cover of episode Age of Disclosure?

Age of Disclosure?

2025/2/12
logo of podcast Need To Know with Coulthart and Zabel

Need To Know with Coulthart and Zabel

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Bryce discusses his recent wildfire evacuation experience, highlighting the emotional impact of potentially losing one's home and possessions. He shares a personal anecdote about rescuing a childhood toy, Mighty Mouse, during the evacuation, emphasizing the importance of sentimental items amidst crisis. The experience prompts reflections on the parallels between wildfire evacuations and the potential chaos and emotional reactions that could arise during UAP disclosure.
  • Bryce was evacuated from his home due to wildfires, facing the possibility of losing his home and possessions.
  • He rescued a Mighty Mouse doll from his childhood as a sentimental item.
  • The evacuation experience highlighted the emotional impact of potential loss and the importance of treasured memories.
  • Bryce draws parallels between the emotional reactions to wildfire evacuations and potential reactions during UAP disclosure.

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This is Need to Know. Real talk about unidentified anomalous phenomena. From Australia, Ross Coulthart. From the U.S., Bryce Zabel.

Well, welcome to Need to Know. Ross and I haven't done a show for about two months now, back in December. And the situation on the UFO UAP front seems to be changing pretty radically and potentially even escalating. In two months, though, we still haven't solved the drone mystery. There's another huge whistleblower event out there, thanks to Ross. There's a new documentary that appears to be one that could actually get us in the end zone of all this.

Congress seems to be kicking the tires a little more on this issue. And the Trump administration has now appointed a number of people who are clearly on the record as pro-UFO UAP disclosure.

And also, I just got evacuated last month, so I thought there were some lessons in disclosure from evacuation from fires. So personally, we'll be talking about all that in a minute. I'd also like to talk about today how I think we're actually kind of at a tipping point. I know not everyone's going to agree with me, but I think things are happening faster, and we are...

in an accelerated mode right now. But before we get into any of that, let me bring in my friend and collaborator, almost ruined that for you, Ross. Nice to see you again. It's been a hell of a month for you, my friend. Congratulations. - Good day, Bryce. Good day, everyone. How are you? Yes, it's been a hell of a time. I've actually been lying on a beach for the last week trying to let my brain cool down because it's been so busy.

I just got to one of those points where you get to where you're so wound up and so hyper, you're not making much sense. So I had the good sense to run off with my wife and lie on a beach for a week. And I'm back, rested and raring to go. As they said about Richard Nixon, he was tanned, rested and ready. Now, I'm not comparing you with Nixon, but you do look more tanned than me. I look like some kind of...

I don't know. I look like I've been hidden in an underground basement for months compared to you. You just- The last time you and I were talking at length, I was terrified for you because you had bushfires, forest fires, or whatever you call them over there, scrub fires, within, I think it was about a kilometer of your home. And you were evacuating, and I was looking almost hourly on the Agora Hills map

trying to figure out where the fires were in relation to your home. And it all looked far too close. I was terrified for you. It was too close. And look, I know multiple people who actually lost their homes in these fires. So in no way am I trying to imply that my experience in any way comes close to theirs. But I think it is kind of interesting to just understand what's been going on around here, Ross. Because, okay,

Before the fires even broke out, I was out without power for four days as there was an attempt to sort of make sure that we weren't starting fires. And so certain areas were targeted for lack of power. So for four days, I'm sitting there without power. And also the internet's not very good. And our cell data wasn't very good. So actually, Ross, you may have been knowledgeable about more things going on in Los Angeles than I feel like I was.

So on the day in question, my wife and I grabbed our cell phones, which we were having a hard time charging anywhere. We'd have to go into our cars and charge them. We went to the community center to see if we could charge things up. And it was chaos over there.

But we went in, we spent about 20 minutes there. But then as we started listening to the reports, we went, we should be home. So we walked outside and the skies were clear more or less when we went in. But when we came out about 25 minutes later, there was this black cloud just right over the community center. My wife and I looked at each other and said, we got to get out of here now. So we raced home and we took two cars or two cars and we just threw everything.

what we could get into it in 20 to 30 minutes into those cars and then we left. And when we left, it was like one of those apocalypse movies because everybody in my area was on the Ventura Freeway driving north. So it was not quite a standstill, but it was like five miles an hour as I was leaving. And yet the people, you know, the lanes on the opposite side of the freeway were practically empty.

So it was really kind of intense, but we got out of there okay. This is a big test, my friend, because obviously you're standing there in your home, you're looking around, what are the most valuable things I need to take with me in the moment of crisis, thinking that my house might not be here in about an hour's time?

You obviously reached for After Disclosure by Bryce Zabel, which is a definitive book by Richard Dole. And you obviously reached for In Plain Sight by Ross Coulthard. But what else did you reach for? Well, I will tell you, the truth is I did not take After Disclosure, but I did take In Plain Sight. So congratulations. That's terrible. You made the cut. I was thinking, well, I'll read it again. But what was interesting is I don't think Until It Faces You, Ross,

that you really can understand the sort of existential crisis it is to think that you're walking through your home that you've lived in. For me, I've lived here 40 years.

That you may never see again. You may never see anything in it. All the memories, all the photo albums, all the everything. And and that's tough. I mean, we were profoundly affected by doing that. And then I'm sitting there after these 20 minutes. We're in the car and we're saying, OK, we got to go. We got to go now.

And Jackie said, "Well, why don't you go in and make one final sweep? Just see if there's anything that we've missed." So I said, "Okay, I will." And I was in the house for about 45 seconds because at this point we were like, "We got to go." You know it, man. When there's a crisis, you just go, "We got to go now." So I was just going through to see what I could see. And Ross, the last thing I took, my eye caught

a little Mighty Mouse doll that I was given when I was five years old by my grandmother.

It wasn't even my birthday. It was my brother's birthday. But my grandmother thought, well, Bryce doesn't understand how this birthday stuff goes. I'll give him something, too. I played with that Mighty Mouse doll. And you remember what it was like in the show. Here I come to save the day. So I took Mighty Mouse at the last minute. And I'm sure for everybody, there's some bizarre little thing. But in reality, a lot of the stuff can be real.

you know, replaced. Your computers, of course, can be replaced if you put anything in the cloud, as you and I do, things are stored. So, you know, I've got a lot of that stuff. Our photos were stored in the cloud and things like that. And I took Mighty Mouse.

So I think there's lessons from the LA bushfires for the UAP issue as well, to be honest, Bryce, because what it shows is how quickly the news cycle moves on. You know, the simple fact is the public these days have the attention spans of gnats.

You know, this is one of the most existential crises for Western California there. And it's kind of like falling off the news now. And yet my heart was in my mouth for you guys for days worrying about what was going to happen, thinking that you were going to be losing your beautiful home in the hills there. And...

I guess with the whole UAP issue, it's a reminder also that even though I've had a fairly busy month, you know, things come and go. And I do wonder, what is the news event? Like, what is the thing that's going to make people go, right, we'll remember this? You know, what's the 9-11 moment? I'll tell you one thing I did think about disclosure when this was all happening.

and you guys know it because you were watching the news, but a lot of the homeowners in the Palisades were very upset because one of the reservoirs hadn't been filled and some of the hydrants didn't have water in them. And people were rightfully upset about that. And they were angry. And I thought,

This is interesting because their anger was righteous. And I think a lot of people in a disclosure moment, some of them are going to feel that kind of anger. It won't be about, it'll be about authority anger. Why didn't the authorities tell me about this? Why would they lie to me? Why didn't, why weren't they honest about it? And I think maybe that is another lesson about why disclosure has been so difficult to come by.

Well, it also underlines my view. I'm a cynical investigative journalist and we have a saying in my business, which is always assume a fuck up before a conspiracy. And so I generally, I'm drifting more and more to the view that the reason for the continued UFO coverup is not because necessarily there's some

particularly dark secret that they're all trying to hide. It's because it's such a heavily compartmentalized, heavily secret operation with so many alpha male types running it that it's easier for them just to cover it up because it's all a bit of a screw up. There's been mistakes made. People have done terrible things, but really there's not some huge conspiracy to

And I'm starting to wonder whether that's what's behind all of this, that essentially in the bottom of it is just one gigantic screw up. That, yes, some pointy headed general 60 years ago made the decision that during the Cold War, this was best kept secret.

But really, when you ask people, and boy, I've been asking a lot of people, particularly the last few weeks, when you ask people, what is the reason? Is it because we're protecting weapons that we're trying to use against potential foreign adversaries? Is it because the aliens have told us not to? Nobody really has any good answer. And the thing that also strikes me

the thing that really strikes me and it's a bit like that with the bushfires as well nobody's really in charge like there's not one supernumerary beast or body that basically seems to be controlling things

If there ever was an MJ-12, a Majestic-12, they're not doing a very good job. Maybe LA should hire what's left of Majestic-12 to run the fire response. That might be the way. Listen, it's interesting to me to hear you say, well, I assume a fuck up before a conspiracy. However-

What you've been involved in for the last month has certainly been fairly conspiracy oriented because obviously you are the man that brought Jake Barber out there. And I just want to, I want to tee you up here because I want you to explain what that month's been like for you. But I think I have, we have just done our, this is our 60th episode of need to know.

I think you have done that many podcasts on Reality Check in the last two months or two weeks. You've been all over the place. I mean, it's unbelievable how much attention, and I've never seen the detail where you go first with Jake and then on to the other folks as well. So kind of walk us through the behind the scenes part of it. When did you first hear about this case? How long were you working on it? And how did it roll out?

Well, as you know, my friend, you were one of the very few people that I told I'd met somebody. And you will recall that way back in 2023, I was telling you that I was talking to somebody from a certain three-letter intelligence agency. And I think I told you about a dramatic incident where I was picked up at a Californian regional airport. I literally was told, you're going to meet me.

come to this airport at this time of the early morning and we'll meet you. And I think I spoke to you the evening after I got back from that day. But this is a period, it's no secret now that Jake and his team were very excited

concerned for their safety. And so this gigantic aircraft arrives at this small regional airport and I hop on and there are some very grim looking men and we're taken to a very remote location in the California, deep regional California and

And I'm taken out of that vehicle and put into an armoured vehicle, an armoured car. And there are guns and all manner of weapons in the back of the vehicle and other grim looking men in other vehicles. And I realised all of a sudden I hadn't told anybody where I was going. And I was thinking...

well, if this is a certain three-letter intelligence agency and I've been annoying to them, I'm about to be buried in a hole somewhere in the desert and I'm never going to be seen again. And I remember thinking how stupid it was that I'd done this. But there was another time also where in the course of the day, I was asked to wear a blindfold and I did. I was blindfolded.

And then I think, poor old Jake, I think he could see I was thinking, are these guys going to take me off and kill me? And he pointed to a – when I took the blindfold off, there was a semi-automatic pistol loaded sitting in the console between me and him as he was driving.

And he said, if you feel safer with that, that's loaded. And I said, I'm an Australian. I'm hopeless with weapons. I know what that is. And it was a bloody big Glock, I remember. And I remember thinking, there is no way I am using a weapon. But I said, more importantly, why would you need all these weapons? What's going on?

And that's when I realized this whole idea. I mean, the thing that really has amused me in the last few weeks is this idea that Jake and his team are part of some PSYOP by the CIA. These guys were genuinely concerned for their safety, for my safety being with them. And it turned out that a large part of the reason why they were so tooled up and they were ready for combat. God help anybody that had taken us on. They were very, very...

very competent operators. But the thing that made me realize how serious they were was that they were ready for anything. And it's clear to me, I can't go into the specifics of what happened because I've undertaken to Jake that for a whole variety of reasons, we won't go into a lot of the detail. But these guys have been through some really dangerous situations to bring this story to the public.

And they're risking their lives revealing what they know. And I cannot emphasize more the degree of danger that they have. It's tourney time. And with FanDuel's Dog of the Day, you can get a daily profit boost during the college conference championships to bet on any underdog. So get ready to celebrate some upsets. No one saw that coming, except for me, baby.

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completely egregious and false interpretation from some people has been that they're just part of some CIA psyop and that they're just doing this as some part of a controlled disclosure.

Believe me, they are not doing this with any kind of authorization. I mean, I take your point about them feeling that this could be very dangerous to them personally, certainly before they've come out and done it. Do you feel that, and the people we're talking about are Don Paul Bales and Fred Baker, and I think, is it Blitch? Is that his last name? Yeah, John actually, I used John very much because I've known John for a while, and I

John was the guy I used to begin the process of vetting the credentials, the credibility of these guys. And I won't be giving away too much if I say John's got a yacht and he has a yacht in a certain location. And we nominated that they meet John on a yacht and go out to sea. And there they could have a frank conversation where everyone could test their bona fides.

John, who's a very, very capable operator, as we revealed in the story, he's a former Delta Force officer. I mean, he's a very, very credentialed military officer, as well as being a person with extraordinary neuroscience training, just the most extraordinary background. He took these guys out on his yacht and he could see they were armed, he told me later.

He realized in his head he was thinking what I'd been thinking, which is am I being about to be shot in the back of the head and dumped off the side of my yacht? We've all watched too many Sopranos episodes. And he told me he pulled out his military ID and he put it on the table in front of them in the yacht and put his military ID down.

And then there was this kind of pause and then everybody else pulled out their military IDs and put them down. And that was a big moment for him because he knew he wasn't going to get thrown overboard. And I caught up with him after that because we'd used that as a way of him verifying credentials and they all sat out at sea and told war stories and swapped stories about units that they knew, people that they knew. And I remember I caught up with him the evening that they all came back

And I said, so what do you reckon? And he just looked me straight in the eye and he said, these guys are the real deal. And that was the beginning, if you like, of the process of checking, which has been probably the bigger part of the story over the last two years. Do Barber and company though, still feel that their own safety is in jeopardy or has the act of

talking to you and now to other people like Jesse Michaels and people like that, and the extreme length of the interviews that News Nation has put out there, do they feel now that that has somehow inoculated them from this danger? No, I don't think they feel it's inoculated them from danger. I mean, they're still susceptible to whatever the particular agency or the particular private aerospace company involved might want to do.

They've been very, very careful not to compromise things that they believe are national security sensitive. And that's not just because of their dobser. It's essentially a measured judgment about what they think the public ought reasonably to be told.

Believe me, though, Jake, and we were there with him when he went to the Congress to give this evidence. Jake has given very, very detailed four and a half hours of evidence to the Senate Intelligence Committee where he goes into names, dates, times and places and talks about the criminal and illegal activities that have gone on. And in fact, one of the things I really want to emphasise here is

There's not a lot of point in having oversight agencies like the Senate Intelligence Committee if they don't follow up on stuff. And, you know, one of the things that really shocked me was I've spoken to a politician who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee and they, by right, ought properly to know about what these staffers have taken these briefings on because in the briefing that Jake gave...

I'm pretty sure there was staffers and legal counsel, which is the way they do it. They inoculate their members, their politicians against what's being revealed to the committee by taking the evidence in camera in a skiff first, and then they brief their members. And what really shocked me was that in the last few weeks, I've become aware that there are senators that are not aware or were not aware of what Jake Barber was alleging. And, um,

it's interesting that we have this weird oversight system in Congress where you have staffers who take it upon themselves to decide what their politician ought reasonably to be told. And it's largely for political risk to inoculate their politician against the risk of being told things that might come back and bite them on the bottom later. But I think

I'm now aware that the Senate Intelligence Committee is taking Mr. Barber and other people's allegations extremely seriously indeed, as is, by the way, the new Trump administration. It's now public that I spoke to Donald Trump Jr. for a podcast before my story went to air yesterday.

And the impression that I've garnered from speaking to people in the Trump administration at a fairly high level is that they are very engaged with this issue. And just to come back to your question about what the private aerospace company that was working with Mr. Barber and the intelligence agency that was working with Mr. Barber, what are they going to do about this? Well, they'd better watch themselves because there's a hell of a lot more evidence that

that hasn't been publicly revealed. And it's not being hidden for any nefarious reasons. It's basically, it's to measure and see what the people of potential ill intent might do. And so it's going to be very, very interesting because I think, as you say, we're at a tipping point at the moment. We're at a point where

There is a huge opportunity here if somebody shows the political courage to investigate. I think that's true. But, you know, clearly the other thing that happened since we last did a need to know is Donald Trump.

didn't put his hand on the Bible, I guess. I guess that didn't happen. But he did take the oath of office, and he's obviously landed at a full sprint. And one of the things that you have to say is that Trump and his administration, as well as MAGA, the place is crawling with disclosure advocates. I mean...

Yeah. Tulsi Gabbard is going to be the... I'll tell you though, mate, I think Trump wimped it on the drones. I mean, I think Trump showed cowardice on the drones. I'm shocked that the Trump administration came out with that ridiculously lame statement about

from the White House press secretary where she talked about how the FAA had authorised drones for research and other purposes. And the fact that the President of the United States, a person who has campaigned on the deep state, if you like, would allow himself to be so egregiously snowed by what is blatantly Pentagon disinformation. He needs, and this is a real test of Trump,

I mean, essentially, this is the moment when we really see if Trump's all hot air. The point I was going to make was simply, regardless of what Trump thinks or does or whether he said or didn't say about the drones and let his own people say it, but he has surrounded himself by people that are pretty upfront about disclosure. Tulsi Gabbard being the DNI chief. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State.

I mean, my gosh, he's been so outspoken on this issue. John Ratcliffe over at CIA, Waltz in the White House, and then Trump Jr. I mean, he's got a lot of people involved.

talking to him who believed that he ought to be more forthcoming on this. He has said he's forthcoming and even signed one of his numerous executive orders about JFK. The question is, will he take that same kind of sense of, well, we got to get it all out of there. Will he take that to the UFO UAP issue? And I

I don't know, but he certainly got people who in their previous incarnations before they came into the administration were certainly outspoken. And certainly a lot of the Congress people that he has talked to seem to be itching to know more. You got Anna Paulina Luna, who's going to have a news conference in a couple of days with some kind of big announcement coming.

Who knows? You got Burchett. You got and then on the Democratic side, you got Moskowitz and Schumer. And you've also got rounds as a Republican, Kirsten Gillibrand. I mean, there's a lot of people in the Congress and, you know, in the executive buildings around the White House who seem to think that this ought to be something that people talk about. That's kind of one of the reasons why I think I guess the other part is that.

What do we know about Donald Trump at this point? And by the way, I have to always say this. Every single time we talk about a politician or Donald Trump, people accuse us of something or another. We're just analysts here, okay? He's the president. I'm just looking into the president. And one of the things that it seems very obvious that he likes to do is be a disruptor. I don't think that's a big secret. He wouldn't have

put in place the people that he's put in place. And Elon Musk wouldn't be running around Washington with a set of keys everywhere. So clearly there's some disruption going on. And that is Trump's MO, disruption. Okay. Well, if that's the case, the ultimate act of disruption is this UFO issue. So I wouldn't say that I've heard anything that leads me to believe that it's on the

on rails here, but it certainly has the possibility of coming to the fore very quickly. I mean, at least that's my take. What's your take? Okay. I just want to repeat my analysis on the drones. I mean, I do think that with Donald Trump

You judge him by what he does, not by what he says. And I credit, by the way, Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch on his USA Today, what is it, Restless Politics US podcast, which I love.

And, you know, so judge Donald Trump on what he does, not what he says. And for me, the big moment, the big test was whether after months and months and months of incursions by drones over military bases, where in some cases airstrips have had to be closed down for several hours, in fact, as much as a day because of incursions over those bases.

It was incumbent on the new administration to basically make a decision about what they were going to tell the public. And Trump had promised. He promised that he was going to ask for an investigation and he was going to get an answer. And frankly, what we've received to date from the White House is, I'm afraid, more of the same. I mean, judge him by what he does. And what he's done, frankly, is come out and parrot the same old tired Pentagon lines.

And I don't know whether President Trump was knowingly involved in the release of that decision because it came from a female spokeswoman.

I hope that it was just a junior decision that was made by his chief of staff and passed on down through the chain for the spokeswoman to release at a press conference. But does Trump really want to be associated with such a disingenuous and completely inadequate answer? Why would the FAA have authorised drones for research purposes when it said on oath in December, on fucking oath that

It basically, it's either lied or it's committed perjury. I mean, I don't know what the answer is, but basically the FAA testified on oath to the Congress that there was absolutely no suggestion that these were US government or US government authorized drones. There was no authorization for these flights. These were incursions by unknowns. That was the evidence that was given by the FAA. They lied.

Yes, that's true. They have lied. Now, and this is the thing that really gets me is I've been taught as a journalist, and I'm sure you were too, when you see that kind of obvious contradiction on the facts, when you see on the one hand the FAA has basically said,

These are not authorized objects over US sensitive facilities, over US airspace. These are unknown craft. At different times, we've been told they may be Iranian, they might be foreign adversaries. Nobody's got an answer. And privately, people I'm talking to are telling me contradictory things.

On the one hand, there's kind of a kind of a rusted on belt of people who probably don't really know, but who are inclined to accept what's being fed down to them through the grapevine, which is, don't worry, guys, this is us. Don't worry. You know, it's all friendly. Don't worry about it. And then the guys who I was talking to who really know, who actually have had direct involvement on the ground with these drones in the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, DOD,

They had no idea what these drones were. They were telling me, Ross, we do not know what these objects are. That's the issue. The issue is that there are things that are flying in our airspace with total impunity. Now, I'm not saying they're aliens. We just don't know. But the simple fact is up until the first or second week of January, and it's still happening, I'm still being told by people these incursions are continuing,

I was being told by people in the national security establishment, across the board and in law enforcement, that they had no bloody idea. And I asked repeatedly, is there any possibility that this is some kind of test, some kind of application of advanced technology by the US to try and test airspace or public response? No, no, no, no.

Now we come back with this one line statement from the White House. And what does the media do, the legacy media? It rolls over like a supine little puppy and lets it tickle. How pathetic. Let's really put that under a microscope. First of all, I wouldn't give the spokesperson such a pass. She is the official spokesperson who runs the daily briefing kind of thing. So

This was what she was told to go out and say. She doesn't make it up. Somebody told her this, but it's interesting. So as you just said, the media completely missed that drone story. They should have followed up. They should have said, FAA, that's interesting. And I didn't see a lot of that. But in contrast, let's remember when Trump began his first term and Sean Spicer went out there and said, oh, no, this was the largest attended inauguration in the history of

And the media was all over that one. That was a fun one for them to cover. Why hold somebody accountable over the size of the inauguration, but not over something as critical as drone intrusions that continue over states and military? At Sierra, I discovered top workout gear at incredible prices, which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward. Awkward.

Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. And so I'm just shocked by all that. And by the way, they are continuing. I mean, this is the other thing. I'm talking to people who are telling me that they're still seeing objects, orbs, apparent drone craft of some kind, car-sized, large SUV-sized objects.

In one case, I was told the size of a bus hovering over bases. And I'm told that electromagnetic weaponry has been deployed unsuccessfully to try and bring these objects down. That's the issue is there's two competing narratives right now. And is Trump...

Is this new president just going to supinely roll over and allow his tummy to be tickled by the national security establishment? And that's what I'm accusing him of doing. I think that he's wimped it. And at the moment, the indication on the drones is that the president is basically allowing himself to have the wool pulled over. You have a new theory, Ross? What is your new theory?

You say we don't know, but I mean, there aren't a lot of potential suspects. There's still the U.S. There's non there's I guess non-state actors. There's actors from China and Russia, for example, or there's some kind of UAP, possibly NHI. What's your take?

Okay. Well, my good friends, John and Jerry Tedesco, the Tedesco brothers who operate a mobile laboratory observatory on Long Island, they go off Fire Island on the coast off Long Island there. They've been observing these orbs now for at least two years.

And John and Jerry tell me that they're still seeing these objects. They've been seeing them over Long Island. They went into New Jersey and they saw them in New Jersey. And they're showing some of the characteristics of the five observables. They're showing stealth mode. They're showing speeds, anomalous speeds. They're showing instantaneous movement. And the thing that really interests me is...

Again, it's the way that the mainstream media, particularly the news networks, are so manipulable. I mean, just this week there was an article in The New Scientist, just a most reprehensible piece, one of those tired, lame old stories where they basically insinuate that for anybody to take the UAP subject seriously, you know, you're mentally ill or you're basically misled. Right.

And it was the most ridiculous, out of context piece of tendentious journalism I've seen in a long time. And it was in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world. And, you know, I don't understand that disconnect. I don't understand how the news editor in the New York Times or the Washington Post

can sit there and know, for example, that the FAA, I mean, does anybody do that anymore? Do they look at what people have said under oath in Congress and go, hmm, the FAA testified in December that they had no knowledge of any authorised operations, that this is not some sanctioned operation, this is not anything that we know about. That was their testimony under oath.

And then a month later, the White House spokeswoman is allowed to come out with a statement that totally contradicts that assertion. I don't know anymore. I really don't know anymore what the...

what the media's position, its view of itself is about what its responsibilities are in relation to holding power to account. Well, you know, it is interesting, though, the speed of things that came out in the Biden administration versus the Trump so far

It was very slow in Biden, very fast here. And I think it was Steve Bannon who once said that the strategy was to flood the zone with shit, right? Flood the zone, get all the receivers out there.

It is possible that there is so much to report about Donald Trump right now and his however many, I've lost track of how many executive orders and firings and this, that, and the other thing that are going on. It's possible that the drone thing just kind of slipped by, but that doesn't mean an enterprising journalist shouldn't look into it. Look, I want to tell you something about what I heard, but again, I'm not going to tell

I haven't tracked it down. So, you know, a responsible journalist who's actually working and paid to do it should look into these things. We know that there were incursions at Langley. And I've heard from somebody that this Langley drone. When was this by the when were this is so just to be clear, Langley Air Force Base, Langley Air Force Base.

Precisely as opposed to where the CIA is located. When was that? When were all those overflights going on? Do you remember? Oh, I looked at that. I mean, we were reporting on them ourselves back in November, October, November. Okay. So somebody, you know, again, I'm,

I'm not able to use the source's name, and it's also not a direct source, but it's a good source. And they said that every morning at Langley for something like a week, there were 20 objects a mile apart circling counterclockwise around the base. And then there were three or four helicopter-sized objects circling

circling clockwise around the base. And as you said, that they seem to be immune to this anti-drone technology, whether it was EMP or whatever it was. And the thing is, if that kind of stuff is happening, if that's a true story, somebody should be looking into it and reporting it and winning the Pulitzer Prize for it. I mean, this is amazing stuff. I don't think... Let me put it this way. If China was running...

drones a mile apart going counterclockwise around Langley Air Force Base, that would be pretty much an act of war. So I don't understand why people wouldn't be up in arms. And let's face it, simply saying the F, well, first of all, let's go ask the FAA today. What does the FAA say about the fact that these are supposedly their drones? Do they even have a response? I don't think I've heard it.

Well, no, their official position is that we've all been terribly mistaken and that the objects that are being seen that are drones are authorized drones being used for research and other purposes. But why would they have denied it earlier? That's the question. That's the whole point. I mean, that's the whole point. It's an utterly absurd, it's a ridiculous explanation. And one thing that I've found over the years with the world of UAP research is that

You have these sightings, like at one stage you and I were reporting on sightings over Eglin Air Force Base and over out at sea, where pilots themselves were so concerned about what they encountered that they called in various politicians, including Anna Paulina Lunar and Matt Gates. And I think Tim Birchett might have been involved as well. He was. And the base commander was basically ordered in the end to provide the two members of the oversight committee, Gates and Birchett,

with some kind of a briefing. And what's really interesting is that's important. That's politicians doing what politicians should be doing. But the media just mocked the whole thing. I mean, this is the thing that really worries me about what's going on in America at the moment. Is America still a democracy?

Because you've got this weird situation where I've been taught all my life to hold power to account and that you do that by publicly questioning

contradictory assertions that politicians or their spokespeople make. And that's how you find shit out. I've been taught to read press releases backwards because they hide all the bad stuff at the bottom of the press release. You know, there's things that you learn about how governments work. This whole drones explanation stinks like a mangy dead dog.

There's something going on that they don't want us to continue asking. There goes my friend, the quotable Ross Coldheart, calling the drone thing a mangy dead dog, which I think is a perfect thing. And by the way, I do the same thing. Every time I see a press release, I start at the bottom and work my way up to the top. Maybe I read the first

And then I dropped down and I don't know why I've done that. I guess somebody told me to do that years ago, but it's just what I was taught. It was a mate of mine who was one of my editors at the paper I was working at. He said, Roscoe, the way we'd always hide stuff is that so that we could say in the future that we'd already announced it. We'd hide the really embarrassing, the really embarrassing stuff in a very long press release.

And he said, so you always read the long press releases because that's where they hide the bullshit. And worse still, the stuff that they're really embarrassed about, they'll release late on Friday afternoon because everybody in the press gallery has gone out for a drink. And the last thing they want to come do is write a late story at six o'clock at

I'm so glad to hear you say that, of course, because that is the one thing that Richard Dolan and I predicted in AD after disclosure. We said, if there's ever any kind of official disclosure event, look for it on Friday afternoon after everybody's gone home. And then the story would have to be covered over the weekend when the B team was in charge at most of the places. And

That is, by the way, Friday afternoon is when they released that first preliminary assessment on unidentified anomalous phenomena back in 21. So there is something to that. It's not just a joke. It really happens.

I realize it's very frustrating to hear that kind of shell game going on with the truth about what the FAA is saying or not saying. There is a piece that I wanted to throw out there that I think is going to be

pretty salutary in the next couple of months. There is a new documentary coming out. And of course, everyone remembers James Fox's great one that just came out, the program. There's a new one coming out called Age of Disclosure, produced and directed by Dan Farah.

It is going to have its opening weekend at the 2025 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. People are buzzing about it. I urge you, if you want to see it, the trailer is already on YouTube. You can see the trailer. It's a very good trailer. They have a website where the trailer is too.

What's interesting about this is it takes everything that's in Fox's thing and takes it up a level because there's like 34 senior members of the US government who talk about this. They include Elizondo, Stratton, Rubio, Rounds, Gillibrand, Clapper, Davis,

Puttoff, Mellon, Carson, Gold, Gallaudet, and Simivan, and Gallagher. The names go on and on. What they're all saying, at least if you look at the trailer for this, they're all going that one extra step. That seems to be what's been going on since Grush has come out.

Everybody seems to be taking it that one extra step. And this one, I think, looks to be like the one you may say to your friends and family. I know you have your own skepticism about this, and I don't usually ask you to do too much, but why don't you watch this one so that we can talk about it?

These people do not look like fire-breathing, ranting conspiracy theorists. They look like pretty reasonable people who we trust to run offices in our government. And I think the battleground is being prepared in a couple of months for this to be something that we're going to be talking about again in a big way.

Again, I've just not heard statements. I feel the same way, by the way, about your interview that you just did for News Nation. These are people saying things to you in those interviews that go a step beyond just what we've sort of heard before. They're an evolutionary advance. At least that's how it sounded to me. Yeah. I mean, Jake Barber is a firsthand

hand witness to the legacy retrieval program of UFOs, period. People have been asking for that for years. He's a first-hand witness. And believe me, getting him to the line where he agreed to go on camera was incredibly complex and difficult. There's been a lot of hoops we've had to jump through.

Similarly, with that Age of Disclosure documentary, I think people need to really focus in on the admission that's made in the trailer by Jay Stratton, who is probably one of the most senior people in the Pentagon involved in the investigation of UAPs. Jay, to his enormous credit, has come out publicly in that trailer and he's quoted saying he has seen alien craft in

And bodies. And bodies, yes. Now, that is firsthand evidence. This is the thing that really blows me away about this. At what point does the public go...

Oh, yeah, we want first-hand evidence. It's like Oscar and Ernie sitting in the box. The complaint is always, you know, when Grush first came out, the complaint was, well, I don't want to hear him tell me about people that told him things. I want to hear from someone who's first-hand, who was there, who saw the craft, who saw the bodies. Well, that's Jay Stratton. And I'm sure some of these other guys have, too.

but they haven't gone that far. Jay Stratton, in that soundbite, just out and says it. And I'm trying to remember the exact title he had, but was he not...

the leader of the UAP task force? He was. In fact, I think from memory, he was like an admiral or in terms of civilian status in the Pentagon, he was the equivalent of an admiral or a rear admiral. I've forgotten. Well, maybe a vice admiral. Here's my question. How does Jay Stratton get to say that when so many other people...

like Elizondo and others who say, well, I'd like to tell you what I really know, but, you know, I've signed, you know, there's the DOPSA and there's the this and I've got an NDA. And so I can only say X. Right.

How does Stratton get to say X, Y, Z? How does he get to do that? Again, I don't know. I mean, I really truly don't know. And look, Jay is his own man and I'm sure he's, he's got a book which is coming out, which is going to be released, which is also being handled by the way that the agent for the book is Dan Farah, who has also made the Age of Disclosure documentary, which I understand was co-EP'd with Lou Elizondo and

And so my understanding is that the reason why the Age of Disclosure documentary has been able to get so many good people is because Elizondo, as a co-executive producer, was able to bring...

a lot of these people to the table, including, I understand, James Clapper and John Ratcliffe and a lot of these people who've basically gone on the record, apparently in a really definitive way, categorical way for the first time. I'm kind of interested to see whether guys like Ratcliffe, John Ratcliffe, who's now running CIA, I'm curious to see if he gets interviewed and people say, well, previously you had said this, Mr. Ratcliffe.

Do you stand behind that? And what can you tell us now? Because if he doesn't, then that's very foreboding to me. If he doesn't say it, he should be, he's got the head of the CIA. He should be advancing the story. I'm just wondering if when they go into the defense department for their first briefing, there's some men in black that comes out with one of these things and goes, just look at this device for a moment, please. Yeah.

And then suddenly John Ratcliffe goes, everything the Pentagon does is absolutely exceptional. I respect them deeply. The CIA is not involved in a cover-up. It's a fantastic organisation. And by the way, the FAA did authorise those drones for research and other purposes, and we shouldn't question them in any way whatsoever. And maybe they've done the same thing to President Trump, because I have to be honest with you, Bryce, I'm not hopeful. I'm not hopeful at the moment. But see, here's the thing, Ross. I hear you, and I...

I take the frustration. I feel it in my own heart. I just think that there are too many moving parts right now.

When we talk about a slow drip, it's not even a slow drip anymore. What you did with Jake Barber and company recently, again, was an evolutionary step over David Grush, which frankly, I didn't think could be done. I mean, to be honest with you, I was like, well, we'll see. I wanted to just clear up one thing, though, about your News Nation podcast.

documentary you did with Jake Barber because I see it keep turning up and I just feel like I'd like to give you, you're the horse's mouth here. So let me, I want you to tell me there's, you know, the classic, uh,

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that there was even a promo from News Nation about where it's, you know, everyone knows what I'm talking about. It's the night vision goggle version of the rope hanging down and the egg craft wrapped in something and that kind of thing. What's...

What is the problem? You know, you'd ask the same question of anyone else. So I'm just asking you, what's the provenance of that? Where did that video come from? Is it actually taken from a barber's craft or was it taken at a different time? There's just a lot of rumor and misinformation on that one. So let's clear it up right now. Clearly I have many other sources inside the legacy program. Clearly there are other people talking to me.

And clearly I've been able to procure the video from the retrieval program in a completely separate operation from Jake Barber. Barber did not give me that video, period. It wasn't taken from Barber's craft though, I guess is the question. No. No. So it's, if anything, and again, I'd almost have to watch your show again because I'm

I think that the initial rush of comment was people going, somebody said, well, by the way, that wasn't even taken, you know, that's not related to it. And they put them together, but you know what I find? Yeah. It's, it's funny. You know, you give the UAP community what they want and they come galloping over the hill, like the cavalry going, Oh, it's all a CIA psyop. You know, it's all bullshit. You know, don't trust them. They're all false flags.

And then you had other people saying, "Oh, it's an aerogel balloon." Don't you think if it was an aerogel balloon, the Pentagon would have been out on Monday morning, first thing saying, "This is complete bollocks. This is an aerogel balloon." Right. I mean, the bottom line is they know what we've got. They know what we're sitting on. And they're very nervous about what we're going to do with the rest of what we've got. And they'd better make a decision.

Can you define they? When you say they? The gatekeepers. The gatekeepers. The people who are sitting on this absurd secret.

We're doing them a favour. We've actually been what Americans want us to be, respectful of national security, respectful of the imperatives of protecting key national security issues. We understand that there are certain aspects of this program that need to be protected. But what we don't understand is why the American public cannot be told and why a lie persists that humans are not engaging with extraterrestrial intelligence. They are.

Now, whether you call extraterrestrial or interdimensional or alien or non-human, the simple fact is we are engaging as a species with non-human intelligences.

of a highly advanced nature with a highly advanced technology. And we've been recovering their technology for years. Which is the other thing you've introduced though into the conversation, the word psionic, which prior to watching it in your show, I think the first time I heard psionic was on Dungeons and Dragons or it was some kind of game. And now it's a thing. So can you just

for the benefit of those of us who are coming later to that party, define psionic as you use the term? When I first started researching UAPs, I was told five, seven years ago, you need to understand that there is a nexus between the technology of UAPs, UFOs, and human consciousness. And I didn't for the life of them, didn't for the life of me understand what they meant.

And it took me quite a few years until people started talking to me about psychic connections with the phenomena. There's one individual who calls it CE5, which is not a professional term, but essentially it's the idea that the human mind has abilities that we're not even aware of, that we are somehow able to connect with another realm with our minds.

And yes, of course, material science will dismiss this and say it's all nonsense. But I think we're actually humanity is on the cusp of an extraordinary, quite momentous discovery at the moment.

There are experiments being done in telepathy. I really commend, by the way, everybody watch and listen to the telepathy tapes. I was just going to say that. Unbelievable. Fantastic series done by Kai Dickens, a very excellent journalist who's worked very closely with a psychiatrist called Diane Hennessy Powell. And despite...

Numerous attempts by the Don Quixotes of skepticism to sort of tilt at the windmills and suggest that there's no basis to the telepathy. I don't think they've laid a glove on the quite strong empirical evidence that's been gathered by that team to show that there are children suffering from high-level autism who are nonverbal, who do appear to be developing enhanced skills of psychic phenomena.

And similarly, there are people, and Gary Nolan, Professor Gary Nolan of Stanford University, he's been talking about this for years, and he talked about it in the interview that he did with me for News Nation. There are people increasingly who are being identified as having quite literally differently shaped neurons at the base of their basal ganglia in the caudate putamen. And it is possible that the hypothesis is that this phenomenon

allows some kind of use of the brain in ways that we haven't yet realized and that we might be able to transcend our understanding beyond material science to the idea that the human brain is capable of connecting with some kind of consciousness.

And the idea that seems to be, and I'm still finding my way with this myself, but the idea that seems to be inherent in our understanding of psionic phenomena is this idea that we are somehow connecting to an intelligence that is connected with the technology that we're seeing.

And it really does raise the question, Bryce, whether the technology of UFOs, UAPs, is a nuts and bolts technology or whether it's something more. Can it operate without...

psychic abilities. And there's a whole story here that I'm delightedly beginning to unravel. People have been falling out of the woodwork, talking to me, contacting me in the last few weeks, wanting me to talk to them about what they know about their role in the psionic program. It's leaking like a sieve. And boy, it's a travesty of a story. It's absolutely incredible. And I'm so looking forward to bringing it to people when I can get it all together.

What we're talking about here is Operation Stargate, Project Stargate, the CIA's investigations into psi phenomena, telepathy, remote viewing. It never stopped. We were snowed. The wonderful and highly amusing and great fun book by my good friend, what's his name, John Ronson.

who did the book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. He basically took the piss quite rightly with the way that the Pentagon tried to walk through walls, General Arthur Stubblevine talking about psychic warriors. But the simple fact is the remote viewing program, the Psy program, the psionic program, it never stopped.

That's the really interesting thing is that whatever the Pentagon says, it's been kept in a very, very compartmentalized, highly secret program operated within the Pentagon. They're still using remote viewing in the Pentagon. They've been using remote viewers, yes. So you've got the whole – you've got the psionic aspect. You've also got the skinwalker aspect, neither of which seem to be about nuts and bolts. They're related somehow, but –

How? I just wanted to put this out because I know we're getting later, but everybody seems to be pushing that extra step out. And one of my favorite writers is, of course, Whitley Strieber, who, as we all know, in 1987 wrote Communion and literally took the stuff that we're talking about, about

getting inside the minds of whoever these others are and trying to understand them. He's got a new book out. I've read all his books through them. This new one is called The Fourth Mind. I have to say, I'm a little disconcerted by the image here because it looks like a gray in a cartoon universe or a bad AI or something.

If that's actually what they look like, folks, then I'm not sure what that says about the nature of reality. But in this latest book, what Streber is trying to do, he's got two parts. Part one is talking about what he thinks they are.

And then part two is talking about what he thinks we are. And when he talks about we, he thinks that we've had some of these latent abilities that, Ross, you're talking about, these psionic abilities and other abilities going like levitation, et cetera, going back many, many, many thousands of years and that we've lost them somehow. And maybe we're encountering someone who has them. But the one thing I...

I'm not done with this book, but one thing that he was just on Jesse Michael's show and he said something that I thought was kind of interesting. I just wanted to throw out there. This is his quote. He goes, he's talking about the visitors, these people, and he says, "They are really concerned about something called cultural colonization. In other words, if they show up with this amazing array of skills, technology, mind, they're going to overwhelm us and make us feel completely disempowered and they don't want that.

They're not looking for slaves. They're looking for friends and they don't want us running behind them looking for their cell phones to the beyond or whatever they have.

I don't know exactly how Strieber thinks he knows that specifically, but he's certainly claimed an alleged contact of an ongoing basis for 40-some years now. So I just wonder, because now he's even got... He's trying to get inside the heads of these others and saying that

And the lack of transparency from them, the lack of contact where they, you know, why they haven't landed on the White House lawn or done any of that stuff is that they're afraid of overwhelming us, which, of course, would make sense to a lot of people who remember Native Americans being overwhelmed by European colonists when two different countries.

technologies and cultures meet, often it's the less technological one that doesn't fare so well. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of intellectual

discussion going on on this topic. And it's not just, there's all these wonderful new players coming into it, but even the established players are starting to look at it in different ways. And the one thing, you started to do this just a few minutes ago, if you take into account

All of these different people that have started talking. And I mentioned their names earlier, but let's just say if you take in what David Grush has said and what Lou Elizondo has said and Chris Mellon and Gary Nolan and Whitley Streber and all these, there's so many different people. And while they don't agree about every single detail,

There is a larger picture that seems to be mutually reinforced by all this testimony, which is this has been going on a long time, at least back to Roswell. Roswell was real. So was Majestic 12, whether it's called that or not today, probably not. But it was then that it has caused a number of crashes that we have retrieved.

crash wreckage and actual intact craft and bodies, and that first the government and now private contractors involved have spent time trying to reverse engineer this to some degree of success, but not perfect success. And this is what everybody says. They're all saying it from different points of view. So I'm starting to feel like this is

this basic part is the open secret. And that if you are aware of the testimony, it's no secret to you. So the question is going to be over this year, next year, and the year to follow, when does what people who study this and understand the level of, you know, people like CIA directors who are talking about it, when do people start who, you know, aren't us, aren't me, aren't you, aren't our listeners,

When do the rest of the world start cuing into it? And when they do, then we're going to learn some new things. And I'm sure right now that you know things that you've not put out there for good reason. You can't figure out, you haven't quite nailed the source or you don't have anyone who will say on the record about that. But don't you feel, Ross, that we are getting closer and closer to kind of a semi-consensus about what's going on?

Oh, boy. I'm not sure. I think there's still a possibility, my friend, that this might all get buried. I'm actually, I keep on coming back to the fact that the president, the new president allowed himself to be so badly snowed. I know that he's been lied to, or I know that the White House spokeswoman conveyed a terminological inexactitude, a lie.

And I don't know who conveyed that lie and why, but a decision was made by somebody in the national security establishment to completely mislead the American public. And the big question in my mind is why? Why did the new president so willingly assent to such a significant backflip? Was he aware of that?

And this is going to be, in my book, a key test of his presidency, because frankly, if the new president is able to be snowed so successfully on the drones, what's

when he's made such a big song and dance, you know, watch what he does, not what he says. He made a huge song and dance about getting to the truth and finding out for the American people. And these things are overflying my golf course. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. The

Beddington or whatever it is.

All of a sudden, the White House just puts out a one-sentence statement and everybody goes away and the media sit there and go, oh, yeah, well, that explains it. Perfectly reasonable explanation. I'm sorry. I just don't. I mean, that's not the media I know and respect. And that's certainly not the way the great masthead newspapers were taught to do and say. It's not the media that you know and respect. And it's also not what Trump said he was going to do. I mean, he said, I'm going to

"This is easy, I'm going to get in there, I'm going to figure out it, and I'll tell everybody." That clearly hasn't happened. I have a question, though. You now know, maybe not well, but you were on Donald Trump Jr.'s show, call him up, ask him why his dad's doing this. I mean, these are the times that require bold action. Let's find out.

Let me just say that I'm aware that there is an incredible amount of back-channel communication going on at the moment with members, very senior members of the Trump administration. And a lot of people are watching the next few weeks to see how he responds. And I think what's going to be key is hopefully the announcement by Anna Paulina Luna, Congressman Luna, is in some way going to bear relevance to the UAP subject.

And hopefully that we will see a stiffening of resolve by the new administration. Watch what it does, not what it says. One other thing like the Anna Paulina Luna, which by the way, when this show airs, I believe she will have already spoken. So we'll know then, but there's something else going on.

Former Admiral Tim Guladit has stated, when I saw him speak at the Sol Foundation this year, he was talking about a whole of government approach to the whole topic. I remember sitting in the audience saying, "Wow, this guy's like auditioning to be the UFO czar, because what else would you want? You'd want a whole of government approach to trying to solve the problem. I think that's exactly what is needed."

Then, I think a couple of days ago, I've heard that Giladet is actually meeting with people in the Trump administration to discuss his whole of government approach.

I know and you know that there are conversations going on. So far, people like to appoint czars. If there's a UFO czar, I think Tim Glodd is auditioning for it, certainly. There's other people that would be great. Chris Mellon would be certainly great, as would David Grush and people like that. So do you think it would be a good or a bad thing to have

Trump appoint a UFO czar when in fact there's Arrow in the Pentagon? If you're going to appoint a UFO czar, you need to give them teeth. Right on. Balls.

And the simple fact is, you know, the Presidential Records Review Board was meant to be a nine-member review panel that was going to begin the slow declassification of UAP archives. And it was going to operate independently of the Pentagon and the intelligence community. So what you have to do is set up a situation where whoever it is that is appointed has integrity, character, and power over

That's the issue. One of the things that we're seeing at the moment is the emasculation of inspectors general that normally have oversight on the intelligence and defence community. And I do think that's a mistake by the Trump administration, that they're sort of curbing the powers of inspectors general. The inspectors general are a really important check on power, on tyranny. And yes, OK, they are susceptible to political influence, but they're one of the only checks we've got.

And it's really important if you're going to make an appointment like a UFO czar, if that does happen, don't just make a glib appointment. Give them real power. Make them answerable to the public, not just to the president. Insist that whatever they uncover is declassified.

insist that the public knows that they've got the power of subpoena, that they can go breaching the constraints of any kind of compartmentalised security oath or non-disclosure agreement, insist that they have the power to go into the files of any private aerospace company, including the one that Mr. Barber worked for. Mr. Barber, Jake Barber, has given the full details of the aerospace company that he worked for and the crash retrieval operation that he was part of

to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He's very, very willing to share that with any government agency that's got the proper oversight authority that wants to properly investigate. At the moment, one of the problems we have is people in the Congress, they're a bunch of pussies. They're frightened. They're all looking and worrying about where their next meal is coming from. Who's going to be paying their political donations?

They're totally captive in the large part to the defence industry and the intelligence community, and they're awestruck by them. We've had 80 years of Cold War, and frankly, far too many politicians just roll over and glibly accept the assurances that they're given in a background briefing by some intelligence community grey man. What you need is somebody to go in there with intent, character, courage,

morals and power. Well, this power issue that you brought up, though, I would think Congress would be the place to give somebody power to do something because I can't see Trump by executive order giving away to somebody else the power to report only directly to the people and not to him. He's going to want

He's going to want the power over that person, I would think. Well, I mean, it's enshrined in the Constitution. Article 1, I think it's Article 1, Section 9, requires that everything that Congress is paying for, including be it dark black world defense programs hidden in private aerospace, wherever they're hidden, they still have to account to Congress. And at the heart of this is a very simple idea. Congress has the right to know that

And there's been improper, illegal, and in fact criminal withholding of evidence in order to conspire to deceive the American public and the Congress and presidents. And this is the thing is that successive presidents I know have been lied to about this. Yes. This is why this matters. And is President Trump, is he going to allow himself for all the blah, blah and the jaw, jaw, is he going to allow himself to be snowed?

Are we just going to see him feeding the population what he thinks they want to hear in terms of the jaw jaw? What's he actually going to do?

So what he's going to do is going to be the big test in the next few weeks or months. Because frankly, I'm skeptical. Having seen the pussy response that he gave on the drones issue, I'm worried he's allowing himself to be snowed by the national security establishment. He's just another politician.

So let's put him to the test. Let's see what he comes up with. Well, let's see. You know, we've already given everybody a bonus episode here because we've been off the air for two months. So we got to wrap it. But before we do, talking about all this openness.

Trump signed an executive order about JFK. Two parts to our thinking here. Will it reveal anything about UFOs? And will it reveal any definitive answer about who killed them? I'm skeptical on number one. On number two, I say CIA.

Well, I mean, I'm absolutely in no doubt the CIA was involved in a conspiracy. I mean, JFK, for any reasonable person that looks at the evidence, it was a coup d'etat. I mean, I'm sorry. I mean, any idiot that comes out and I notice, oh, the usual suspects in the media come out and basically say, oh, you know, how anybody could suggest that it was anybody other than Lee Harvey Oswald. They've got rocks in their head.

You only need to look at the evidence. I've got this wonderful book here on my desk, as it happens, by Robert Grodin, which is the definitive story of why. There were literally over 100 people that day who saw and heard, they saw smoke and heard shots coming from the grassy knoll. The direct witnesses on the day

were aware of a conspiracy. The big thing is there's been a cover-up and is the American government, is the national security establishment going to allow an open venting of a dirty cancerous secret inside the body politic? I'm really skeptical. I think the best you might get is suggestions that the CIA was involved in an attempt to cover up its level of knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald.

I think it might come out that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, as we all know he was. I mean, you don't get posted to Atsugi, which was the Japanese base where the US Air Force deployed U-2s. You do not get deployed to Atsugi and get involved in what Oswald was involved in before he got involved in Dallas.

unless you are connected in some way to the CIA. The evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was sent to the Soviet Union as a kind of a sting operation to try and find out more about what the Soviets knew. And the Soviets were onto him in a flash and sent him back to the US. And so they ended up using Oswald for what he eventually admitted he was,

He was used as a patsy to conceal the murder by a conspiracy, by a criminal conspiracy, a coup d'etat of the president of the United States in November 1963. All my adult life, that happened obviously when I was a young kid, but all my adult life, it seems completely reasonable it's a conspiracy. It always seemed like that. And then the more I read on it, the more I was sure about it.

But I've watched the media report on JFK, and at best, it would be, well, some say it was a conspiracy. Some say it wasn't. I guess we'll never know. And that's not acceptable to me personally.

to sort of see that be the way the history books are written, that we'll never know. So my fingers are crossed to at least get something that tilts the conversation over into the idea that it was a conspiracy, because it clearly was. Clearly more than one shooter. I just remember watching the...

Well, you know what? I'm not going to get into a JFK thing. We could go on and on and on. I'm not going to do that because we got to get out of here. But it's been great seeing you again because there's been so much going on in your life. You need I'm so glad to see that you're tanned and I'm going to go out in the sun before the next rain. By the way, we're having rain here right now. Not this second, but soon. We've had a little and now we've got more coming. And, you know, it's it's very interesting.

very good but in between maybe it'll fill up those reservoirs that governor newsom claims were empty for a reason i've never quite got my brain around whether or not those reservoirs were were meant to be empty or not but basically uh you need a bit of rain in california yeah that might be well and we're getting we're getting a good amount so i do think the fire season is over here for a while and won't be back probably till

June, July, hopefully. Um, so we got a short respite, but anyway, it's been great to catch up with all this stuff and there's so much more to keep going. And, and by the way, for anyone who, uh, who is inspired to know more, uh, about the, the Jake Barber story, again, uh,

News Nation maintains a pretty active YouTube site. And Ross, like I said, you've done it. Seems like you've done a dozen shows on it already. So there's good stuff there to listen to. Yeah. So thanks for taking your time here, everybody. Thank you for being here on Need to Know. And we'll catch you on the next time. See you then. Cheers.