Hello, and welcome to this special edition of Open Mind UFO Radio. I'm
your host, Alejandro Rojas, and I am joined by Martin. I don't
know what to call you, Martin, unidentified willis well, yes, only
because I forgot my license. How did you know that I'm driving without a
license? Wow? That fits. It just came out, and then it
actually applied to the situation. I know. I left my my wallet at
home by accident this morning, So that was I think you're doing like this
teleptofy thing of something I don't know, I don't know going on it.
Wow. The world's a strange place the last few days. I think everybody
would agree with that. I think so, especially with all this news and
everything going on. You still okay, No, I agree. I think
I think you're right. It's so it's really been something, hasn't it.
Yeah, So let's talk about that something, and this show is something.
So I called it a special report some of you may be expecting, because
that is I'm having Leslie Kane on today. You're wrong and I'm so sorry,
and so is Leslie. She was not able to make it, and
so, which is kind of a bummer. Of course, She's really busy.
She's been out there, but the holidays and a bunch of other stuff
came up and she had the cancel. She's devastated. However, she has
promised me, and I apologize Martin, but she has a promise me that
I will be the first interview she does when she gets back into you know,
having some time. So she'll be doing an interview with us in the
next couple of weeks. So that'll be good because news keeps developing. In
fact, she was very concerned. She was like, Hey, if we
do an interview, you can't post it like a couple of days later because
there's so much that. Excuse me, there's so much that's changing from day
by day. So at least we'll have the latest when that happens. However,
I have the next best thing. There would be better. Better would
be maybe lou Elizondo, the man of the hour right now, but it's
not him. But I do have John Alexander and Nick Pope. Why is
that important? Yeah, pretty cool because John Alexander was in Army Intelligence,
just like a lot of these people in To the Stars Academy, which i'll
refer to as TTSA going forward, that group that Tom put together. A
lot of those guys were in defense and intelligence, and lou Elizondo, who
ran this Department of Defense program, he also was in defense intelligence. So
John Alexander comes from that world, not only that when he was in intelligence,
and this was a couple decades ago, this is before this DoD UFO
program. He and somebodies got together to find who are these people keeping the
UFO secrets. They did a deep dig to figure out is there a secret
organization out there that is investigating UFOs and keeping the secrets. Some of them
assumed there were, but John says he didn't find any. What you found
was disappointing, was kind of bumbling by the Air Force. They're just kind
of like UFOs are a hot potato. I don't want to deal with it,
You deal with it type of situation. Wow, Yeah, that's I
remember. You know, he did that project where he was trying to find
out and I understand the hot potato. And it's kind of how this whole
thing kind of developed very quietly, and it's quite fascinating how all this took
place. And we talk about this kind of this embarrassment factor that happens the
other person I have is Nick Pope. I've had on several times. But
the reason he's important is because he worked at the UFO desk for the mod
the Ministry of Defense in the UK. So essentially Nick Pope's job there in
the nineties was similar to lou Elizondo's job in many ways, and so we'll
talk about that. So it's kind of a round table. Got him both
on at the same time, and we do this roundtable discussion about all this
recent news. So very very exciting stuff. I mean, these guys are
I mean, they talk about having some internal insight. I think it doesn't
get better than these two guys. I can't wait to listen to the show.
So it's a lot of fun. So there's a lot of news of
course around this DoD program. And you know, since we've talked last Martin,
there's been more news because there's stories coming out every day. There's a
story that came out today in the Sun actually that has my face on the
front, which is a little bit of embarrassing with Tom DeLong because you know,
I'm not this story, but they liked. You know, I'm pretty
much the only one talking about Tom DeLong, probably because it seems like he's
taken a back seat a bit. And I did write a piece on the
Huffington Post and at Open Minds dot TV a longer piece about you know,
Tom's involvement with this whole thing, but and the fact that I feel if
it wasn't for him, it wouldn't have happened. So this revelation, So
that's been going on, But what have you been observing. Let's talk to
some of the news he's out there. Well. Also, I do want
to say, when you were with me on my show the other night with
Kevin Randall, what did you think about I loved his comedy? Says I
guess I owe Tom DeLong an apology. He said. You know what is
funny is after I wrote my piece about Tom DeLong and his involvement, I
got a few responses like that, saying, you know, you're right,
he deserves credit. We need to give credit where credit is due. And
I lay it out how on the one hand, Tom is saying some pretty
wild stuff and on the other hand, what he delivered was quite remarkable and
credible. You know, this revelation that the government has been secretly investigating UFOs
and have discovered unknowns, and we haven't been told that for decades, literally
decades, and not only that, lots of us have been banging our head
against the wall, saying, hey, look, the government is investigating UFOs.
We've got these file even though they say they're not, and everybody ignores
us. They think we're conspiracy, goofballs or something. So this vindicates us
and demonstrates that we were right all along that there was something going on and
we wouldn't have had that without Tom. So that's a really big deal.
So you can hear with Kevin Randall, because Kevin Randall's one of these guys
who's who's been very careful researcher, great researcher. And I asked that of
John and Nick, not about Tom specifically, but how important this news is.
And we'll talk about that, but it is very important news and we
wouldn't have it without Tom. So a lot of people are feeling that way.
So I hope people read my story, and I understand. I think
some were disappointed because Tom, you know, has these pretty wild ideas,
and that his ideas are not what he proved or demonstrated, but what he
demonstrated is something that I would have hoped he would demonstrate which is more exciting
just this simple revelation that they are investigating and taking it seriously. Yeah.
Absolutely, So getting back to what is going on with the news, I
just wanted to comment because the other night, not last night, but the
night before, I turned on you know, CNN News because they've been covering
this pretty steady around ten o'clock, and all of a sudden, the host
said, my next guest is Neil de grass Tyson, and so I went,
oh, like, oh no, because I have watched him, you
know, over the years, you know, bash the whole UFO thing,
you know, many times, and so I just thought that was gonna be
more of that, and I was totally impressed with the way he handled it
this time. So I really enjoyed what he said. He's he was actually
almost arguing with the host of the show, saying, no, I really
think it's not a bad idea that these things are investigated. And it's like,
wow, that was Neil de grass Tyson saying that, and he's saying,
you know it is you know, he did remind everyone, and I
think it's a good point. Is that a UFO means an unidentified flying object
he said, perhaps an astrophysicist like myself and others may be able to make
it an IFO, an identified object, but you know, I don't know
about this one in particular, that type of thing. So it was it
was great to hear someone who usually, like I said, he usually bashes
the UFO idea in the past. That's what I've seen repeatedly, so I
was really relieved that he actually was acting like this is a serious thing that
you know, could possibly be looked at. I agree with you. I
heard that interview, and I also was impressed he was making the point and
I understand his point that you know, when Elizondo says this is evident of
life elsewhere or something like that, or he said, A think this is
evidence that we're not alone, compelling evidence that we're not alone, and I'll
leave it at that. Tyson disagreed with that. He said, you know,
this isn't evidence of that, this is evidence of unknowns. And to
Elezondo's defense, you know, it was Aaron Burnett on CNN who pushed Elesondo
choose that answer because she kept asking him about aliens, and he said,
this isn't about that. I don't want to talk about that, this isn't
about that, and he finally gave her that little thing, and of course
that's the thing they run with, which is really frustrating. I watched an
interview with James Fox on CNN and they kept doing that. They her sentence
a question started with asking about UFOs, but in the same question incorporated aliens.
And I think what people have to do is kind of say, hey,
look, you're asking me two different questions. Here. You're asking me
about UFOs and to getting unidentified objects. Then you're asking me to speculate about
aliens. This isn't about aliens. This is about UFOs and gathering data to
figure out what they are. We don't know what they are. Is it
possible they're extraterrestial Perhaps that that may be the case, but we have to
follow the data to bring us to that conclusion, and we just don't have
those conclusions yet. So but I was really impressed with Tyson too, because
he was very supportive of the program. Like you said, he said,
twenty two million dollars is a drop in the bucket. He said, it's
like ZEROS reserves or zero something percent of the defense budget. It's totally justified
to spend a little bit of money in relative terms, of course, on
investigating unknown objects. These guys are observing, it makes sense to do that,
And I thought that was really cool too. Yeah. Yeah, And
to your point, I have watched these people, you know, that are
conducting the interview just push someone into a corner. They you know, the
same person did that with Leslie Kayane the other night, and she held a
ground pretty well. But trying to get them into saying it's extraterrestrial, they're
just you know, it's like a loaded question after a loaded question, trying
to get them to say that. And but you know, I like the
fact that at least no one is going there, you know, I mean,
I just hope no one goes there because I think it would it would
just take away from it if someone said, yes, you know, I
do believe they're extraterrestrial. Yeah, And I think that's why, you know,
normally we've heard Tom DeLong be the front guy out there speaking like crazy
to everybody and talking about the alien topic. And I think that's why he
must have agreed to kind of sit on the sidelines for now and chill out,
you know, and let these guys have their moment to talk about the
actual investigation. And this is partially us educating the mainstream though too so it's
kind of educating them and trying to de attach the alien stigma from the term
UFO, because you know, we've tried to come up with these terms UAP
anomalist aerial phenomena. It doesn't work. That has not worked with the press.
They don't say, oh, okay, you've got a UAP that's totally
different than the UFO. No, they say UFO. They go back to
the term UFO because really that's just trying to sneakily say the same thing using
a different term. So you have to tackle the idea of UFO that they
have in their mind and detach that stigma. And that's what we've got to
work towards and I think is happening. But we have to be a little
more aggressive. And we shouldn't be aggressive or be afraid to be aggressive.
Leslie shouldn't be afraid to say, hey, she was with Don Lemon,
Hey don you know this is an alien's I know that's really interesting to talk
about, but that's not what we're talking about. What we need to focus
on and what the issue here is and what the DoD was doing was examining
unknown objects, unknown aircraft, and they were observing aircraft that demonstrated technologies that
are beyond our own. That is the issue. We need to continue to
investigate that and then maybe we'll be able to have some answers as to what
is the root of this issue. But that needs to be the focus,
right And I do understand when like Don or anyone else is you know,
interviewing someone, They're going to ask, well, what do you think it
is? I mean, that's a normal question for anyone to ask, because
you know, for instance, when the Navy pilot I gave it I can't
remember it's fall or something like that, was being interviewed. You know,
he was talking about what he observed. Well, you know, this thing
went that way, it went this way. You know, it didn't have
any source of propulsion that was visual or any you know, wings or anything
like that. You know, so when you tell a story like that,
of course you know the next question is going to be, well what do
you think it was? So I do understand, but all you can answer
if you're being interviewed is I'm not sure you know what I mean? What
else can you say if you we're at a point where we have to be
careful anyone that's being interviewed because it can go you know, it can go
south pretty quickly, right, And you know, when lou was being pushed
and I don't understand necessarily why they do this, but he could have said,
and I think it would have been accurate and just find to say,
I don't know when she's like, are these aliens? I don't know.
That's the point. We don't know. We need to do the investigation to
determine what the matter is, and that once that point is made, then
maybe some speculation could happen, because if, of course a thorough study of
UFOs is able to determine or demonstrate with some you know, demonstrate that we
are having visitations like Bigelo seems to be convinced of as well, then that's
extraordinary, you know that that is really cool. That would be interesting too
if that were the case. Another interesting point too, is this kind of
cat and mouse game thing that happens is that you know, throughout the years,
even in Project blue Book, we got a lot of files that are
very similar to the one case they've released details to and that these jet fighter
pilots are coming out and talking about, which is you know, essentially the
Nimitz carrier group saw this object they called a tic tac. It was forty
foot long object that was hovering and then making weird maneuvers and shooting off at
incredible speed. That when jets are scrambled to the area of an unknown,
that the unknown observed for a short period of time and then races off at
incredible speed. That is what we've heard over and over and over and over
again. Yes, which would kind of be indicative of I think what Nick
Pope suggested on an article recently, which is that perhaps these are observation you
know, the things are here for observation only type of thing. That's an
interesting idea. Yeah, like drones in a way, Yeah, interstellar drones.
Sure, I mean it's I know, we can't fathom something like that
because of the distance thing. But I don't think that's I don't think that's
a bad theory at all. Is the go ahead? No, I'm just
saying, I mean, we would do it if we could. Is there
another interesting story out there? No, but well, you know, I'm
sure there is. But you know, to your point, Also, I
just want to want to say this. I think it would be great if
people are being interviewed about this, is if they brought up that topic that
these things have been observed for a long time. It's not just recently,
because I think a lot of people may just assume that wow, this happened
and then not really know anything else about it. But I really think that
more people would be interested in finding out if they knew while this has been
happening for decades, so it can't be some new technology. Yeah. Yeah,
that's a big point I'm trying to make to some of the people in
the press who have contacted me lately, is that this is important because of
the reason that we said earlier that the government has been denying any research into
this topic or that they take it seriously when actually they do. Another point
is that exactly what you said, that this is not a new occurrence,
that these sort of events have happened over and over again. And you know,
the third point that I like to make with them is that things have
changed a bit in that now. I guess, getting back to Robert Powell
and his investigation, how he looked into this case, this Knimitz case,
for the last year or so, and the when he had put in FOYA
requests, they said they didn't have any information. And now that this story
has come out, he's revisited with them and they said we will now have
information forthcoming, so essentially acknowledging that they lied in the first case, that
they didn't have information, and that now because they're kind of busted, they're
going to be revealing at least providing something to people. And I'm sure when
they provide this information won't just go to Robert Poll. I'm sure the New
York Times and others have made these similar requests, so it's at least opened
up this case a little bit. Now do you think someone asked me the
other day, and I thought it was a fairly decent question. Do you
think this is a baby step on disclosure? Well, what are your thoughts
about that? I don't think so, at least I don't know for sure,
but I don't think so. I I mean, it could be argued
that this is disclosure. They did disclose that they're investigating UFOs and they have
been doing that secretly. That's a disclosure, and it could be the disclosure.
The issue is that, well, we have another level of disclosure.
Elizondo says he is not aware of anybody else looking into this matter, and
that no one else had looked into the matter. In fact, the exotic
materials they obtained that they claimed to have obtained are in Bigelow's hands. They
contracted Bigelow to Aerospace to look at this, so that to me would indicate
there is no bigger program. If there was a bigger program, why would
they give that material to Bigelow instead of shuttling that to whatever this other secret
program is, right, unless it's always been in a subcontractor's hands, in
a private hands to begin with. You know, there's always been argument about
that. Well, you know, that's the way you keep a secret is
to get it out of you know, government. Yeah, you know.
And one of the points that John's going to make here in a little bit
in the interview is that there's no real leadership, that it's very haphazard,
and we've had these issues in the past that each branch of the military works
on their own projects and on their own things, and they work with their
own contractors. So in other words, there could be a program that the
Navy has that the Air Force is not aware of sort of things. So
we heard of a defense Department of Defense, which makes sense because that's more
centralized. But perhaps there is another program out there that we're just not aware
of and they're not aware of and they're not even working together. That would
be possible, but I don't know, I do this well, obviously it
seems that that's what Tom DeLong thinks that you know, that that there will
be some sort of revelation that they've retrieved a body that they do know that
aliens exist. There's no proof or or indication official indication of that at all
at this time. So, uh so I don't know, you know,
it's all. It also goes along the line with what I've said on my
show a number of times that my thoughts are and this is just a theory
that the government has no idea what's going on, and they're just where we
are at, uh, you know, looking at this, you know,
maybe they would have some more insight. Yeah, because there's a lot of
uh there's a lot of classified information almost out of time. But to your
point, yeah, because we keep hearing that over and over again. Now
there's another secret project that come out came out, but the the whole thing
is we don't don't know much and it and that's what Alexander is saying.
They don't know much and they're just as uh mystified as this by all of
this is the rest of us, and and that's all the indication we have.
But thank you so much for joining us. Martin, absolutely my pleasure.
For those of you who celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a wonderful
and safe Christmas. All right, So we've got to go to break And
now for those of you listening on kg R, you'll hear a couple of
commercials, and then for those of you listening on the podcast, you'll hear
a short music interlude and we'll be right back. Welcome back to Open Mind
UFO Radio for this special edition show just prior to the holidays. Santa Claus
is getting his sled ready right now, and all of us, of course,
are talking UFOs and we've got a bigger audience talking UFOs and the normal
out there in the world. Hopefully Santa doesn't get buzzed by any unknown object.
But on the phone with me, it's John, Alexander and Nick Pope,
and I don't think I could have got two better people because John Alexander
worked in Army Intelligence and many of the to the Stars Academy people worked in
intelligence, including the man of the Hour Lou Elisondo, who we'll be talking
about. And then all so Nick Pope, and speaking of Lou, Nick
Pope did kind of what Lou did for the UK, working at the Ministry
of Defense for a few years, so we'll get into that as well.
So welcome, gentlemen. Glad to be here, all right, yes,
likewise good, good to be joining you for this show. So to start
off, John, so this is kind of like, uh, I guess
is it? This at a big surprise, this revelation that this department exists,
especially given that when you were in Army Intelligence you kind of got somebodies
together to look for any clandestine kind of UFO project in the government. Well,
we did, but we went much further than that. And I think
this is I can actually be explained. I was not familiar with it.
They came along two decades after I retired. But what you're seeing here is
are actually a relatively small program. And I think his personality dependent, meaning
you had to have somebody like Lou who pick up the guide on and cause
it to happen. I've got to say he did better than I did,
because we were not able to get funding. And I would say that the
reasons we were not are the ones that have been exposed in the heat that
people are taking. Now. We can cover more about that if you wish.
Yeah, we'll get into that definitely. But I want to ask Nick,
I mean you had mentioned John. You just mentioned that, you know,
it was kind of one guy. They didn't have a lot of resources,
which is kind of like your program, Nick, Wasn't it just maybe
were you the only staffer at the UFO desk and then you worked with other
agencies. Yes, it was pretty much just myself as the subject matter expert.
I had administrative support, and of course there was a whole network of
other experts that we could bring in on particular investigations, be they radar experts,
be they imagery analysts, so we had a wide reach. But yeah,
the actual core team was very small, and one reason for that goes
back to this point about the political embarrassment. We did not want this to
be a particularly visible program, and we didn't want there to be much of
a cost associated with it, and it depends how you do the accounting.
Now, I've had a financial policy job at the Ministry of Defense, and
I know that as long as you use existing resources concurrently with other defense tasks,
you can really say that there's no additional cash cost in what you're doing.
And that's one way to keep things off the radar pun intended. So
this budget, can I mention what Nick's just mentioned is absolutely critical and the
reason I think for the end of the program, and that is we say
off the radar. There are external radars and internal radars, and as long
as you do things at a certain level, you can stay below the radar
if you use that euphemism meaning you're not drawing attention to yourself. And I've
got to agree with Nick. We found the same thing. People were scared
to death of being exposed and thought to be wasting resources. That was a
critical issue, right And then this budget so it kind of gets back to
this twenty two million dollar budget that they had or at least and maybe you
guys can clarify it's a little clear. Is that money that all went to
Bigelow or not. I think Chris Mellen made a comment on Coast to Coast
when he was on with George Nap and I that they probably didn't see all
of that money even though it was earmarked for the program. And is that
a lot of money when it comes to this sort of program. It's menu
scull no one of my pets saying you'll see it repeatedly. Is whatever we're
looking at is at least as complex as AIDS or cancer. And remember when
you say twenty two many, you're talking over five years. So the amount
of money I actually did the calculations last night, and based on the budget,
you're talking about zero point zero zero one percent of the defense budget.
I mean yes, let me just yeah, just just to make give people
an example of what that might buy. I think it buys you about a
quarter of one of the new F thirty five fighters, right, And how
does that compare to the budget you know for your program, where we hardly
ever costed it out. That's the thing. In terms of additional cash costs,
we were desperate to keep those almost down to zero. Hence, as
I say, this idea of simply piggybacking on other resources and capabilities that already
existed within the Ministry of Defense. And so since twenty twelve when the Pentagram
says they ended that budget. It seems like that's what this organization was doing.
They were using other resources. Yes, I think certainly what I've heard,
and I hasten to add, I have not got any insight knowledge about
this particular US program. I had left even the Ministry of Defense in the
UK by the time this was set up, and it's not clear though perhaps
we can get into that later, the extent to which there was any liaison
with allies. But my understanding is that yes, it continues in some form,
but now kind of off the books unofficially, just piggybacking, as I
say, on existing resources and capabilities. So almost back to this idea of
people looking at this unofficially just in the margins of looking at other things like
Russian aerospace capability. Well, I think we've put on some critical issues here,
and I think one of the issues they have not played it very well
politically since it came out, because I think the public now believes there was
a big UFO program when in fact a small b They were looking at specific
kinds of threats, and I think probably given the advent of drones and things,
other kinds of emerging threats as well. But I offer to people,
if you think there's a program, try calling your local government agency, air
force or whatever and try to report a UFO and you're going to find they
don't take it. And what I've heard from the people involved is I think
most, if not all, of these things had to do with incidents that
involved our air military assets as opposed to just general comments about seeing weird stuff.
I think you're right, and I think that either Chris Mellon or maybe
Lois Elissando has confirmed that in one of their more recent interviews, that these
were military cases that they were looking at because ridiculously. I remember my first
UFO investigation for Moufon, and it was this security guard who had just come
back from desert storm and he felt he saw some weird thing. It was
at, you know, over a period of time, over a mountain in
Colorado where there's a lot of air traffic, just in the suburbs there,
and finally he said, I better call this in. He said, he
was still kind of hyped up. He was still like on alert, you
know, looking for abnormal things, and they're supposed to report that sort of
thing, and so he tried calling the airport, the FAA. Nobody wanted
to hear anything. And then I did the same to see if you know,
anything else was reported, and shockingly, that's when I found out they
don't want to hear any thing about it. The FAA didn't want to hear
about an object in our airspace. They told him and me to call Davenport.
Peter Tavenport is new Fork organization, and I don't know that Davenport,
one guy you know, sitting at his computer in Washington, would have been
able to do anything about this apparent threat that was you know, No,
well that's the problem, you bin Sorry, go on, John, No,
I was going to say that that has been the case across the board.
You might remember when I was with KNIDS, we did visit FAA.
I took a big a load down there, and it turned out that the
deputy director of security had been a personal friend of mine who frankly, when
I brought up UFOs and you know, Alexander's crazy again, but he did
put us in touch and it was very interesting what happened. We dealt with
some very high level people they had no problem in believing in UFOs, and
some of them who had been. Air traffic controllers said, yeah, they
had, you know, had such reports and were themselves aware of it,
but did not want to actively get involved. I mean they were looking and
for a while NIDS was listed as a place to call because they think government
didn't want involvement and they just wanted to make this go away as quickly as
possible without alienating the public. And Nick, what were you going to say?
I was going to say, it comes back to this age old point
about the language that one uses when discussing this subject, and I'm talking about
when those of us actually within government do this sort of thing. You really
can't ever run a UFO project. We in the Ministry of Defense changed the
terminology, as you know, to UAP Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in an attempt to
lose the pop culture baggage that the term UFO has, and in an attempt
that was ultimately successful to get some funding for a small intelligence assessment that we
code named Project Condine. But really you have to kind of almost reinvent the
language on this. Hence we get into advanced aerospace threat identification programs, we
get into advanced theoretical physics groups, we get into all of all of this,
and it's just a way around it. If a pilot says I want
to report a UFO, they might actually get a psychological evaluation and get grounded.
So the only way around it is to say, I think I've seen
one of these new drones and I'm a little concerned that it's flying in restricted
airspace. Then you might get someone in government to take a look at it.
Yeah. No, Nick is exactly right on this, and that's what
we did. We created the term advanced theoretical physics and the reason for that
was to prevent we thank people from filing freedom of information reports thinking they would
ask for UFOs and it would not be any translation. So Nick is exactly
right, and the linguistics is very important. Now getting back to another matter
that you had mentioned, you both had talked about. It's kind of like
why something like this needs to be so secret, And Esquire actually had a
story that came out today and it was from a military historian and former strategist,
Robert Bateman, and he talked about this. He was like, why
is the government so cagy on UFO matters? And he said, essentially,
these special access programs, the type of that was created in the DoD Here
they are even more secret than top secret because they that and they're even more
careful about who knows what. And there's two reasons, either because we want
to hide capabilities from the Chinese or the Russians or enemies, or the second
reason is because it's kind of politically embarrassing. So, for instance, you
talked about, you know, when they've done, like researched what games Chinese
children play so that they have an idea of their psychology, and that this
is that sort of thing. It's a politically embarrassing sort of thing, and
it's one of the reasons that answers the major secrecy. Even though it doesn't
seem like, you know, it's not like they were hiding any dead alien
bodies or something like that. Well, the black world is replete with those,
not just in UFO, but in other areas where they want to hide
stuff because the potential for embarrassment. Unfortunately, I think the people who divine
this are not a webfair of what the public beliefs. I remember about seventy
percent of the public beliefs have actually seen the UFO, and is actually considerable
support. Having said that, if you looked at the ones I saw c
on n ASNBC reports coming out, they brought out what I call they ain't
an awful crowd. You know, look at the waste of government money,
and that is internally what they did run into, by the way that all
indications are, that was a piece of it saying you're wasting your money.
Remember I've always said that there is competition for this money, even in the
black world. As long as you're low enough, it won't cause a flap.
But as it becomes visible, and this also happened. I might mention
with the remote viewing program some of the things that led to the depth of
that, and it had to do with the waste of money aspect, which
you can make mhm. Nixt ran into that. Yes, let me actually
pick up on a couple of those points and then perhaps get into another interesting
thing. One reason for the secrecy is certainly the political embarrassment, though another
reason is that actually the sorts of resources that you would need to access to
properly investigate the most credible sightings do include some fairly sensitive pieces of kit and
capabilities. I'm talking about things such as the space tracking radars that form part
of the ballistic missile early warning system, possibly the deep space network, various
other things. There are quite a lot of reasons why this might be classified.
Not all of it is political embarrassment, though part of it is.
I don't think we should also Sorry, I just want one more point on
this. I don't think we should also underestimate the whole technology acquisition aspect of
this. You know, we want to take we should take a step back
with this and say, why are governments looking at this? Why are you
know, people like John and myself interested in this anyway? And one of
the answers is, well, because there does look as if there's a capability
out there that we don't have a technology, and in one sense, we
don't actually go in with a conclusion led belief system of what we're dealing with.
In one sense, we go in, Look, doesn't matter if it's
Russian or Martian, if it can do those speeds and maneuvers, there's a
technology there that we want because it seems to be better than ours. And
that's why, by the way, the word threat tends to crop up in
all these organizations Advanced Aerospace Threat Investigation program, we are interested quite rightly in
potential threats and let's make no mistake about it. If this technology truly did
come from some exotic source, the national or corporation that first acquires it is
going to have a pretty huge advantage, which is what it seems. Bigelow
has talked about that that in one of his main goals. And John,
you would know about this because you worked with big Low on some of these
projects with Bigelow Aerospace with tech acquisition. He was planning on getting into the
before he got into the space commercial space industry, he was doing these sort
of things looking for technology to acquire, hopefully being able to glean some technology
from the observed phenomena of UFOs that he could develop for his company. So
he was looking for that himself. It seems well, in years pasted,
long before I was Bigelow, and part of our study, we had a
guy named Ben Rich and Ben was the head of the Skunk Works, and
despite a lot of stories out there, I don't believe that they had it,
but we had. I had talked to him about this specifically on several
occasions and somewhat in depth, and he had a shopping list, so it
was exactly that. I mean, he wanted the propulsion systems on me,
give me this and give me this because he recognized the technological advantage that they
could gain by having it, right, So which end, you know,
to the Stars Academy when they announced their launched they also said something similar that
they're hoping to glean the technology and even they seem to have and you guys
know you know how put of, I'm not sure if either of you are
familiar with Steve Justice, the guy who works for work for skunk Works who's
now working with it. To the Stars Academy team, they seem to even
think that they have been able to observe a technology that they want to develop,
and they kind of have an idea of a craft. They've even released
a picture of a craft that they hope to develop. Well, when I
had developed the study, again we're talking in nineteen eighties, one of the
things that we were proposing to folks was to do exactly that that if you
looked at these observations carefully and try to discern what the characteristics were, that
you could back your way into what kind of technology would be required to enable
that. And we do know and this is kind of across the board,
not just in this area, but being able to envision the outcome that you
want is very important to leading to development of new technology. Hmm, that's
interesting. Did you have a comment that way, Nick, I mean how
much? I mean, was there any technology that was able to be acquired?
But do you believe from the ufodeska in the mod not to my knowledge,
But that didn't mean that we didn't have the aspiration to acquire that technology.
And I suspect that our shopping list was very similar and I would say
almost identical to the US list. Of course, all the things that you'd
want would be the exotic propulsion systems, avionics, aerodynamics, better stealth,
that sort of thing. And let's not forget, of course, the weaponization
of this. If you look at the declassified parts of the UK government intelligence
assessment on this project Condine, you will see the phrase novel military applications used
when talking about the aspirations of what we might get from a better understanding of
UFOs, whatever they turn out to be, and you will specifically see,
for example, reference to RF weapons, radio frequency weapons, directed energy weapons,
whatever you want to talk, whatever terminology you want to use. Again,
I go back to the fact we don't necessarily say that we think this
is extraterrestrial. We simply say that technology seems to be out there and we
would like to acquire it. And as I say, it goes back the
real I think reason for a lot of the secrecy is that the nation that
first gets its hands on that has something that nobody else has. And one
other point, by the way, and you can make a wider point about
the extent to which, for example, the space program has been segueing out
of government and into the private sector. One very important aspect of this whole
story goes back to the involvement of Robert Bigelow. But it's a more general
point. I'm going to put you out. I'm going to stop you there.
Hold on to that point because we're out of time. So I will
get back to that after the break, because I do want to address the
whole Bigelow aspect of this as well, so we'll be right back with that.
But you're listening to Open Minds CFO Radio. I'm here with John Alexander
and Nick Pope. We're going to take a quick break. If you're listening
on KGRA, you're going to hear some commercials. Otherwise, if you're listening
to the podcast, just gonna hear a short musical interlude. Thanks for tuning
in, and we'll be right back. All right, we're back. You're
listening to Open Mind GUFO Radio. I'm your host, Alejandro Rojas, and
we have Nick Pope formally working the UFO desk for the Ministry of Defense,
and we've got John Alexander, former Army Intelligence but then he's worked in the
defense industry in multiple different ways and he still does some consulting, so and
he used to work with Bigelow. So earlier John mentioned NIDS, which was
the what was it that acronym? Mean again, I forget the National Institute
for Discovery Science, right, which was Bigelow's first organization to look into paranormal
aspect of the different paranormal aspects. So actually the second that he's had a
longer insist than that. Wow, I was not aware of that, but
we'll get into that. But Nick, you were making a point about Bigelow's
involvement. Yes, one of the critical points about the New York Times story
about the Pentagon's UFO investigations is the fact that this was moved very quickly out
of government into the private sector into of course below aerospace. But I've seen
this before in some of my UK work in relation to Project Condine, as
I mentioned the Intelligent study on UFOs, also a Defense Intelligence Staff study into
remote viewing. The move of this into the private sector was deliberate, and
what it meant was that it was making parliamentary or in your case in the
US congressional scrutiny more difficult, and critically, it was taking it outside of
the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. Now what I see as I
look at people discuss this latest story on the internet, is everyone's saying,
right, we're going to really hit them with all these Freedom of Information Act
requests now, and we're going to get to the bottom of some of the
other unanswered questions here. Well, good luck with that, but I think
people are in for a bit of a disappointment. What you tend to get
is you get the documents at the beginning of the program where government kind of
sets it up and then moves it over into private sector. Then you get
whatever reports get sent back into government, but everyone knows that they are subject
to FOI. But what you don't get is all the stuff in the middle
because Freedom of Information Act, of course, doesn't apply to the private sector.
And this I'll choose my words carefully, but this is something that people
in government know about and I'm sure are rather pleased. I suspect it goes
a little bit further than unintended consequences. And sometimes these things are done through
new contracts, but very often I've seen it done in the UK with an
amendment to an existing defense contract, and so very little of the good stuff
is actually foiable. John Well, what I want to follow is a little
different. That has to do with whatever we're looking at the capabilities, because
in my view, what we're looking at in these way of craft and doing
the highly maneuverable things is in fact a new source of energy. So this
has geopolitical strategic consequences because I've always said that little widgets flying around are interesting,
but that is nothing compared to understanding of an energy that might take us
away from the requirement for fossil fuels M And you think then that is as
it pertained to his story justification for secrecy, I don't think they're there yet.
I'm just saying that that, in my view, is the real strategic
issue. I might mention from secrecy, and I know that Lou and Chris
and I have talked about it in an area we agree with, and they
can talk to the UK, but we all, I think, believe that
this has been terribly overclassified. Most of the information really does need to get
much more into the public sector, and actually in an area we're looking at
what we call basic science, and I think that's what needs for the understanding
needs to be. I think what you're alluding to, Hell may have the
mind on it. I do think that they're still guessing a bit, but
you know it's certainly worth exploration. M hm. So I think what and
I think I've talked to both of you on this before, but you both
kind of describe, is that then the military is kind of in this bind
that the UFO phenomena is politically embarrassing, but at the same time, the
potential payoff is huge. It's either developing these weapons systems and being the first
to get there, or it is developing these energy systems, these power systems,
which is also a huge payoff. So they have this huge reason to
do it, but how to do it is a bit tricky, Yes,
just a bit of that we would and I think the people listening to the
program may agree with that, but that is not a universally held position.
One of the big findings in the study that I ran was that nobody's in
charge. And if you listen to Chris Mellen, who was in a position
to oversee a lot of things, that's basically his position. Now nobody is
in charge, at least not at a high enough level that can coordinate all
of the activities that would be necessary for a fully integrated program. Rather,
they were and I do know that they were hit and miss as to how
the information was derived, whether they ever even heard about it. So the
loss of command and control, and you do have a number of people internally
who think it's all bs. You know, this is all a waste of
time and energy. So you've got to be willing to accept, hey,
the reality of the phenomenon and be take it the next step farther in understanding
the implications again at a strategic geopolitical level before you're doing it. And I
don't think there's a lot of people who are willing to make those leaps.
And yes, that I think is something that certainly resonates with me. You
know, I think here in the US, given this this confusion we have
over who's in charge all the different agencies involved, the private sector involvement too,
perhaps these new revelations can can lead to a reassessment of this in government.
Now. Of course, I'm completely out of the game anyway, and
the US is not my area of expertise, But coming at this from my
background, I can't help but think that that here in the US OSTP,
you know, might might be well placed to get a grip on this,
and maybe Office of Science and Knowledgy Policy, White House o STP and the
director there kind of maybe you know, bang a few heads together, sit
around and say, look, what have we got here? Who has done
what? How can we try and draw some of these threads together, and
how can we decide, you know what, what have we got here?
What do we need to do and who should be doing it? Which I'm
not optimistic. It's it's a good idea and what needs to be done,
But I'm not optimistic in the current environment where you can't get them to even
listen to you know, climate science, if you will. The evidence is
already overwhelming and happening, and yet they fail to respond for political reasons.
Well, I think that I share your your view that it's perhaps an optimistic
thing. I mean, I think in the current administration this can probably only
happen top down, and I sincerely hope that President Trump will be listening to
all this and you know, thinking, my goodness, what a confused mess
the US government has gotten itself into with this difficult and controversial subject over the
years. I want someone to sort it out, and I would think that
he would look to Director Ostp to do it. But you know, I
hope he will look to someone. And you know, whatever you think of
President Trump, I think we are in this kind of top down situation where
perhaps at the moment, only the president can say somebody you know, sort
this out. Unfortunately are is not on Fox and Friends? Well, and
the point that you know, I think John is making, as you know,
given the appointments, especially appointments that have anything to do with science or
the environment, that that have been made with this administration, Uh, yeah,
there's there's not much hope as even if you were to identify somebody who
that person would be, although who knows, I guess we can hope for
the best if well, you know, even to happen. Yeah. I
mean, the point is that even if we're pessimistic, it doesn't mean that
people shouldn't try and and I'm sure that the Times, having broken this story
and in many ways broken something of a taboo, aren't just going to sit
back and and forget about this. And so, you know, one of
the important things to do now is, you know, we can all sort
of sit around and and be pleased about this and say, well, it's
great that this subject has got some serious media attention. But one of the
things that it seems to me now is what are the unanswered questions or what
questions haven't we asked yet that we should be asking? And how do we
then, you know, how do we move this forward? How do we
capitalize on this? Well, I think that's a good point. And you
know, if we get back to reality and how you know these people are
motivated, it's by politics, and I think that's been an interesting aspect and
i'd like to get your both of your comments, because I know you pay
attention to this sort of stuff. It's been a weird issue UFOs when you
get into politics. Hillary kind of picked it up with her campaign, strangely,
seemingly influenced by John Podesta, her campaign manager, who's into this and
and has even had conversations with at least Tom DeLong and maybe others this organization,
the TTSA that they created. But right now Harry Reid is kind of
the point political guy in this, even though he did have bipartisan support to
create this Department of Defense initiative, And it seems like the White House hasn't
figured out even from the campaign. I don't think Trump has figured out which
side he wants to come down on the whole UFO issue. Does he want
to He never wants to agree with Hillary. But at the same time,
I think Hillary was trying to speak to his base by even bringing up the
UFO issue, and he doesn't want to displease his base either, So he
hasn't said anything, and I wonder if you all have some thoughts on that.
Well. I think politically this is in the noise level. One of
the things I've mentioned unpopularly at the conferences there is this is not a voting
issue. They're a small group of people who are intensely interested. You have
a large group of people who believe, but it is not something that is
going to move politically. I don't think it is fair to say that there
was bipartisan effort because that infers that the parties themselves have taken positions or numbers
of what he did get was a number of people. I was a bit
surprised. George Knapp had a very interesting program last night and they started talking
about Senator Stevens who had a personal experience. So he was willing to go
along with it because he had actually seen an encountered a UFO as a former
Air Force pilot. But that's a big leap from there to joint bipartisan agreement
on it. Make it the political nightmare, I guess, just meaning that
Stevens at least was Republican. It wasn't just all Democrat or Republican. Right,
Well, no, it's not it, I would say more than bipartisan,
which in first party relationships it's a lot of it is personality dependent,
and there you have somebody, I said, with Stevens who had a personal
encounter. Now, one of the things you Senator Reed talked about though,
was that he also took blowback from people who said this is satanic, we
should not have anything to do with it, bringing into an illogical religious argument
as well, So they're all over the spectrum. I think it's more personality
belief systems than it would be alignment with any party affiliation. Nick, do
you have some thoughts? Not much on that, frankly, I mean,
yeah, I think it's a classic case of UFOs should not be a political
issue, but almost everything becomes a political issues. It's you know, it's
tricky. Yeah, And that's the hard part if everything becomes a political issue.
So it either if the White House is going to even do anything,
they would want to justify it, and of course then the Democrats would it
would attack them. But I guess in the positive side, Democrats wouldn't really
be as motivated to attack him on this issue if he did something on it,
because you know, there their candidate and their people have been you know,
the recent people to be pushing this forward. Even though in history,
you know, we do have some big names in the Republican Party who have
been big on this issue. Goldwater, somewhat Reagan, but uh, you
know for some others. But remember you have Jimmy Carter, obviously a Democrat,
who had a personal observation and it was interesting because there's some story is
out on it, because he did ask officially. I forget which of the
organization, but I think it was the opposite Science Technology to look at it.
So it's National told the backsand yeah it was NASA and the Air Force
advice NASA don't do it. But I want to ask this question before we
run out of time of each of you, and I guess we'll start with
Nick. Is this news, this revelation of this organization in the DoD a
big deal? And if so, how much of a big deal? It
is a big deal in one sense, it shouldn't surprise anyone that government looks
at this. And I'd be frankly concerned if pilots are seeing things and things
are being tracked on radar and somebody isn't looking at it would be a scandal.
So it's but it's it's a big deal. Clearly, The Times as
a paper of record is very important here. We wait to see where we
go. I think the next week or so it's going to be very interesting.
And there are still some important unanswered questions. The references, for example,
to recovered materials, What materials are those, where are they currently stored,
what tests were done on them? And what conclusions, if any,
were found. So plenty of issues and plenty of unanswered questions still right,
And actually there has been some positive movement in that. For instance, Robert
Powell, he's part of the Scientific Coalition of Euphology and he's a researcher.
For a while he's been investigating that Nimae case and he's been told to PACs
and with his Voyer requests. But now that this has been released, he
went back to them and say, hey, wait a second, and they
said, okay, we're going to be releasing some information soon, so we
do have some more They're actually going to respond to some of these Foyer requests
on this limit siding. But John, your thoughts on is this a big
deal? Well, I guess i'd specific respectfully disagree with how big a deal
it is. It is certainly interesting. One of the points is that if
you look at what we did versus what they do now, they have better
sensors. There's no doubt about that they have collected more data. But I
don't think they have any better answers. So you've got to remember that this
is a phenomenon that transcends basically time and space. It has been going on
for millennia. I suspect in the long run it's going to be a hiccup.
Who knows, Maybe they can, you know, generate some interest.
Now. One of Tom Delong's areas of interest, aside from the technology aspects,
is to get younger folks more actively involved and interested in exploring these topics.
That would be a plus because basically, if you look at the folks
there and a lot of us, and we're talking about dinosaurs, we need
a lot of young folks that have the technical expertise to come up behind us
and carry the torch forward. Well, one of the things they mentioned is
that Bigelow and you would and would have more insight than the rest of us,
since you've been very close with Big Low and you're in Nevada. That
Big Low has some sort of mysterious metal from a UFO. It's been kind
of implied. Would that be a big deal if they have some metal?
It may or it may not be. I have argued that looking for unobtainium
is probably not the right way to go. I hate to say the area.
I agree with Sagan And you know, if you look at contact,
how did they make it? It was by transferring information and using the materials
that were available at the destination. When back when we were at NIDS was
still in existence, we did have some pieces and had it analyzed, but
I never saw anything that indicated again it was unobtainium or something that was totally
unexplained. We have had this sort of material reported for many decades. If
they have something and we have not seen the reports, obviously that says it
is totally you knew and we don't know how to do it, then that
would be of interest. Some of the proponents for roswell and other things suggest
that maybe these are being intentionally left for us. You know, there's not
accidental. It's here for us to research and try to make steps forward in
metallurgy or you know, other materials science. M well, we're pretty much
out of time. That time went like so quickly speaking of space time anomalies.
But I'll give you both ten seconds. Yeah, of course, it's
very little time to say anything. But if you had one final remark,
Nick, what would that be? It would be to keep an eye on
this story as it develops over the next few weeks. There's more to come,
John, I certainly agree with that, and we're hoping that some of
these reports get released to the public where they should be right, so,
and I think we will be seeing more. So thank you guys so much
for joining us, and we'll be talking to you soon, I'm sure.
Thank you, Thank you both. All right, thanks guys. I will
probably get this up tomorrow and I'll send you guys the links and then it'll
be on kg r A on Monday night. So thank you so much.
I knew it would be interesting. Well, if I don't speak to you
all before, Happy Christmas, yes, Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas, Merry
Christmas. If you say happy Holidays, then you're capetually well you see,
even that's political now, I know everything, even Santa Claus is political.
Well, Marry Holidays. Well like this. We didn't get into it,
but we used to say, you know, from a intelligence standpoint that if
you said good morning, you could classify it because good modified the morning and
offered information about that's pretty funny. Thank you so much to Nick Pope and
to John Alex. I think besides the primary people involved, they're the absolute
best people to talk to. You can find information about both of them at
their websites. John's website is John Blexander dot com and Nick Pope's I believe
it's Nickpope dot net, but if you just google Nick Pope you'll find them
all over the place, so check that out. Thanks guys, Thank you
to Martin for joining us at the beginning of the show, and I do
want to wish everybody some happy holidays, including Caleb Hanks, thank you for
doing the opening and Closed Music Systematics who does a bumper music. And be
sure to go register for the UFO Congress ufocongress dot com right now. Above
all times, it's important to get there so we can have these conversations and
no doubt everybody's going to be sharing some interesting takes on this recent news and
we'll have some more to share about guests related to this very important news.
Anyway, you all have a wonderful holiday week. Until next time, Adios moved tatos