Speaker 1: High Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you
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Speaker 1: it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot
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Speaker 1: For more information, check out the show notes enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2: They come from outer space, lower Earth orbit, go to
Speaker 2: twenty eight thousand feet right off the coast of Catalina.
Speaker 2: Whatever that object was, drop right down to the surface
Speaker 2: of the water. These things were breaking the soundberg, but.
Speaker 3: There was no big boom. Freaked us all out. We
Speaker 3: didn't even know how to respond to it.
Speaker 2: Came from outer space all the way down to twenty
Speaker 2: eight thousand feet and stopped.
Speaker 3: It was so outside of our experience we didn't know
Speaker 3: what to do.
Speaker 2: They look like about a fifty foot long giant ticktack,
Speaker 2: pure white, no doors, no windows, no nothing, sh of
Speaker 2: his aircraft proximately whatever that object was, with two fast
Speaker 2: eagles aside cap station the exact latitude, longitude and altitude,
Speaker 2: and stopped. How in the hell didn't know where that
Speaker 2: cap point was. It was a secret location only in
Speaker 2: secret message traffic. They knew where in tent.
Speaker 4: Welcome to high strange.
Speaker 1: I sat down with senior radar operator for the US Navy,
Speaker 1: Kevin Day, in two thousand and four. He was aboard
Speaker 1: the USS Princeton, a naval guided missile cruiser, when strange
Speaker 1: objects began to appear on a screen. Over the course
Speaker 1: of several days, he continued to see large tic tac
Speaker 1: shaped objects running circles around the Navy jets, raising the
Speaker 1: legitimate concern of a possible mid air collision.
Speaker 2: There were zigzagging all over the sky like a flywood
Speaker 2: do an impossible things darting all over the place, creating
Speaker 2: G forces thirty five gus forty g's that would make
Speaker 2: us into pancakes.
Speaker 3: The pilot can survive maybe eight or nine G forces.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's anything biological in these things. You
Speaker 2: all saw, yep, we all saw it.
Speaker 3: And it shook me to my core, truly did.
Speaker 1: They watched on radar these unknown objects dive from over
Speaker 1: eighty thousand feet in the air to the very near
Speaker 1: surface of the ocean in a matter of seconds. They
Speaker 1: were long, fifty foot cylindrical objects, white in color, no
Speaker 1: windows and no doors, and by appearance they were rotorless
Speaker 1: with no signs of propulsion.
Speaker 2: We were concerned about safety of flight. I was at meetings.
Speaker 2: Hey guys, I got something for you. What's up, keV.
Speaker 2: We have a safety a flight issue off the southern
Speaker 2: California coast. And when I went to describe what happened
Speaker 2: to us and knowfore, I got laughed at man, what
Speaker 2: do you mean?
Speaker 3: They laughed UFOs ha ha.
Speaker 2: And the people who weren't laughing, they were giving me
Speaker 2: this kind of look looking down their nose, like wish
Speaker 2: he been smoking. It was real. I mean, pilot saw
Speaker 2: it with our eyeballs. It's on every ship's radar, and
Speaker 2: those radars are really good at what they do.
Speaker 4: He trust me.
Speaker 3: I was concerned about safety of flight. Man for aar
Speaker 3: Landers too. I got so frustrated no one would listen.
Speaker 4: I quit.
Speaker 1: Commander David Fraber flew his F eighteen super Hornet towards
Speaker 1: the object and it crossed directly in front of the
Speaker 1: nose of his jet, then took off out of site.
Speaker 1: When the object appeared again, it was at the exact
Speaker 1: location The jets were supposed to rendezvous at a secret,
Speaker 1: undisclosed set of coordinates. Five years after the TIC TAC incident.
Speaker 1: Kevin Day resigned from the Navy in twenty seventeen. While
Speaker 1: volunteering at a country club near his house. He was
Speaker 1: carrying a plate of fish and chips when he noticed
Speaker 1: the breaking news on the TV.
Speaker 5: Unexplained aerial phenomena. This Navy video showing the pilot's reaction
Speaker 5: to the strange aerial encounter.
Speaker 1: The Pentagon released three videos of unknown flying objects to
Speaker 1: the public.
Speaker 3: I stood there, frozen. I dropped the plate of food
Speaker 3: I was carrying.
Speaker 1: After over twenty years in the Navy, being mocked and
Speaker 1: laughed at by the Department of Defense, he was finally vindicated.
Speaker 1: He belined to his house in a daze.
Speaker 2: I raised home, probably broke and reached traffic law on
Speaker 2: this little talent to get home, Jump on the computer,
Speaker 2: call my friends and deal with it, you know, because
Speaker 2: what else are you gonna do?
Speaker 3: If it was you, what would you do? I have
Speaker 3: no idea, right exactly. We're just human.
Speaker 1: Right. When he got home, he started calling other sailors
Speaker 1: aboard the USS Princeton, people who also witnessed the event.
Speaker 1: Now that the news had broken, he wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure they could all stick together, and he urged them
Speaker 1: to come forward and talk about the incident openly.
Speaker 2: We can't let command a favor twist in the wind
Speaker 2: by himself here, because we were there and we know
Speaker 2: what happened.
Speaker 3: We have to balance what he's saying. So that's how
Speaker 3: that all started.
Speaker 1: Both the New York Times and Politico broke the news
Speaker 1: that the Pentagon had been investigating UAPs for a decade.
Speaker 1: This UAP task force was officially known as the Advanced
Speaker 1: Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The leader of the operation, lou Elizondo,
Speaker 1: had just resigned, claiming he left the program for similar
Speaker 1: reasons as Kevin Day. His higher ups were simply not
Speaker 1: taking this seriously.
Speaker 2: I think what happens from this point forward, the science
Speaker 2: teams get on the ball around the planet and we
Speaker 2: start collecting science data on these things.
Speaker 3: UAP is noble. We can know what these are.
Speaker 2: We're worried about paying the rent and making sure the
Speaker 2: electric bills paid and the kids are on school and
Speaker 2: time and they're.
Speaker 3: Healthy, well addressed. Who the hell's got time to think
Speaker 3: about you? You know, we have to live in the
Speaker 3: data to life. What if the entire.
Speaker 2: Planet has to change all of a sudden and we're
Speaker 2: not prepared. That's what the scientists are saying. Now, hey,
Speaker 2: get ready for the societal impacts. Looking back on this,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't trade a moment what I went through, because,
Speaker 2: you know what, the things that happen to me are
Speaker 2: going to be a powerful damn message. You want to
Speaker 2: go to Congress. That's how I'm going to transmitt this.
Speaker 2: I'm going to turn it into a message that they
Speaker 2: are going to have to listen to. I feel so
Speaker 2: damn lucky. I can't even express how lucky I feel,
Speaker 2: how blessed I am.
Speaker 4: What in honor? What in honor?
Speaker 2: It was all worth it, all of it to get
Speaker 2: the message out. Whether we like it or not, whether
Speaker 2: we admit to it or not, these things are coming.
Speaker 3: Accept it. I don't want anything. I don't want money,
Speaker 3: I don't want fame. I want the.
Speaker 2: World to get ready for what's about to happen. That's
Speaker 2: what Kevin Day wants.
Speaker 6: It was so cool to see a Space Shuttle launch
Speaker 6: or a landing and realize my dad was instrumental in
Speaker 6: doing that.
Speaker 1: This is John Greenwald, the founder and creator of the
Speaker 1: Blackfault dot com, And after.
Speaker 4: He retired, I found out he worked on the Mars lander.
Speaker 6: I found out he worked on the Space Defense program.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot about him that I didn't know
Speaker 4: until after he retired.
Speaker 6: And my dad he has really kind of I think,
Speaker 6: instilled in me the fascination with space and stretching the
Speaker 6: limits of what science can do.
Speaker 4: I started way back when I was fifteen years old.
Speaker 6: A incident in nineteen seventy six one of the very
Speaker 6: few UFO documents that you could go and read and download,
Speaker 6: and it read very much like a X Files episode,
Speaker 6: a science fiction movie. It just didn't make sense. Seen
Speaker 6: over the city of Tehran, Iran, a second UFO was
Speaker 6: seen coming out of that one, a third coming out
Speaker 6: of the bottom, one of which the F four Phantom
Speaker 6: pilot saw hover above the ground and cast this large
Speaker 6: light just like the.
Speaker 1: Tictec in two thousand and four. The Tehran UFO incident
Speaker 1: involved not only eyewitnesses the radar pings of something strange
Speaker 1: in the sky. The pilots began to engage the UFO
Speaker 1: over Iran's capital city, and as they got closer, both
Speaker 1: F four Phantom jets lost controls of their onboard weapons systems.
Speaker 1: As they turned off from the pursuit and headed back
Speaker 1: towards their base.
Speaker 4: Magically, all their.
Speaker 1: Communication and weapons functions began working again, and this happened
Speaker 1: to both of the jets.
Speaker 6: During this whole event, two separate F four Phantom jets
Speaker 6: seemingly were strategically shut down, losing controls communications as they
Speaker 6: were engaging this UFO.
Speaker 4: Whatever that was.
Speaker 6: One could potentially be a coincidence. Two, however, seem strategic
Speaker 6: and it seemed like technology. There's really not a feasible
Speaker 6: explanation for it, even to this day. So the question
Speaker 6: mark is, well, what was it and why we're talking
Speaker 6: about nineteen seventy six here with all this time that passed.
Speaker 6: I mean, maybe we'd see something similar, maybe we'd have
Speaker 6: a viable explanation.
Speaker 4: At this point we have nothing. We have neither.
Speaker 1: This was almost thirty years before the tic TACs were seen.
Speaker 1: How could an adversary like Russia or China have such
Speaker 1: a tight lid on some advanced technology like this for
Speaker 1: so damn long.
Speaker 6: That was the first document that I got when I
Speaker 6: was fifteen, and I thought, man, the Internet has to
Speaker 6: have more. And that's what kind of drove me and
Speaker 6: motivated me to go back and look. And there really
Speaker 6: wasn't anything. You just saw more of the he said,
Speaker 6: she said story. There were chat forums, message boards at
Speaker 6: the time, nobody really had the full story, and if
Speaker 6: they were telling the same story, they were telling it
Speaker 6: in different ways.
Speaker 4: And it was so frustrating.
Speaker 6: So that's why I started utilizing the FOYA and then
Speaker 6: just going after these documents because I figured, Hey, if
Speaker 6: this four page document exists, there have to be more.
Speaker 4: And sure enough, there was a lot more.
Speaker 6: The Freedom of Information Act is essentially a law here
Speaker 6: in America that allows anyone in the world. You actually
Speaker 6: don't even have to be an American citizen to access information.
Speaker 6: You request information, they have to send it to you,
Speaker 6: but the fine print allows nine different reasons for them
Speaker 6: to say no. Those nine different what they call exemptions,
Speaker 6: are those reactions that you see, freedom of information. We
Speaker 6: can go after information. Government militaries got to send it
Speaker 6: to us. Problem is they put in nine reasons for
Speaker 6: them not.
Speaker 4: To send it.
Speaker 6: To see things that the American public and the world
Speaker 6: have never seen before, to get documents, to get videos
Speaker 6: like old film reels, it's such an amazing feeling because
Speaker 6: you're seeing history that only a select few people that
Speaker 6: had clearances or that were involved in the project have.
Speaker 4: Seen before I was fifteen. I was stupid.
Speaker 6: I didn't realize exactly what I was getting myself into,
Speaker 6: but quickly learned that the government was going to push back.
Speaker 6: And what I first wanted to achieve was essentially get
Speaker 6: these documents out and put them out in their raw form.
Speaker 6: I didn't anticipate the struggle that there was going to
Speaker 6: be to get it. Being that fifteen year old curious kid,
Speaker 6: I didn't know a whole lot about it. I just
Speaker 6: knew there was something there. What was this Freedom of
Speaker 6: Information Act? But hey, they're going to send me something
Speaker 6: for free.
Speaker 4: Cool?
Speaker 6: And that's what I kind of went for the Freedom
Speaker 6: of Information Act, building a website and just kind of
Speaker 6: going from there, and I take it to kind of
Speaker 6: the next level for me, where I put it online
Speaker 6: for everybody. Here we are twenty six years and three
Speaker 6: point two million pages later. I haven't gone anywhere people
Speaker 6: can download with the click of a button in seconds
Speaker 6: what sometimes took me over a decade to get. Literally,
Speaker 6: for me, that drives some of the motivation to do
Speaker 6: what I do.
Speaker 1: John has been collecting documents released via foiler request since
Speaker 1: he was fifteen years old. I wasn't even remotely productive
Speaker 1: with anything at that age.
Speaker 6: I went from that curious fifteen year old kid who
Speaker 6: was just trying to find some documents to really piecing
Speaker 6: together pieces of the puzzle that in some cases had
Speaker 6: never been released to the general public at all, finding
Speaker 6: that irrefutable proof that they were still interested in UFOs
Speaker 6: and even in the CIA files had material of some
Speaker 6: kind post what they admitted to investigating back in the forties, fifties,
Speaker 6: and sixties. I deep down kind of always knew there
Speaker 6: was a mystery to this. I mean, you just look
Speaker 6: at the books on bookshelves and a bookstore, and I knew
Speaker 6: that there was a lot to the topic. It wasn't
Speaker 6: just kind of like a silly Internet rumor. So, being
Speaker 6: again that young naive kid, I didn't know what I
Speaker 6: was getting myself into, but I at least was kind
Speaker 6: of solidified with my beliefs that there was something unknown
Speaker 6: about this, something.
Speaker 4: That was worthwhile exploring.
Speaker 6: From all over the world, they were collecting sightings and
Speaker 6: that nineteen seventy six Iran incident, I'll stress the date
Speaker 6: nineteen seventy six, seven years after the United States Air
Speaker 6: Force and in turned the United States government said, hey,
Speaker 6: there's nothing to this, there's nothing that's a threat to
Speaker 6: national security.
Speaker 4: We're not interested.
Speaker 6: If you want to report something, go to your local
Speaker 6: law enforcement or a UFO group, but we don't care.
Speaker 6: Behind the scenes, though, they were collecting all these reports,
Speaker 6: and clearly, if you have a craft of some kind
Speaker 6: in nineteen seventy six that can strategically shut down two
Speaker 6: separate F four phantom jets, that's a concern. There was
Speaker 6: a United States Air Force pilot that chimed in on
Speaker 6: one of the documents that I found through the NSA
Speaker 6: on this very incident. He stated in this once classified document.
Speaker 6: It was a low level classification for this one. There's
Speaker 6: certain things in a pilot's career that just defy logic
Speaker 6: and explanation. This case is one of them, he says.
Speaker 6: But this will probably be filed in a drawer somewhere
Speaker 6: and forgotten. All the way up to twenty seventeen, the
Speaker 6: government maintained that they had zero interest in UFOs. Oh,
Speaker 6: that's probably left over from Project Bluebook. They forgot about it.
Speaker 6: Military is notorious for forgetting things. What I did was
Speaker 6: proved quite the opposite, that it was actually modified through
Speaker 6: the two thousands. UFOs was never taken out. Now, some
Speaker 6: of your odd it's might say, well, that doesn't sound surprising.
Speaker 6: They're looking into UFOs prior to twenty seventeen, when the
Speaker 6: UFO program that was reported in the New York Times
Speaker 6: kind of blew open this whole avalanche of interest and
Speaker 6: so on. Prior to that, it was a lot different.
Speaker 6: That's part of my story, that's part of my growth
Speaker 6: and seeing both eras being deeply entrenched and saying, look,
Speaker 6: there is irrefutable proof the government is lying. They're interested
Speaker 6: in UFOs. These phenomena are real. Those multiple facets of it,
Speaker 6: It extended way beyond nineteen sixty nine. They're lying to
Speaker 6: you about the interest. They have material. You can see
Speaker 6: photos of it in the old Army files. I mean
Speaker 6: there's stories on top of stories on top of stories,
Speaker 6: and then you get to twenty seventeen, then they start
Speaker 6: talking about it, and then all of a sudden you
Speaker 6: have this completely different conversation.
Speaker 1: My experience on my other show, Radio Rental has shown
Speaker 1: me that there is more unexplained in this world that
Speaker 1: I ever could have imagined. Through decades of in depth research,
Speaker 1: John Is unearthed mountains of bizarre stories, all by requesting
Speaker 1: documents from the government.
Speaker 6: Now they're acknowledging UAP are real, they're looking into it,
Speaker 6: they're investigating it, and they're talking about it.
Speaker 4: They're not poking fun at it.
Speaker 6: There's research organizations or groups within the United States military
Speaker 6: complex that are looking at this thing. That's all positive,
Speaker 6: full stop period. The bad part is the secrecy. I
Speaker 6: thought twenty six, twenty fifteen years ago secrecy was bad enough,
Speaker 6: it's worse now. It's not a popular take right now
Speaker 6: because those that want to believe that we are on
Speaker 6: the road to some disclosure feel that just because the
Speaker 6: government is talking about UAP, that this is it. The
Speaker 6: reality is that even though they are talking about it,
Speaker 6: they have deeper secrecy now procedures specifically targeting the UAP
Speaker 6: topic to classify it, and they don't want to tell
Speaker 6: us about it. A lot of people that again really
Speaker 6: have that belief that we are onto something here on
Speaker 6: the road to this disclosure, feel that politicians are going
Speaker 6: to be the answer.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 6: Look, I've met quite a few politicians over the years.
Speaker 6: Some of them are great people, some of them their
Speaker 6: heart is in the right place. But if anybody thinks
Speaker 6: politicians are going to be the turning point for transparency
Speaker 6: on UAP have a real big letdown coming. My proof
Speaker 6: of that is you look in the last couple of
Speaker 6: years and these classified briefings that we now know quite
Speaker 6: a few politicians have had. They are going behind closed
Speaker 6: doors and hearing what you and I can't.
Speaker 4: They don't come.
Speaker 6: Out and reveal anything, right, I mean, we can all
Speaker 6: agree to that. They've got their security oaths and nobody
Speaker 6: has turned around and shouted to the heavens that all
Speaker 6: of this stuff has to be declassified. Their own procedures
Speaker 6: are stopping them from doing that.
Speaker 4: Politicians cannot circumvent it.
Speaker 6: So even if those are coming out of the classified
Speaker 6: briefings screaming to the high heavens, you need to declassify
Speaker 6: all of this in the eyes of the military, it
Speaker 6: doesn't matter. Can they have pressure, absolutely, Will they be successful?
Speaker 4: Probably not?
Speaker 6: And newsflash to some politicians are kind of selfish like
Speaker 6: that they want the information for themselves and they want
Speaker 6: to keep part of that information from you and I.
Speaker 4: Why control.
Speaker 6: Those are all elements to this conversation that a lot
Speaker 6: of people I don't think banter about as much as
Speaker 6: they should. I don't think politicians are the answer. I
Speaker 6: don't pretend to know what the answer is. I just
Speaker 6: don't have as high of hopes as some people do.
Speaker 6: Even though you have politicians on these committees, getting the
Speaker 6: classified briefings and maybe getting motivated enough to create that legislation,
Speaker 6: they are not there in perpetuity. They are not there
Speaker 6: forever they change, they'll retire, they get voted out. That's
Speaker 6: why I don't think politicians are going to be that
Speaker 6: ultimate answer.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of things that play here.
Speaker 6: I think society creates the dream scenario, but it's not
Speaker 6: necessarily reality. I don't believe disclosure in the sense that
Speaker 6: we all talk about it is going to happen. I
Speaker 6: don't see the government coming to some kind of podium.
Speaker 6: President comes out in front of the White House and says,
Speaker 6: the extraterrestrial presence is here.
Speaker 4: They're real, we know about this.
Speaker 6: That's how most people define disclosure, and I don't think
Speaker 6: that's going to happen. I think disclosure is going to
Speaker 6: be with us, that we're going to be able to
Speaker 6: figure out those answers for ourselves. For some, that threshold
Speaker 6: is a lot higher or lower, depending upon who you
Speaker 6: talk to for them to really come to the conclusion, Hey,
Speaker 6: there is an extraterrestrial presence here.
Speaker 4: For me, that's what it's all about.
Speaker 6: Bring it all together for yourself, analyze it for yourself,
Speaker 6: and come to a conclusion. I don't need the government
Speaker 6: to tell me what I believe. I don't need a
Speaker 6: researcher to write me a book and tell me what
Speaker 6: to believe. I don't need anybody who runs a site
Speaker 6: called the Black Vault to tell me what to believe,
Speaker 6: because I don't want to be that person to tell
Speaker 6: people what to believe. I think we should all just
Speaker 6: look at all those pieces of the puzzle and try
Speaker 6: and figure it out. And for me, that's what disclosure
Speaker 6: ultimately is.
Speaker 4: What is it? Is it extraterrestrials, Is it aliens? What
Speaker 4: everybody wants to know?
Speaker 6: I don't know, because my threshold is really high to
Speaker 6: say that everybody thinks the government is this all knowing entity,
Speaker 6: that they have the answers and they're just the big,
Speaker 6: bad evil guys that are keeping it from us. There
Speaker 6: is a partial belief that I have that they just
Speaker 6: have zero answers, that they truly are clueless, that they
Speaker 6: have no idea just like kind of some of us,
Speaker 6: we're just trying to figure all this out. I think
Speaker 6: that's a possibility too, that the government doesn't have all
Speaker 6: the answers. I mean, you can't in one breath say
Speaker 6: they're completely inept and can't do X, Y and Z,
Speaker 6: and then in the next breath say they are holding
Speaker 6: the biggest secret of humanity and they've been able to
Speaker 6: cover it up in any ample undeniable scientific proof that
Speaker 6: extraterrestrials are here and it's all because the United States
Speaker 6: government has done that. Does the government know more than
Speaker 6: what they're telling? Absolutely, that's undeniable. We can see that
Speaker 6: with the secrecy and the reactions and the denied documents
Speaker 6: and videos and photographs. But does that denial constitute answers
Speaker 6: that I don't know, but I would have my doubts
Speaker 6: that they do. I think that they may be trying
Speaker 6: to figure it out just as much as some of us.
Speaker 7: My name is Ryan Graves, former fateen pilot.
Speaker 1: Ryan Graves, former Navy fighter pilot and engineer, got a
Speaker 1: sense of deja vu when he saw the UAP videos
Speaker 1: released in twenty seventeen. He recognized the voices he'd already
Speaker 1: seen this video before during a classified briefing aboard the
Speaker 1: USS Theodore Roosevelt in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 4: They upgraded all their radar systems.
Speaker 8: Once we had upgraded our radar to the newest version,
Speaker 8: we were seeing things that just weren't there on the
Speaker 8: other radar. We would go out in the morning with
Speaker 8: one aircraft with one radar and not see anything, and
Speaker 8: then we'd get an upgraded radar on our next flight,
Speaker 8: and then we'd see a lot of these objects.
Speaker 7: We actually didn't think it was anything.
Speaker 8: We thought it was a radar malfunction of some type
Speaker 8: until we got close enough with some of the cameras
Speaker 8: we have on board to see that they were physical objects.
Speaker 1: During an air to air training mission, as pilots were
Speaker 1: returning to the aircraft carrier, they noticed on radar an
Speaker 1: object that looked to be a disc or gimbal shape
Speaker 1: with five other objects flying in formation nearby it.
Speaker 7: There was energy emitting from those spots.
Speaker 8: This was now potentially some kind of drone or junk
Speaker 8: or something. Once we got them on the fleer, which
Speaker 8: is our camera system, we'd want to fly by the
Speaker 8: scene with our eyes, but we couldn't see them if
Speaker 8: our radar is looking at something. Everything is looking there,
Speaker 8: and all that information is pumped into my visor on
Speaker 8: my helmet. As I'm flying right at this object, there's
Speaker 8: a square in my visor showing me where to look.
Speaker 8: Look there, Look there. I can see my wingmen and
Speaker 8: the circles on them. But for these particular objects, we'd.
Speaker 7: Come by them and there would be nothing in the square.
Speaker 7: We couldn't see them.
Speaker 8: Faighteen's radar system isn't the best tool to help us
Speaker 8: figure out what these are.
Speaker 7: There's a refresh rate.
Speaker 8: If something was to accelerate so fast it just darts
Speaker 8: off on the radar, that might not look like a
Speaker 8: super fast acceleration. That might just look like something disappearing
Speaker 8: off my radar.
Speaker 7: One of the days we.
Speaker 8: Were going out on a flight together, two of the aircraft,
Speaker 8: two people in each aircraft, and just a standard day
Speaker 8: going out to do some training out in the working areas.
Speaker 8: We enter the working areas at a very specific location,
Speaker 8: at a very specific altitude, and now as aircraft are departing,
Speaker 8: they essentially depart lower at the exact same spot. That's
Speaker 8: kind of the entry and exit point they call it.
Speaker 8: They were flying through that point and right at the
Speaker 8: point they flew right by.
Speaker 7: One of these.
Speaker 8: Objects went right between the lead aircraft and his wingman.
Speaker 8: This object went right between them, flew through it almost
Speaker 8: hit the thing. To my knowledge, this is the first
Speaker 8: visual of the object. They ended up knocking off the
Speaker 8: flight after that, essentially canceling the flight. He came back.
Speaker 8: He had a look of shock on his face. I
Speaker 8: was hit one of those damn things. I was like, well,
Speaker 8: what it looked like? He was like, it was a
Speaker 8: dark black cube inside a clear sphere. The corners of
Speaker 8: the cube were essentially touching the inside of that sphere.
Speaker 7: No gas, no propulsion, no propellers.
Speaker 8: We shouldn't have objects operating near our fighter jets that
Speaker 8: we don't know what they are.
Speaker 7: That's a serious issue. The fact that one of these could.
Speaker 8: Take out our aircraft and the crew with it is
Speaker 8: a major safety issue United States security perspective. It's a
Speaker 8: major lapse to just assume that this is something that's
Speaker 8: not going to be a problem. As time progressed, more
Speaker 8: people saw them. I know at least a ten or
Speaker 8: so that saw the objects themselves and described it the
Speaker 8: same way.
Speaker 7: It kind of broke our brain. What we do with
Speaker 7: things that are strange.
Speaker 8: We try to make it not strange anymore by relating
Speaker 8: it to something else. Laying in bed at the end
Speaker 8: of the day, that lingering question, that kind of uncertainty.
Speaker 8: For a while, that's where it sat for me until
Speaker 8: I left on deployment to Mississippi, where I was in
Speaker 8: a flight instructor gave me more time to kind of
Speaker 8: think and reflect on it, and that's when I realized
Speaker 8: I felt the need to talk about it.
Speaker 2: He released video shows an encounter between US Navy pilots
Speaker 2: and some kind of unidentified flying object.
Speaker 8: It wasn't an overly hard choice. We've been stigmatized around
Speaker 8: this topic. I hate to use this word, but programmed
Speaker 8: in a sense, with certain assumptions about what ET is
Speaker 8: through our media and our culture and all those things. Right,
Speaker 8: we like that it's something that fascinates us as human
Speaker 8: beings to think that there's something else out there, and
Speaker 8: so we've built up stories about it. But those stories
Speaker 8: have been created with our own imaginations. I had some
Speaker 8: assumptions that I didn't realize were so fundamentally baked into
Speaker 8: my core right. Being able to examine those assumptions in
Speaker 8: a logical way help me understand that there's actually a
Speaker 8: lot of meat on this bone. We are truly perhaps
Speaker 8: talking about something alien, and that word I think has
Speaker 8: more depth to it than we commonly think it does.
Speaker 8: If something is truly alien, it might be very difficult
Speaker 8: for us to really imagine its makeup. We have to
Speaker 8: assume if there's hyperintelligent aliens out there, that there's a
Speaker 8: lot of knowledge that we don't have right that we're
Speaker 8: just at the very beginning of our scientific understanding. If
Speaker 8: that's true, if that logic is true, then almost by definition,
Speaker 8: anything we're going to see as almost magical beyond our
Speaker 8: comprehension and understanding because we just simply haven't connected those
Speaker 8: dots yet.
Speaker 7: And that is understanding.
Speaker 8: When you look at the behavior overall, there's no consideration
Speaker 8: for energy here. To have something that can go as
Speaker 8: fast as a jet and then go as low as
Speaker 8: a helicopter to do those things back and forth, it
Speaker 8: takes an incredible amount of energy. But when we would
Speaker 8: look at these objects on the flear, it just looked
Speaker 8: like a single source of IUR energy.
Speaker 7: Coming out from the objects.
Speaker 8: No propellers, there's no heat, there's no plume of gas
Speaker 8: keeping it in place.
Speaker 1: When a Navy fighter pilot says they saw something unexplained
Speaker 1: in the sky with no signs of propulsion and openly
Speaker 1: claims that the technology is not from anything we have
Speaker 1: here on Earth, it's hard not to listen and to
Speaker 1: actually believe their story.
Speaker 8: One of the things that I'm doing within my work
Speaker 8: at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics is building
Speaker 8: a state of technology manual, if you will, for UAP
Speaker 8: sensing something that would be updated yearly that we could
Speaker 8: put out to help inform engineering community on different methodologies
Speaker 8: that have been tested and what works and what doesn't.
Speaker 8: Really looking to move the engineering conversation forward. This is
Speaker 8: the beginning of a scientific peer review process that's going
Speaker 8: to allow a standardized and reputable way of discovery where
Speaker 8: we can have experts come in from across the aerospace
Speaker 8: scientific regime and provide peer review to papers that get
Speaker 8: published and no kidding, move the science forward. You can
Speaker 8: see how artificial intelligence is moving itself in to science more.
Speaker 8: It would make sense to utilize machine learning to perhaps
Speaker 8: understand certain areas or functions that maybe aren't obvious to
Speaker 8: our understanding of science. I think that we will radically
Speaker 8: have redefined how we think about intelligence. We're going to
Speaker 8: share this earth in a sense with another non human intelligence.
Speaker 8: We have to really leverage our interaction with AI to
Speaker 8: be competitive and successful. That's going to be an interesting change.
Speaker 8: I think the concept in our understanding of consciousness and
Speaker 8: intelligence will be much greater in fifty years.
Speaker 9: How do we try to kind of unwind and understand
Speaker 9: how those vehicles could operate that way?
Speaker 4: Because if that's.
Speaker 9: A bad guy who has that technology, we're in big trouble.
Speaker 9: They're basically rendering defenseless all of this stuff that we've
Speaker 9: developed over many decades.
Speaker 4: To protect and they're toying with us.
Speaker 9: Is there any way we could understand how those things
Speaker 9: could be doing that, Maybe get a little further down
Speaker 9: the road of explaining where they're coming from, who owns them,
Speaker 9: is somebody in them or is it a drone. One
Speaker 9: of the studies the idea which I found fascinating was
Speaker 9: on multi dimensional travel. In other words, maybe these things
Speaker 9: are not so far away. They're from here, and think
Speaker 9: of stranger things. They're from the upside down, and that
Speaker 9: sounds crazy the more you think about it. We know
Speaker 9: there are things that exist in this natural world that
Speaker 9: we can't see. When you sent me a text on
Speaker 9: your phone to mine something went from you to me,
Speaker 9: and we don't see it, we don't feel it, we
Speaker 9: don't taste it.
Speaker 5: The concept of not knowing what it is is alarming.
Speaker 5: They were all explained, we wouldn't even be talking about this.
Speaker 5: Whole nature of the phenomenon is that we don't know
Speaker 5: what it is. It's always been that way. I wish
Speaker 5: they would get to the point where they would be
Speaker 5: willing to say, I don't know what it is, but
Speaker 5: I know it's not from planet Earth, or I know
Speaker 5: it's not made by human hands.
Speaker 7: That really distinguishes.
Speaker 5: It closes that door which we've always left open about well,
Speaker 5: maybe it's Russian or Chinese or something.
Speaker 9: The government said this publicly a year ago that some
Speaker 9: of these UAPs as they call them.
Speaker 4: Are not ours, they're not our aircraft.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's possibly secret technology from America, which they sort
Speaker 5: of said it isn't, But there's always that little bit
Speaker 5: of question about that.
Speaker 3: If that works true, it would be an amazingly good story.
Speaker 4: There would basically be evidence of a government within a government.
Speaker 9: I think it's very remote that that is the case,
Speaker 9: these things have been seen at least since the beginning
Speaker 9: of the technological age, the age of aviation. What country
Speaker 9: developed this stuff when? I mean, how could we have
Speaker 9: missed that all these years later?
Speaker 5: Gradual dissemination is probably the safest and best way to
Speaker 5: do it, and then they can gauge people's reactions and
Speaker 5: see how it affects people and not create this huge shock.
Speaker 5: If they can work gradually up to the moment where
Speaker 5: they might cross that line where they acknowledge that there's
Speaker 5: something here that's non human.
Speaker 9: I think it's an exciting time to be around. We
Speaker 9: obviously have a lot of problems as a planet, a
Speaker 9: lot of people who doubt we're going to make this
Speaker 9: thing work much longer unless we get our shit together.
Speaker 9: We also live at a time where technology and the
Speaker 9: ability to understand not just our own world, but what
Speaker 9: else is out there is much sharper than it's ever been.
Speaker 4: Massive changes in the world just in the.
Speaker 9: Last hundred years, more change than in the previous thousand years.
Speaker 9: One hundred years from now, we may know a lot
Speaker 9: of things if we don't kill ourselves first. There's no
Speaker 9: doubt the Overton window has moved. There's a window of
Speaker 9: what's acceptable public debate. If things don't fit into that window,
Speaker 9: you can't really talk about it because.
Speaker 4: You're seen as being on the fringe.
Speaker 9: UFOs clearly, the fact that Congress openly talks about it
Speaker 9: demands more investigation.
Speaker 4: The Overton window has moved.
Speaker 5: We think of ourselves as being the top of the
Speaker 5: food chain, right, We're it to imagine that that's actually
Speaker 5: not the case.
Speaker 9: You have to kind of reconceive a lot of our
Speaker 9: own narrative here on the planet. Keep an open mind,
Speaker 9: open to the idea that some of these.
Speaker 4: Sightings really are not earthly.
Speaker 1: This morning, I woke up, had breakfast and some coffee, showered,
Speaker 1: then went to my office. I got a call from
Speaker 1: this reporter at Newsweek. He wanted to hear my thoughts
Speaker 1: in the latest Chinese surveillance balloons, the one shot down
Speaker 1: by the US military, but more specifically the strange tic
Speaker 1: tac shaped objects shot down over Alaska, the one the
Speaker 1: US government claimed it was unable to recover.
Speaker 4: That's too bad.
Speaker 1: I had a few zoom calls, a quick lunch, did
Speaker 1: some scrolling on TikTok and Instagram.
Speaker 3: Is it a UFOE boone wouldn't do.
Speaker 1: That algorithms working nicely today. Send a few emails. Some
Speaker 1: listeners sent me some home footage of what they think
Speaker 1: is a UFO in their backyard.
Speaker 4: An email from someone in the military who has a story.
Speaker 1: Then this really angry message about how my podcast is
Speaker 1: polluting the minds of kids, and if aliens were real,
Speaker 1: they'd be in the Bible or something like that.
Speaker 4: I don't know. Her name was Karen Something.
Speaker 1: I left my office, went to my local neighborhood bar.
Speaker 1: It's called Vesper by the way, I'm getting a Manhattan.
Speaker 1: I saw a few friends there who were so energized
Speaker 1: to talk about UFOs. Damn it. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: be the UFO guy. But our conversations felt different. They
Speaker 1: became more philosophical, discussing our beliefs in the real implications
Speaker 1: of life beyond our planet in the universe. Okay, I'll
Speaker 1: stay for one more, a phone call, email, Time to
Speaker 1: eat dinner and go to sleep.
Speaker 4: But I didn't. I couldn't sleep.
Speaker 1: My mind was racing with way too many existential thoughts
Speaker 1: about life and the future, and not the negative kind either.
Speaker 1: This insatiable itch in the back of my brain, this
Speaker 1: desire to learn more about everything and just figure it
Speaker 1: all out. As I sat on the edge of my bed,
Speaker 1: reflecting back on all the people I talked to, all
Speaker 1: the personal stories and eyewitness accounts, the mountains of archival
Speaker 1: documents I'd read, and all the differing opinions from every
Speaker 1: single person out there, I realized something. I realized despite
Speaker 1: all my efforts in this podcast, I myself still did.
Speaker 4: Not have a definitive answer.
Speaker 1: If anything, it felt like I had opened the door
Speaker 1: to even more questions. But I almost instantly realized something
Speaker 1: else that I think I'm okay with that. Truthfully, had
Speaker 1: I learned that all this UFO stuff was just fake
Speaker 1: and closed the book on it, well, then I wouldn't
Speaker 1: even have more questions.
Speaker 4: The conversation would be over.
Speaker 1: Knowledge and understanding isn't something you attain overnight.
Speaker 4: It's a process that's so individually unique to all of us.
Speaker 1: I feel like, because we live in a world where
Speaker 1: information travels the fastest it ever has, Like how quickly
Speaker 1: we get the breaking news on our phone, can send
Speaker 1: a message or make a call, how connected we are
Speaker 1: to even strangers all through the Internet. It's too easy
Speaker 1: to fall into the mindset that we need to know
Speaker 1: everything right now, everything around us is so instant. The
Speaker 1: reality is we're all still learning about everything and will
Speaker 1: never stop learning. Things change, people change, views change.
Speaker 4: We're all still evolving.
Speaker 1: It's too easy to look at life in this exact
Speaker 1: moment and think this is it. But if we just
Speaker 1: stopped for a second and really think about it, we
Speaker 1: all know that's not actually true. Look back in history
Speaker 1: a thousand years or even just last week. We know
Speaker 1: more today than we literally did yesterday. I mean, seriously,
Speaker 1: we used to smoke cigarettes on airplanes like it was nothing.
Speaker 1: Today's breaking news is tomorrow's old news, and with every
Speaker 1: minute passed, it all becomes a little bit easier for
Speaker 1: us to understand. It's okay to not know everything, and
Speaker 1: feeling like we have to all the time tends to
Speaker 1: make us incredibly divisive. Once upon a time, we were
Speaker 1: cavemen just banging rocks and making fires. We've evolved so
Speaker 1: much in nearly every way imaginable, and we can't forget
Speaker 1: that we're still evolving. So as I sat there on
Speaker 1: the edge of my bed, thinking back on everything I
Speaker 1: had learned, I realized that even though I couldn't close
Speaker 1: the book on UFOs, the fact that I couldn't means
Speaker 1: to me that there's still so much more to learn.
Speaker 1: Life can feel like a hamster wheel doing the things
Speaker 1: we know until we get too tired and go to sleep,
Speaker 1: but our own curiosity of the world around us should
Speaker 1: be encouraged and celebrated. This desire to reach out and
Speaker 1: explore is what makes us special as humans. So even
Speaker 1: though the hamster wheel keeps turning, it's okay to step
Speaker 1: off every once in a while and contemplate the bigger picture.
Speaker 1: It'll be right there waiting for you if you ever
Speaker 1: decide to come back until next time. This is High Strange.
Speaker 1: High Strange is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association
Speaker 1: with Cadence thirteen, created, hosted and edited by myself Payne Lindsay.
Speaker 1: Executive producers are myself and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Rooney,
Speaker 1: Cooper Skinner and myself. Original scorer by Makeup and Vanity Set,
Speaker 1: Sound design, mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production
Speaker 1: by Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, Meredith Stedman,
Speaker 1: and Sidney Evans.
Speaker 4: Our cover art is by Polygon.
Speaker 1: This episode features the song Man on the Moon performed
Speaker 1: by Rim courtesy of Concord Records. Visit Concord Music on
Speaker 1: the Web at Concord Musicgroup dot com. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group,
Speaker 1: Station six Beck Media and Marketing, as well as Chris
Speaker 1: Corcrum and the team at Cadence thirteen. Check out the
Speaker 1: show's website at high Strange dot com. Follow the show
Speaker 1: on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange, and you can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Payne Lindsay. If
Speaker 1: you have your own UFO story, email us at tips
Speaker 1: at high strange dot com. And if you're enjoying the show,
Speaker 1: please help us out by rating and reviewing the podcast
Speaker 1: and share it with your friends.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening.