt to try to understand understand this incident. But
yeah, I mean, it's it's remarkable because it does assess that these were
physically real objects, you know, they were not optical illusions or hologram systems
or advanced countermeasures or many of the other things that come up. And then
as you say, yes, it makes some pretty interesting claims about the relationship
between some of the things in the water and the things that we're flying.
Yeah, it's it's it's a it's a it's a pretty incredible document to me.
What I find interesting is that that that apparently this process started with such
an unofficial document that that was ever involved in the process in the first place,
and that may speak to the kind of condition that the you know,
the UA p u FO program was at the time, that there really wasn't
a well funded effort to really, you know, formally study this, but
rather someone kind of did their best to put together an analysis and kind of
make the case that it was important that that itself is pretty striking to me.
Yeah, so there is somebody who's Kevin Childress, who I know has
been around the UFO community for a very long time. He says he worked
as a DOE Special Agent Department of Energy, and he said this is he's
not surprised by this, the way the document looks at all. He says,
it's a standard deductive prose format used for investigation reports. Yeah, it
absolutely is. And I mean when I look at it, you see you
know it's got it's got kind of an executive summary type format where you've got
key assessments on the front page. I mean, that's very much in line
with what an intelligence product does you know, into your comment before about speculation,
well, you know, oftentimes intelligence requires looking at things that you can't
draw definitive conclusions, but nonetheless you have to be able to at least make
some working assumptions about what's going on. So to me, it was very
much in keeping with that. It's just the first question was, well,
it's not formal, and we knew that Bass was involved, so it's sort
of plausible that perhaps a Basque contractor had written the document originally. But yeah,
I mean this is an example where the online discussion actually when I think
several researchers pulled their insights, it seems the picture has shifted a bit now
that it's more definitively you know, an O and I product. The informality
of it is really interesting too, because I think the you know, if
you look at the narrative and what happened with Nimtz, it was informal,
the entire thing was, and it kind of speaks to what Colonel John Alexander,
who as an insider very Intelligence had his own informal investigation regarding UFOs and
UFO cover reps. Conclusion was that government or military is extremely inept and unable
to deal with this issue. And he's just kind of claimed that we've bungled
it and we ignore it. And if you examine the KNIMT situation, given
that document or witness testimony, that's kind of what we have here. Kevin
Day, a radar operator in charge supervisor, you know, is seeing these
anomalies for several days, and only after several days finally he says, can
I get somebody to go take a look at these? They say, okay,
and he's able to scramble, you know, get Fravor and the rest
of the guys scrambled, and they have the tic tac situation occur. Fraverer
gets back, another guy Underwood, I guess, says I'm gonna go get
that thing on camera, and they're like, yeah, right, he does.
And then this documents written up in an informal matter, and I think
that, you know, Brian Bender with Political has been making the argument this
whole a tip program is not as big as you guys think. It's very
it was, and he's right, this is something foisted upon the Pentagon by
Harry Reid. It's not something they wanted to do on themselves. So all
of this is almost informal, and in my experience looking at this topic,
there's a history of that. In fact, all the Bigelow group, Eric
Davis how put off, they've all been trying to get the government in there
to look at these things more seriously, and in order to do that,
have a lot of these informal kind of where interested parties in the government are
doing this, taking it upon themselves to really look into these things as much
as they can, but not part of some kind of formal organ manner.
And you know, to me, that's pretty insightful into how the military has
been dealing with all of this. Yeah, and you know, it sounds
strange because I think we tend to have this idea of American military power.
Intelligence power is absolute, absolute, you know, it's the best funded military
in the world, and it has exquisite capabilities to be sure it does.
However, it gets a lot of things wrong, you know, or it
fails to pay attention to important things. I mean, we have had,
you know, significant intelligence failures in regular sorts of issues. So it's not
at all surprising that in something strange and something that could be frankly harmful to
someone's career, Yeah, that there would be a lack of attention to it.
And I agree that there are a lot of troubling signs that that has
been the case, that this has never been really handled all that formally,
at least as far as we've been able to see. And that brings up
the question we were talking about earlier, of the pressure and the kind of
questions that need to be raised. So it's not me saying that there's an
issue of strategic surprise. It was Depententon spokesperson saying, this whole program is
designed to prevent strategic surprise. Okay, if we're talking about strategic survive,
we're talking about an existential threat potentially from a military perspective. So it just
certainly does not follow that the way that you treat a potential existential matter is
with a couple of intelligence people, and you know, it has no real
clear reporting mechanism and no real strategy, no real metrics that It's just not
how you handle a matter like that. And I think that that's something that
we have to keep in mind as we're going forward, is keep the perspective
on this of if this really is something truly unknown, it's it's actually important
to get to the bottom of it. It's not just a fun kind of
navel gazing thing, and the policy has to be, you know, commensurately
serious, and hopefully we'll see that. I mean, it seems like what's
happening now is at least an attempt to do that, and it remains to
be seen, you know, how robust and how long lived that attempt's going
to be. But I think a lot of that on us, and I
think we've talked about this before, but I think this is why this has
gotten so far, and I do want to speak to this. Kevin Childress
to the guy who worked with DOE, says, you would only be allowed
to investigate if it's in the scope of your responsibility. Agents don't have free
reign to investigate whatever they want. True, however, Elizondo said, you
know, it was something he was given permission to look at. Not only
that when it comes to O and I intelligence, just to the point you
just made, that would justify their involvement in that they're examining, you know,
a potential threat an unidentified object. The concern was that there weren't mechanisms
in place where Kevin Day shouldn't have to after day five or six, you
know, say hey, can we scramble something to look at this. There
should have been procedures in place at day one. We have this unknown we
need to check these out. Yeah. Well, and getting back to the
to the Japanese question, which is, you know, they're regularly dealing with
aircraft trying to come into their territory, and they have those protocols about how
they respond to get on the radio, and eventually, if it goes bad
enough long enough, you start shooting at it. So it raises the question
of, well, what should the rules of engagement ben for Commander Fraber in
that situation. I mean, he was in a situation where he was met
with something he could not identify, and he, you know, under his
own wherewithal, made the decision to try to get a better look at it.
But you know, maybe there ought to be some parameters on what you
should do. I mean, maybe you shouldn't maneuver too violently, or maybe
you shouldn't you know, do anything that may be threatening. I mean,
it sounds a little funny discussing it, but I mean apparently it's a live
question because it happened, you know, and these are all issues that have
to be worked out. And one of my really growing concerns the longer that
I've looked at this is that the taboo and the stigma interferes with those conversations,
that it just sort of shuts down the thinking because everyone gets stuck at
the level of well is this real, is it alien, or is you
know whatever, and that makes you gloss over a bunch of really important technical
questions about what what do you do when you're confronted with that situation? Because
there are you know, there's a lot of details you have to work through,
and if you're always stuck at is it aliens, you're never going to
to kind of get to those. So I'm hoping the longer this goes,
too, the more the community too is looking at things like drones and becoming
more familiar with it. We're kind of, I think, all getting an
education in this defense space and realizing, well, it's not as easy as
just aliens, you know, or whatever, right because for instance, you
know this situation, it could be drones, and I would guess that is
a lot of the thinking of like the Senate Intelligence Committee and some of the
other higher ups. They're thinking, Okay, what if those were weaponized drones
that they were encountering and nimit, then we totally bungled that situation. We
would we left ourselves open to damage. And of course now we have just
in the last few days, I ran flying a drone over the limits and
getting pictures of it. So what if that drone was weaponized? I think,
you know, we've considered drones to be toys for so long, and
even these incursions over these nuclear facilities, we've considered them to be toys that
now people this effort is really pushing people towards considering, Hey, we need
to take these all seriously. Yeah, you got a bad time to have
a UFO. Stigma or taboo is when a weird drone is flying over a
nuclear power plant and a guard says, I don't want to report it or
I don't want to deal with it because I'm going to seem like I'm talking
about UFOs because it's just in twenty twenty, you know, we're we're living
in a different world where that could actually be something quite serious that needs to
be dealt with. And I mean, I think there's there's plenty of evidence
that those issues have been you know, have been looked at, but I'm
not sure they've gone as far as perhaps they could have, given the taboo.
And it's an extra dreamely and important, important stream of reporting about that
that I think is actually really underappreciated. Yeah. So, and and I
guess that kind of comes around too, is the future of this Where is
this headed? And I guess you know that'll that's where we'll end up here.
UH will end it because I would like your opinion and uh advice for
people which is that, you know, that's the big hole. That is
the big hole that the military keeps looking at that no doubts and intelligence takes
seriously. The big hole is are we using this? Is this taboo keeping
us from taking a serious look at UA, at drones and other potential technologies
we're not aware of, and are we leaving ourselves open? I think that's
what sold this UAP task for us and and all of this to happen.
The big question is if it does happen, and if they do fill that
hole, thank goodness, because we're all going to be safer for that.
Our military people will all be safer for that. But where does it go
from here? What if we have an interest in some transparent parency regarding the
research of real unidentified Are those going to go in a trash bin? Or
what's going to happen to those who's going to look at them? You know,
where do we go from here? Especially if we are interested in these
true unknowns that could pose and Chris Mellen makes this point in Phenomena could pose
the giant scientific breakthrough. Yeah, I mean that's the thing is that if
there really is something you know, truly exotic and usual going on here,
it's it's the biggest story you know. Ever, essentially it's it's incredibly important.
So you know, at the at a minimum, there would be a
tremendous kind of opportunity cost for not pursuing something so remarkable if there's reason to
think that it's it's really there and it's going on. So I think there's
a couple of different answers. I think. I think at one level that's
what we talked about earlier in terms of setting up pressure for there to be
reports that are maybe conservative in the information that they give out that many people
in the community would like to see pictures and so on. Instead you're going
to get statistical tables. But I can tell you that kind of coming from
the scientific community in a little bit more kind of policy circles that will actually
do more in a way because it will give you a picture that you can
then point to and say, this is happening a a certain amount of regularity
with a certain sort of trend. These are true unknowns, and we can
kind of quantify a little bit of just what the issue actually is. And
then also it makes it easier to make the argument of well, if the
military hasn't solved a case like this in sixteen years, what's to make us
think they're going to solve it in the next three or five. Something isn't
happening, and that something might be, for example, a relationship with a
broader scientific community. It kind of gives an inroad to start making those arguments
of hey, if you want to solve this, and really you must solve
it. Given the strategic environment that we're in, you're going to need to
bring in more people, and yes, it's going to be difficult for you
to do that, but there's ways to go about it. So that's one
is this is becoming, you know, it seems an international issue in the
sense that at least the Japanese are looking at it. We've heard some comments
from from Muel Zondo, you know, mostly on social media, but nonetheless
saying that an international strategy is something that TTSA is considering. It remains to
be seen exactly what that would look like. But if we start to head
into a world where there's a little bit more cooperation on these issues, and
that's probably a whole other hour or two that we could do, that has
a potential too for shifting the dynamic because it no longer becomes just an American
security issue, but it becomes kind of a broader issue. So I think
there's you know, there's multiple moving pieces here. And again, just for
context, it's like, we're, what thirty nine days from the election,
and so you know the question of who's going to sit in the Director of
National Intelligence chair is very much an open question, let alone Secretary of Defense
and all the rest. So there's a huge amount of kind of like political
calculation that's going to happen in the next I don't know, forty to fifty
days that's going to really have a major bearing on all of this stuff too.
So it kind of makes sense that things are a little murky, I
think at the moment. And I would say it's murky too what effect any
administration change will have. We don't know how friendly or unfriendly you know,
any administration is towards this. Childress has another question I think that you might
find interesting or a comment. He says, my personal opinion is decades of
deception or perhaps ineptitude, have created massive systemic problems that pervade government and commerce
beyond UFO, And I added the neptitude he says decades of deception, but
yet it is this issue systemic. Maybe that's why major campaigns like melons orness
theory. Yeah, I think I don't know that I would necessarily say deception
exactly, but I think that's basically right and that there are some systemic issues.
So in fact, one of the projects I've been working on I've been
kind of doing an experiment to see is I've been kind of reviewing books from
national security literature and history that have nothing to do with UFOs but yet talk
about UFOs. So, for example, I was looking at the Iraq War
and the intelligence issues there, and it's just seeing because you see many of
the similar kinds of problems of something that's been overlooked or it hasn't been taken
seriously, and then all of a sudden it becomes a major problem, and
there's a kind of scramble to come up with an appropriate response. And normally
you would think, you know, there's surely there must be rooms full of
people who work on you know, Iraqi security issues all day long. Well
maybe, but maybe not right, So the history is inevitably more complicated.
So actually, yeah, I do think there's some evidence that there's there's all
kinds of areas that have been neglected, you know, particularly in the technology
space. I guess just to button this one up, I would recommend reading
Christian Brose's The Kill Chain. It's got kind of a rough title, but
it's well worth your read. So it's from a former senior staffer kind of
like a melon sort of figure, but in the Senate Armed Services Committee,
and he wrote an analysis of basically everything that's wrong and kind of defense policy
making right now. It's a scary read. It's an extremely scary read.
So yeah, in short, yeah, there's some reasons I think to be
concerned in more than one policy area at the moment. M m yeah.
And it's kind of funny. It just brings me back to John Alexander's point,
because he's like, he's shocked that people are not open to the idea
that our military can be really kind of inept in this arena whereas you know,
most people are given a given that the government a mess and everything,
but they can't buy it when it comes to UFOs, they think their mastermind.
Except right, we live in this head spinning contradiction. And I mean,
I think the reason is because there's something to that contradiction, like sometimes
at the policy level things go cartoonishly wrong, where it's almost you can't believe
how it's sort of stupid the decision making is. But then on the other
on the other hand, there are also plenty of capabilities that are truly I
mean they call it sometimes exquisite capabilities, meaning that they're so technologically complex,
so advanced that they're they're kind of mind boggling too. So we live in
that contradiction as a country where we're capable of doing profound things and we're also
capable of shooting ourselves in the foot. You know, we do both regularly,
and I think when it comes to the UFO issue, we're left asking,
well, which is it. You know, did someone mastermind the best
cover up of all time? Or or we kind of clueless here, that's
the question. Mm hmmm, Well great, I think we're pretty much out
of time. So glad to have you back. I would say, I
hopefully will have you back again in the future because I love our conversations.
I think that it's I'm very happy that you're now writing about and focusing on
this topic because your insights are very helpful. Thank you so much. Thank
you. I appreciate that these are These are always great. So, yeah,
this is awesome. I look forward to doing more. Yeah, so
we'll have more row Host reports coming up, and you know, I'm definitely
going to be sticking to more of the policy more breaking down government and science
and the institutions, the mainstream institutions, and how not only how they are
affected by all of this, but how you know, those interested in moving
the ball forward, how they do so. So for example, you know
there's there's people like Nick Pope who have worked in government. I'll be interviewing
him next week and we'll be talking similar sort of topics and he has insight
from the mod also have in a couple of weeks Kevin Kanouth, and I
think that's a really important conversation because he's a physics physicist. How does you
know, how do we get this the scientific community to take this more seriously
and the question that you and I were just talking about, how do we
get science, How do we get the data like the Nimtz case that the
real unidentified into the hands of scientists and what scientists to do what with it?
Those sort of things, which is kind of where I think many of
us would like all of this to evolve to so those sort of discussions that
will have so Kevin will be in a couple of weeks and then about three
weeks will have James Fox, whose filmed The Phenomenon, launches on October sixth,
and I highly, highly highly recommend everybody watch it. It puts together
a very compelling argument for for this phenomenon. So it's got a good title,
but I think it's going to be especially eye opening for those people who
are really getting interested in this topic now to show that, you know,
there's a rich history of military interest and involvement in this field and witnessing things
and demonstrates kind of how they've been tackling that over the years. So stay
tuned to the Rowhast reports. Like I said, live versions like this one
will be open for everybody, and then it will go into the archives,
which you just have to push that join button to see. And then of
course if you join on Patreon as the audio level, you'll get those as
an audio also. So thank you again, Adam, and until next time,
we'll talk to you later. All right, thanks, thanks everybody.
Let me play one of my cool outro videos. Here now Here we go