Speaker 1: Fifty of them took out something called alien Abduction Insurance,
Speaker 1: which promised to pay out if they were abducted, impregnated,
Speaker 1: or killed by aliens, and fifty of them insured themselves
Speaker 1: to a million dollars each.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's such a great racket because the great
Speaker 2: thing about alien abductees is they can't prove it, So
Speaker 2: if you're the insurance company, you never have to pay out.
Speaker 3: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in
Speaker 3: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 3: all around the world.
Speaker 1: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 1: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 3: created conspiracies.
Speaker 1: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 1: weren't true.
Speaker 3: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 3: news almost every day.
Speaker 1: Will break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 1: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mission Implausible. Welcome to Mission Implausible. Where with
Speaker 3: both of our producers, Adam Davidson and John Stern.
Speaker 4: Hey, guys, you know, since I'm here with the three
Speaker 4: of you. There's a question I get asked a ton,
Speaker 4: which is, how does Adam know these guys.
Speaker 3: I don't remember the specifics, but I was, especially after
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen. I had gotten out of the agency and
Speaker 3: I'd worked in Moscow and on Russia issues and was
Speaker 3: writing some myself and going on TV at the time,
Speaker 3: because people seemed perplexed. They didn't understand or have experience
Speaker 3: with Russian intelligence and things seem so foreign to them.
Speaker 3: I read your article where you were talking about the
Speaker 3: Russian what's called SYSTEMA where essentially the sort of mafia
Speaker 3: criminal culture that they all live in, where everybody's afraid
Speaker 3: to attack anybody else because they don't know what they
Speaker 3: have on them. And you wrote an article in The
Speaker 3: New Yorker which I thought captured that really well, and
Speaker 3: I would often use that either in my pieces or
Speaker 3: when I was on TV talking, and I might have
Speaker 3: on Twitter, since we followed each other, I might have
Speaker 3: reached out to you, and.
Speaker 5: I do honestly no joke. I'm very proud that you
Speaker 5: felt that way like that makes me feel very happy.
Speaker 3: Geez.
Speaker 4: If I had known the story about how you both
Speaker 4: met with so boring, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: Have asked.
Speaker 4: Were two worldwide adventurers. Yeah, I tweeted.
Speaker 5: Back, although I do remember the three of us talking
Speaker 5: and like you saying, we never talked to journalists. That
Speaker 5: wasn't part of our job.
Speaker 3: I never spoke to a journalist, not a single time
Speaker 3: when I was at thirty years an agency. No me neither.
Speaker 1: And I have a question for you about UFOs So.
Speaker 1: In Baghdad, I was talking to an Iraqi official who
Speaker 1: claimed that it was a conspiracy theory, perhaps spread by
Speaker 1: CIA and by people like you and the press, that
Speaker 1: Iraqi culture was not the greatest because we were claiming
Speaker 1: that aliens thousands of years ago had come and helped
Speaker 1: them build well the pyramids of course in Egypt, but
Speaker 1: also the Ziggurats and gifted them this. And of course
Speaker 1: he said that that conspiracy theory that Aliens had come
Speaker 1: and helped start civilization, it was a conspiracy to destroy
Speaker 1: Iraq culture and Iraqi pride.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've certainly know that there's a lot of
Speaker 5: people out there who think the Aliens did everything ancient.
Speaker 5: I never heard the conspiracy theory part of it, although
Speaker 5: having spent a lot of time in Iraq, there's a
Speaker 5: lot of conspiracy theories in Iraq, in the Middle East
Speaker 5: in general, and I remember really coming to understand that
Speaker 5: when you live in a world where the official story
Speaker 5: is definitely untrue, like the one thing you know for
Speaker 5: one hundred percent certainty is whatever the official story is
Speaker 5: that's not true, it does create a fertile ground for imagining, well,
Speaker 5: what could be true, maybe the opposite of the official story.
Speaker 5: And also it's a place where the fix really is in.
Speaker 5: There really are rooms where a handful of people get
Speaker 5: together and decide major events. And they might be people
Speaker 5: who on the surface or enemies like within a country
Speaker 5: or across countries. So I am now, as you know,
Speaker 5: working on a project about ancient Mesopotamia, and I have
Speaker 5: learned that when you talk to academic archaeologists and you
Speaker 5: say you're a journalist, you have to very quickly say,
Speaker 5: I don't believe an alien.
Speaker 4: Leads us in so well to the topic of today's
Speaker 4: episode UFOs, And that's the way podcasts are supposed to work, right,
Speaker 4: banter and then you get into the subject. But the
Speaker 4: reason I'm here to say that today is because I've
Speaker 4: dragged my good friend Michael ian Black in to speak
Speaker 4: about this because he has a long standing relationship to
Speaker 4: UFOs all right from television. You might know him from
Speaker 4: Michael and Michael have issues ed the State. A lot
Speaker 4: of people say the State wet, hot American summer. I
Speaker 4: love the seventies, I love the eighties, I love the nineties.
Speaker 2: What's next time is a flat circle, baby, We'll see
Speaker 2: where it ends up.
Speaker 4: He's an actor, he's a stand up comedian. He's a
Speaker 4: writer of humor, kind of a David Sedaris type when
Speaker 4: it comes to your writing.
Speaker 2: Sure, minus the success.
Speaker 4: I actually think you're very successful compared to.
Speaker 1: Some Yeah, I'm looking forward to a Chortal or two.
Speaker 2: You'll be lucky if we get to two. If we
Speaker 2: get one Shortal, I will consider this podcast a success.
Speaker 2: Which didn't mention is that I have a long standing
Speaker 2: fascination with UFOs and related topics.
Speaker 3: Can tell us a little bit about how that came
Speaker 3: about and where you are now.
Speaker 2: I remember being interested in this topic from like the
Speaker 2: ages of four, five, six, I mean Close Encounters had
Speaker 2: come out, and Star Wars was out and Star Trek
Speaker 2: was out, and I had a sighting when I was
Speaker 2: in high school coming back from the movies one night
Speaker 2: with my girlfriend at the time and my best friend,
Speaker 2: and we were driving back and we saw over the
Speaker 2: tree line. It didn't seem like it was particularly high
Speaker 2: above the tree line, maybe about the altitude of a
Speaker 2: small plane, and we saw a I guess you'd call
Speaker 2: it something like a fireball. It was a sort of
Speaker 2: reddish orange, glowing ball of something sort of traveling slowly
Speaker 2: and soundlessly across the sky. At the time, I didn't
Speaker 2: know that that was a kind of common sighting. We
Speaker 2: didn't know what it was. I thought maybe it was
Speaker 2: a small player that was on fire. And so the
Speaker 2: next morning I checked the newspaper to see if there'd
Speaker 2: been a plane crash, and there hadn't been, or at
Speaker 2: least nothing was reported, and that was it. Like we
Speaker 2: tried to follow it as we were driving, but it
Speaker 2: was in the woods, you know, so we couldn't. And
Speaker 2: then it disappeared. There was no mention of it in
Speaker 2: the paper, and that was that. And so my interest
Speaker 2: remained but sort of waned over the years until twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: which is when The New York Times published their now
Speaker 2: famous article about UFOs, written by Leslie Kane, Ralph Blumenfall,
Speaker 2: and Helena Cooper, which basically said, yeah, UFOs were real,
Speaker 2: the Pentagon's been studying them for years and we don't
Speaker 2: know what the hell they are, and so I've been
Speaker 2: following the story very closely since then.
Speaker 3: Recently there was some talk of whistleblowers that have come
Speaker 3: out and talked to Congress, and of course different players
Speaker 3: in Congress over the last few years have been talking
Speaker 3: about declassifying or asking what the government knows about UAPs
Speaker 3: they call them now, And I don't know why they
Speaker 3: changed the name. I think UFO was a fine name.
Speaker 2: But I love UFOs as an acronym. But I think
Speaker 2: there was a movement inside ufology, which is what you know,
Speaker 2: people who study this call themselves uphologists, to get a
Speaker 2: different name on it because UFO had so much stigma
Speaker 2: and baggage attached to it, so they went with UAP.
Speaker 2: But yes, so answer your question about whistleblowers. Yes, so
Speaker 2: famously last year a guy named David Grush came forward
Speaker 2: and he was sort of the laison between the sort
Speaker 2: of official channels of the government and the less official
Speaker 2: channels of the government as represented by ARROW. I guess,
Speaker 2: which is the All Domain Anomalist Resolution Office, which was
Speaker 2: tasked by Congress. It's in the name resolving these cases
Speaker 2: of UFO slash UAP, and Grush was involved in that
Speaker 2: effort and ended up coming forward and telling the public
Speaker 2: this is real. These programs are real. We have in
Speaker 2: our possession, meaning the US many craft. The number that
Speaker 2: I keep hearing is something like a dozen, but who knows.
Speaker 2: And there are existing reverse engineering programs to try to
Speaker 2: get as much tech from these things as we can.
Speaker 2: And that caused a huge firestorm, and he ended up
Speaker 2: testifying in front of Congress alongside Ryan Graves and David Freeber,
Speaker 2: who are both pilots who witnessed anomalost phenomena, the famous
Speaker 2: tic TAC incident and another incident. And there are allegedly
Speaker 2: forty whistleblowers who have testified to Congress. And what's key
Speaker 2: about these whistleblowers as opposed to David Grush is Grush
Speaker 2: didn't have first hand evidence of these programs. He's a
Speaker 2: secondhand witness. But these whistleblowers who are allegedly coming forward
Speaker 2: are all first hand witnesses, meaning they have either touched
Speaker 2: the craft or communicating with quote unquote biologics or witness
Speaker 2: these biologics or handled meta materials or some such thing.
Speaker 2: So that's where we are.
Speaker 1: Let me gently push back and let's have fun with this.
Speaker 3: Wow, dare you?
Speaker 1: I'm a guest on your podcast, So if Grush is
Speaker 1: your witness, you got to sort of look and take
Speaker 1: it as a whole. Gruss was a quarter to the media.
Speaker 1: Grush was committed to a mental health facility by his
Speaker 1: wife for alcoholism and suicide. And this was found by
Speaker 1: reporters who looked into them after he was making these statements.
Speaker 2: It wasn't found by reporters. It was leaked to a
Speaker 2: reporter named Ken Klippenstein. His snout was led in that direction.
Speaker 2: But what you're saying is true. Grush was checked into
Speaker 2: a psychiatric facility, he did have troubled alcohol, he did
Speaker 2: have PTSD. All of that is exactly true. He has
Speaker 2: said as much. The piece that came out was clearly
Speaker 2: a hit piece for reasons that aren't clear unless there
Speaker 2: was some reason to unless there was some compelling reason
Speaker 2: for the government to push back. The government as an
Speaker 2: entity has not disputed his claims. What they have said
Speaker 2: is through the Pentagon, they've basically said, we've seen no
Speaker 2: evidence of extraterrestrial technology or cracked. I'm paraphrasing, but that's
Speaker 2: basically what they're saying. It's a kind of non denial denial.
Speaker 2: But his claims were investigated by the Inspector General for Intelligence.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you call that person. Those claims
Speaker 2: were found to be urgent and credible, and he was
Speaker 2: invited to testify in front of Congress, which he did
Speaker 2: under oath.
Speaker 6: Okay, so there has been activity by by alien or
Speaker 6: non human technology and or beings that has caused harm
Speaker 6: to human I.
Speaker 7: Can't get into the specifics in an open environment, but
Speaker 7: at least the activity that I personally witnessed. And not
Speaker 7: to be very careful here because you don't tell you
Speaker 7: never to acknowledge tradecraft, right, So what I personally witnessed
Speaker 7: myself and my wife was very disturbing.
Speaker 6: You said that the government has alien bodies or alien species.
Speaker 6: Have you seen have you seen the spacecraft?
Speaker 7: I have to be careful to describe what I've seen
Speaker 7: firsthand and not in this environment, but I could answer
Speaker 7: that question behind behind closed doors.
Speaker 2: It's not like Grush was the first guy to come forward.
Speaker 2: There have been dozens and dozens of these people. It's
Speaker 2: that Grush is probably the highest ranking or most credible
Speaker 2: to come forward. There have been other high ranking military officials.
Speaker 2: Did you remember this story that came out maybe five
Speaker 2: or six years ago. The head of Israeli intelligence was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we've got this, We've got this treaty, this intergalactic treaty
Speaker 2: with all these other civilizations. Let me see if I
Speaker 2: can find the exact quote. Okay, this is from NBC
Speaker 2: News twenty twenty. A former Israeli space security chief has
Speaker 2: sent eyebrow shooting heavenward by saying that Earthlings have been
Speaker 2: in contact with extraterrestrials from a quote unquote galactic federation.
Speaker 2: This is how I'm a shed former head of Israel's
Speaker 2: Defense Ministry Space Directorate.
Speaker 3: Why is this a US government thing? It seems to
Speaker 3: me if it's other life forces or whatever coming to
Speaker 3: the States, why do we care that the US government
Speaker 3: is classifying something. You'd think anybody around the world could
Speaker 3: have seen this or done this, or scientists could be
Speaker 3: looking at this. But somehow we're talking about agencies in
Speaker 3: the US government holding things up Like it's hard to
Speaker 3: imagine why if somebody came to this planet, they would
Speaker 3: somehow just come to us.
Speaker 2: It's a great question, and it's a question that comes
Speaker 2: up a lot. And the fact is this is a
Speaker 2: global phenomena. It has been since the beginning of time.
Speaker 2: And when I say the beginning of time, I literally
Speaker 2: mean the beginning of recorded human history. People have been
Speaker 2: seeing things like this in the skies. Russia has always
Speaker 2: had a big program, China has a big program, Brazil
Speaker 2: has had a big program, Mexico has a program all
Speaker 2: focused on this stuff. So this is a global phenomena.
Speaker 2: It's just that we focus on the US because we're
Speaker 2: in the US, and also because the US has taken
Speaker 2: the lead on this from the beginning. The secrecy of
Speaker 2: it emerged because the UFO phenomena, its modern incarnation, began
Speaker 2: happening towards the tail end of World War Two, when
Speaker 2: Allied fighters in their planes we're seeing these objects following them,
Speaker 2: these little sort of round metallic spheres just kind of
Speaker 2: following them, and they didn't know what it was. They
Speaker 2: thought it was some sort of German weapon. Well, the
Speaker 2: Germans were observing the same thing. They thought it was
Speaker 2: an Allied weapon. And that's what became known as Foo fighters,
Speaker 2: and that's where the band got the name.
Speaker 1: We know how difficult it is to keep a secret.
Speaker 1: Some of the things I thought were the most secret
Speaker 1: things we had in CIA when I was on the inside.
Speaker 1: I pick up the New York Times and I'm like,
Speaker 1: holy shit, it's all out now. And not only that,
Speaker 1: I was sort of tangentially involved in this particular operation,
Speaker 1: and there's more facts in here than I knew, right
Speaker 1: because I wasn't cleared into the entire thing. So the
Speaker 1: phenomenon of tens of thousands of people all knowing this
Speaker 1: and nobody saying it after all these years in Russia,
Speaker 1: the United States, Australia, except for like a few whistleblowers,
Speaker 1: I had trouble with that. So theoretically, I'm not like
Speaker 1: coming against anything you're saying. I just want to see
Speaker 1: the proof until i'm going to buy into it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm with you. I mean to me, the only
Speaker 2: thing that has been proven beyond a shadow of a
Speaker 2: doubt in my mind is that there are anomalous things
Speaker 2: happening in our skies, in our space and in our seas.
Speaker 3: All right, well, that's been some great stuff. Let's take
Speaker 3: a short break for a commercial. Moving back in just
Speaker 3: a moment, glad.
Speaker 1: To have everybody back. Let's go back down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: If the government is classifying this stuff, it seems to
Speaker 3: me there's two possible reasons, and one of them doesn't
Speaker 3: hold up. So one of them is we want to
Speaker 3: study it because we want to get a leg up
Speaker 3: on the Chinese or something like that. That means you
Speaker 3: assume that something from billions of miles away we would understand.
Speaker 3: The other one is, oh, it would scare people, and
Speaker 3: therefore we don't want to let it out. But then again,
Speaker 3: that assumes that we are the only ones that control
Speaker 3: this thing, and people would go crazy. And I don't
Speaker 3: buy that piece at all.
Speaker 2: As I said, before this phenomenon started happening towards the
Speaker 2: tail end of the Second World War, which means obviously
Speaker 2: the onset of the Cold War, America was already looking
Speaker 2: ahead to its main confrontation with the Soviet Union. Suddenly
Speaker 2: in Roswell in nineteen forty seven, something crashes that is indisputable.
Speaker 2: The Air Force at first says it's a flying saucer.
Speaker 2: We've got ourselves a genuin flying saucer that crashed here
Speaker 2: in Roswell. Then like a day later they said we
Speaker 2: were mistaken. It's just a weather balloon. Decades later they
Speaker 2: said it wasn't a weather balloon, and then after that,
Speaker 2: I think they've come up with another story since then.
Speaker 2: So the secrecy begins almost immediately. At the same time
Speaker 2: that this was happening, the Russians were having their own experiences,
Speaker 2: the Chinese were having their own experiences. Like it was
Speaker 2: all happening kind of simultaneously at a very fraught time.
Speaker 2: And that's not coincidental. If you believe the UFO Lord,
Speaker 2: I don't know if I do or I don't, but
Speaker 2: UFOs are so strongly associated with nuclear weapons and nuclear testing.
Speaker 2: There are famous stories corroborated where UFOs will show up
Speaker 2: at I forget the name of the base here in
Speaker 2: the US, it was a missile base, and in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty three, I believe, and they shut down the nukes,
Speaker 2: which should not be possible. The nukes are not connected
Speaker 2: to each other, and they're not connected to a central
Speaker 2: relay point. Each one got shut down one by one
Speaker 2: and then they were offline, and then at some point
Speaker 2: they were brought back online. Russia or the Soviet Union
Speaker 2: had a different problem. The UFOs came and they actually
Speaker 2: activated the missiles to launch, and the Soviets didn't know
Speaker 2: what to do about it. They were like, our missiles
Speaker 2: are getting ready to launch right now, we're not controlling them,
Speaker 2: and then they shut it off. And UFOs have been
Speaker 2: around missiles and missile testing facilities since the beginning. So
Speaker 2: it's not coincidental that all this stuff started happening around
Speaker 2: World War Two. If you believe the lore, people say,
Speaker 2: why don't they just land on the White House lawn
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty two, they basically did. I'm reading off
Speaker 2: the Wikipedia page of it now. From July twelfth to
Speaker 2: July twenty nine, nineteen fifty two, a series of unidentified
Speaker 2: flying object sightings were reported in Washington, DC. Later became
Speaker 2: known as the Washington Flap, made front page headlines and
Speaker 2: newspapers around the nation. A pilot and stewardess on a
Speaker 2: National Airlines flight observed lights above their plane within minutes
Speaker 2: both radar centers at National Airport and at Andrews Air
Speaker 2: Force Base. We're tracking more unknown objects.
Speaker 1: It's just funny about nineteen fifty two, because the admittedly
Speaker 1: little research I've done. The CIA did get involved with
Speaker 1: UFOs because there was concern that there were so many
Speaker 1: sidings that they thought that Soviets were behind it because
Speaker 1: at that time we could only have our missiles in
Speaker 1: so many places, and they were afraid that this was
Speaker 1: a Soviet trick that if everybody started reporting UFOs, that
Speaker 1: the Soviets could lost a missile strike and we wouldn't
Speaker 1: know what was real and what wasn't because of this
Speaker 1: spate of UFO sidings.
Speaker 3: Well, my question is it sounds like, from what I understand,
Speaker 3: you're involved in this thing called the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance.
Speaker 3: Can you tell us a little bit about that and
Speaker 3: is it similar to the Stars Academy because we have
Speaker 3: a buddy, Jim Sen who's tied to that organization.
Speaker 2: So, the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance is a new organization founded
Speaker 2: by a guy named Steve Bassett, and Steve Bassett has
Speaker 2: been the only full time UFO lobbyist in DC now
Speaker 2: for I feel like twenty five or thirty years. He's
Speaker 2: been the one dude that has been really pushing and
Speaker 2: advocating for what we call disclosure, having the government come
Speaker 2: out and say exactly what they know, go through the
Speaker 2: history of this thing, etc. At the moment, it's not
Speaker 2: very much. It's people who are in show business who
Speaker 2: are interested in this topic, who maybe want a network
Speaker 2: and collaborate and work to advance disclosure. But I think
Speaker 2: it's important to note that, unlike the To the Stars
Speaker 2: Academy founded by Tom DeLong, the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance has
Speaker 2: no commercial stake in anything. They're not funding anything, they're
Speaker 2: not taking a preprudasorial role in anything. They're basically just
Speaker 2: a tax exempt organization trying to get people who are
Speaker 2: interested in this to speak out, step forward, and so
Speaker 2: that's what I'm doing. It's interesting from a political perspective
Speaker 2: how the gang that's most interested in this right now
Speaker 2: are very right wing conservatives timber Chet, Paulina Luna, Matt Gates,
Speaker 2: and then there's a Democrat named Jared Moskowitz. They're on
Speaker 2: this like a dog on a bone. And on the
Speaker 2: Senate side, Oddly, the one who's been most vocal is
Speaker 2: Marco Rubio, who has said I might be getting this wrong,
Speaker 2: but either he or his staff have spoken to some
Speaker 2: of these other whistleblowers aside from Grush, and they corroborate
Speaker 2: what has been said. So it's all this shadowy, weird,
Speaker 2: murky shit. And John, You're exactly right. You cannot separate
Speaker 2: fact from fiction. Like the government as a whole doesn't
Speaker 2: know what this is. Barack Obama said it on Colbert.
Speaker 3: Actually that was James Corden, and here's a clip.
Speaker 8: The truth is that when I came into office, I asked, right,
Speaker 8: I was like, all right, is there the lab somewhere
Speaker 8: where where cape the alien specimens in spaceship And you
Speaker 8: know they did a little bit of research and the
Speaker 8: answer was no. But what is true, and I'm actually
Speaker 8: being serious here, is is that there's footage and records
Speaker 8: of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly
Speaker 8: what they are. We can't explain how they moved their trajectory.
Speaker 8: They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so
Speaker 8: you know, I think that people still take seriously trying
Speaker 8: to investigate and figure out what that is.
Speaker 2: The ironic part about this is people in this field
Speaker 2: who have been studying this have for decades been trying
Speaker 2: to get other people interested in it and interested in
Speaker 2: it in a serious way. So to have a comedian
Speaker 2: come on and talk about it, it's sort of like,
Speaker 2: am I cutting my own legs out from under? People
Speaker 2: making jokes about it, you know, like you're not going
Speaker 2: to hear me make any anal probe jokes, for example,
Speaker 2: for exactly this reason. It's like we wanted to be
Speaker 2: taken seriously because we think there's something there.
Speaker 3: You don't take anal probe seriously.
Speaker 2: I take them very seriously. But on the context of ets, I'm.
Speaker 1: Over fifty, I take them serious.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So there was this, if you remember, there was this
Speaker 1: quasi religious cult that was also into euphiology called Heaven's Gate.
Speaker 1: Thirty six of them committed suicide. They thought that their
Speaker 1: souls were going to go into an alien spaceship that
Speaker 1: is trailing the hail Bop common. But before they did, though,
Speaker 1: fifty of them took out something called alien Abduction Insurance,
Speaker 1: which promised to pay out if they were abducted, impregnated,
Speaker 1: or killed by aliens. And fifty of them insured themselves
Speaker 1: to a million dollars each.
Speaker 2: I'm guessing they didn't pay out. I mean, that's such
Speaker 2: a great racket, because the great thing about alien adductees
Speaker 2: is they can't prove it. They can only so if
Speaker 2: you're the insurance company, you never have to pay out.
Speaker 2: There's aspects of it like we didn't even come close
Speaker 2: to touching. There's the extra temporal hypothesis, champion by guy
Speaker 2: named doctor Mike Masters, who thinks this is all about
Speaker 2: people from the future coming back and sight seeing essentially,
Speaker 2: or trying to avert some sort of future crisis. There's
Speaker 2: the extra dimensional theory, where these things are just sort
Speaker 2: of living in our reality and we're just sort of
Speaker 2: bumping up against it dimensionally. A Gresh alluded to that
Speaker 2: in his testimony. I mean, it's just so crazy and
Speaker 2: so bizarre, and I love it so much because it's
Speaker 2: so weird. I mean, the universe is it's a pretty
Speaker 2: big place. Like you could add up three Californias together
Speaker 2: and you wouldn't even approach the size of the universe.
Speaker 3: Michael, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you.
Speaker 2: John Stern should have warned you. Michael's very serious when
Speaker 2: it comes to UFOs.
Speaker 1: Michael, you're the guy I want to be abducted by
Speaker 1: aliens with.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Oh that's nice.
Speaker 2: I've never had that offer before, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: take you up.
Speaker 4: John Jerry. That was the famous Michael Lea and Black.
Speaker 4: Was he everything I promised?
Speaker 1: That is more? As always, I was really impressed with
Speaker 1: the guy. I think he made some interesting arguments and can.
Speaker 4: You believe he's also a performing comedian.
Speaker 3: Well, that's what I respect about him.
Speaker 1: The conspiracy theory business needs more more comedians.
Speaker 4: But also there's more going on with these UFO reports recently,
Speaker 4: isn't there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, there's been a lot of reports that we
Speaker 3: talked about today about UAPs and the Senate and whistleblowers.
Speaker 3: But there was a recent March eighth story in the
Speaker 3: Washington Post and it's entitled Pentagon report finds no evidence
Speaker 3: of alien visits or hidden spacecraft, and it says it
Speaker 3: claims about secret government programs reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology are
Speaker 3: based on quote, circular reporting and hearsay. But it's very,
Speaker 3: very strongly suggests that the stuff that has been in
Speaker 3: all these other reports just isn't true, which.
Speaker 1: Means that there's no evidence or they're all in on it.
Speaker 1: The Pentagon's in on it. How come they bring me
Speaker 1: and you in because they wanted to keep it secret.
Speaker 1: That's why they didn't bring us in on there.
Speaker 3: And they brought us in on the Kennedy assassination. You
Speaker 3: think they would have brought us in on the UAP thing.
Speaker 1: So John, who have we got teed up to give
Speaker 1: us the empirical scientific side of things, the no shit
Speaker 1: show me proofside.
Speaker 3: So today we have Seth Shasteck. He's the lead astronomer
Speaker 3: at the SETI Institute, the host of the popular podcast
Speaker 3: Big Picture Science, and a prolific author who's written a
Speaker 3: number of books, one not too long ago called The
Speaker 3: Confessions of an Alien Hunter. And so Seth, tell us
Speaker 3: about yourself and the work that you've done related to
Speaker 3: UFOs or what they're now called UAP.
Speaker 9: Well, my background, as you just heard, is astronomy, radio
Speaker 9: astronomy actually, and on that basis, In fact, I was
Speaker 9: hired maybe twenty or thirty years ago by the SETI Institute.
Speaker 9: SETI it just means the search for extra terrestrial intelligence,
Speaker 9: and the idea here is to use instruments that are
Speaker 9: normally used for radio astronomy, in other words, big antennas,
Speaker 9: to try and eavesdrop on any signals that might be
Speaker 9: being produced by visitors to Earth, or perhaps by extraterrestrial
Speaker 9: intelligence that's not visiting birth Seth.
Speaker 1: In light of recent claims by people in front of Congress,
Speaker 1: it seems to be there's an irony between the US
Speaker 1: government support for SETIO and claims that the government already
Speaker 1: knows about extraterrestrial life and is hiding it from the public.
Speaker 1: It seems like the US government is engaged in both
Speaker 1: looking for life and then try to hide it at
Speaker 1: the same time.
Speaker 9: There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking. There seems to be
Speaker 9: an underlying belief that if aliens were actually visiting Earth,
Speaker 9: that the US government would try and keep that quiet. There's,
Speaker 9: of course no way in which they could keep it quiet,
Speaker 9: but a lot of people think they could and that
Speaker 9: the federal agencies are up to the task.
Speaker 3: But there's been a lot of recent activity to include
Speaker 3: Congressional hearings and a lot of things that are supposed
Speaker 3: quote unquote will blowers and things lately. Why do you
Speaker 3: think that is and why now?
Speaker 9: Well, I don't really know the answer to that. It
Speaker 9: isn't that the government suddenly took an interest in this.
Speaker 9: I testified to Congress myself twice about the whole UFO phenomenon.
Speaker 9: And keep in mind that Congress is made up of politicians,
Speaker 9: not scientists, so they ask questions that are from a
Speaker 9: science perspective somewhat elementary.
Speaker 1: Let's take a breather and back in a moment, and
Speaker 1: we're back. Just sticking with Grush for a while. He's
Speaker 1: claiming that for the past seventy nine years, the federal
Speaker 1: government has kept this secret about space aliens, and that
Speaker 1: we've got materials. They keep using terms like biomass and
Speaker 1: so forth. I'm telling you that, having spent thirty three
Speaker 1: years inside of CIA, it would be virtually impossible to
Speaker 1: keep a secret like that from leaking out. People getting
Speaker 1: drunk with each other, you know, or people getting married. NCIA.
Speaker 1: We'll stay with a job for three or four years,
Speaker 1: and then we'll move on to another one, So people
Speaker 1: would cycle through some of these offices, so there would
Speaker 1: literally be tens of thousands of people who would know
Speaker 1: this well.
Speaker 9: I've worked for the federal government in the past. I
Speaker 9: even had secret clearance, actually, and I don't believe that
Speaker 9: the federal government could keep something like this quiet for decades.
Speaker 9: But you don't have to believe that. I think that
Speaker 9: the real point is not so much whether the government
Speaker 9: is keeping things quiet, but the fact that if we
Speaker 9: were being visited, it wouldn't just be the federal government
Speaker 9: that would have the evidence. This is a mistake that
Speaker 9: the public generally makes that only the military or the
Speaker 9: agencies inside the government would know if aliens were visiting Earth.
Speaker 9: If aliens are visiting Earth, everybody would know. They're like
Speaker 9: eight hundred satellites around our planet these days, and most
Speaker 9: of them have cameras that are looking down. If there
Speaker 9: were aliens spacecraft buzzing around, they would see that. And
Speaker 9: those are not all American spacecraft. The Europeans have lots
Speaker 9: of them in Japanese. Why is it that do you
Speaker 9: think the government would get this secret? And I've never
Speaker 9: gotten an answer to that other than that, well, you know,
Speaker 9: it would disquiet the public. The public couldn't handle the news,
Speaker 9: which is kind of nonsense, because one after another surveys
Speaker 9: of the public's attitudes on these subjects show that the
Speaker 9: majority of them believe that this is happening, and they
Speaker 9: don't seem to be riding in the streets about it. Now.
Speaker 3: That's one of the other things. In one of your
Speaker 3: recent writings, I noticed you were talking about this sort
Speaker 3: of group of recent quote unquote whistleblowers. And one of
Speaker 3: the things you say, which I tend to agree with,
Speaker 3: is whenever this kind of extraordinary claim is made, there's
Speaker 3: never any follow up or evidence, and they just say that, well,
Speaker 3: that material is classified. And it's quite handy to say
Speaker 3: something that's really out there and just say, well that's classified,
Speaker 3: so therefore and so, just to get to the overclassification issue,
Speaker 3: it seems like Senator Schumer recently has tried to push
Speaker 3: a bill on forcing the government to disclose the Congress
Speaker 3: what it knows about these type of things. And as
Speaker 3: you know, Harry Read one of the previous has the
Speaker 3: Senate too also was very interested in this issue and
Speaker 3: wanted to pushed towards either declassifying or including the Congress
Speaker 3: in these type of things.
Speaker 9: You know, these statements. I watched this fellow, David Grush
Speaker 9: claim that the federal government had teams of people that
Speaker 9: were routinely going out and recovering crash debris from alien spacecraft.
Speaker 9: And if it were true, at least a science community
Speaker 9: would have access to these materials. I mean, what could
Speaker 9: be more interesting than to study materials that had been
Speaker 9: brought to Earth by another species?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 9: And why would you keep that classified in the first place.
Speaker 9: There's really no reason to do so, it's something you
Speaker 9: would want, as many scientists as possible to study. When
Speaker 9: they say things like well it's all classified, that's very convenient,
Speaker 9: but it's hard to believe that the Aliens have arranged
Speaker 9: things that only one federal agency has proof of their visits.
Speaker 1: So set the last couple of days, I've talked to
Speaker 1: some friends of mine who were formerly in CIA but
Speaker 1: in the S and T director the Science and Technology Directorate,
Speaker 1: and I got some interesting response and let me outline
Speaker 1: a scenario for you and have you like address it.
Speaker 1: So the Russians have a satellite, or the Chinese or
Speaker 1: the North Koreans and say that satellite was to crash
Speaker 1: in the Gobi Desert or in Kazakhstan, and we wanted
Speaker 1: to get a hold of that to understand the latest
Speaker 1: Russian technology or whatever. It is conceivable that working with
Speaker 1: special forces, it would be CIA because we have a presence.
Speaker 1: Let's just run with Mongolia, Gobi Desert. I'm just completely
Speaker 1: making this up. We probably wouldn't want to tell the
Speaker 1: Mongolian government that that's there because it would leap back
Speaker 1: to the Russians, and we might want to use the
Speaker 1: CIA presence in Mongolia if there is one, to bring
Speaker 1: in a special forces team to go to the site
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, find a way cover way
Speaker 1: to get out there. And if there was a site,
Speaker 1: the craft would really be debris, right, and we would
Speaker 1: be interested in acquiring the materials to see what are
Speaker 1: the Russians using, what are the polymers on this and
Speaker 1: so forth. They would acquire this material, bring it back,
Speaker 1: and yet it probably would go to some element inside
Speaker 1: a CIA. He's claiming it's this thing called OGA Office
Speaker 1: of Global Access and it would be shared with the
Speaker 1: scientific community inside of CIAS and grush. If you look
Speaker 1: at his actual whistleblower complaint, it says that he was
Speaker 1: denied access to programs that they didn't want to read
Speaker 1: him into. If we were acquiring a Russian satellite or
Speaker 1: bits of it, that would be a program we probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't tell about because it's not a UAP. It's completely identified.
Speaker 1: We know what it is, and we know where it was,
Speaker 1: and we know what we got, and so that really
Speaker 1: doesn't fall into his Bailey Wick ause a UAP, and
Speaker 1: of course we would try to keep that very controlled.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 9: I guess I would come back Jerry to what I
Speaker 9: said before. I'm not disputing the fact that a government
Speaker 9: agency like the CIA could keep something secret. I certainly
Speaker 9: hope they can keep something secret, to be honest, but
Speaker 9: it's not clear to me why alien spacecraft would be
Speaker 9: something they'd want to keep secret. You would want every
Speaker 9: scientist with any expertise in the matter to be studying this.
Speaker 9: There's obviously no security threat. The aliens are not blowing
Speaker 9: up our cities or anything like that. It's an American tendency.
Speaker 9: I've lived in other parts of the world, and it
Speaker 9: isn't the same there to want to think that the
Speaker 9: government is keeping stuff from them. Americans like that idea.
Speaker 9: It's an idea that's fairly unknown in Europe at least,
Speaker 9: but here it's very commonplace that we like to think
Speaker 9: that the government doesn't play straight with us. But in
Speaker 9: the case of alien visitation, that isn't really so much
Speaker 9: a government thing as it is a science thing.
Speaker 1: Secretly recovering a Russian satellite that has crashed somewhere.
Speaker 3: We do do that, Jerry, if if a satellite crashes,
Speaker 3: or a drone or a nuclear weapon goes astray, the
Speaker 3: SAA is involved in trying to go coach.
Speaker 1: And if we would try to keep that quiet and
Speaker 1: people could draw conclusions from that, it's much sexier to say, oh,
Speaker 1: if they're not telling us what it is, it must
Speaker 1: be an alien satellite, as opposed to like a North
Speaker 1: and craft that crashed.
Speaker 3: I think these conspiracy theories have moved to the place
Speaker 3: where they've created this really strong notion that there's this
Speaker 3: deep state that's working somehow against the interests of regular people.
Speaker 3: And what's frustrating to me, who spend almost thirty years
Speaker 3: in the CIA, is everybody I know, they're the good
Speaker 3: and the bad, and the smart and the dumb. Everybody
Speaker 3: believe they're working on behalf of the American people and
Speaker 3: took that job really, really seriously, and believe that they
Speaker 3: had to inform the Congress and had to inform the
Speaker 3: political leaders, and they took that job incredibly serious. So
Speaker 3: this notion that there's this sort of evil Cabala people
Speaker 3: hiding things from the American public. We're hiding things because
Speaker 3: we're trying to do things on behalf of the American public.
Speaker 3: And it's hard to imagine how hiding UFOs would be
Speaker 3: part of that process.
Speaker 1: It sounds right to me now that we all walk
Speaker 1: around with cameras right on our cell phones. How come,
Speaker 1: there's no great photographs now of UFO, of UAPs whizz't around, right,
Speaker 1: We've got all these from the nineteen fifties, these grainy pictures.
Speaker 1: But now that everybody but he's got like one of
Speaker 1: these things, and when they see it, they can be
Speaker 1: geolocated and they can take pictures of it. Thousands of
Speaker 1: people can take pictures of it. They seem to have
Speaker 1: like disappeared sort of.
Speaker 9: It was noted by somebody who was writing for I
Speaker 9: think Skeptic magazine or whatever that with every improvement in
Speaker 9: the camera technology that we carry around in our pocket
Speaker 9: and every improvement of that, the alien stepped back a
Speaker 9: little a little bit to make sure that the photos plan.
Speaker 1: I have heard several times people throw out, in a
Speaker 1: dish gallop the robertsond panel as if like, ah, that
Speaker 1: proves it. So I went and I took a look
Speaker 1: at what this is, and yeah, there's actually a touch
Speaker 1: of truth in it that the robertsid panel set. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two, apparently there was this huge spate of
Speaker 1: UFO sightings and people were calling it in and CIA
Speaker 1: did get involved. The concern was that it was overloading
Speaker 1: our ability At the time to protect our ourselves from
Speaker 1: incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, like we were only able to
Speaker 1: protect ourselves so much, and this was actually interfering with
Speaker 1: our ability to protect ourselves, they said at the time,
Speaker 1: and CIA apparently and it's been completely declassified, he as
Speaker 1: he can go read it. But CIA at the time
Speaker 1: recommended that in order to protect ourselves from a nuclear attack,
Speaker 1: it would be good if there weren't quite so many
Speaker 1: false reports, and that maybe there should be a program
Speaker 1: to inform the American public, like how to deal with
Speaker 1: these and to debunk some of these claims these were
Speaker 1: experimental aircraft and so forth, and that this might be
Speaker 1: a good thing to do. And this then has morphed
Speaker 1: into the CIA as early as fifty two saying that
Speaker 1: we had to lie and engage in a disinformation campaign
Speaker 1: against American people, when actually what the statement was at
Speaker 1: the time was completely the opposite. And this comes into
Speaker 1: what Grussia is saying, saying that the US government is
Speaker 1: involved in murder of people wanting to talk about this,
Speaker 1: that he's personally worried that the agency, the CIA is
Speaker 1: involved with this huge campaign of disinformation against the American people,
Speaker 1: that we're illegally for the last eighty years have been
Speaker 1: withholding information from Congress, which gets pretty awful and destructive
Speaker 1: to our body politic. Part of what Grush and so
Speaker 1: others are asserting is that we have these crafts we
Speaker 1: being the US government, the scientific community, I assume, and
Speaker 1: that we have been reverse engineering the technology and materials.
Speaker 1: So how would that even work?
Speaker 9: I think you've already stumbled up on what the true
Speaker 9: answer is, because, look, you could liken this to giving
Speaker 9: Neanderthals a laptop. Somebody could argue, Okay, these Neanderthals are
Speaker 9: going to reverse engineer that, and they'll be making their
Speaker 9: own laptops soon enough. They're probably never going to be
Speaker 9: able to reverse engineer it, right, you know, I don't
Speaker 9: think we would be able to reverse engineer alien technology
Speaker 9: because it would be at least thousands of years more
Speaker 9: advanced than where we are, and we just wouldn't have
Speaker 9: the basic understandings of that technology to allow us to
Speaker 9: reverse engineer.
Speaker 1: And the people who would look at it running with
Speaker 1: this scenario, they'd all be the top scientists and none
Speaker 1: of these guys are going to keep their mouth shut.
Speaker 3: But none of you guys worked on the Kennedy assassination
Speaker 3: like I did. You don't understand how we can.
Speaker 9: That was just a low level functionary in Dallas.
Speaker 3: Well if we can, if we can take these things
Speaker 3: and re engineer them for weapons use, then we better
Speaker 3: hurry up and give it to the goddamn Ukrainians.
Speaker 1: For CHRISTI I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, So s
Speaker 1: with SETI. You're actually involved in a scientific, peer reviewed,
Speaker 1: provable science to look for extraterrestrial life, whatever that is,
Speaker 1: or signs of it. So what is the government and
Speaker 1: what are you doing in SETI doing to actually look
Speaker 1: for signs of life at a more serious level.
Speaker 9: If you're talking about life beyond Earth. What we're doing
Speaker 9: is we're continuing to build bacecraft to crawl around or
Speaker 9: just sit on the surface of Mars, for example, because
Speaker 9: Mars seems to be the most likely place in our
Speaker 9: Solar system to have produced life. We send a lot
Speaker 9: of hardware to Mars. We also send hardware to Venus,
Speaker 9: which is slightly closer, but you know, Venus, it doesn't
Speaker 9: have an appealing environment for life, so Venus gets a
Speaker 9: little less attention than Mars. But we're trying to find
Speaker 9: that out. And the question we're trying to answer is
Speaker 9: not whether aliens are planting hardware on Mars. We're trying
Speaker 9: to find out whether life in fact can't get started
Speaker 9: on a world like Mars, and whether it has. Okay,
Speaker 9: that's just a purely science question. It isn't going to
Speaker 9: affect your plans for the weekend. So maybe a better
Speaker 9: scheme is to do what is awful being done, and
Speaker 9: that's SETI, of course, where we just use big antennas
Speaker 9: to try and see if there's any radio traffic bouncing
Speaker 9: around our part of the galaxy.
Speaker 3: Have you found anything?
Speaker 9: If we had, you'd know it.
Speaker 1: Seth, it's been really great talking with you. When we
Speaker 1: find intelligent life, we'll have you on along with the
Speaker 1: alien hopefully. And said, do you know why aliens don't
Speaker 1: come at Christmas time?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Here goes.
Speaker 9: I can't say I do.
Speaker 1: They don't want to give away their presence. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: You got three kids.
Speaker 3: They love that stuff. Yeah, I bet they do. Now
Speaker 3: let's speak with our producer, Adam Davidson and try to
Speaker 3: sort this all out together.
Speaker 1: Welcome back, Adam, fresh off your spaceship.
Speaker 5: Fresh off the spaceship. I'm out here in the countryside.
Speaker 5: It has been a weird couple of years for the
Speaker 5: alien curious. Can we really think this through? If you
Speaker 5: were at CIA right now and you were in a
Speaker 5: meeting and someone said, okay, we just got irrefutable proof
Speaker 5: if our satellites picked up something in Kazakhstan or whatever,
Speaker 5: would the instinct be all right, we got to keep
Speaker 5: this hush hush.
Speaker 1: Well, we'd probably talk about it over beers with some
Speaker 1: of our friends in Vienna, Virginia, the Vienna Inn. We'd
Speaker 1: all have beers about it, and we wouldn't say aliens,
Speaker 1: but we would like probably allude to it. Right, It's
Speaker 1: not something that we would keep secret among ourselves.
Speaker 5: But the much more specific question is has anyone come here?
Speaker 5: And is it being covered up?
Speaker 1: And why are they such bad drivers that they keep
Speaker 1: crashing right right right?
Speaker 5: So what do you think? Do you think aliens have
Speaker 5: come to Earth?
Speaker 3: It's sort of like religion, Like you know, I can't
Speaker 3: prove it. I'm skeptical, but I also do want to
Speaker 3: say that it would be wrong for me to say
Speaker 3: there's not things that are larger than me or that
Speaker 3: I can never understand, And so I just think we
Speaker 3: have to keep an open mind look at these things.
Speaker 3: Take our time, assume that there's always things that we're
Speaker 3: not going to be able to figure out right away.
Speaker 1: The bird to proof is still on the people making
Speaker 1: the assertions without definitive evidence, and as intelligence officers, I
Speaker 1: want the definitive evidence and then I'll believe it. I'll
Speaker 1: be happy about it.
Speaker 3: Well, what, it's interesting even within the government. So Jerry
Speaker 3: and I both worked for thirty years in the government
Speaker 3: in this secret side, right, neither of us know anything
Speaker 3: about this. So somehow, if there's this thing happened, and
Speaker 3: it's a certain part of the CIA and intelligence agencies
Speaker 3: found this out out and have been able to keep
Speaker 3: it from the rest of us. And so I had
Speaker 3: never heard anything about any of this when I was inside. Now,
Speaker 3: obviously they probably didn't want to tell me because I
Speaker 3: would blather it to somebody else. But if it's true,
Speaker 3: it's unusual how well it's been kept secret.
Speaker 1: And it gets even more difficult if some of the
Speaker 1: assertions are that it has been so for the last
Speaker 1: seventy years, that in seventy years no one has said anything,
Speaker 1: and I find that highly implausible. I find it highly
Speaker 1: implausible that that Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe
Speaker 1: Biden that all of them would look at this and go, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying anything because I don't know why.
Speaker 3: Right after they saw what we did to Kennedy, I
Speaker 3: think they know.
Speaker 2: To keep.
Speaker 4: So, guys, this is John Stern. I've been listening the
Speaker 4: whole time, and I have a question, very practical question.
Speaker 4: If I came across evidence of a UFO, or I
Speaker 4: saw one and I got a great photo of it,
Speaker 4: what should I do?
Speaker 1: Who should I call?
Speaker 3: That's a great question. You should call Davidson, and it
Speaker 3: should be journalists should look into this. If I saw something,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't automatically go to the government.
Speaker 4: Frankly, how about Juliani? Should I give it to him first?
Speaker 1: Yeah, give it to his Russian handlers.
Speaker 4: But don't give it to the government because they'll cover
Speaker 4: it up.
Speaker 5: You're saying just like you already did. That's what I'm hearing.
Speaker 5: Like I didn't believe in it, but now I do,
Speaker 5: because you said exactly what you would have said if
Speaker 5: you were sworn to secrecy.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, I don't know that we've solved this one.
Speaker 3: This is a biggie and you may come back to
Speaker 3: pieces of this later, but thank you all, and we'll
Speaker 3: see you next time on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher,
Speaker 4: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4: It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for
Speaker 4: iHeartMedia B