UFO Disclosure and NHI Threat Analysis (with Bryce Zabel)
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It can't be all a smokescreen. That's got to be ruled out. There are tens of thousands of cases worldwide. And we're not just talking about lights in the sky. We are talking about people who see structure, metallic kind of physical objects. You can't dismiss all that.

That was Bryce Zabel, host of the Need to Know podcast and author of AD After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact. In this episode, Bryce and I go deep on UAP theory, the modern UFO disclosure movement, and the reasons we need to know more information before dismissing the idea that contact with non-human intelligence may represent a looming threat. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Julian Buarro.

Last summer, the House Subcommittee on National Security held a hearing entitled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency." The resulting testimony was explosive, including accounts of reverse engineering from crashed UFOs and the recovery of non-human biologics.

A year later, we're checking in with Bryce Stable, a diligent researcher on the cutting edge of UFO disclosure. When we were emailing to schedule our interview, he summarized his point of view with a simple statement: "We need to stop asking, 'Are UFOs real?' The government itself and decades of cases have said they are. The conversation needs to pivot to, 'Who are they? What do they want? And are we safe?'" Our extensive conversation explores these questions and so much more.

Before we get into the interview, I've edited our conversation for length and clarity. Do you have an extraterrestrial experience you'd like to share? Is there a topic you're interested in learning more about? Send us a message on Instagram at theconspiracypod or shoot us an email at conspiracystories at spotify.com. Stick around.

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Welcome back to Conspiracy Theories. I am here with Bryce Zabel, host of Need to Know, author of AD After Disclosure, and creator of Dark Skies. I'd like to start off by introducing you to our audience. Tell me about your experience working in the NHI and UAP field, and what first interested you in the subject?

It's fascinating, really, because everybody has their own story about that. You have your story. I have mine. Everyone we talk to who's interested in the UFO UAP issue has their own. And they're not the same. So everyone has that unique moment where they said, well, this is really a real phenomenon. Maybe I should really be thinking about it. For me...

I moved to Oregon. My family moved to Oregon. And I grew up right near the Trent farm where in 1950, they had taken those two wonderful photos that today have never been debunked properly, if at all. And then...

I kind of forgot about it, but I noticed when I was a young man starting in radio, I heard about Travis Walton and his case. And I started talking about that every morning on my radio show, and I got an incredible amount of interest from the audience. And that kind of kept me interested. And then, frankly, I left the news business. I'd been a CNN correspondent here in Los Angeles, and then I'd worked as an investigative reporter at PBS.

But, you know, shows end, shows get canceled. And so then the question was, well, what are you going to do? Are you going to be an anchorman with a suitcase and just travel from town to town? And my wife suggested, well, have you ever written a screenplay? So I started writing. And at the same time that I had just gotten started in the business, I

Whitley Strieber's Communion came out. And for anyone who saw that as an important moment in their life, it's creepy because it's got the famous gray on the cover, right? I mean, we've all seen it. And I read it and I didn't know what to believe, to be honest with you. I mean, I was not a believer. I was not deeply experienced in it. I just knew it was interesting.

So I thought that would make a great screenplay. So I started working on a screenplay under the premise that what would happen if the government believed Whitley Strieber's story completely...

And they wanted to shoot down a UFO. Well, they might wire his house up without any knowledge on his part. And then they might just wait till he got abducted again and then try to shoot this thing down. So I wrote that movie, called it Progenitor originally, and it got made by the Sci-Fi Channel as their first original film called Official Denial.

And it was during the actual research for this thing where I was sitting alone in the dark in my house at like 2 or 3 in the morning doing research to make sure that the movie was as credible as it could be. And I just had to put the book down and ponder this. And I thought, wow, this stuff is real.

And it didn't change what I did with the movie, but it changed how I saw the topic and kept a finger in that for many years. And that led eventually to the Dark Skies TV series on NBC. So, yeah, I don't think it's ever a process where people have that moment of Zen instantly. They kind of fall into it. And that's certainly my story.

If you couldn't tell from Bryce's retelling of his introduction to the UFO space, he's followed this story for years, researching accounts of sightings and abductions for film and television with a unique journalistic rigor. I'm going to break in occasionally during the episode to parse some of the subjects he brings up throughout our conversation, particularly if we haven't covered the topic on our show before. So what are the Trent UFO photos?

On May 11, 1950, Paul and Evelyn Trent observed a slow-moving, metallic, disc-shaped object over their farm in McMinnville, Oregon. Paul's pictures of the craft were published in Life magazine in June of that year, bringing the story to the national stage. As Bryce said, they have not been conclusively debunked, despite thorough analysis in 1967 and 1975.

Skeptics claim the images are a hoax. Proponents consider them to be credible evidence. I'll let you do your own research. Bryce also mentioned Communion, Whitley Strieber's account of his close encounter with aliens in December 1985. The book went on to become a bestseller upon his publication in 1987 and sell over 10 million copies by 1997.

The book features a striking rendering by noted artist Ted Seth Jacobs of a Zeta Reticulin, otherwise known as a gray alien. Jacobs would say, at one point, Whitley Streber said the image corresponded exactly to what he had seen. Now let's get back to the interview. First, thank you so much for spending time with us. I really do feel like this will be incredibly instructive and enlightening for our audience to

When we were emailing and setting this interview up, you said, we need to stop asking, are UFOs real? The conversation needs to pivot to who are they? What do they want? And are we safe? When you pay attention to breakthroughs in physics in particular, and the way that we are interrogating simulation theory, the way that the future instructs our present, it seems plausible that

that these occurrences may be quote unquote human from the future or from alternate dimensions of our present. The science is, it's not disproving science.

or making these events less plausible. Right. The smarter we get, the more we're able to leap into their reality. There's no doubt about it. And the arc is good for that. Our science does improve, and that means we're more able to

understand their presence. And when I argued that we already know UFOs are real, that's an important distinction because a lot of people will say, do you believe in UFOs? I get asked that a lot. And I say, well, of course I believe in UFOs. They're unidentified creatures.

They fly, and they're physical objects, most of them. So, yeah, we know they're real. The question isn't, are they real? The question is, who's making them? Why? And what are they doing with them? And is this a threat of any kind to us? I also would suggest one thing that has just sort of entered my mind recently, because we keep talking about AI. A supremely advanced technological civilization that's not ours would probably have their own AI.

So if they've been here for 80 or 90 years, their own AI has access to everything about humanity. They've read everything on the internet. Well, let's really scare everybody. They've read your text messages, right? They've got everything. They've sucked up the books that have been written since books started being written. They know everything. So these others, whoever they are, know everything about us.

And beyond that, the amount of data on all of us about our behavior and our interests and what we like to do and where we go every day has never been greater. So we already know a lot about ourselves. And again, let's say they're 10,000 years in advance of us technologically, then clearly they know everything about us. And my brain can only work so fast, right? Well,

They can know everything about humanity at the same time and think about it at the same time, I would imagine. And here's the problem in terms of that threat analysis. We don't seem to know that much about them.

They know everything about us, but we don't know anything about them. At least that's what the government and others would have us believe. And think about it. What's the number one thing you do when you're in a war, whether it's World War II or Vietnam or Korea or Iraq? Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. You need to know what you're up against, right? Well, we don't seem to know that, apparently. And yet we have...

ample evidence that these things have been cited at nuclear sites since we've had nuclear weapons. That's right. And let's remember also Roswell was the first American nuclear bomber base ever. And you know what the second one was? It was at Peace Air Force Base right next to Betty and Barney Hill. So we know, and there's the Malmstrom case and so many cases, they've surveilled our nuclear weapons. Now,

Here's what's interesting about this topic and why I'm loving this conversation, because you could look even at the surveillance of nuclear weapons from two different points of view. One of them you could say, well, they want to protect us from ourselves. You know, that's why they're doing it. Why did they turn them off before? Because they want to be able to turn off all the nuclear. But then other people could say, well, if they're surveilling our nuclear weapons, that's what you do.

Prior to taking action, you want to know what you're up against. You want to know if you can turn them off and on. So we're just in a position where if there are other people that know more about this than you and I do and our listeners right now, well, those people aren't sharing their work. So it always takes me back to if they're not going to share their work, brother, then we're going to have to do it.

UFOs observing and interfering with nuclear weapons has been researched extensively by author Robert Hastings. Air Force Captain Robert Salas, who was at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967, reported that 10 nuclear missiles he was overseeing suddenly became inoperative. At the same time, base security informed him of a mysterious red glowing object in the sky. Similar theories exist regarding the Rendlesham incident, which we covered earlier this year.

Some theorists believe that nuclear tests in the 40s serve as a kind of bookmark for interdimensional or time-traveling observers. Not to make this any more complicated, but if you're listening to this show, I trust you have an open mind.

As I mentioned earlier, UFO theory is being advanced by breakthroughs in quantum physics, like retrocausality, a concept which states that actions and events in the future can potentially affect events in the past. The key takeaway from these concepts is that they open up the pathway for us to think about time on a nonlinear matrix. Now back to the interview.

What I really appreciate about Need to Know as an avid listener is your approach as a journalist, approaching stories with scrutiny. I have a question expanding on the new era of UFO whistleblowers. Obviously, 2023 was a huge breakthrough with the congressional testimony on UFOs led in part by David Grush.

a former United States Air Force officer and intelligence official. It harkens back to Marcel's investigation of Roswell. What kind of additional credibility comes from people who are embedded in intelligence agencies or the defense apparatus? The one thing that goes to the heart of your question is that

When somebody comes forward from within, there are two possible reactions, and either one seems credible. One is you believe them because finally somebody on the inside is on the record, and

And the other is a natural skepticism that says, well, the government has put forward information that's not always accurate on this, to say the least, right? So maybe they're using this person to do that. That's certainly the knock that Lou Elizondo got when he first came out in 2017. And some have done the same with David Grush. Now-

I'm going to tell you why I believe both these guys. First of all, thank you for the nice comment about need to know. And it really helps to keep you on your journalistic toes to co-host a show with someone like Ross Coulthard, who, of course, is an award-winning investigative reporter. Because I was hanging out with Coulthard, if you will, I was well aware of his investigations into whistleblowers, particularly David Grush.

And when we first started talking about it, he didn't use his name. I just knew this guy was a source. And that's kind of a good thing. That's what reporters who do these things do. You don't want to brag. You don't want to tell people unnecessarily. You tell them what they need to know, when they need to know it, if I can borrow that phrase. So along this path, Ross says,

There's a guy coming into town, and I knew it was this guy, and we had helped him make a deal to interview this person on News Nation. And so David Grush comes to town, and he's

I go with Ross and another person and we go to lunch with David Grush. And he seems like a pretty nice guy to me. He's funny. He's kind of relaxed. He's in a pair of cargo shorts and a t-shirt. And at some point it comes up like, well, if we take David Grush to the news nation thing tomorrow, is it possible he'll get arrested before he tells his story? Or even more concerning, is it possible we'll get arrested? Right? So those were things to think about. So, uh,

We go and talk about how do we make sure that even if this goes badly at News Nation, even if Dave Grush is hauled off in handcuffs or we're hauled off in handcuffs, what can we do to preserve his story? And the idea came up, well, we should put him on camera today because that'll give him a chance to practice.

And that'll also give us a chance to have some video in case something goes bad. And in between talking to him at lunch and then during the day when we recorded that, and I also went to the News Nation interview, I

I got to know him a little bit, and I got to tell you, I mean, he had then and he has today the absolute ring of truth. But as I said, that's not always enough, right? But when you start to see his credits and you realize that people are vouching for him and they're agreeing that he's had the experience, he said, right?

You start to then think, well, this is going to be fascinating. And he started talking about some things that are now widely known. But at the time, I was kind of shocked. I mean, among them, we got a UFO from the Italians in 1933. I mean, that extends this whole mystery 90 years at least out there. And he does not come off as a man who's conning anybody. Ross thoroughly vetted the manpower.

the man. And others have done that since. Dave Grush is the real deal. He does not have what some people on the internet demand. He didn't actually touch a UFO. He hasn't attended an autopsy of a cadaver. He doesn't have that, but he has enough that the intelligence community's inspectors general called his testimony urgent and credible. And I guess that's what I would tell you the same. I find everything that he has said to be

to be reasonable and reasonably backed up. I can't think of two words better, urgent and credible. What is unique about the outcome of Grush's disclosure is that there isn't necessarily full agreement on one side or the other within the Department of Defense itself about how to move forward with this. As you said,

There were officials who called this disclosure urgent and credible. There are obviously defense officials who would rather keep all of this under wraps. Claims by former Nevada Senator Harry Reid reported in The New Yorker. Reid said, I was told for decades that Lockheed had some retrieved materials. He then goes on to say that he was rebuffed by the Pentagon when requesting access.

What do you make of this that the former Senate majority leader can't get access to these materials but is effectively confirming what Grush testified to in front of Congress that non-human biologics or technology may be in possession of our government?

Well, there's a lot to unpack in that. Let's take that from the top. For those of you who ever watched the remake of Battlestar Galactica, one of the things I always talk about is everything has happened before and it will happen again. And in a way, that is something you can apply to the study of ufology. Senator Barry Goldwater, for example, in the 60s,

attempted to get into what they call the Blue Room at Wright-Patterson, which is where many people believe that the crashed saucer from Roswell was taken and certainly was a hotbed of that.

And Barry Goldwater was told basically, no, you can't have access. Don't ask us again kind of thing. So Harry Reid actually got further than Barry Goldwater did. So I guess on a transparency progress scale, that would be something. I do find the case of Senator Harry Reid raises another issue, though.

When he passed away, there were a lot of obituaries for him. He was an important guy. He was the Senate majority leader. He knew everybody, etc., right? And I read all these obituaries and

Harry Reid, at that point, had retired from the Senate, but he was dedicated to the issue of UFO UAP disclosure. And he spent more of his time in his retirement from the Senate thinking about that than anything else. And guess how many papers I found in the major newspapers and major magazines that actually mentioned that? None.

didn't make it. Why is that? I think part of the stigma of this UFO thing is you have to go back to high school. Everybody wants to be cool. Nobody wants to say anything or hang with anybody that's going to get them ridiculed. And clearly, the government stumbled onto official denial and ridicule in the 40s. And I doubt they probably thought it would go on as successfully as it has, but it took hold. And

I don't think the government has to do nearly as much of the suppression of evidence that people attribute to it because we do it ourselves. And that's still an issue. Now, not everybody feels that way. And more people today are feeling the other way, which is maybe we should be talking about this. It might be something that we should be concerned about. Now, I'm not trying to be a fear monger or anything because, in fact, whoever does have that information hasn't shared it freely.

They have not shared their work, as we like to say. So we don't really know whether it's good, bad, or indifferent in an actual hard knowledge kind of way. But as I said, everything that has happened before will happen again. Well, Harry Reid was the majority leader of the Senate.

A Democrat? And guess what? So is Chuck Schumer. And Senator Schumer last year had some legislation that he was proposing with Mike Rounds, who was a Republican. And in that legislation, the phrase NHI, non-human intelligence, is used by my count 22 times.

Now, it didn't all get passed. Some did. Some of the stronger attempts at transparency did get cut at the last minute. But for Senator Chuck Schumer, who is no crazy guy, he's not running down the street with his hair on fire very often. He's a pretty measured fellow, and he's willing to talk about non-human intelligence. So,

No matter what the pushback comes from the government, it does appear there is a UFO disclosure transparency group within the Congress that is bipartisan. You will find Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the House. So for every Chuck Schumer, there's a Marco Rubio in the Senate.

in the Senate. And in the House, it's the same thing. There are Congress people who have been briefed. And from what I understand, and again, I don't have multiple sources on this, but it does appear that a number of them have been told exactly what David Grush said

isn't far off and that there are bodies and there are craft. So who knows? We just really aren't as privy to this as we ought to be. I mean, let's face it. If there are craft or bodies, well, how did we get possession of them? Well, the government went and got them. Even if they're now in private enterprise, they started with the government. And I would just say, hey, I'm a taxpayer.

How come it's not part of the deal that I get told what my money is being spent for? And so I think a lot of people are waking up to that way of looking at it. Now, will that prevail? I don't know. There's a lot of pushback going on right now. And it's possible, again, if you go with everything that's happened before will happen again. Well, there have been moments where people in the past thought we're inching up closer to it. And then, wow, that toothpaste got back in the tube. So it could happen again. Quick note.

The following question refers to declassified documents regarding the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat, in which democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was deposed by the CIA to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company. It should come as no surprise to any longtime listener of this show that this led to decades of brutal torture at the hands of U.S.-backed regimes within the region. Another conspiracy for another day. Now back to the interview.

Declassified documents regarding the 1954 Guatemalan coup list a number of strategies under the title of de-emphasis, one of which says, if possible, fabricate big human interest story like flying saucers. People may look at that and think, yes, the testimony by David Grush is out there to pull focus, to prime us to be susceptible to a more

inflammatory UFO disclosure later on when they want the US populace in particular looking in one direction while something else happens. The way that cable news works now, especially, they might cover the same topic

for 24 hours. You had mentioned that you either look at revelations and testimony as credible or you look at them as propaganda or a smokescreen. I guess I just wonder what you think about that, how you talk to someone who looks at it that way. It can't be all a smokescreen. That's got to be ruled out. There are

tens of thousands of cases worldwide. Now, do I believe them all? Of course not, all right? But many of them are documented with data from radar, and many of them are done by pilots, commercial pilots, Air Force and Navy pilots, police officers, doctors, lawyers, you name it. They've been seen by everybody. And we're not just talking about lights in the sky. We are talking about people who see structure.

metallic kind of physical object. So you can't dismiss all that. That is data. To say that that's not data is disingenuous. Data is not just something we get

In 2024 off a Navy radar, right? It's also that deep. No, I can't dismiss all those people. That's I can't dismiss a hundred thousand witnesses and say they're all crazy. None of them saw anything ever. And what was disingenuous to the max about the arrow report is that

What the report seemed to be saying is, well, we've looked at all the potential cases out there, and really, there's a very small percent that can't be explained, 2% to 5%. So they're outliers, so we don't have to think about them. But that misses the point. You and I and our audience right now know 95% to 98% of them are misidentifications. We're not interested in those. It doesn't give you a pass to dismiss the other 2% to 5%.

So it's just frustrating. And it's so helpful to frame it as 2% to 5% instead of the raw numbers, which count in the thousands. Oh, my gosh. It's just crazy. And I guess that's why I was kind of tearing my hair out a little bit over the Arrow report because they got away with it. First of all, most of the reporters that reported on it probably only read the executive summary. And the headline writers all said –

The Pentagon says UFOs aren't ET, which was not even the question. And again, it's the House investigating the hen house. And by the way, since there are other opportunities for who they are, it's even disingenuous to say we can't find ET because they might not be ET. They might be some other form of non-human intelligence. So they're parsing it by using ET simply because it gives plausible deniability. And finally, I'll say this.

That movie, that first movie I wrote back in the 80s that got made by the Sci-Fi Channel is called Official Denial. At the very end, the main character says, it's not where they're from, it's when. And you then realize it's like one of those sixth sense kind of reversals. And you realize that the ETs so-called in that movie were us from the future. While I have no actual proof,

legitimate information on that. Well, actually, I do. There's a couple of people that have talked about it who seem credible. But

We don't know is my point. We have yet to come face to face with anyone who confirms any of that. And think how clarifying it would be if we could say, well, they're just E.T. I mean, that would at least be clarifying. But as it looks right now, you could make a better argument that it isn't a single source problem.

issue that we've got here. It isn't just one group that's flying around our skies and coming out of our oceans. It appears to be more than one, and maybe a lot more than one, and maybe over time, many more than one. It has to be more than one. So, you know, folks, that's why I feel compelled to study this issue and talk about it and think about the future.

In July of 2022, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office was created as an extension of the Department of Defense. They are leading the UAP search and disclosure efforts. You talk about Arrow on your show regularly. If you go onto their website, there's a dropdown menu that says, have we identified UAP yet? And effectively they say no. Right.

What are we to make of this, given what we've been talking about this entire time with all of this weird stuff that has been happening, noted, covered in nonfiction, covered through fiction, based off of true stories, and the drop-down menu for have we discovered anything has one sentence that just says, no, we have not identified any credible evidence of UAP up to this point.

What purpose does this office serve?

That's a great question. I will say this, Julian. Part of that is getting into the weeds for the majority of people, right? You know what you're talking about. I know what you're talking about. And a lot of people who are listening know what they're talking about. But if I went to a dinner party at my house and said, what do you think of that arrow report? Everybody would go, yeah. Anyway, when's the school open for Halloween? You're just not going to get it out of that. I have to say that

Because of that, because of the nuance of all these acronyms and all that, part of me doesn't expect the government to be too forthright about it because –

They haven't so far. So why now? But I also don't take very credibly a report or an organization that the government sets up to investigate itself. I'd have been a lot happier instead of getting a report from Arrow that we got a report from the intelligence community inspectors general.

Because they're independent. They could write what they wanted. I'd be very happy if Congress could put together a succession of hearings very much like we did for Watergate and start hauling these witnesses in and put them under oath. And if they say something controversial, go get that person and haul them in and go for the truth. But what I was going to say is it's led me away from

The Arrow, which is the all domain anomaly resolution office, which again, they've had four different titles for that group in just the short time I've been doing this podcast with Ross. I'm in transition on this issue. Ross, for example, is...

investigative reporting is in his blood and he's looking for a great case, you know, a great sighting with great witnesses that can be interviewed and all that. I've read so many books. I've read so many reports. I've talked to so many people. I'm no longer thinking one more great case solves anything per se, unless we had, for example, the

the Phoenix lights kind of case over New York City in broad daylight. And then, yeah, that would do something. But to simply say, here's a great case out of Florida or Brazil. And look, all these farmers from, you know, all these different, we've got, there's thousands of those. I'm increasingly thinking of myself as a different voice.

That voice, I'm willing to stipulate that maybe Ross or George Knapp or Jeremy Corbell or any of a dozen other great people who are out proving things, James Fox or whatever. There's a lot of those people doing that. I'm thinking about the future. I'm thinking the longer this goes without a resolution of some kind, we're going to be just caught flat footed.

when we finally acknowledge it. I had to see no evidence that even this limited, semi-limited hangout disclosure that we're in right now is actually getting through. I don't think they have a plan. I used to think, of course they have a plan. They've had...

70 or 80 years. They've got to have a plan. I'd have a plan in 70 years. I'm not sure that they do. In fact, part of the reason Dolan and I wrote AD After Disclosure is we just thought somebody's got to have a plan. If they're not going to announce a plan, maybe we should. And so now I spend a lot of my time thinking about leading the discussion about what's next.

Not what happened then or proving another case since there's been 10,000 cases. And many of them extraordinary, you know, not able to be dismissed. Instead, it's probably time to start thinking about, okay, if we get past that,

Now what do we do? That's what this scripted podcast I've been working on called Undeniable is about. I want to see the future because we're only going to be as successful dealing with this as we are prepared to deal with it. So I do think we have to start talking about those issues because let's

Let's face it, if it happens fast, and it could, I mean, remember, we're not the only people in charge of this. There's other nations out there who could lead the charge themselves. It could be Brazil. It could be France. It could be China. It could be Russia. I mean, we're not the only people that get to decide this. So this may come upon us very quickly and out of left field. Or let's

Consider this. If there are others out there, this non-human intelligence, well, what do we absolutely know about this phenomenon? I'd suggest there's really only one truly basic thing we know, and that is both sides agree it should be secret. That's the only thing you can prove, because if we didn't want it to be secret, Joe Biden would walk down into the newsroom and say,

Yeah, it's all true. We got them. We got the bodies. We got the craft. And look, listen here, you know, and he would tell us, but he doesn't and nobody and none of his predecessors have. And if these others thought that

You know, the people of Earth should know about it. They wouldn't just be flying around and never landing and communicating in an honest way with a planetary society. They'd connect with us. They haven't done that. They could, in fact, land on the White House lawn. By my reckoning, they never did. So we have a situation where we can't count on them at all.

Or the government to do it. So we have to do it. And knowing that it sort of depends on what's in your heart. If you think this is all bunk, you've got nothing really to worry about. Right. But if you think that there's an underlying reality to this, whether it be aliens or time travelers or aliens.

You know, crypto terrestrials are all these other theories that are out there. Nobody's talking about it. We have to figure it out. We're on our own here, folks. I think that's my big lesson. We're on our own. In my eyes, there are a couple compelling reasons why

UFO disclosure may be being suppressed. The first is kind of the Oppenheimer angle, where having researched the creation of the atomic bomb for our nuclear fallout series on this show, after Oppenheimer creates the bomb, they ask him, what do we do next? And he says, arms talks, right? Because the last thing that he wants is

is an arms race that leads to the destruction of our planet. If by some chance the United States or Russia or some other world power are in possession of technology that can be reverse engineered that far exceeds

our greatest weaponry at this point, it would be irresponsible to let other world powers know that they're in possession of this just based off of what would happen after that. Clearly, if you think back, let's say that you accept Roswell as a true event. I do. I think that there may be elements of it that have been perverted over the years.

And I look forward to a time when they find all those missing documents that they have not released over time. But imagine you're Harry Truman.

You took over the office when Franklin Roosevelt died in the last month of World War II. And then you ended the war by dropping a couple of nukes on Japan. And you're being attacked by your political opponents. You got to run for election the next year. And somebody comes in and goes, "Yeah, Mr. President, we got an issue down here in the Southwest." And you're going to hear them tell what they think they've got.

And I think you would probably get a room full of people in the Oval Office, to the extent that they did it that way, who would probably agree,

We can't tell everybody about this yet. We don't know what it is. We don't know if it's a threat or not. We don't want to share this craft that we have no idea how it works, but we sure as heck don't want to have the United Nations passing resolutions that we have to share it with everybody because we don't want to share it with the Soviets. I'm probably a broken record on this, but I do think at that point, the idea would be

let's not disclose it. Let's try some kind of disinformation. Because remember, we won World War II, and at D-Day, we convinced the Germans we were landing someplace besides where we landed because of disinformation. We had tens of thousands of people who were trained to disinform people about things. So if I was Truman, I'd say, you know that thing you did with D-Day? Do that right now. Buy me some time.

And I would imagine most of the people who would be in a meeting like that would think this will buy us a year or two or three maybe, but then we'll have to figure out a plan B. But it didn't turn out that way. It turned out to be such an effective combination. And it's two parts. Again, the twin pillars of this thing are denial and ridicule. And if you look at it today, we still have both going on.

It just worked. So here we are. Before we get into my second most plausible reason for withholding disclosure, I'm going to give some additional context.

Dr. Steven Greer founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, an organization aimed at investigating sightings with a science-based approach and developing a protocol for eventual contact, and the Disclosure Project, an organization aimed at supporting whistleblowers publicizing classified information. In 2001, he held an extensive press conference that featured testimony from 20 retired Air Force, FAA, and intelligence officers.

He held a follow-up disclosure briefing in June 2023. The second most compelling reason that I find for the suppression is based off of Dr. Stephen Greer's perspective, where he sees potential reverse engineering of alien technology as a panacea to many of the issues that we face today in terms of energy scarcity, food scarcity. Could these technologies allow us to

in a very short time, fix these things. And then the obvious implications of that would be what are the financial results of immediately bottoming out the energy sector? Because we've unlocked the ability to produce electricity at a massive scale through this alien technology. Do you have any thoughts about that perspective?

One thought is whatever's powering these things that we keep seeing in our skies and seas is not gasoline. So if our energy economy is currently built on old school energy sources, you probably would be in the camp of, well, don't screw that up right now. And so there's two problems. Did we succeed in reverse engineering? Do we understand how to create different energy? And even if we did, do we share it?

Do we just keep it in our pocket for a rainy day, which would be a crime in my view because most of the problems in our world are about things like energy. Many wars have been fought over it. So if there was a way around it – but I'm not sure there is. On the subject of Dr. Stephen Greer –

I respect the man. I acknowledge the actual good work that he has done, particularly the report, I think it was in 2000 or 2001, that he put together as kind of a briefing paper for people. And it's a powerful document and well-researched and credible in every way. I'm not trying to stir up trouble. I know there's a lot of people that believe that the threat narrative is a bad thing.

I want to know more. I want to know who they are and what they want before I'm prepared to say it's all sweetness and light. It might be a threat. My philosophy about that, I go back to Ronald Reagan during the talks with the crumbling Soviet Union when he was trying to achieve nuclear missile reductions. And he famously said, trust but verify. I think that is the way forward here. Somebody is here.

not 100% sure who it is, but it looks like they're flying around in things that we didn't make and they're from someplace that isn't here. Beyond that,

I think there is just speculation. It's possible that people like Grush have told congressional investigators and other investigators details that would come down on one side or the other, but I've not seen them. So to try to ascribe some kind of motivation to people or non-human entities that might be interacting with this

is done with too little information. It's like trying to solve a math equation with too many variables in it. It inevitably leads to speculation. This is why whatever the truth is, I say let's respect the right of governments to classify what are truly important things to the life of their countries.

So, I almost have traveled a path here where even though I wrote a book about disclosure, I don't tend to use the word as much as I used to because people are confused about it. Does disclosure mean that the press secretary comes out in the White House briefing room and say, I've got hard drives available that have all our information and you can all have one as you leave the room? No.

I don't think that's going to happen, and I don't even think it should happen. I use a different word. I like confirmation. What I think – and it's not just government. It might be private enterprise. It might be whoever. But what the people probably deserve on this topic is confirmation. If it's non-human intelligence, that ought to be able to be confirmed.

Without destroying the world as we know it. Just to simply confirm, yes, some of these things are from somebody that's not us.

Okay, then maybe the vastness of the knowledge that we have in this world right now and our ability to talk to each other can get to work on it. Some of it will be leaks or whatever, but I would say this also, don't think that there aren't people standing in line right now to talk to Congress. And one of the reasons that there's been a little hiccup in getting them forward into those rooms, and a lot have gotten into those rooms and have set the hair on fire of a number of our representatives.

But it's not something that you easily want to go do because there's a lot to possibly know about this. And if the absence of evidence is some kind of evidence, you'd have to say looking at 90 years of no official confirmation, if it's real, then there must be something wrong.

about it, but disturbing is in the eye of the beholder, right? What might disturb you or our listeners right now might not be what disturbs me, right? And we're just all out in the shadows here, bumping into each other, trying to get there, and there are people probably out there who could help us with that. Isn't there something fundamentally disturbing about answering one of the most fundamental questions that humans have always had?

In a very concrete fashion where we've looked to the sky for tens of thousands of years, the very first thing that the human race worshipped was the sun for bringing us the necessary energy to grow crops and sustain life. And suddenly we say, beyond the sun, there is intelligence and they have visited us and it changes everything.

fundamental understanding of the place that we hold in the universe, you must have thought about what happens after that. Oh, you think? Yeah. You know, listen, a part of what makes me unique, but also makes it hard to wear the journalist hat all the time, is that most of my life is in entertainment and showbiz. I'm still writing scripted podcasts, feature films and television pilots and things like that.

And my obligation is not to tell the truth, right? If you want the truth, read more books or whatever. Don't watch television shows and movies and hope that it'll be there. But I will say this. As a journalist, you don't have to come to the point. Could it be this? Could it be that? But if you're writing a screenplay about something, we have to have a point of view. What was it? What does it mean? How did people respond to it? My wife and I have Kathy Martin's book under option, Catastrophe.

captured that she wrote with Stanton Friedman about the Betty and Barney Hill case, which is, for those of us just joining us, is the first case of modern reported abduction by Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. Fascinating case. There's a lot to say that it's real. There are some inconsistencies as well.

And as a journalist, I'm only willing to go so far and say, might be this, might be that. Fascinating. But as a writer or a producer, you have to come down on it. Were they abducted or did something else happen? So, yeah.

It depends on where you're coming at for this topic as to what you can say is something that seems factual or not. And I found a lot of satisfaction in having a foot in journalism and in showbiz because that allows me to sort of complete the journey. The journalist in me can say, there is some profound evidence out there that has not been adequately explained. And I enjoy that.

doing that because I think it is clearly where we are as a world right now. We have good questions to ask and we're looking for answers. And that takes me to the showbiz part where I can at least try to explain one of those theories as the most likely one. And I've enjoyed it.

When you approach a subject of this magnitude, it's important to recognize its scale. We've touched on the economic factors that may incentivize withholding information. We've talked about the military or defense factors. There are non-governmental entities like the World Economic Forum that

bring leaders of industry and political leaders together to think about how our lives are conducted during the pandemic. The news coming out of the World Economic Forum meetings at the time was talking about

the implications of everyone working from home and what that means and how our lives are organized as a result of that. Now, it seems like the hot button issue is the 15-minute city and dealing with congestion and pollution as a result of commuting. So this isn't necessarily a question, but it's more for our listeners to be informed that

When we talk about UAP and UFO, we talked about the philosophical implications of even understanding that we're not alone in our universe. There are so many factors at play here that make this an interesting topic to be examining. Well, and don't you wish that the people who are the gatekeepers to the extent that they exist, like I said, doesn't have to be government, could also include private enterprise. You just kind of wish somebody would help out.

And there appears to be a smaller group, but an important group from within who do want to help out. People like Elizondo and Grush and the ones waiting. And part of the problem we're at at this unique moment in history is a lot of these follow-up whistleblowers were waiting to see how Grush got treated. If he got laughed out of town and his career was destroyed, that's...

Not good. If he was treated with respect and was allowed to tell his story, then that's good.

And instead, we got kind of a mixed bag. He was allowed to tell a story. He held his hand up in the House committee room and promised to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then he did. At least he told his truth. And instead of that being on the lead story on the nightly news or on the front page of every newspaper in America, it was largely ignored. Even the New York Times, which broke this story in 2017, I think, put Grush's testimony on page eight.

Now, here's a guy saying, I've worked on the inside. We've got bodies. We've got craft. And that's on page eight? Wow. I mean, what do you have to do to get on page one? And the answer is maybe invent a different strawberry or something. I mean, who knows? So we're in a kind of a weird time of cognitive dissonance on this whole issue. There's so much that I would like to unpack from that response. The first being...

You're not the first person we've had on this show who has spoken about the stigma of being labeled a conspiracy theorist and addressing that at the top of what is going to be a long question and response is.

Asking for disclosure of materials currently in possession of our government doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist. Wanting to shed light on these events where, look at the nature of UFO, whether you believe that this is an alien intelligence or whatever, there have been enough UFO sightings and crashes to ask what's actually going on here.

it doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist. Moving on from that. Just one, can I throw one quick thing out there? On the topic of stigma, there's not a really great way to quantify it. You could look at newspapers and break down how they write about it or whatever. But my own street Nielsen's is what I would call it. I used to often feel like I was being treated like the drunk uncle at the wedding. You know, it's like, God, don't talk to Bryce about UFOs. He'll just write that kind of thing.

And I don't get that anymore. But instead I get is people that say, you got that podcast? What's really going on? So that's kind of a groundswell shift of some kind that's in a positive direction. But I will say there are ways that we refer to this issue that don't do us any good. This conspiracy theorist thing. First of all, love your show here. And you're touching on a lot of things. And one of the things that is very clear is

There are conspiracies. Conspire, I believe, I think it comes from the Greek words. It means to breathe together or something like that. To do almost anything, you have to conspire with somebody if you're going to look at it. And you can't make it a negative all the time. I mean, it's getting clearer and clearer to anyone that's looked into it that John Kennedy wasn't killed solely by a

Lee Harvey Oswald. I mean, it's bigger than that. And that doesn't make you crazy to acknowledge that after all these years. So there are conspiracy theories and there are conspiracy theories. I don't believe all conspiracy theories by any means exist.

And I don't even classify them all by that name. There are just areas in history where people got together to do something that they didn't want everybody to know about. Okay, maybe that's a conspiracy. But to think that you agree with that should make you referred to with a pejorative use of conspiracy theory, I think is wrong. And my favorite guy who ever talked about this kind of thing was George Carlin. He really got ticked off that...

that people would call people who believed or were open-minded about the UFO issue, they would be called in the media a UFO buff. And he hated that because he said, that makes it look like I'm a hobbyist.

You know, you wouldn't do that to someone else on another topic. And I think he's right. I think we've done a lot of this to ourselves. And as we move forward in time, what makes me an optimist as opposed to a pessimist on this is that I think.

As time goes on, we are less and less going to refer to people who are seeking answers on this in a pejorative way. We're simply going to acknowledge who they are. They might be a scientist. They might be a journalist. They might be your neighbor down the street. But if they're looking at it authentically, there's no reason to diminish them. There is certainly enough out there, whether you believe it's definitive evidence or not,

But there's certainly enough anomalous sightings and so forth out there that you have to give it credibility. And therefore, the people who want to talk about it shouldn't be ridiculed. It's just wrong. And so I think that is progress. I'm glad that you brought up the JFK assassination.

We're going to have you back on to talk about that because I fear that the tangent would completely derail us. We would fall into a definite rabbit hole on that one. An obvious commonality between UFO disclosure and the JFK assassination is the bipartisan support for disclosure. In the aftermath of the JFK assassination, there was bipartisan support for disclosure for what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald and when they knew it.

Now, flashing forward to 2024, it's even more rare to have bipartisan support for anything. One of the reasons that the TikTok legislation took over the news cycle is because Congress actually did something quickly.

So moving forward to my question, you're optimistic about disclosure. Who's trying to keep this a secret? That's a question in itself. Just on the optimism point of view, though, when I wrote A.D. After Disclosure with Richard Dolan, who is, I think, the greatest historian working on this topic, it was a real thrill to spend a year of my life discussing

kicking ideas around with them. And at the end of the day, we came up with the phrase that said that we thought UFO disclosure was impossible, but inevitable, which of course can't be, right? As time has gone on, I've noticed that Richard is more of the impossible because he sees this pushback and says, I just saw him on another show a few days ago where he said it could take

you know, 50 more years, right? So he's in the impossible. I'm in the inevitable simply because I look at the tech that we have available to the common person now and the ability we have to cross-reference cases, thoughts, interactions with other people that never existed before. And I'll just put it this way.

If UFOs and UAP can be explained as maybe not extraterrestrial, but as NHI, that is not going to be capable of being held from the public much longer. I look at a horizon of more like 10 years for that at max. By the way, as regards something you were talking about JFK, it's true. We could talk JFK forever.

But I think he's still instructional to the UFO UAP thing. When I was creating Dark Skies with my collaborator and co-creator Brent Friedman, one of the things we started with, without even thinking about it, we just said, well, what are the greatest conspiracies of all time? And of course, that was UFOs and JFK. And we said, what if we put them in an atom collider and what would we get? Well, we got Dark Skies, which again...

Again, was JFK learning about the reality of Roswell and committing to tell the truth to the people in his second term. And in the pilot episode, he gets killed. When Brent and I wrote that, that was just a TV series. It was just a couple of Hollywood writers going, well, what's the craziest thing we could do? Maybe people will watch that.

We didn't read anything about it. We hadn't seen anything about it. We hadn't heard. There were no podcasts at that point. This was just two guys saying, what if we do this?

But now if you go on the internet, you will find a lot of discussion about it as if it's a credible thing because there is a document, again, disputed as to whether it's real or not. But it is a document where JFK is trying to get his people to do more consultation with the Soviets to make sure that a UFO didn't set off World War III. So I think there's a possibility that all of these things –

don't exist in their own little compartment. If you have a government that possibly for even good reasons is withholding information, because I realize things sometimes need to be classified. I'm not crazy. I think that obviously it's a dangerous world out there. There's a lot of reasons why people withhold information. Some of them are neutral, right? And some of them are for your good interest. So when you come down to UFO disclosure, one does have to wonder,

What is it about this topic that after potentially 90 years and maybe thousands before that, but certainly in the modern area, what is it about this topic that makes it such a dangerous thing to have an open discussion with our fellow citizens about? I was elected to run the TV Academy, and one of the people at the TV Academy said, just remember, all of us together are smarter than any one of us.

And he was talking about just giving away Emmys and so forth. But I've always remembered that. I don't think it originated with this gentleman, but people have said that over the years. And I would have to believe it would apply to the UFO issue. If you have just a small classified group of people who are very compartmentalized people,

And they're the only ones that get to talk about something that's outrageous and paradigm shifting. They're going to move at one pace. But if you told everybody in the world about it, you don't have to give away the actual classified stuff. But if you told everybody in the world about it, all of us together would be a lot smarter than any one of us. And that's probably why UFO disclosure is going to happen eventually.

You talk about growing up in Oregon and early exposure to UFO experiences, your neighbors having met people who had firsthand experiences. We were both in Roswell last summer. The thing that left me with the largest impression was hearing from people who weren't Travis Walton, who weren't Barney and Betty Hill with these immensely popularized stories of abduction and encounter.

What can you tell me about what it's like to meet people with firsthand experiences with UAP? It can be mind-blowing. But I think at the same time, as a journalist, what I have to say is, all right, what's the background of this person? Do they seem authentic? Because as a journalist, for example, I like to say I've been lied to by experts, right? I mean, I've been in penitentiaries where a convicted murderer is saying, no, no, I'm completely innocent, and you want to believe them. So I...

I've come to the conclusion with time that the experience of abduction is a real thing. I do believe there have been and probably still are abductions that are happening. But I don't instantly believe everyone who tells that story because they are as influenced by the media as I was. And there's lots of different people out there. So not every abduction story passes the test. Some do and some don't.

And it's really hard to tell one from the other without being able to do a deep dive into it. So, for example, we talked about Whitley Strieber. You know, he's kind of America's abductee, really. I mean, he's been writing about it since the 80s. I know Whitley Strieber. I've developed projects with him and had long conversations with him, and we've been very friendly together.

And I asked Stanton Friedman, another person we just talked about, I said, Stanton, what do you think about Whitley Strieber? And because I just thought, I'd like to know, because he spends all his time doing this. And Stanton took about 30 seconds to speak, which if you knew Stanton Friedman was a

Not the way he usually rolled. I mean, he was so well schooled in the whole topic that he could talk about anything and could do 20 minutes on any topic you would bring up. But he took about 30 seconds to think about it. And he said, I think he has been abducted sometimes.

And I said, well, you mean like he goes, well, I mean, I believe that it happened to him, but I don't know that I believe it's happening to him as much as he said it continues to happen to him. So, you know, there's just a lot of opinions on it. I will say that sometimes when you talk to somebody and they tell you their story, you'd have to believe that if it's not true, that it's a pretty extraordinary story to make up for that person who is telling it.

And that is also part of the whole phenomenon. Because I became widely known during and after the Dark Sky series on NBC for knowing about this topic, what I kept finding was people would... It could be my plumber. I remember my plumber did this once. He goes, so you got that show on TV about UFOs? And I went, yeah. And he goes, well, you know, I never really told anybody about this. And then he tells me their story. And I have to say...

Those are the ones that have a lot of credibility to me. And I've had that happen probably 20 times, maybe 25, where people just say, you know, it happened when I was X, you know, at some age, younger age. And it's not always an experiencer. It's sometimes just someone who saw craft that were physical and structural. But I mean, it had a real impact on them. And because it often happens when they're younger, they're

They want to talk about it. So they'll either tell their parents or their friends. And what usually happened in those cases that these people were telling me about, whoever the adult in the room was said, well, don't talk about that anymore. People think you're weird. And that happened to a lot of people who have either seen what is completely anomalous or

with their own eyes, with other people, and they still get told, don't talk about it. So for them to actually overcome that and talk to me is a testament to the fact that they don't think I'll make fun of them, that I'll listen. I have a journalistic background. And they just want to get off their own shoulders. Not that they think I would do anything about it. They're not trying to sell me a movie or anything. They're just saying,

I just want to tell somebody who's not going to laugh at me. Absolutely. And thank you so much for joining us on Conspiracy Theories. I can't wait to have you back as we have further updates around UFO and UAP disclosure. And please take this time to let our audience know where they can find you.

Well, thank you. And it's been my pleasure to come in. And it's so rare, as I think we were both responding to at the beginning, a lot of podcasts these days are people calling each other up on streaming services or whatever. It's also remote. And you and I are sitting at a table right now, just so everyone knows. We're looking at each other. We're having a conversation. We're two guys who are in the same room, if you folks can believe that.

So it's been fun to do that. It does feel like a rarity now. And it's the way radio used to be. And it's personal. It's human. And it's a good thing. Okay. In a nutshell, I am doing the Need to Know podcast with Ross. And that is needtoknow.today if anyone wants to check that out. I'm also working on the Undeniable Scripted podcast, which I am enjoying because it is about after disclosure, if you will.

And I've written three books in my career. One of them was the AD book with Rich, and I really think that that is the one that is relevant for today. And I'm writing my own new book called Strange Visitors, Close Encounters of the Hollywood Kind, but it won't be out this year. I'm still struggling through the script.

But I just say to everybody, it's all, oh, you know, I forgot to tell you one thing. I have a big feature film that's being shot in Europe this summer. And it's got the lead actor. We've got the director. We got the money and it's going to be made. So that's all exciting. My life is exciting. And I look forward to being alive long enough to see this issue come to the forefront and be solved. I can't recommend Need to Know Enough. I can't recommend After Disclosure Enough.

And we're going to be sure to have you back on the show. Thanks so much. All right. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with new episodes every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystoriesatspotify.com.

We'd like to thank Bryce Zabel for sharing his knowledge with us today. Be sure to check out the Need to Know podcast to stay up to date on the world of UFO disclosure. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was produced by me, Julian Boirot, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.

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