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G'day and welcome back to Need to Know and what a month it's been. I'm Ross Coulthart and I'm going to bring in my colleague and good buddy Bryce Zabel all the way from Los Angeles. G'day Bryce, how are you mate? I'm doing very well and you know this we've been doing Need to Know on a pretty much monthly basis since you started the reality check thing and I have to say I
A month gives you a lot of stuff to cover. You know, you tend to think maybe weekly it feels too much. Like, how could we possibly keep up? You know, I mean, keep that thing full. But when it's monthly, my cup runneth over. That's all I can say.
Yeah, I don't know where to start. Maybe we should start with what on earth is going on with the incumbent president's attitude to UAPs, because it's very hard to read the entrails right now. I think things were far more promising, Bryce, before the election result than they are after. All the indications are that the new president is frankly wimping it.
And he seems to be avoiding the UAP issue. The most telling thing being, of course, that whilst he's issued executive orders for the release of files on Epstein, JFK, MLK, RFK and 9-11, he hasn't conspicuously issued any kind of executive order for the release of any UFO files, which is in complete defiance to what he was promising before the election.
It is curious. I still, though, think he's surrounded himself by people. And I just want to take a moment to talk about two people in particular that he's surrounded himself with. The first, of course, is the new head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, who was also the former director of national intelligence under Trump's first administration.
And I just think it bears repeating. This is what Ratcliffe said on TV for the public to hear back then. He said, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. When we talk about sightings, we're talking about objects that have been seen by Navy and Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.
There have been sightings all over the world, and there is actually quite a few more than have been made public. And so I think it would be healthy for as much as this information to get out to the American people so they can see the things we have been dealing with. Okay, that is the new head of the CIA. Here's from Marco Rubio, who was a former senator from Florida and is now the new secretary of state. He says...
There is a lot more we don't know about these UAP, and that is a big problem. We've taken some important steps over the past few years to increase transparency and to reduce stigmas, but more needs to be done. And then finally, in this new documentary that's coming out from Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure, Rubio says, quote, "We've had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it's not ours."
And we don't know whose it is. That alone deserves inquiry, deserves attention, deserves focus. Even presidents have been operating on the need-to-know basis. But that begins to ramp out of control. Well, first of all, thank you, Marco, for using need-to-know. We really do appreciate that, Ross and me. But the main thing I'm saying, Ross, is...
You can't really buy back those words. They said them. But now the question is, do you think that Trump has backed away because he was briefed by intelligent people, intelligence people to do so? And as a consequence, that he will stifle even the best instincts of his secretary of state and the director of now the director of the CIA?
I actually think it's more to do with the fact that it's at the moment not a high priority, that Trump has come into power with a very set series of targets that he wants to achieve in his first couple of months. And by golly, he's certainly hit the ground running. And I just don't think that UAPs is the one that he wants to deal with first. It's easier for him to make promises about the JFK files, about the Epstein files, about
Because frankly, Bryce, even though you and I and the people watching this are interested in this issue, the polling suggests that people aren't as engaged with the UAP issue as we would all like to hope. I think the stigma, the taboo that's still attached to this subject is still there. It still lingers.
And so for a lot of people, it's just not an issue. We're not cutting through into, with the exception of News Nation and others, the mainstream legacy media. You know, there's not really a lot happening in the legacy media to cover this issue.
And as well as that, I think Elon Musk is a big influence on President Trump, perhaps too much so at times, because noticeably, Musk went on Rogan last week and essentially said that he had security clearances up to the wazoo for SpaceX. And if he...
you know, if Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin or Boeing did have recovered non-human technology, he says he would know about it. And I think that's a breathtakingly naive comment by Mr. Musk. I respect him enormously and think he's pretty damn good at making space rockets, but I don't think he's aware of just how compartmentalized the US national security system is.
and how easy it is for people to be kept in the dark from one special access program to the other. Essentially, he would have to be read in to a non-human technology recovery program. And I think it's entirely plausible that he wouldn't know about it.
But my suspicion very strongly, and I've been told this by multiple people now, is that Elon Musk has been read in at least in part to the crash recovery program. And I'm told that that was essential because of the SpaceX rockets that they see things up in space through some of their cameras and some of their receivers that frankly can't be explained by
simply. And I think for that reason, that's why I'm told that Elon Musk has been read in. Something, of course, he denies and he's entitled to. And of course, he would be obliged to if he'd been read into that program under some kind of unacknowledged special access program.
Well, I kind of anticipated you might be bringing up Elon Musk. So, I actually looked into this Joe Rogan program and wrote down what he said exactly so that we can all assess this. This is the quote from Joe Rogan, from Elon Musk.
"You know my company, SpaceX, has the most advanced rocket technology in the world. I think I'd know, and to the best of my knowledge, there is not any magic there that's not like some super advanced propulsion technology. There's nothing even that I'm aware of in theory." Then he goes on to say, "I have security clearance. I have top, top secret that there is. I have equivalent of an all-access pass
from a security clearance standpoint. So I don't think they're hiding it from me. I do want UFOs to exist, yes. I want UFOs to exist because that would be really interesting. It would be cool. It's a more boring world where UFOs don't exist,
or like advanced propulsion stuff doesn't exist, but I've seen nothing yet." So that's what he says. Now, I have a couple of fast observations to that to go along with yours. The first would be, despite how interesting it is going on Joe Rogan and how that can be interesting and you can learn things from it, it's not the same as holding up your hand and swearing to hold truth before Congress or a court of law, at least not yet.
There's been no legislation passed saying Joe Rogan is the arbiter of truth in America yet.
Also, let's say that Musk, as you were talking about, Ross, has been read into a top, top secret program on UAP. It would have to be some kind of special access project. And as you and I have discussed those rules, as I understand them, if he was told one of our nation's top secrets about UAP, and then he would be obligated not to disclose that. And if he was asked about it, wouldn't he be obligated to actually lie about it?
Absolutely. That's exactly the case. And that's what I was saying, that people who are read into the program are legally obliged, security obliged, to lie about it. And even if there are, I think some of them take the view that even if they're put under oath, they're still obliged to lie about it. And frankly, I don't know where this gets us because
I think we could be seeing a stalemate here, that if Age of Disclosure doesn't push the needle, if Skywatcher get a breakthrough, that could be a very exciting moment if Skywatcher announced that they've been able to retrieve a craft to be able to invite one to land. They've assured me they're not going to shoot one down like we understand the military has been doing. But aside from that,
Unless the NHI decide to manifest themselves and show themselves more overtly, I really don't know how we're going to push the needle on this because I get the very strong impression that Congress, okay, you've got the UAP caucus, you've got Anna Paulina Luna, you've got Tim Burchett, you've got a lot of fairly junior Congress people in the lower house.
And you've got one or two senators. They aren't the numbers to get a bipartisan rump to push through UAP legislation. And that's why I think at the moment, the chances of getting the new UAP disclosure laws back up before the House are pretty remote. So frankly, I think there's a real possibility, if not probability right now, that we are being snowed.
that for all the promises that were made during the election campaign of accountability, transparency and openness, frankly, whilst I have huge respect for the motives of Anna Paulina Luna and her colleagues on the new Transparency Oversight Accountability Task Force, the simple fact is it took, I think,
I think there were 180 hearings of the Warren Commission before they were able to crack that nut. There were multiple staff brought in from outside, huge amounts of resources brought in just to investigate the JFK murder back in the 1960s. And then you had the Church Commission, which had a very similar quantity of people reinvestigating the JFK case.
You've got Anna Paulina Luna pledging as the chairperson of the Oversight Task Force that she is not only going to investigate the JFK case, but the Epstein files, the 9-11, MLK, RFK. And then if she gets to it inside the very limited six-month period they've got, they'll get to UAPs.
I'm sorry, I smell a rat. I do think that there's been a deallocation, a deprioritisation of the UAP issue, and I'm very, very suspicious as to why.
You know, Ross, I'm a little depressed hearing that because you and I have been doing need to know for three whole years. And, you know, we haven't definitively cracked even one of those, the UAP thing. And she's going to crack all of it in six months. It's it's truly astonishing. I do have a few thoughts about this. First of all, I mean, I wish any attempt at transparency to be successful, more or less. Now, the thing is, she doesn't even have a real committee. It's a task force on the declassification of federal secrets.
And I certainly do agree that there do not appear to be enough resources devoted to doing this to compare with, say, Watergate or the church committee or any of these assassinations that were looked into.
It does seem kind of radically strange to me that if you're going to have a task force instead of a committee, that it is going to solve JFK, RFK, MLK, Epstein, COVID, and UAP in a six-month period. I mean, if that's true, maybe they should hire some federal workers back and put them to work on it because they're overwhelmed at this point. But, you know, while personally, I would like to see a sustained effort regarding transparency and forward motion on it,
it. I also question if these areas are as challenging as I know they are in the smoking gun document department. Because in the JFK thing, there's been some releases and there's been 62 years since it happened. So there was a lot of time to get rid of smoking gun documents if they in fact existed. And I know you and I both know a lot about the JFK assassination, Ross.
And I was a bit perplexed to say the least to hear Luna saying that she was going to call in some firsthand witnesses that would solve it all. And let's again remember, this happened 62 years ago. Most of those firsthand witnesses are dead. Say you were a doctor in the autopsy and you were only 30 years old at the time, you'd be 92 right now.
I just don't understand how that's supposed to happen. And the truth is I have a library of like 50 different JFK books that is just stuffed with witness testimony, right? So
For some congressional committee now to say they're just going to interview a few people and suddenly it'll all be solved sounds kind of naive to me. And, you know, what we just heard, by the way, and I'll wrap this up, is that she's taking a group of lawmakers to Dallas on March 26th.
where she's going to interview some of these witnesses. That seems ignorant and insulting compared to how deep this problem is. So she is probably correct. I think we'll both agree that JFK was shot by more than a single gunman. And I'm actually, Ross, I'm kind of grateful to hear her say it out loud. But so far, like I said, this approach...
Kind of leaves me a little cold when you look at it from the point of view is, are they really going to be able to do this? I don't think you could solve the JFK assassination in six months right now unless you had a lot of resources.
And also, for those of us who think that there probably is a connection between the JFK coup d'etat assassination and the UFO issue, then I think that makes it all the more intriguing that there is this resistance, this official resistance to revealing the full story of the JFK story. I worry that what's happening is, albeit she's well-intentioned, Congresswoman Luna is basically being set up to be the...
if you like, the emblematic symbol of the state doing its level best to reinvestigate this case when frankly it's superficial, once over lightly, and nothing really much is going to happen. She certainly seems to be cocky. I saw her news conference when it was announced and
And she was like, yeah, we're just going to take care of this. You know, it's just it just struck me as like, really? Can we have a few more questions and answers about how you would actually do that? But, you know, again, you got to start somewhere. Maybe they'll get into this and they'll realize they got a lot more work to do than they first thought they did.
The other thing that makes me very sceptical and cynical about President Trump's commitment to any kind of UAP disclosure at the moment is his White House spokesperson's response to the drones explanation.
So as we know, in the first few weeks of the White House, there was an order given by President Trump to his chief of staff that she was to go off and find out what was the answer behind these drones. And you could smell a dead stinking rat with the way they did it. One of the things you learn in journalism is always listen to the final few words of a press spokesman before they finish their briefings to the media.
Always look in the last sentence of the press statement that's issued on a Friday night. That's always where they bury their stinking laundry. And in this case, what happened was the White House spokeswoman, just at the very conclusion of a press conference, she made the dramatic announcement that the response, the official response on the drones was that they were FAA authorized research drones and that they were also being used for, quote, other purposes. Now,
Now, the thing that really slayed me was that there was not one question from the national media in the White House press room at that moment. Here was a unique opportunity to go, hang on a moment. We've had months of incursions, months of overflights, New Jersey congressmen, New Jersey sheriffs, county sheriffs, police, military, all saying that these objects are
extremely suspicious and gravely concerning and clearly unauthorized, notably over the Picatinny Arsenal in northern New Jersey.
But the official explanation supposedly is that these drones were FAA-authorized, which as you know and as I know and as the public should know if they were doing their homework, back in December, the FAA testified under oath to the Congress that it did not know the source of these drones.
So, who was lying? Was the FAA lying under oath back in December or is it lying now in the statement that's been issued by the White House? Or has the White House chosen to use the FAA as a convenient foil for whatever the lie is that they're using to try to disguise the truth of this story?
I'm really worried because as of even earlier this week, there was an aviation subcommittee in the HUS, in the Congress, which heard evidence from the president of the Air Traffic Controllers Association. And he revealed that they were completely unaware of any authorised drone flyovers. You would think, especially after a catastrophe like what happened in Washington, D.C., with the collision between a helicopter and a passenger jet,
If the FAA was truly authorizing drone overflights over New Jersey and other parts of the United States, and by the way, the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, China, Russia, wherever else these supposed drones were seen, you would have thought that they would have notified the Air Traffic Controllers Association. That didn't happen.
And I don't know what I'm more concerned about, the obvious White House lies or the fact that the media just simply failed to pick up on the significance of that supposed admission. I find it despairing at the moment, the lack of curiosity, the lack of intelligence in the questioning from the White House press corps. Every day, thousands of Comcast engineers and technologists like Kunle
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You know, excellent summation. Let me just kind of underline a couple of the points you made. By the way, Ross, I have listened to the last two episodes we did just to sort of get up to speed on our drone talking. And the one thing I realized is, I think I know why you do need to know and not just reality check. You get to swear.
on need to know because you have sworn up a storm on this, the drone issue. And I found it refreshing. And I actually learned a few new good words that I will be dropping into the podcast. Listen, can I just tell you, I got into, I got into trouble earlier this week because I was doing a radio interview with a friend of mine in the U S and apparently he rang me and told me, please don't use the word bullshit. Uh,
on our radio show, because if you do, the FCC will get us into trouble. I've been officially told not to use the word bullshit on public radio. Bullshit to that, Bryce. Yes, bullshit to that. You can say almost anything you want here, and you seem to have done it.
Kudos. Listen, I'm bothered for a couple of reasons about the drone situation. Again, I'm just restating your narrative there. First of all, what we're seeing is not transparency at all, and that was promised. This is instead subterfuge. To me, it's highly offensive.
Second, as you pointed out, the performance of the media has been actually abysmal. I mean, it's just awful. I've read multiple stories. Every morning, I start with a survey of what's in the news. When there's drone coverage, I focus on it and read it.
And I have read multiple articles, not just one or two, multiple articles where the reporter simply asserts as if it is a proven fact that it's all been explained as FAA test drones. Boom, move on, nothing to see here. And I find that so discouraging. I mean, it's government obfuscation married to media malfeasance, which I think means bullshit. Doesn't make me happy.
I completely agree with you. Now, I mean, something's wrong with the official drones explanation. I mean, I'm getting inquiries from people from all over the world still who are saying to me, are you still interested in these objects? Because we're still seeing them.
I'm talking to a guy off a major city on the east coast of Australia at the moment who's telling me that he's seeing fleets of these things just off the coast. And what's more, they're disrupting a military area on the coast. So whatever this is, it hasn't gone away. Well, not only has it not gone away, but Ross, the thing that is making both of us want to tear our hair out, what little is left for both of us, is that...
Why is the FAA supposed to be flying drones into Australia? I mean, that would be something that would be so highly irregular, so just ridiculous times 10. And yet we're to believe that. And the FAA, these FAA drones were flying into the UK. And frankly, these drones have been seen all over the world at this point. So it just doesn't, pardon the expression, but it just doesn't fly.
Now, I guess we should move on from our ranting about drones, Bryce. I will go on about it all day. The other thing that's happening at the moment, of course, is the possible imminent demise of His Holiness the Pope, which, as I understand it, would be a bit of a disaster for people looking for the Vatican to be more transparent because he has apparently been quite transparent and open in terms of his willingness to allow the archives, the Vatican archives, to be pried open just a little.
And I suspect that whoever replaces him won't be as amenable to the kind of openness and transparency that he, quite a progressive pope, has shown. Well, absolutely true. First of all, a lot of people have now seen this new movie, Conclave, that came out about picking a new pope. Right.
It's a pretty good movie. The ending is kind of controversial, and I'm not even going to step into that. Just to say, though, that the idea of picking a new pope is something that happens from time to time. And even in our time, there's been more occasions where popes in ill health have stepped down. So, you know, even though I certainly wish the pope...
good health and a recovery, I think it's pretty clear that his papalship or whatever it is won't be forever. And so there will be a new pope taken on. And let's
Let's face it there. We've, we've seen this in Diane Pasolka's books, for examples, American cosmic, and then encounter where she talks at length about the Catholic church. And it has been reputed over the years to be a vast storehouse of this kind of information. Now,
I don't think a new Pope is going to come in and lead the way and say, and by the way, I'm opening up the Vatican files to everybody any more than Trump is probably going to, you know, let you and me walk in and look at the secret files about UAP. That's, that's not likely to happen. But I, I, I've always thought that disclosure such as it is,
is something that's going to sort of start happening. People take their cues from other people. It begins to sort of catch on and move forward. So somebody has to go first. I don't know who that'll be. It could be anybody. It could be another country. It could be Brazil. It could be whatever. Somebody goes first. And at a certain point when momentum is reached, then the Catholic Church, which represents a lot of these countries, very,
fully will have to step forward and say some of what it knows. And at least from what I understand, it knows a whole lot. Well, I guess my biggest worry is that it's not a friendly institution like the Catholic Church that maybe
Say Putin or President Xi, Russia or China seize the initiative and reveal what they know about a non-human intelligence. How best to wrong foot a new president than to show that you are more progressive and open and transparent than the greatest democracy on the face of the planet?
I mean, one of the great weaknesses, one of the, frankly, the Achilles heel of the United States military industrial complex right now is the lies that I believe they are telling about the UAP mystery. And they do believe, and they probably have been able to suppress the story quite successfully in legacy media and also on social media. I'm amazed how automated the bots are that come in now.
whenever you say anything that the bots don't want published. It's quite extraordinary how controlled social media is on the UAP issue and how suppressed the issue is.
But what I'm concerned about is maybe not a friendly power like the Vatican. Maybe Xi or Putin sees the initiative. I mean, China, I'm told, is way ahead on attempting to research and reverse engineer non-human technology. There you go. Well, if that was true, then wouldn't they be less likely to want to lead on disclosure of anything? Wouldn't they want to just keep that lead to themselves? Well,
What if they felt that they were ahead and that it was time for them to show a moral authority? I mean, how big a lie can you tell before the public basically start thinking there's no faith anymore in any public institutions? I mean, we are looking at the possibility here, albeit, I think, slight with Paulina Luna's congressional committee.
We're looking at the possibility here of the truth being told for the first time about the JFK assassination, about MLK, about Epstein. And frankly, a lot of people out there are already very, very cynical and sceptical. A lot of people think that Epstein was an Israeli Mossad agent. And frankly, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Israelis were involved in some kind of blackmail of
high public figures in America in order to extract what they wanted. It's good espionage, frankly, and Epstein would have been a good way of doing that. But the
The simple fact is I think the likelihood of UAPs coming out in any official way is increasingly less likely in the United States. For whatever reason, the U.S. is allowing itself to be snowed. And frankly, if I was Putin or Xi, I would seize the initiative. What better way to humiliate a foreign adversary rival than to show its public how it has been lying?
I agree with all that. I will say that when Richard Dolan and I were writing AD After Disclosure, one of the things we sort of challenged ourselves about was to say, is there any evidence anywhere that anybody inside the US government actually has a real plan?
And we really couldn't find much evidence of a real plan. And so we thought, well, we'll try to write our version of a plan such as it is. And I don't even think we necessarily accomplished that. But let's say that...
We've been getting a plan together since, say, 2017, when The New York Times wrote its article and Elizondo came out, and now we've had Grush and Barber and the gang. I would think it would be incumbent upon anybody who was sitting on top of really important information to say, "What's our plan here, folks?" Obviously, it would benefit any country to be first, I think.
I'm not positive, but I think it would benefit them to at least say, if they thought it was inevitable. If you think it's inevitable, then it's good to get out front of it. That's what we teach in PR classes across journalism schools all over the world. So yeah, it'd probably be good to get out in front of it. But then, what I really hope we have a plan for is, if the scenario you paint about China or Russia coming forward,
I hope we have a plan that we can implement immediately where we jump in and sort of confuse the issue about who actually started this. Just have our own plan to get something out there because it would be good for our country to do it. And I'm talking as an American now, I think Australia would obviously be part of that plan. I mean, obviously, the Five Eyes have every good reason to have a plan coordinated. And I haven't seen anything Trump
said that he's getting out of the Five Eyes agreements or anything like that. So, let's just say we're all on the same team. I hope they can do it. The one thing I was going to say to you, Ross, that I find interesting, that we've got about half an hour right now, and we're talking about disclosure issues, right? But a good friend of ours, Kelly Chase, who's a podcaster, just caused kind of a stew last week or the week before when she said,
She was changing the name of her podcast. Everybody thought, oh, she's getting out of podcasting because she doesn't want to be involved in disclosure. That wasn't what she was saying, I guess. She was just saying, I don't want to talk about disclosure anymore. I want to talk about the phenomenon. Well, I say to that, here, here, accept that.
We make these decisions politically. I'm in favor of talking about both. I think disclosure is something that this is how we're going to handle it, and I hope that we get a handle on it very quickly. Well, I guess Louis Elizondo always said that he thought that disclosure would never be an event. It would be a process, and that's becoming increasingly clear. Let's be honest about it. I mean, Washington is a very conservative country.
institution. I mean, even if Trump is trying to drain the swamp and take on the deep state, as sceptical as I was once that there is such a thing as a deep state, I am persuaded that there is a cabal of people who take it upon themselves to do things that are unconstitutional outside the oversight of Congress and improperly withheld from the knowledge of the American public. And if that's what constitutes the deep state, then there is definitely a deep state.
And I think Trump's difficulty is he's got so much on his plate right now, he's got to allocate his priorities to where he thinks he needs to put them. And he does seem determined to resolve the Ukraine issue or Ukraine's issue. And I don't know if I entirely agree with everything he's doing in Ukraine. I do like the idea of bringing the war to a quick conclusion, but I hate the idea of giving Putin everything he wants and more.
Let's talk, you mentioned Richard Dolan. Richard Dolan's got this brand new book, USOs, Underwater Submerged Objects and Unidentified Submerged Objects. And from what I've seen of it so far, and I've heard multiple praiseworthy accounts saying it's a cracking good, masterful account. Yeah.
It is a cracking good masterful account, although I have a couple of comments about it. First of all, he points out that there's no consensus yet whether it's unidentified submersible objects or underwater, what did you just call it? Unidentified submerged objects. Submerged or submersible. Nobody's quite clear that. Anyway, I got a copy of Richard's book as I do all of the things he writes because I think he's probably...
the most literate writer we have in ufology right now, along with Whitley Strieber, in terms of just writing a cracking good book, which you did as well. So I don't mean to cut you out of that. I'm just saying these two guys- I think Richard's history of the national security state and UFOs is masterful. It's like a Bible, and I refer to it constantly. But here's the thing.
Because we had Richard on our show not long ago, and one of the things he said, which I thought was very interesting, is he started out to write a book about USOs. The more he got into it, the more he said, "Well, I've now got too many cases." I think he got up to 700-some cases.
Imagine this, just imagine this. Imagine you were starting to write your book in plain sight and then in the middle of it, you went, "Oh, this is too overwhelming. I need to write six books about this." That would be crazy. Well, what Richard did is he said, "I'm going to write three books about USOs." All right, so far so good. Like I said, I'm reading the first one.
But it's all chronological. So the very first thing, it's the first book out and the chronology literally starts hundreds of years ago. And the first book doesn't even end until 1969. So for people who are looking to get to those instant hot cases that, for example, Nimitz would be a pretty good case about that potential. You don't get those until the later ones, but that's the only beef I got with it, which
which is a small one. I'm not, but maybe a third of the way through it, but you just learn so much in it. And it's the accretion of detail, which is what I constantly say to people that makes you just take a pause and say, okay, not all of these people for hundreds of years have been lying about this or making this up. They are seeing things.
And if you got 700 some great cases, they're seeing some very unusual things. And so from my point of view, I like it. I like it a lot because the USO topic has been underserved, obviously. There have been one or two books about it that were pretty good in the day. But Richard, I think, in his style, has taken this to top shelf stuff. And I urge anyone who's looking for just kind of one of those
mind-blowing things where you say, I hadn't actually considered all that before. Here's your book. At Capella University, you can learn at your own pace with our FlexPath learning format.
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You know, it's funny, Bryce, when you started talking about history there and the way Richard does use his history to great effect, I recall you told me earlier that Dorothy Kilgallen, who's one of the great early writers on UFOs, it's the 70th anniversary, did you say, of when she first started
started writing about retrievals of spacecraft by the United States. Just so people understand, Dorothy Kilgallen was first a columnist, a journalistic columnist, and a darn good one in the 50s. And she was fearless later in the 60s talking about not only the JFK assassination, but also about Jack Ruby, who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on TV, live TV.
What's interesting about Dorothy Kilgallen is she also got her reputation kind of, I don't know, it just got impacted by the fact that she was a panelist on one of these variety shows in the 60s. But if you look back at her early work in the 50s, she's
literally on the, on the dime about this great stuff. And she literally is talking about crash retrievals. She's got a source in the UK that she's talking about. I was, I wrote so many quotes down. I didn't write Dorothy's down. So I don't have it to give you right now, but
She was fearless. And I was so in admiration of her that I wrote an entire episode of Dark Skies about the Dorothy Kilgallen murder because she died in 1965 of very mysterious circumstances. And my co-creator at Dark Skies, Brent Friedman, and I just said, well, that's pretty interesting. And by the way, you want another interesting coincidence out there.
Dorothy Kilgallen dies of supposedly an overdose, supposedly drinking too much and taking a bunch of drugs. And there's really no evidence that she had that serious of a problem in that regard. But that's how she died. But guess what also happened the night that she died? The New York power blackout.
of 1965, which I always found. And so that's what we made our episode about. Because if you dive into Richard's books and other books, that New York power blackout wall on the surface is pretty well just a technology failing kind of event.
There were multiple reports of UFOs near power stations back then. And so I just find it a very interesting case. But thank you for bringing up Dorothy. She is an unheralded journalist and she deserves to be heralded. So I salute her.
You know, it's funny, Bryce. I just hope in 70 years' time they aren't saying, oh, do you remember that Coulthard-Zabel guy, that team back in the 2020s? They were all going on about this UAP disclosure. Remember how they died in strange circumstances? There was that weird case with the bottle of whiskey and the pills found around them? Right. Like a
I didn't know they were suicidal. Who knew that? You know, listen, to be honest with you, at this stage of my life, to even imagine that in 70 years anybody would care about anything I'm doing right now makes me smile. We should be so lucky. But I hope we're not lucky enough to make an end the way Dorothy did. And, you know...
Without getting too heavy about this, one of the undercurrents of the current sort of disclosure movement, and certainly one that is associated with Roswell as well, is some heavy-handed intimidation of witnesses. Literally where people are told, we will kill you, we'll kill your children, we'll kill the rest of your family, and we'll throw your bones out into the desert where nobody can ever find them.
And let's face it, even the Congressman, Stephen Schiff, who wanted to have congressional hearings on Roswell,
at the age of 52, encountered an unusually fast-acting cancer that took him out in a year. There's just a lot of mystery about it. We have heard David Grush, for example, and Lou Elizondo imply that there have been some lethal force used to keep the secret over the years. I know that you yourself have even looked into that a bit.
Yeah, look, I'm in absolutely no doubt that people are threatened and intimidated. And I've said publicly, quoting witnesses, quoting including Jake Barber, who's referred to people being murdered, Jake and his colleague, Don Paul Bales and Fred Baker. They've all made me aware of dreadful things that have gone on inside the program that ought properly to be being investigated. And it's interesting, you know, a lot of people, a
A lot of people are saying to me, you know, why hasn't Jake testified before Congress? He has. He's given this evidence before Congress. And this is the great frustration to me that essentially what we're looking at here is Congress seems to be operating in porridge right now. They're basically in quicksand because everything seems to be so pathetically slow.
Evidence has been given by Jake and by multiple other witnesses that would lead any rational, sensible person to a very quick exposition of the legacy retrieval and reverse engineering program. Times, dates, names of people in charge, places, locations, literally the number on which cave to look for witchcraft.
And frankly, there seems to be, I think, a lot of foot dragging in the Congress. I love the idea that there is this determined rump of Congress people, Congressmen and Congresswomen, and a couple of senators.
But frankly, the bulk of the Congress is not moving on this issue at all. And, you know, the evidence is there if they bother to run with it. One of the problems I have, for example, with Paulina Luna's task force is in order for her to get a subpoena to be able to demand access to files, she has to get permission from the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
She doesn't have the backup support staff to do the kind of digging you'd expect. I just feel a little bit at the moment, like Bryce, that we're in danger of history repeating itself. And as you are the man on history, I think there's not only was it Dorothy Kilgallen from 70 years ago, I think one of your favorite subjects is the Betty and Barney Hill story, if I'm not mistaken. Right.
We're getting up to 60 years now since the Betty and Barney Hill story. Your past 60 years, it was 60 years and 21. But there is a 60-year anniversary in the Betty and Barney Hill case. And it's one really that I've been singing the praises of for a long time, and I haven't heard too many other people do it. Traditionally, people believe that the Betty and Barney Hill case came to the American public
in 1966 with the actual publishing of a book called The Interrupted Journey by John Fuller. And that is the accepted story, if you will. But the more I looked into it, it became clear that the story went worldwide in 1965 when the Boston Traveler published a series of articles about the Betty and Barney Hill case.
And it was tracked down by a brave investigative reporter, John Littrell Sr., who heard about this case and just started doing what a good investigative reporter does. He started calling people up, he started putting a little shoe leather into it. And they broke that story in October of 1965 in the Boston Traveler.
more reprints for the newspaper than anybody had ever seen before. People worldwide were asking for reprint permission on it. And it was only after that, that John Fuller, who wrote The Interrupted Journey, got hold of the story. That's how he heard about it, because he had read those articles. So it's an anniversary, 60 years since John Fuller
sort of brought the story to the world. And I salute him too, because first of all, imagine this. He was able to go to his newspaper, which was good.
good newspaper in Boston at the time and convince his editors that this was a good enough story to let him run with. He investigated for well over a year, and then they gave him enough space to write multiple articles about it. Most of the information in those articles stands today. In fact,
kind of an interesting thing. I believe in his articles, he points out that Barney had a gun in the trunk of his car. When they wrote The Interrupted Journey, John Fuller wrote it, they thought that that would reflect bad on Barney. So, they made it into a tire iron that he had in his trunk. Now, what kind of journalists make those kind of decisions where you say,
Yeah, I think it'll look better if I change this. I mean, I suppose it's happened, but I would never do that, and I don't think you would ever do it. No, you can't make things up. You can't make things up. I didn't realize. So basically, it's the 60th anniversary of when the Bitty and Barney Hill story became public news, essentially. Yes.
Absolutely true. And that is an unsung hero of the case, John Littrell Sr. And it is a great example of chasing a story down. And it's frankly, the reason I focus on Ross is...
It's exactly that kind of cojones that more reporters need to have. You have them, my friend, and so do some other people. And I'm happy for all of them. But not enough of the mainstream people who don't cover UFOs or UAP as a regular thing. They don't seem to ask any questions. And we, of course, we've already gone over that with the drones thing. It's very frustrating. And I hope that people bring your game up.
I couldn't let this go without mentioning it. One of my favorite UFO cases is the Kecksburg UFO case.
And it is also the, it's an interesting thing. A lot was happening in 1965. The Kecksburg UFO case was also in that year, wasn't it? I'm not the world's greatest expert on Kecksburg. I know that it did happen in Pennsylvania. I know that people saw something going down that was described as kind of an acorn. It's a crash. A lot of people think it was a German Nazi belt or something.
Right on. I think with time, though, although there have been good investigations into it, it's not one that I stand on because I'm not 100 percent certain of exactly what happened. But it's interesting. It's kind of like the Roswell case in the same way. You can't find that one witness who says.
I saw it crash. I saw the recovery of it. I was part of it when it was flown to right. You don't get that person. Instead, you get 600 witnesses that talk about, well, if it was just a weather balloon, why would all these people do all these weird things to protect it? The same thing happened with Kecksburg as I understand it, which is,
They did put up a cordon around the area where it went down, and they did prevent people from going in and out, and they did try to suppress coverage of it. All that happened. And then...
In the same way that Roswell said, yeah, but it was probably just a weather balloon. I believe in Kecksburg, what they tried to say, it was some kind of Soviet satellite that had gone down and they were recovering that. But to the best of my knowledge, and again, I'm flying a little blind here. I believe that what was said about the Kecksburg thing was that that Soviet satellite didn't come down at the same time or the same place that the Kecksburg thing happened.
So, Bryce, before we roll out, what's your prediction for the age of disclosure? Dan Farah's much-trumpeted nonfiction documentary exploring former leaders in the military and the intelligence community speaking out publicly, serving and former leaders basically telling the UAP issue allegedly like it is. Do you think it's going to make a difference? Is it going to move the needle? I think, yes. I think a couple of things about...
The Age of Disclosure by director Dan Farah.
I think it's the biggest one yet. I think it's bigger than the phenomenon. It's big. They've got 34 different people, all of them who worked inside the government, and all of them who collectively had announced to themselves, "Look, we'll all hang together or we'll hang separately." They've all come forward at the same time. From the people I know who have -- I have not seen it yet, I'm about to --
From the people who have all seen it, it's very powerful. And I believe that it will, in fact, move the needle. Now, moving the needle is kind of a relative term. We've used it before. And needles do get moved. How far will it move the needle? I think this one will go down as the big one that you show your friends and family when they say, you know, I just...
I don't really want to talk. I know you're interested in it, but I don't really know much about it. Now you can say to them, okay, give me two hours, and then you can show them this thing. And I think there's some astonishing comments in it from various people. So yeah, I think it will move the needle. I think it's a big deal. And I'm very proud that it's been made.
Well, let's hope that Donald Trump, for one, is watching. Something tells me his son, Don Trump Jr., who's very enthusiastic on UAPs, will be encouraging his dad to watch.
much. I hope it somehow forces the new president to actually move on the UAP issue. Maybe Elon Musk should take a look as well. Maybe that's the one I don't want to have happen. He seems overwhelmed already by what he's doing. Let him just go do what he's doing. We'll solve the UFO, UAP mystery ourselves, and then we'll tell him what we found out. That's my take.
So unless you've got anything more pressing that you want to raise in today's show, Bryce, I think we'll call it a day this week. We probably should. I have, like I said, and you did it too, we both, just so people know, when Ross and I were about to record, we each go to search our memory files and write a little note to each other saying we could talk about this, this, this, or this. And frankly, it sounds like we've been on a lot of topics in this one, but the truth is I got
pages of stuff sitting around my desk right now. And I know Ross does too. And what that means, I think, is it ain't over yet. Yes, there are some indications that are a little troubling, but at the same time, so many things are moving forward. And even people who are gatekeepers can't control the gates forever. So I'm still kind of in that point of view right now.
Well, fingers crossed. Good to see you, Bryce. See you next time. Great to see you, Ross. And thanks, everybody, for watching. We appreciate it.